Tory Shepherd: Hanson’s evil trick to sow division
ANYONE who thinks ‘It’s OK to be white’ isn’t a racist statement needs a history lesson, or two minutes on Google, writes Tory Shepherd. And our own Senate has been tricked by it.
HAVE you stopped beating your wife?”
That is a pretty good example of a loaded question.
It comes with the built-in assumption the target is a wife basher. It can trip them up, perhaps confuse them into saying YES!, thereby implying that they had actually been beating their wife when they meant “I never did”.
It’s a good example, but it has been topped this week by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. A motion Senator Hanson introduced to the Senate asked senators to agree or disagree with the statement:
Anyone who agrees is saying far more than “it’s OK to be white”. They’re giving the nod to a white supremacist slogan.
It’s a statement that has made its way via the Ku Klux Klan into the broader extremist lexicon.
It gets squidged in alongside ridiculous warnings about a looming “white genocide”.
Meanwhile, Senator Hanson trumpeted that those who said “no” to the white supremacist slogan think it’s not OK to be white. I’m sure she thought it was terrifically clever.
Senator Hanson is a mouthpiece for this deluded form of racism in which white men are the “most demonised” people in Australia.
It’s a topsy-turvy concept where diversity means the end of white skin.
The spectre of the Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion AND the nation’s first black African Senator Lucy Gichuhi siding with One Nation was nauseating. Even after Senator Scullion later apologised.
It turns out the Federal Government had decided to vote against the motion, but an administrative error saw them given instructions to vote for it.
But that doesn’t explain why some comments from Senators appeared to double down on it. And anyway, an admin issue doesn’t excuse what happened.
In the parliamentary footage of the vote there’s some chaos, and uncertain faces. Labor is hooting at them from the other side: “Really? You’re going to vote for this?”. But they did.
In short, there was either a gigantic cock up, or a cover up, or a mixture of both. The Government said it was a mistake, and tried to start over again by taking the vote a second time and finally getting it right.
The immediate and obvious lesson is that senators should at least read the motion they’re voting on. It wasn’t long. Just a few words.
If they hadn’t looked at the words when the motion was first listed in September, the first hint that maybe it was worth typing the phrase into a search engine was that it came from Senator “swamped by Asians” Hanson. Everyone who either blithely or blindly declared that it was not a racist statement needs a history lesson; or at least a short Google session.
Far-right, gun-toting, Alt-Right-quoting Canadian provocateur Lauren Southern got mass exposure when she wore an “It’s OK to be white” T-shirt on tour in Australia earlier this year.
“If I’m white and I say I’m proud, the media will go nuts,” she said happily as she tried to drum up publicity for her gigs.
The phrase itself started getting around almost two decades ago, with a white-power band using it as the name of a song.
By 2012 a KKK group had converted it into the hashtag #IOTBW on Twitter, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Then, last year, users of 4chan, an internet forum humming with racism and misogyny, came up with the idea of baiting people by bombarding universities with flyers reading “It’s OK to be white”.
Lefties would be outraged, they said, then normal people would assume that Lefties were outraged because they all hate white people, and would turn on them.
They might even swell the ranks of the Alt-Right.
It was a prank of sorts — an evil trick to sow division.
And that it has worked, and fooled people into believing there is some sort of surge in anti-white sentiment, shows there’s at least a whiff of the smarts in the nationalist movement despite their logical fallacies and moronic hate.
A lot of this painting of whites as noble victims under deep threat from non-whites is moving beyond the troll-infested internet forums.
People are trying to usurp the Black Lives Matter movement with White Lives Matter, to flip the reality around.
This weird distortion has crossed into our federal Parliament, into the corners of mainstream conversations.
It’s a whitewashing of history, and a neutralising of inequalities that are deeply embedded in our society.
It’s not OK, and it’s a looming fight.
Tory Shepherd is the state editor of the Adelaide Advertiser.