The Cronulla riots: Has multiculturalism failed?
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Dr Amanda Wise |
The race-based riots in south-eastern Sydney in December shocked many Australians, but what were some of the underlying causes, and what do the events mean for the future of multiculturalism in Australia?
Dr Amanda Wise, Research
Fellow within the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University admits the riots shocked her as much as anyone. However she believes the seeds of discontent were planted both recently and over a number of years.
The role of the media
"The Cronulla riots demonstrated that the ethnicisation of particular forms of anti-social behaviour by the media does impact on race relations on the ground," Wise says. "In this case, sections of the media were clearly responsible for inflaming the situation by attaching racist meanings to the previous weekend's attack on two lifesavers.
"The ascription of blame to an entire ethnic group for the actions of a few is the definition of racism. The attack was represented in the media as a powerful symbol of a broader cultural problem of anti-social behaviour among young men of Middle-Eastern background. The lifesaver is of course a potent icon of Australian cultural identity and the attack was framed as symbolic of a wider threat to 'the Australian way of life'.
"This imagery is also fuelled by a wider socio-political context of post-September 11 moral panics around Islam and men of 'Middle-Eastern appearance'. These global images and meanings filter through to localised politics and interactions."
The local factors
How these images and meanings helped lead to riots in Cronulla, Wise says, also has a lot to do with the particular local history and makeup of the area.
"A place like Cronulla is especially vulnerable to such discourses - the Sutherland Shire is Sydney's most Anglo-Celtic area and is very visibly white," she says. "Ethnographic research I have been working on for the last three years into what I call 'multicultural place sharing' in suburban Australia has shown the positive power of everyday repetitive contact with cultural difference. Those who live in multicultural suburbs engage in a myriad of fleeting engagements with difference in everyday encounters; at the shops, in our parks, at the football, on the beach.
"Living with difference is actually not always easy; there are cultural practices that cause discomfort, and culturally different embodied modes of being that cause unconscious forms of anxiety. It is important to acknowledge and deal with this 'difficult stuff' of multiculturalism, including, where it happens, forms of anti-social behaviour."
The future of multiculturalism in Australia
Wise disagrees with talk that the Cronulla riots represent a 'failure of multiculturalism'.
"Personally I don't think it does," she says. "In any case, multiculturalism is not something that can be wiped from our national map with the stroke of a policy pen. Multiculturalism is more than a set of policies, it is a lived reality made up of a living, breathing ecology of culturally diverse citizens. Tensions are inevitable. The quality of a multicultural society is to be measured not so much by its lack of conflict, but by the quality and multiplicity of responses, national and local, aimed at healing moments of cultural rupture such as occurred in Cronulla."
For further information contact Dr Amanda Wise at Amanda.wise@mq.edu.au