The Sky is Blue, The Grass is Green and I Am White

Coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, the notion of popular media being dominated by ‘white’ characters and culture was one that I had admittedly not put much thought into previously. After consulting the readings (Dreher 2014, Kalina 2012) I felt as if my eyes had been opened, retrospectively reviewing the media I consume on a daily basis and recognising how rare it is that races other than my own are given screen time. Multiculturalism is a value at the core of Australian culture and I greatly value the opportunities I am offered every day to socialise and share experiences with individuals from cultures different to my own. I find this to be the most fulfilling aspect of my employment as a bartender in a suburb known for its eclectic collection of ethnicities and flicking on the TV after another shift while writing this blog post, I can’t help but feel that I’m viewing what is supposedly a societal mirror through a sea of bleach.

Of course as with any discussion of racial issues, racism as a whole must be discussed and that is basically where our tutorial discussion took us. During this discussion I was able to assert my belief that the best way to eradicate racism is a cyclical approach, heading back to the days of being able to describe someone by the colour of their skin but with discriminatory connotations removed. At the beginning of this post I describe myself as Anglo-Saxon but I have no idea if my ancestors were part of the migration from continental Europe to Britain in the early 5^th century and frankly, I don’t see how such a description says anything about my character. I find terms like the classic ‘African-American’ more offensive than calling someone black as it makes a number of assumptions about a person’s ancestry and suggests that it somehow influences who they are today. Only once we as a society learn to accept that skin colour is a large portion of our aesthetics, move past the awkwardness forced upon us by political correctness gone mad and use this colour as a purely descriptive term removed from prejudice can we truly create a world without racism.

References:

Dreher, T forthcoming 2014, ‘White Bread Media’, The Media and Communications in Australia

Kalina, P 2012 ‘Diversity still out of the picture’, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, accessed 10/5/2013, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/diversity-still-out-of-the-picture-20120229-1u1jg.html