Andrew L. Urban
Recently, The Australian published a column by a contributor they call The Mocker under the headline, “Giridharan Sivaraman’s worldview is built on grievance and victimhood”, which triggered over 600 comments. Mine was rejected.
Below are extracts from The Mocker’s column:
Australia has been good to Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman. Born in the subcontinent to an Indian mother and a Sri Lankan father, he and his family migrated here to escape conflict and discrimination.
Australia gave him and his family save haven. He has since prospered. Now occupying a taxpayer-funded sinecure, he draws a salary of $398,450 per year. So how does Sivaraman thank his adopted country and the public he ostensibly serves? Simple. His idea of gratitude is to tip the bucket on the nation, its institutions, and a large segment of its population, particularly those with Anglo-Saxon heritage.
As the Daily Telegraph reported last week, Sivaraman said during a radio interview in October that Australia Day, or “Invasion Day” as he termed it, was “not a day to be celebrated”. It was a “day of mourning in many ways,” he claimed. To “not acknowledge that,” he insisted, “compounds racism”.
Our institutions “were built to ensure white privilege and white supremacy”. And “structural racism”, he claims, is “pervasive”. It has “made its nest in almost every facet of Australian life”.
Consequently, “systemic bias” is “baked into our society”. The racism that arose during the voice referendum, he claims, continues “to have horrific impacts on First Nations communities”. Merely encouraging young people not to see race, he says, “structurally maintains white supremacy”.
The “only religious public holidays recognised by law are Christian ones,” he laments. He does not like Harmony Day or phrases such as “social cohesion”, because that “risks contributing to the notion that racism is not a significant problem in Australia”.
To say Sivaraman incessantly bemoans the state of society is an understatement.
“When someone like me asks for equity, dignity and respect, I’m asking for our institutions and structures to reflect me, to be culturally safe for me, to allow me to thrive,” he says.
So insidious are the effects of structural racism that Sivaraman himself was complicit in unconsciously acquiring an Australian accent, a fact he realised when a woman told him he sounded “ocker”.
“I felt embarrassed, a bit ashamed,” he said. “Deep down I knew I had developed my ‘strine’ to fit in. I had let go of my mother tongue, Tamil, a language of beautiful literature and poetry so as not to sound different.” His doing so was “a result of institutions and structures that divide us,” he wailed.
***
To which I commented:
“That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Mr Sivaram please note, your assertions about racist Australia are dismissed. Good bye.”
It was REJECTED by the moderator. Mine would have been one of 647 comments.
Here a few of them:
Peter
Why not abolish this role that seeks to find disharmony. Singapore manages its diversity better with a government body. Australia Day should be a day of unity and celebration..
Peter
Why not abolish this role that seeks to find disharmony. Singapore manages its diversity better with a government body. Australia Day should be a day of unity and celebration..
KeithW
Unnecessarily disrupting, ridiculing and demonising the celebration of all that is great about Australia on the nominated National Day is, to my mind, a thoughtless, unkind, and un-Australian thing to do.
Scott
The Mocker … this has aspects that are highly amusing to read.
Then you comprehend what this guy has written; then I am at a total loss in understanding why this guy is staying in our country. At a total loss.
Darren
The calculated use of phrases such as “were built to ensure white privilege and white supremacy” are used by some with the intent to denigrate whites, instil a sense of guilt and are highly racist in themselves. To suggest that our forefathers-built institutions to bake systemic racial bias into our society is to be ignorant of history. Our institutions, laws and practices are under attack, yet have served us well, irrespective of a person’s colour, ethnicity, sex or any other label that is chosen to be weaponised. If you are lucky enough to be an Australian, then you have been given the right to work within our social structural boundaries, but you cannot go outside them. You can contribute to their improvement and help develop them, but you can’t knock them down.