According to these influencers, people like me are the problem with Australia

The other night, I stared at my phone screen in horror as a young blonde woman with a broad Australian accent calling herself a “conservative Christian” pouted at the camera and pointed to a caption that read: “I stay awake at night because Australia is being invaded and they could take over from the inside of the country overnight”.

A quick scroll through her social media feed made it clear the “they” she was referring to are Indians, and other Asian immigrants. People like me.

Credit: Artwork: Marija Ercegovac

The same woman also posted a video where she smirks to an audio clip that proclaims in a jubilant tone “Wait a minute, I’m white!”

This led me down a wormhole to numerous other accounts from young Australians with similar messages – anti-immigration and racist sentiments masquerading as patriotism. Some accounts are fairly small, with fewer than 1000 followers. But others, including, the one that first led me to this content, have more than 10,000 followers, suggesting these views are more popular than I realised.

Among the most popular is one account with almost 70,000 followers. In one video, text placed in front of his face reads:“It’s a numerical reality for every country in the world that they either develop a policy to limit migration from India, or they become India”, while the caption reads: “1.5 billion to our 27 million … do the math”. That particular video has more than 550,000 views, while another – with the text: “India could send every country 2 million Indians and still have a billion left over” – has been viewed 1.8 million times.

Trying to process this racist vitriol, I felt profoundly disappointed. The surprising number of other young Australians who appear to share the views of these people has confirmed something I have been in denial about for a long time.

Like many other Australians from diverse cultural backgrounds, I dealt with the racism I experienced growing up with a specific narrative – I told myself that these attitudes were outdated and were bound to become less common with each new generation of Australians.

I told myself that when racists complained, and in some cases lied, about immigrants (claiming we were stealing their jobs and single-handedly responsible for the housing crisis, for example), they weren’t thinking of or talking about people like me. That is, people who aren’t white, but who have lived in Australia for most or all of their lives. People who have Aussie accents, know all our cultural references, are as passionate about this country as the next person, and who consider ourselves Australian, alongside our other cultural backgrounds.

I told myself claims like immigrants are “swamping” Australia are predicated on the idea that all immigrants are “others” – foreign in a fundamental way that I am not. That these people’s fear and misinformation are guided by a two-dimensional view of multiculturalism that assumes all migrants are more different than they are similar because of visible markers of difference such as traditional clothing and heavily accented English.

Of course, this type of racism is just as vile as any other. But my thinking has always been that as migrant families move into their second and third generations of citizenship, racism would naturally ebb away as our shared Australianness became more embedded. Clearly, I was wrong.

After stumbling upon those TikTok accounts, suddenly, I couldn’t square the attitudes I was seeing with what I had always assumed drove racism.

To an extent, I get it. It’s the same in-group out-group dynamics that have existed since the beginning of time. But it’s also extremely disappointing to see the prejudice I grew up with still being reiterated decades on.

Counter to my optimism that racism would slowly ebb, and more progressive attitudes become commonplace, is a 2024 report from the Australian Human Rights Commission that found racism remains commonplace and prevalent in our society.

I look at my son, who is mixed race, and wonder how he is meant to make sense of it all. It’s macro, but it’s also very micro. How can I teach him to be proud of all of his cultural heritage when there are young Australians who would embrace one half of him and revile the other? How do I rationalise that both sets of his grandparents migrated to Australia for a better life from Fiji and England respectively, but only one side of his family was repeatedly told to “go back to where they came from”?

As much as I wish I could say to him that racism is a relic of the past, that people who are racist are from another time when it was more normalised, and that things have changed, that is clearly not reflective of Australian society as it stands.

And no matter how much I recognise the underlying drivers of racism, it doesn’t change the fact that there are people in the country I call home who want me to disappear for no other reason than the colour of my skin. Some things haven’t changed, and it’s getting harder for people like me to keep believing they can.

Zoya Patel is an author and a freelance writer from Canberra.

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