Andrew Bolt: Now is not a good time to be a white male in Australia

In the eyes of the hysterical Left, simply sharing the same gender or race as those who have done wrong now makes you just as guilty.

This is not a good time to be a white male in Australia. Not when the most fashionable people — even teachers — are now racist and sexist.

Two examples last week show how far this poison has spread.

In Warrnambool, Brauer College made male students stand up “as a symbolic gesture of apology for the behaviours of their gender”.

So even boys who were perfect gentlemen had to apologise for boys who were pigs, simply because they shared the same gender.

Sharing the same gender meant they shared the same guilt. The worst of the boys now define the best. So all males are guilty.

On Wednesday came another example of this toxic collective guilt.

Mark Leibler, co-chair of the Referendum Council, was on Sky News to push again for an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament.

Leibler’s agenda, in my opinion, is racist enough. His arguments were even worse.

“We didn’t occupy this continent with consent,” Leibler said. Aborigines objected, and “we started off by murdering them”.

But wait. Who is this “we”, Mark?

Mark Leibler.

I know I haven’t murdered Aborigines. Nor did my parents. Nor did my grandparents, back in Holland. None of my friends and neighbours murdered any, either, so who is this “we”?

To Leibler, I assume, “we” means white Australians — or perhaps anyone who does not have at least one Aboriginal ancestor among their great-great-great grandparents.

This is race guilt. Blood guilt.

“We” are all the whites, now accused of murdering Aborigines simply because we share the race of individuals we never knew who did kill Aborigines hundreds of years ago.

And even then, to say that the British colonisers “started off by murdering” Aborigines is a grotesque exaggeration and defamation of our nation’s history.

But sharing the same race now means sharing the guilt. The worst of whites define the best. So all whites are guilty and must say “sorry”, as sanctimonious white politicians do every year on National Sorry Day.

So do schoolchildren. White schoolchildren say “sorry” for crimes they didn’t do, to people they weren’t done against.

This is the new racism. And the new sexism.

This destroys one of the great ideals of the West, informed by Christianity and preached since the Enlightenment — that we are individuals, to be judged by what we ourselves do and say.

This is the ideal that Martin Luther King Jr famously preached in 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But that ideal is now officially dead. Today we are judged not just by our race but by our gender — and no one is more guilty that the white and the male.

White men are judged, and not against the best of them but the worst. Not against Einstein but Hitler; not against Abraham Lincoln but the Ku Klux Klan.

White men are judged, and not against the best of them —Like Einstein — but the worst

This new racism and sexism seems driven hardest by intellectuals who seem to despise a Western civilisation they believe is the sinful work of white males.

In fact, China’s brutal communist dictatorship is now exploiting this self-hatred to make us weaker and itself stronger.

Freshly elected to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, China this year claimed Australia was riddled with “racism” and “systemic discrimination”, committing “war crimes” and “violence against Aborigines”.

And sick with self-hatred, frozen by moral relativism, which Australian intellectuals dared call out this monstrous hypocrisy from the genocidal Chinese regime?

In 1969, Sir Kenneth Clark ended his legendary TV series Civilisation with this warning — that civilisations can and do die, and just being rich will not save them.

“Far more, it requires confidence — confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws and confidence in one’s own mental powers,” Sir Kenneth said.

And “above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible”.

But where is the confidence of our intellectual class in Australia?

Where, when academics at Melbourne University’s Graduate School of Education, which teaches our children’s teachers, this month declared that our schools are in fact “part of a system of colonial rule” that is “deeply embedded” with “structural racism”?

And where is the resistance to this collective self-loathing when any male — even one with the God-given genius that makes an individual stand out from the mob — is dismissed as just another guilty white male?