… the recent racist (:dubious:)attacks on indian students ?
I’m a bit embarrassed to say I wasn’t even aware of them. Racism against Indians in particular hasn’t registered on my social radar. Australians are often quite racist, though (IMO), so it doesn’t necessarily surprise me.
Germans are worse.
I live in Melbourne and work in education, so have a lot to do with Indian students. In my experience they are very popular with Australians. Away from the night-club scene in a small area of Melbourne, this is basically a very safe city.
There have been some recent attacks which are dreadful. It has been unclear as to whether it is a media beat-up, taking the fact that some victims happened to be Indian to make it a racist issue - or whether the attacks are actually aimed specifically at Indians. Those in authority are being so careful to say the right thing to try and quieten it down here and in India (we are getting coverage of your press). Now it’s actually the Indian students protesting which is the main worry. So we are not being told exactly how many attacks there have been and how that relates to the usual percentage of the overall attacks. Indian students are very important to our universities and very welcome because they tend to be so easy to get on with and so reliable.
I can assure you that within the general population there is no anti-Indian feeling.
I don’t think Australians are any more racist than other multicultural societies. I suspect that we are less than many countries in the world, because we don’t have a strong identity of our own. In most university classes, Australians are in the minority, because we have so many foreign students. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an anti-Indian sentiment.
I suspect, when the fuss dies down, that you will find that it was an overreaction to a number of brutal attacks that were not specifically Indian, just made into a racist news story and then fanned and lots and lots of hothead media and now being picked up on by some students capitalizing on the attention.
Well, I hope so. I want our Indian students to enjoy their time here and be able to get on with their studies in safety.
Black people are stupid.
There are definitely racists in Australia, like any other country, but as lynne-42 says, it’s never been my impression that Indians are a particular target. If you asked me two weeks ago who Australian racists were most likely to be targetting I would have said Somalis or Middle Easterners. A couple of years ago it was the Lebanese who were “target of the week” - it keeps rotating. And before that it was all about the evils of “Asian Immigration” (that means Chinese/Vietnamese/Japanese over here, not Indian). About the only constant is the general suckiness of indigenous/mainstream relations.
I hopw we’ve seen the end of the recent attacks. I suspect the bad taste will linger for a while though.
I’d have to agree with the above, Indians are generally well liked, easy going people in Australia. As far as I know, the recent attacks were isolated incidents. I doubt if they’re being targeted for their ethnicity, and if they were it would be by a very small, lunatic fringe. I’d say they’ve just been unlucky and have become targets of opportunity.
I don’t think they’re doing themselves any favours by protesting en mass, or getting all activistic (is that even a word?). Presenting themselves as a vocal, attention seeking group will probably only make the situation worse, and bring the racist knob heads out of the woodwork. There are racist pricks here, but we’d like to keep them under their rocks, and not have them come sniffing around at an upswing in local Indian solidarity or similar. Part of the reasons why the Indians fit in so well is because they do tend to be more dispersed, and not clumped together, enclave style.
If there’s crime against students, it should be treated as such, and targeted by the authorities. Race shouldn’t be made a factor.
Like other people I am amazed to hear about this but looking at tonight’s news it seems that, here in Sydney at least, it is a case of people drawing extremely dubious conclusions about crime in a somewhat dodgy bit of town.
The piece covered a street demonstration in Harris Park by Indian “youths” who were complaining that police don’t treat seriously their complaints that they are being targeted. There was no-one on the streets other than Indians and police. This may be because Harris Park is commonly known as Little India - many Indian born people live there and it is full of Indian restaurants and shops.
I work in the suburb next to it, Parramatta, and among the few hundred people where I work there is the occasional robbery or assault but, because we are from various backgrounds, we don’t make the connection that people from our office are targets.
On checking the news here is a piece that supports my view.
I’ve heard from a friend who’s a member of the Melbourne filth that Indian students genuinely are being targetted because there’s a stereotype among druggies that uni-aged Indians tend to carry a relatively large amount of cash on them.
What aggravates the situation is that this tends to be true (many of them work jobs where they get paid in cash and keep it on hand rather than banking it and paying a motza in fees) - and therefore self-perpetuating - and that the students involved would prefer to cry “racism” rather than to practice the normal sorts of risk reduction that sane people would do in a big city.
In Sydney, there’s no real evidence that this is the case, but there’s a perception of racism based on what’s going on in Melbourne.
I think Lynne-42 pretty much said it. I doubt that there is an organised campaign against people because they are Indian: more that these scum wish to find victims and dislike Indians. If the Indians weren’t there, any other person would do.
I’m in Perth and there are no attacks.
That’s pretty cool to hear. My stepdad’s colleague is Indian and moved to Australia maybe twenty years ago, and reported there being a lot of racism at the time. I haven’t talked to him recently, but it’s nice to hear that things have changed.
Oh, there are still plenty of racists around. The population is, after all, made up of humans…
I know next to nothing about modern Indian society, but I’m going to hazard a guess that there are racists there too. But you often only start to notice when you move from somewhere where you’re part of the majority, to where you’re not.
Yes ! With each state being a mini-nation and inter-state immigration for work to prosperous states , there is racism here. It does make headlines once in a while.
Let’s get real about the “racist” aspects of this imbroglio and not rely simply on one sanitized source of information.
Here’s a CNN LINK
Now that we’ve got that utterly clueless buffoon out of the way, let’s get to the nitty gritty of the article:
Some one or two hundred thousand ethic (sic) Lebanese (the vast majority being Muslim) were very graciously granted asylum by the Australian government in the 1990s for compassionate reasons. For those who are capable of putting two and two together and coming up with the right answer, it’s our old friend, the endless Jihad at work here, not your favorite bogeyman, “white racism”.
Casino indians or dot indians? 
Yesterday after I left work, knowing that I had things to do and would be home late, I foolishly stopped at the vegetarian Indian place I like and bought 2 samosas for dinner. I ate them as I walked along the street to my car.
I suggested to people at work today that I had taken a great risk, had I been mistaken for an Indian…
People mocked me. Particularly Mohan, the Indian guy. Apparently we blonde white guys don’t look very Indian.
I’d suspect there aren’t a ton of Native Americans in Austrailia, but that’s just me.
Could you please rephrase the title so that it more accurately reflects the purpose of the thread? As it now stands, the thread has to be opened to find out what it is about. If you tell me what title you want, I’ll fix it for you.
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Revised title to better reflect topic of thread.
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