So maybe this has all been said before. So maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. All I know is that I'm sick and tired of Australian college jocks joking about aboriginals like they're the shit on their shoes.





When you’re young, white, getting a good education and still quietly terrified of the world it is way too easy to forget that words run this world, that words have power, and that maybe refusing to be politically correct isn’t a fun, cool kind of rebellion against the state.

It’s easy, because hell, PC is for pussies who like to sleep well at night and go around vigorously and self-righteously correcting people, right? It’s easy because we’re on top of the world, we’ve never had to endure the suffocating blanket of a society that was forced upon us, one that fundamentally degrades us while making pretty, media-friendly gestures that say everything is better now.

So many people suffer, but what I’m thinking of at the moment, what has me abso-fucking-lutely shaking with rage are the plethora of aboriginal jokes that slide right off people’s tongues. We tell these hi-larious two-liners when we’re drunk, when we’re hanging out with friends, when we’re playing cards, eating lunch, going out. You never know what damage your doing because nobody in your group just happens to be an aboriginal, and if they were, you sure as hell wouldn’t do it close enough to see their reaction.

It’s like self-esteem-boosting-schoolyard-bullying all over again. And it makes me furious.

In the microcosmic worlds of these jokes, aboriginals are downgraded to the level of humorous animals, living on the outskirts of our cities, illiterate, horny, violent, inept, moronic creatures, paralleled to shit-eating pigs and dumb dogs in the punchlines.

A noble, ancient culture, a people born and bred in our deserts and land, full to brimming with a mythology and understanding of the world we could never understand, reduced to this by a few ignorant, eager to impress jocks?

It’s so stupid. It’s so accepted. It is disgusting.

It’s not active discrimination – I’m not talking massacres, legal bias, ghettos or violence. It’s the passive-aggressive perpetuation of a particular image that is presented to us through the media.

It is this insidious, humorous bent on the issue that destroys hope, that blocks pathways out of the gutter, that makes the nice, elderly employer choose a blond freshman girl over a middle-aged aboriginal man.

Language. It has such power over us, and flows like poison from laughing throats.


Shut the fuck up already.