Australian buses, where all the best racism occurs

Another one of these incidents.

("Learn some manners.... stick that up your mother's c**t." Oh the irony.)

And this one a month ago...

A lot of people will use these sorts of clips as proof of what a racist country Australia is. But I think it's important to view these things in context. Drunk or mentally unstable underclass types on buses are not really representative of mainstream Australia. Of course, that doesn't make it any easier to bear if you subjected to this kind of aggressive racist tirade. Is it fair to draw links between this sort of behaviour and broader systemic examples of racism? To an extent. But it's a complicated picture. 

What bugs me in these videos is the relative lack of bystander intervention. It's understandable to a certain extent that a lot of people don't want to draw the ire of someone who is in an aggressive mood and thus potentially dangerous. But it's the silence that these types of people interpret as agreement. It's notable that the first action taken by the driver in the first video is not to warn the woman who is spewing invective, but to ask the target of her rage to sit down. I'm not sure how they operate on Sydney buses, but I've never known standing up on a bus to be a significant societal transgression. Unless perhaps you are the wrong ethnicity.