Belly education can be evil - and it can also do so much good. Depending on what is being taught.

There is a similarity between Aboringal children, those of middle eastern background and those from the West. Too many of their 14/15/16 year olds are on the streets and getting into trouble.

Thing is that not many of the middle eastern ones and or even the ones out West have have the dirty rundown messy homes that you talk about but the children are still suffering and they still get up to mischief.

Whilst the home environment is very important, the most important thing is the quality of the education that the children are receiving and the way that they are being supported and treated by society as that determines how they feel about themselves as individuals.

If these kids are in disadvantaged schools and being treated with disdain and they know that they cannot compete, what exactly do you think should motivate them to do different?

Jolanda: "Discrimination, bullying and harrassment is illegal under the Racial Discrimination Act. CATCH IS that you have to prove that what happened was directly because of your race, as an individual, before they will even look at your complaints and generally the person/s accused don't confess and they turn it on you and your people as a group."

I see. While such behaviour is actually illegal, in your view it is "permitted" under the law because the legal test for proving that such behaviour constitutes racial discrimination is too stringent. I'm not sure that I agree that this constitutes permission - rather that such racist acts persist because the Act has proven difficult to apply in some cases. Certainly, there have been many successful actions brought under the Racial Discrimination Act.

Oliver: "A clan is more closed than a nation. Clans tend to have close genetic ties, exhibit familialism, and, often, patrimonialism. In North America, the Sioux clan (not nation)is too homogeneous to mirror the ethnically and culturally diverse US."

Well and good, Oliver, but this is precisely why the term "nation" has been taken up so enthusiastically by Australian Aboriginal groups in their endeavours to assert e.g. Native Title claims. As in the case of Canadian Aboriginal groups, the political term 'nation' is preferred to ambiguous anthropologically-derived sodalities such as 'tribes' or 'bands' to refer to corporate groups with e.g. claims to territory.

Put more simply, 'clans' are an anthropological concept used to describe kin-based social organisation, while 'tribes' are an athropological concept that refers to politically oriented social organisation. The notion of Indigenous nations is one that has been taken up by Aboriginal people themselves in order to more accurately assert their own perception of their political organisation, particularly in relation to territorial claims.

For more detail on this, perhaps you could enrol in an Anthro 101 course :)

Belly, you make an interesting point.

>>Let me tell you the truth our country streets are full of 15 year old criminals<<

What happened last year? Were the streets full of 15 year old criminals then? Or were they only fourteen?

And what will be the case next year, will the streets be full of 16 year old criminals? Or will they be this year's fourteen year olds, grown up a year?

The sad fact is that our streets have always been full of (pick a teen age) criminals, beating each other over the head with whatever is handy and leading a life of petty criminality. In the mid-sixties in the UK there were pitched battles every summer (for a few years) between mods and rockers. The movie Quadrophenia does a pretty good job of describing it if you cannot get hold of archive footage.

Where kids feel that they are for some reason excluded, they adopt this kind of behaviour. It is not nice, it is not desirable, and there is an entire industry out there that makes a living from "finding solutions", but they are as far from doing so as they have ever been.

The only encouraging aspect is that despite the background only a small percentage actually grow up to be habitual criminals. Some of them do, no doubt about it, and it can be fairly said that they learn their trade in the streets. But a surprising number grow up to be good and productive citizens.

Perhaps if we paid more attention to these folk than to the hopeless cases we would discover what changes - to education, the law, policing and punishment - would be most effective.

Jolanda... when you said theres nothing wrong with being racist you show that there is a double standard in society. You wouldn't have any problem crying out racism when it suits you, but then pretend that the racism that affect others is just normal human reaction. Then you expect to still be taken seriously without any trouble ,it doesn't work like that.

Jolanda..when you said theres nothing wrong with being racist you showed how there is a double standard in society. You wouldn't have any problem crying out racism when it suits you, but then pretend that the racism that affect others is just normal human reaction. Then you expect to still be taken seriously, it doesn't work like that.

Trying to get back to the original theme of the thread, are there different types of racism? Is one kind worse than others, or are they all just bad? Is racism something that can be objectively determined, or is it a subjective thing?

I do believe that it is a subjective thing, and that is the difficulty in eliminating racism or at least minimising any harm that it does. I could say something with no racist connotation on my behalf, but it could be interpreted by someone from another background in an entirely different way. Likewise the same can happen in reverse. Amel for example, by suggesting that Australians are racist, you are making a racist comment (may I suggest that that's why you got such a strong backlash of comments). You didnt intend for your comment to be racist, but I think its been taken that way.

There is KKK-type racism, which should be pursued and hunted down. Then there is the school-yard bully type racism. In this context racist slurs are just a tool to bully, such as mental ability or appearance can be. Not in the same league as KKK or neo-nazi's, but probably no less damaging to the person on the receiving end. To my mind though, this should be dealt with not as racism, but no different to any bullying.

There is no doubt that there are some immigrants to Australia that are racist. Amel, I see this in their attitudes to other immigrant groups, not necessarily towards Australians. This is in part where my problems lie with immigration. Come by all means, but leave your old prejudices behind you. If new ones form after you get here, then so be it, but come as a blank slate.