THE SILVER LINING TO AUSTRALIA’S WAVE OF ONLINE BIGOTRY

By Mikey Carr

Hasn’t it been an exciting couple of weeks for discrimination.

There was of course the yearly celebration of the slaughter of our indigenous people that is Australia day. We’ve had some wildly disproportionate backlash against Erin Riley for pointing out the lack of female artists in the Hottest 100. There have been two shining examples of Australian culture from Ballarat dress up in blackface. And to cap it all off we’ve had a hate-mongering misogynist try and organise a meet up of followers to promote the legalisation of rape amongst other things.

It’s been hard to keep up.

Now I could go on for hours about all these incidents/events/scumbags, but something struck me recently no one else has brought up. While all the hatred being spewed online is awful, there is a silver lining. It is outing a lot of people as the horrible bigots they are.

Think about it, most of the time bigots are too afraid to air their views in a public forum (members of parliament not withstanding). Yet as our flawed legal system means there are often being no consequences to online abuse, these hateful fools are lining up to out themselves at the mildest of social observations, like I dunno, blackface is racist.

While the sheer number of people who seem to think that blackface is ok is staggering, at least we now know the extent of the problem. The big question is how to solve this.

The mainstream media narrative we are hearing is that everybody needs to stop whingeing and getting so fired up about everything so we can have a rational discussion. Never mind it is only the minorities being told to calm down, with scarce a mention about the privileged desperately defending themselves from any accusation of advantage.

The problem with this argument, leaving aside the fact it’s culturally patronising, is that it acknowledges these bigots as legitimate voices worth listening to.  This notion sometime goes under the name respectability politics.

In case you didn’t know, respectability politics refers to US thinker Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s notion that minorities seeking representation must be inclusive of their most violent critics. The idea also argues that to gain a voice within the mainstream power structures of society, the under-represented need to make concessions to the establishment in order to be invited to seat at the table of power.

This is a giant load of shit. Setting up an uneven power dynamic to begin with, whatever concessions the under-represented have to make in order to secure ‘an invitation’ are usually just foreplay for the real ass fucking to come. Pitting minority leaders against their own followers by forcing them into divisive compromises, this is how pretty much ever popular reform movement has floundered out after their initial, seemingly revolutionary gains (thanks Obama… or should I say sorry?).

You see rather than try and play by the rules of the system, I say we ought to make up our own rules, rule number one being we don’t stop calling out intolerance, bigotry and discrimination until we’ve outed every small minded hate monger from the Harbour Bridge to the Swan River. Rather than try and talk to these people, let’s send the a message loud and clear that this won’t be tolerated nor will it be giving any credibility and let’s make sure our government speaks with us. Why not a Racist Racoon or a Bigoted Bunyip instead of a Stoner Sloth ay?

In the end, how can you have a rational argument with someone about bigotry? How do you convince someone we are all just human beings? How do you make someone acknowledge the suffering of people they have so long willfully ignored? I’d say the only real way is make them face discrimination themselves.  Like Hannah Crofts from All Our Exes Live In Texas did when she publicly boycotted Perth jazz club owner Graham Wood via an op-ed in The Brag. Or like Yorta Yorta rapper Briggs did when he publicly posted the hateful comments he was being sent to the employers of the bigots that sent them.

Figures like Briggs and Crofts ought to be praised for taking their time to publicly expose people and hold them accountable for their bigotry, rather than being denounced as whingers. Yet rather than look at this as more evidence of our nation’s backward stance on these issues, I say we look at it as a ray of hope, as it looks like we might just have gotten our first effective weapon against the bigots – which is why they’re having such a fucking whinge. All that’s left for us to do now is keep it up, so next time you see someone post something hateful online, screen cap and send it on. In the end everyone is entitled to have their opinion, but that doesn’t mean they come without consequence.