by phenske (follow)

Is racism really to blame?.

Racism has once again become an issue that seems to take undertones throughout contemporary society, but is it really to blame?


Recently I came across a webpage that has been created by the Victorian Government and Museum Victoria, with an aim to create a racism intervention (I guess). On the page there are five short videos, the first is just a scenario that happens on a tram and then the others are people’s points of view and perspectives of travellers on this tram. I watched them all and had a realisation about it all: we have become people who are so hung up on racism that we perceive everything negative through the lens of racism.

Social media is one of the causes of us attributing bad behaviour to racism. How many videos of racist rants and discrimination have become viral? We are constantly blasted by seeing racist issues on all types of media. We have become almost conditioned to believe that any conflict between two people or groups of different races is racism! But is it? Why have we abandoned the concept that some people are just argumentative jerks? That some people just feel the need to dominate and treat others badly because of their personalities, not because of racism!

I recently was part of a conversation on a local job seeking Facebook page our region has a huge unemployment rate regardless of race, age or gender. We were all discussing how to better improve prospects of getting a job when someone new joined the conversation saying she felt the reason she was not getting any jobs is because she identifies as Indigenous. This shocked me to the core, here we all are discussing how NOBODY can get a job around here and instead of going “Oh well it’s obvious it’s just tough”, someone pulls out the race card claiming it’s discrimination and racism.

Have we become so over-sensitive and conditioned to believe race is the problem in every scenario that we’ve actually stopped seeing the true issue? That people as a whole can just be insensitive jerks?

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