Tag: Jenny Leong

On the State of Australia and Race Race politics is back. But his speech also follows a recent burst of activity by his office that included several data-heavy reports showing the wide gap between Australia’s ethnically diverse population and the mostly white elites running government and business. Dr. Soutphommasane grew up in Fairfield, an area of Sydney that has long been the first stop for immigrant families like his own — and here he is arguing that those who fear such areas do not understand how they work. On Double Standards On the so-called Sudanese crime crisis in Melbourne, if we turn to the facts, we know that in Victoria Sudanese-born people aren’t the only ones overrepresented in crime statistics. In fact, according to Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency, criminal offenders born in Sudan make up about 1 percent of all offenders. That’s greater than their proportion of the total population in Victoria, but state figures show that is also true of Australian-born offenders (who make up almost 72 percent of criminal offenders and roughly 65 percent of the population) and New Zealanders (who are 2.2 percent of offenders and 1.6 percent of the population in Victoria). They’re the complaints of snowflakes who can’t hack it when people challenge racism. It’s a fragility that explains why when racism is called out, the real offense in some people’s eyes is not that an act of discrimination occurred, but rather that someone was subjected to being called racist. More tough talk from Dr. Soutphommasane — especially on the point that some people are less offended by a racist act than by someone calling it what it is. He acknowledged at one point that “prejudice and discrimination are like the permanent stains of our humanity,” but phrases like “implicit bias” or “unconscious bias” — schools of thought explaining that racist outcomes are often tied to historical and unseen influences that shape us all, regardless of background — do not appear in Dr. Soutphommasane’s speech.