Tts easy to ascribe criminality to ethnicity when you think 'white' or 'anglo' is not an ethnicity. From this postion you determine yourself at the centre and an arbiter of everyone else who is not white, anglo, democratic...the list goes on and on. Its a fool proof and easy strawman arguement to put together [as many here on OLO often use to justify their explanations]. For me its intellectually lazy and ignorant.

You may not be overtly racist but you've certainly discovered ways to disguise your racism through a critique of your own contructions of "culturalism". 'This is a form racism without race' or 'new racism' where people think racism is acceptable if its cloaked in forms of cultural discrimination which appear to be no longer rooted in biologically defined race. But it has the same effect as bio-racism.

Dear ozbib
Why on earth did you immigrate here? Weren't we a lost cause?

Blairbar, I don't think any such cause is lost. I did wonder what I had struck.

I came to study with a world-famous scholar, and with no intention of staying; then married. There were a number of Australians, too, struggling to make things better. I joined them. There were a good many successes. (I don't claim the credit). Once I decided to stay, the question was how can I best contribute to the country I had joined, not where can I go where life will be most comfortable.

You'll be aware, though, that some notable Australians did despair and emigrate.

ozbib,
All I wanted to express was my hope that the majority of today's Muslim immigrants will embrace their new homeland using the generous space it provides for the maintenance of their own ethnicity/religion, instead of wanting to bring about changes by resorting to activities that necessarily call for police attention and reaction.

Going back to those years, I know many people saw what we called the "free world" as something that had to be disrupted. Since this was in the middle of the Cold War, this could only serve to strengthen the other side, that I just had escaped from. I know, this was unintentional, at least on the part of the young, naive, "revolutionaries". So was the final outcome that I referred to as the cultural vacuum that - at least in Western Europe - we prepared for the Muslims to move in.

What you described looks bad enough retrospectively. However, at those times the other (actual, not fictitious) alternative was the world I came from, where e.g. my oncle was sentenced to 9 years labour in a uranium mine only for translating and distributing a French prayer book. There was no visible police brutality in those countries - with the emphasis on visible - that the newspapers would be allowed to report on.

There were thousands of refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc coming also to Australia, but I do not know of any larger number of people who in those times would have wanted to escape Australia and settle to live in these countries, or even in the Soviet Union.

These numbers are the only objective criterion we have to decide which of the - then only two - alternative worlds was preferable, and whether it was good to disrupt it (calls for necessary reforms are not disruptions, they do not involve the police), causing the other political system to increase its influence and self-justification.

Apologies for this lengthy comment on times long bygone. Please let us just agree that our recollections are from very different perspectives in the context of very different life experiences.

I am a young Australian with Hong Kong heritage. I have experienced racism myself and it gave me a sense of powerlessness, helplessness and tremendous frustration. However, I think the majority of Australians believe that everyone is equal and that all deserve a fair go in life.

I think it is an affront to all Australians when we see racism but chose to ignore or dismiss it. In doing so, we are in effect encouraging the spread of racism. And by extension, eroding a core Australian value, the ethos of a fair go.

I hope more people will understand that just because an individual is not white, it doesn't mean that they aren't Australians who want to contribute to their country as much as white Australians do.

Racism takes many forms. For example, how do you react to the news that twenty four thousand Indigenous people have graduated from universities in this country ? Does that mildly surprise and excite you ? Or are you flabbergasted, or find it unbelievable ? We all are affected by the racism of low expectations, all of us, black and white, that's been the general Australian attitude to Indigenous people for a very long time - not vicious, not necessarily nasty, not overtly brutal, but racism just the same.

A worse form of racism towards Indigenous people would be to condemn their success in tertiary education as somehow wrong, intolerable, people getting above their station, or - more hypocritically - as not being loyal to their cultural roots. This form of racism is much closer to the controlling, confining racism of the early twentieth century, but it can still be found, even in academe.

There will be around fifty thousand Indigenous university graduates by 2020: get used to it, Australia.

Joe