What is Racism?

‘London woman jailed for Tube race rant’

This is a headline in today's SMH. The woman Jacqueline Woodhouse, 42 was sentenced to 21weeks jail for ‘launching an expletive-laden rant at passengers on a London underground train, telling those seated near her: "I used to live in England and now I live in the United Nations."’

A seven-minute video of the verbal assault was uploaded to YouTube and viewed more than 200,000 times.

‘Condemning her showdown, District Judge Michael Snow at Westminster Magistrates' Court in central London, said: "Anyone viewing it would feel a deep sense of shame that our citizens could be subject to such behaviour who may, as a consequence, believe that it secretly represents the views of other white people."’

I am not in agreement with what this woman has said nor the fact she was reportedly drunk at the time but what I do question is exactly how many people do secretly (or some not so secretly) about the various ethnicities and religions represented in so many countries now.

We see the ‘boat people’ debate rage in Australia and their true origins and reasons for coming to this country, the illegal immigrants that arrive on visitors visas and never go home and our increasing ‘slave trade’ that will have a bill presented in Parliament today to try to help this increasing problem as reported last night on a couple of our television stations. We see flags being burnt, police being labelled as racist for doing their job, women refusing to remove full facial garments for identification purposes at the same time bike helmets must be removed for the same security reasons.

We look at situations in places like Syria and I’m not really sure how the majority feel about this.

When I was growing up it was the Italians and Greeks that were labelled unfavourably by our parents even though one of my best friends at the time was Italian. Most of my generation and that of my children have many friends with varying nationality backgrounds without even giving it a second thought. We all understand there are various cultural differences which a lot of the time is great to experience but fundamentally our values are the same.

I had a dinner party with 8 people some time back and not two were born in the same country. The discussion about how we had been bought up in our individual cultures was an interesting one as we all agreed that how we should act, what was expected of us etc. was the same; the only real difference was food, language and traditions.

There are many countries that do not offer the same freedom or basic safety and I think most of us realise that we just don’t understand what it is like to live in areas of the world that do not enjoy this and it’s because of this we do not want our country to change. By all means join us in our wonderful country but we need ‘team players’. We have shown over the changing generations we accept traditions of all as long as we are not criticised for ours nor looked down upon for our backgrounds or beliefs.

Tolerance is a two way street as is racism.