Vanessa de Largie | The Spectator | January 10, 2020
There has been enough social commentary on our bushfire crisis and climate change to fill Lake Eyre, so I’ll refrain from commenting because I’m obviously not a scientist and don’t know enough.
What I do know, though, is that the fires have brought the scurrying woke-folk out of their burrows in droves. Virtue-signalling do-gooders who are big on grandstanding and small on sincerity.
You know the types? They’re just like the celebrities British comedian Ricky Gervais pummeled at the beginning of the week in his fabulously ferocious tell-it-like-it-is Golden Globes speech.
In the past week, there has been article after article in the mainstream media about the heroism of multicultural Australia with headlines such as, “Sikh group giving free hot meals to bushfire victims hailed as legends”, “This is the Australian way: Muslims donate 36,000 bottles of water to firefighters” and “This is Australia: Muslim heroes travel to fire-ravaged Victoria to cook meals for firefighters battling the blaze”.
Talk about bootlickers at the Church of Woke. It would be a tough gig to find headlines more “token” than these. And sadly, the general public eat this rubbish up, never pausing to question its accuracy or motivations.
A survey conducted by Ipsos Mori in 2016, revealed that people globally overestimate the Muslim population, with Aussies believing that 12.5 per cent of the population is Muslim when in actual fact, it is only 2.4 per cent.
When newspaper editors publish Muslim-centric headlines and advertising agencies insert “token Muslims” into national advertising campaigns in the name of inclusiveness, the general public is brainwashed into believing that more Muslims reside Down Under than the reality.
Pray tell… If Australia is so “diverse”, “inclusive” and “anti-bigotry” as we make out to be — then why make a habit of singling out race at all? It’s unnecessary because the general consensus is that anyone who is legally and lawfully a citizen or permanent resident is an Aussie.
And on a more sensitive note, how are we to know if immigrants need a reminder of their homeland? After all, they all too often fleeing war, famine, dictatorship and corruption in search of freedom and opportunity.
One would assume the point of these celebratory articles is to convey how cosmopolitan Australia is. But by objectifying minority groups for the benefit of enlightening ‘the majority’ is exceedingly more racist and condescending than not acknowledging them at all.
Philanthropy and kindness are part of being human. They have no gender, colour, race or sexuality. Sadly, minority groups have become objects of inspiration much like individuals living with a disability..
These groups are used by the privileged majority and effectively treated as a product; something others can find value in, not to mention used as a tool for political point-scoring.
The late Australian disability-rights activist, Stella Young gave a Ted Talk titled, I’m not your inspiration! During her insightful speech, she recited a tale from her youth, when she was a Buffy-The-Vampire-addicted 15-year-old-girl and the council wanted to give her a ‘community achievement award’.
Young said that she wasn’t doing anything that could even be considered an achievement — if you took her “disability” out of the equation.
So keen are Lefties to be politically correct and inclusive, they infantilise their favourite minority groups like an overprotective mother who wants her child to be happy and safe and protected and unaffected from the ills of the world. It’s cringeworthy to watch.
Publishing articles about minority groups behaving “graciously” and “humanely” is just patronising tokenism — that divides more than unifies.
As Anne Miles wrote in her October 2019 column about diversity on the media and marketing website Mumbrella:
Real acceptance and inclusion is actually invisible. It just is. It’s so natural that there is no need to make a song and dance about it.
We are getting this horribly wrong. There are solutions: learning more about our unconscious bias and aligning our strategies with the actual population count. Be diverse and inclusive but don’t fuss about it or fake it. It’s time to move on from activism and focus on actually doing something.
Amen.