By Sumedha Iyer
“Why do Indians smell? So blind people can hate them too.” My mother told me that joke when I was in my early teens. I was both offended and energised by it. This sucks, that smelly Indian person could be me! But it’s my mum too, and she’s telling the joke. Which is delicious. Like samosas and chutney. Wait, that’s a stereotype. Am I being racist? My head hurts.
By Mridula Nath Chakraborty
Imagine this: a documentary titled Australia’s Children is broadcast on free-to-air television channels in seven countries around the world on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Australia protests against such high-handed parachute solidarity by the well-meaning international community and bans the doco in this antipodean nation. The popularity of the doco rises hundred-fold with millions of people watching it anyway on YouTube. Is there anything wrong in this picture?
By Sukhmani Khorana
When Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently declared that Indigenous people living in remote communities were making a ‘lifestyle choice’, he was rightly rebuked by both sides of politics for undermining Aboriginal sovereignty and spiritual connection to land. What was seldom brought up, however, was how his curious phrasing assumed that there is a norm that the ‘choice’ was deviating from. This led me to wonder about a hypothetical scenario where all of the nation’s Indigenous citizens walked the white-laced path – mortgaging an over-priced suburban house, working a 9 to 5 job in the big smoke, commuting to workplaces and shopping centres. Would that help us ‘bridge the gap’? Would that also be the end of race-based prejudice? Chances are they could still encounter casual racism and institutional stasis.