This happens quite often - pointing out someone may have inadvertently spoken from a position of blindness gets you more outrage from the ego blow than the actual offense itself. You can pretty much triple that shit for anyone right leaning.
It’s pretty gross. Made even grosser in the context of the Voice, where one of the things the No campaign has been doing is attempting to label the Yes campaign as the real racists. What utter bollocks.
Shit has become so unhinged. This is my first referendum so I'm sure how it compares. But the rhetoric just feels so vicious. The no campaign say the voice is divisive but it's their campaign that's divisive. They're importing some of vilest culture war tactics from the US.
The conservatives have been getting worse over the past say, 10 years, Trump kind of accelerated things and that style of "who cares what the truth is" was exported from the US.
The right wing in general was always going to end up being like this though.
Straight out of the US conservative playbook. An embarrassing look in Australia, and shows in the most obvious way that they are not acting in good faith.
The good news is that society has accepted that racism is a bad thing.
The bad news is that the main consequence of this is that it’s unacceptable to accuse anyone of racism if they have any social capital. It’s also unacceptable to shout racial slurs and such, but if someone is sufficiently rich, talented or well-connected, even that can be explained away as consistent with them not being racist.
We have all been raised in racist societies. We all have little racist worms in our brains. We owe it to ourselves to fight our internal racism as well as helping each other recognise when we are being bigots.
Arguing what you said isn't racist is itself racist 99% of the time. If you think maybe what you said really wasn't racist ask why it is racist don't try to defend racism.
If someone starts giving excuses or justifications for why what they said wasn't racist just say "The only correct response when someone tells you something you said was Racist is 'Oh I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I will try to watch out for that in the future. Thank you for helping me fight racism'"
If they keep arguing you just say "I guess you don't wan't to fight racism. You know what that makes you?"
