Racism in Australia

I was talking to a guy from work who was of the view that racism was still pretty in-your-face in Australia. That’s not something I happened to believe, I just tend to think that people are pretty up front about race and not of politically correct inclination, which is fine by me. After some persuation though, and a load of examples (this guy was Asian) I thought… I wonder if I can test this out for myself somehow. So what I did was change my Steam in-game name to a sort of version of my regular nick “Lurks”. 匿伏男子 was what I came up with, because I liked the sound of it too.

Well the first thing you notice is like anyone who has retarded nicks that you can’t say/spell etc, people have difficulty talking to you. What happened pretty quickly was I was called “Asian guy” or some guys would have a bit of fun and banter and call me four box. Which is fine and cool too. It’s probably made a little easier for them given I can obviously speak English. Once I was even asked what it meant.

That said… there was another side, something which I just hadn’t experienced at all before. I was the target of fairly regular racist jibes. Now let’s be fair here, this is about the worst forum you can be for it but that was sort of the idea. When you’re playing Team Fortress 2 a bit of smack talk kicks about. However so as not to skew anything, and well as part of the new way I play these games and make them barable for any length of time, I don’t engage in any smack talk myself. No voice comms, just English responses to questions and team intel etc.

Nevertheless, on several occasions of the course of a couple of weeks I had tirades about how I should fuck off, Australia is full. All sorts of racial slurs. If I pointed out (politely) that in fact I’m not Asian, I’d get abuse about using a rice picker language and worse. I had absolutely none of this in the weeks prior just being called “Lurks” and didn’t have any when I changed it back. I’m fully aware that the guys doing this kind of thing are adrenalin fueled 14 year olds who are enjoying the fact they can act like utter fuckheads without their dad giving them a clip around the ear.

You have to wonder though, is that all it is? Soon enough these guys will have kids of their own. I’ve never actually heard any sort of remotely cohesive insults in game beyond this, just the usual playground stuff about your mum and stuff like that. Yet they seem much quicker to kick off to someone they think is “Asian” (interestingly, absolutely everyone thinks it’s Japanese although a few said Kanji which isn’t a bad effort) and kick off in much more detail with a collection of pre-practiced racial slurs, accusations of stealing jobs and general lack of respect that there could be any language other than English. (Very common to get “it’s all the same” sort of statements regarding where something is Japanese or Chinese etc).

Interesting, slightly disturbing. Also I’ve added this to an experience recently in a cab where I asked the Indian cab driver where he was from (knowing full well he was Indian but wanting to home in a bit more than that and have a conversation) and getting “Uh. Is this a racist thing?” response. Maybe the situation in Australia isn’t quite how I thought it was.