On racism
I am not sure if it is intentional but as far as I can tell, racism may just be a red herring. In reality, the real objections of the racist camp are ill articulated because those underlying objections are often not race based or at least they are not sourced from racial differences. Reading between the lines, those people who are often labelled racists take umbrage at what they consider to be a cultural invasion, which brings with it foreign social conventions and norm with which they are not familiar.
For instance, if you listen to Pauline Hanson's jibe on social media about squat toilets, what she was really saying was 'don't bring squat toilets into our country because we as Australians don't use this kind of toilet, don't like that practice, and don't want to adopt the practice any time soon', which is quite different from saying, 'I don't like those people with a particular skin colour who bring squat toilets into our country'.
Where she invited condemnation is the extension of her initial reaction to the foreign practice and how that view was subsequently transformed and expressed as a product of racial stereotyping and logical fallacy (or intellectual vacancy, whichever way you prefer to look at it) - 'I don't like people with a particular racial appearance because they represent a foreign culture that I don't want for this country'. This is obviously a lazy conclusion; in modern societies like that in Australia, race is a separate concept from culture. We have Australians who are ethnically Caucasian, Asian, African, Indian, etc, but their culture need not be defined by their ethnicity, especially if they were born and bred in Australia. By drawing a nexus between race and culture, the boundary of the debate is blurred.
Is Hanson really a racist then? Perhaps she is just misunderstood and there may just be an ounce of redeeming feature in who she is as a person and she is merely a victim of a lack of eloquence and general misguidance? I'd like to give her the benefit of a doubt but I am afraid there are no two ways about it - Pauline Hanson is racist. Notwithstanding her apparent inability to separate racism from 'culturism' whenever she opens her mouth, she inadvertently dilutes her own power of persuasion by making statements that express her fear of being 'swamped by Asians', which are tell-tale signs of fearing not just a foreign culture but also a foreign appearance. What she is implicitly saying is, 'as long as you are Caucasian, I'd feel more comfortable with you because we look alike, even though our cultural differences could be as wide as the Grand Canyon; meanwhile, an ethnically Asian Australian, for instance, may share the same cultural values as me but I don't like too many of them around me because they don't look like me'. This is what makes Hanson a racist.
What about the issue of culture then? I find that a much harder question to answer. How do I feel about immigrants, regardless of their skin colour, bringing into this country a set of cultural values that are different or even at odds with mine? Would I feel compelled to actively fight back against the invading foreign culture?
The more I think about this, the more I find myself looking for the answer in democracy. Under the premise of democracy, everyone is free to do whatever they wish, as long as what they do does not infringe upon someone else's rights, that is, the 'live and let live principle'. Yes, this is the ideological version of democracy which has not been fully allowed to operate due to pre-existing constraints such as the hangover of religious morality and outdated traditions but the premise of democracy in its purist form does provide a set of blueprint to help modern democratic societies maneuvre around the issues caused by the current of flux of immigration and the associated angst that are borne out of political instabilities around the world.
On one side of the spectrum, if I don't like a particular cultural aspect that is brought into the country, as long as that aspect does not affect other people's rights (that must go beyond a mere negative impact on one's sensibilities, eg, 'I am a Christian, so I find Islam offensive' is not sufficient for your rights to be affected if your neighbour is a Muslim), then that cultural aspect should be allowed to let live. However, if the impact of that cultural aspect tangibly affects other people's rights, eg, terrorism, then we have no choice but to reject the aspect and outlaw it with the utmost outrage.
On the other side of the spectrum, if the cultural aspect is something that appeals to me, I have the freedom to go so far as to adopt it myself. After all, culture is in a constant state of flux. Australia's culture is the way it is today because of different cultures being introduced to it over a long period of time. It has changed, will change, and will keep on changing as the planet continues to rotate. Fearing that the country's core culture will be changed is irrational because the person making that claim has probably contributed to a change to the culture that would not have been approved by others in the past and it is futile to try and contain culture in a box at any one point in the name of protecting it. In the end, culture is a mere human construct that begins and ends with humans and no one person really owns it, so it does not need to be protected. In many ways, culture evolves at its own pace in spite of us all.
In business, we have this concept called 'best practice'. As an ongoing objective of gaining competitive advantages over others, businesses continue to streamline their practices by looking at what others are doing. Rather than carbon-copying everything from others, they synthesise and adopt the best practices to make themselves stronger than before. One would have thought the same would apply to culture. In many ways, that is exactly what we have done in Australia through our reasonably young multiculturalism policies. I often wonder what Australia would be like if you remove the influence of all the cultures that were introduced into this country in the last 50 or so years. I suspect we would have been very bland and, quite possibly, weak country instead.
My take home message? Learn to differentiate race from culture and adopt a healthy attitude towards cultural evolution. Actively stave off the temptation of fear and replace it with education, understanding, critical thinking, and empathy. What if you don't do any of these things? It doesn't really matter - the world will go on, with or without you.
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