Here is a story idea I submitted to Hungry Beast on this Australia Day. Just to be clear, I don’t experience White Guilt. I’m way ahead of the curve and experience White Meta Guilt, the guilt that comes from being a member of a society that feels White Guilt.
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Reconciliation in this country needs to stop being about what white fella thinks is best for indigenous Australians. As a nation, our reconciliation vocabulary only extends to telling this culture how to live their lives based on our own ideals. Has anyone ever stopped to ask the indigenous population what THEY want?
I’m not going to make a video or write a story. You are the journalists, that’s your job.
I want to see this on the 2010 series of Hungry Beast: a vox pop asking indigenous Australians the question “What do you want?” You can come up with more specific variations of this question in order to extract the kinds of answers you need e.g. “When will you know that true reconciliation has been achieved in Australia?”
And really ramp up the White Guilt in your editing. I mean seriously. Thrust that knife into our cold, shriveled, white hearts and rotate. Maybe interleave the vox pop interviews from white and indigenous Australians in a way that illustrates the contrast between our views on what is needed vs. what they actually want.
More ideas
Observation: There is an emerging trend for white Australians to vocally express their White Guilt. This may soon become a new mainstream form of Patriotism, replacing our previous forms: racism and getting drunk.
The kind of White Guilt I’m talking about doesn’t lead to action or solve practical problems. It’s more of a passive attitude that’s adopted by whites so they can wash their hands of the mistakes of governments past. Plant a flag in the moral high ground and one is free to enjoy life in the prosperous Australia we know today, despite the historical events that lead to its creation.
For successful reconciliation, the minority needs to feel like the engineer of their own emancipation. Epic bloody battles for freedom help with this. I’m definitely not suggesting we have one but Australia’s indigenous history is lacking this kind of epic empowerment that is present in other nations, e.g. USA.
Germaine Greer made an insightful observation recently: in indigenous youth culture, getting arrested is seen as a rite of passage. This illustrates my previous point. We can’t just tell indigenous Australians that reconciliation has been achieved. They have to feel it. This will sound ignorant but based on observations of analogous situations, I think it will help if the minority feel like they’ve earned it; like they had to fight for it. If equality is simply handed to them on a platter by Whitey, they don’t own it.
Maybe Investigate New Zealand. They have their own Maori TV station, the Australian equivalent of which seems a long, long way off.
