[recoznet2] no poo pooing pp

[tdunlop]

Trudy wrote:   Luckily, Paddy McGuinness lists his email address at the end of his opinion piece so he can be debated. Whether this does any good is another question. --- Trudy ===============================================   Trudy,   I've written to PP three times at his email address and have never received a reply.  As you imply, I doubt whether he could be debated in any meaningful sense anyway.  I follow his columns out of a sort of masochistic pervisity and a professional interest (he is vaguely relevant to my uni work) but I find at least half of  his columns incoherent - the one below being a good example.  I really don't understand what he says here in the final para about to presume that someone being racist who isn't actually being racist makes you racist.  Go figure.  I contemplated following up this point via his email, but I don't think I'd be any more successful this time.  The really annoying thing is that the topic itself - what is and isn't racism - is an interesting and important one.  Shame he handles it in such a slap-dash way.   Tim ============ Racism, in subtle shades of grey Date: 23/09/99 Racial issues are not always as black and white as they seem. BY PADRAIC P. McGUINNESS RACE and racism are tricky things to interpret, and the heavy-handed and abusive use of the terms whenever something happens which makes us uncomfortable is conducive to neither good sense nor good policy - and often enough is a form in itself of racism. Only last Friday I was confronted with an interesting case study. Walking down Oxford Street towards the city at about 11.30 in the morning, I was looking for a cab, since the bus drivers were doing their bit once again to promote private car use, when I saw one at the kerb with several Aborigines milling about. One of them, a woman, was sitting in the middle of the back seat of a taxi, refusing to get out - the driver would not take them. What was going on? Was he refusing them because they were black? As I got closer, it became evident that all of the Aborigines were pretty drunk, and some of them, including the refusenik, were clutching open cans of Jim Beam and Coke. Of course, any taxi driver would have knocked back people obviously drunk and drinking out of cans or bottles; one of the Aboriginal blokes apologetically remarked on it to me, and was trying with the others to get the woman out of the cab. When she finally came out they went off and the cabbie (who was Chinese) explained to me that he had stopped to drop a fare and they had jumped into the cab without asking. Now this affair obviously had nothing to do with racism. Yet there would be many people who would immediately believe it had. And it serves to point up a difficult problem, that of stereotyping. Many taxi drivers will refuse to stop for an obviously Aboriginal person because they have had experiences like this. This is very hurtful to the innocent, but not necessarily to be totally condemned. A black economist I was talking to in New York a couple of years ago told me that although he hated not being able to wave down a taxi in the street, he understood the motivations of the drivers. Statistically, a taxi driver was far more likely to be mugged by a black customer than a white one. Therefore, it was rational though unfortunate behaviour for a cabbie to minimise his risks by refusing all black passengers, and had nothing to do with racism. If bearded men were more prone to attacking taxi drivers than the clean shaven, I would blame other men like me for problems getting a taxi, not the drivers. And stop the spiel about victims of society and white racism right there. Whatever the reasons for the Aborigines concerned being drunk, the driver was entitled to consider his own welfare and that of his cab. If he had seen the group in advance, he would have been perfectly justified in driving past them. St Vincent de Paul, if he were driving a cab, might have behaved differently, but he would not have survived long. When you have to make snap judgments about your safety you cannot stop to check the credentials of an individual. So in the recent case in Cairns where a group of white boys bashed an Aboriginal man sleeping in a park and were not sent to jail there has been the usual rush to judgment, and attacks on the judge, by southern city dwellers who know what they are all like in the Deep North - a mob of red-kneck racists, all Pauline Hanson followers. On the face of it, it looks pretty bad. Five boys with baseball bats and hockey sticks setting about a sleeping man is appalling whatever the circumstances. According to reports, the judge of the Queensland District Court claimed that the actions of the boys were "not racially motivated and stemmed from contempt for the Aborigines' itinerant lifestyle". It is difficult to see how that mitigates the offence - it is equally bad to attack someone sleeping rough whether they are black or white; the fact that the man was an Aborigine just adds another contemptible dimension. Did the judge mean to say that the attack would have been better or worse in that case? This is not the end of the matter, of course. The Crown will undoubtedly appeal against the leniency of the sentence (community service orders), and more detail will emerge as to what the boys thought they were about, and what the actual reasoning of the trial judge was based on. It may be that there are other factors which have to be taken into account which were known to the judge but which have yet to be reported. Certainly on the face of it the boys deserve to be locked up, and to be given a good hiding into the bargain. If they come from the proverbial "good homes", that makes it worse rather than better. However, the matter serves once again to demonstrate the irrelevancy of proposals for laws against racial violence, against racial discrimination and against racist speech. It is already an offence to assault anyone for whatever reason. It is an offence to carry threatening weapons. If the victim had died as a result of the assault, the boys would have been charged with murder. It is as bad to assault a person for his lifestyle as for his race. Racial tension is a reality in Far North Queensland, but the reasons for this ought to be dealt with directly, not by trying to suppress the fact. There is more than one form of racism; to assume that a group of Aborigines is being discriminated against by a taxi driver because they are Aborigines not because they are drunk is racist, too. [EMAIL PROTECTED]