Racism and the many different Australias (@ Peril Magazine)

I have another post up at Peril Magazine. It's a long screed about the different ways people see racism in Australia, and the difficulty of analyzing it objectively.

If you ask someone who is somewhat right-wing, most of the time they will tell you that Australia is not really racist. Likewise, a left-winger will usually tell you that it is.
Why is that? Well, those on the left like to highlight the evils of “the system” and those they deem to have power and status, and champion the rights of the little guy (in this case, minority groups). So it suits their worldview to see racism around every corner. Conservatives, by contrast, like to imagine that life is one big level playing field where everyone can achieve whatever they want if they work hard enough, and thus they tend to see claims of racism as mere rabble-rousing. Likewise, a conservative point of view likes to defend the idealised traditional Australia of yesteryear, when things were simpler, a time before people with funny foreign names arrived and started trying to change everything.

Check it here.