The Long Reach of the Riots: Denying Racism, Forgetting Cronulla

ABSTRACT

¹Sydney’s 2005 Cronulla Riots marked a watershed moment in race relations between White and Arabic-speaking Australians. In this essay, I reflect on how the riots now sit in the public imagination and explore how certain narratives on the riots have produced a series of problematic silences, disownings, and forgettings. I elaborate six modes of denial and disavowal – modes of sidestepping and disowning the racism that underpinned the riot and more contemporary attitudes towards Muslim Australians. The paper is framed around six ‘modes’ of silence: (1) Always Elsewheres, Always Someone Else; (2) The Spectacular; (3) The Narrative of ‘Past-ness’; (4) Twisted Tolerance; (5) Slippery Humour; (6) Interpolation of Non-Arab Subjects into the White Project. Some claim that the Cronulla Riots were an aberration and many in the ‘Shire’ wish that attention would move on. After all, the riots were a decade ago and the ‘kids’ who participated have all grown up. There has been no trouble on the beach since. I suggest, however, that the riots have a much longer reach – culturally, geographically, and temporally – than is generally understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Race relations
• racism
• multiculturalism
• race riots
• masculinity
• whiteness
• class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Amanda Wise is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University. Her research interests include global cities and diversity; ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in Australia and Singapore; racism and interethnic relations; transnational communities and labour migration. She is author of Exile and Return among the East Timorese (UPenn Press 2006), co-editor (with Velayutham) of Everyday Multiculturalism (Palgrave 2009) and has authored numerous publications on the everyday phenomenologies of living multiculture.

Notes

1. This paper was originally a keynote speech at the ‘The Muslim Question: Citizenship and Racism in Australia’ conference held at Deakin University on 15–16 December 2015. I have elected to keep some of the polemical tone and discursive style of the spoken format.

2. I use the term ‘Arabic-speaking background Australians’ to refer to first, 1.5- and second-generation Australians from Arabic-speaking backgrounds of the Middle East. In Sydney, these are primarily those of Lebanese ancestry and to a lesser extent Syria, though there are other communities. At the time of the riots, the term ‘Lebs’ was used as a racist epithet to refer to second-generation Lebanese Australians. I use this term ‘Lebs’ parenthetically at points through the paper to invoke the language of the time. Yet I use the more formal term ‘Arabic-speaking background Australians’ in order not to replicate the racist baggage that comes with ‘Lebs’ and ‘Lebanese’ in the Australian context. I use the term ‘White Australians’ to refer to the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority – at times this also incorporates others of northern European descent; Whiteness in Australia is somewhat of an elastic category.

3. Entitled ‘Everyday Multiculturalism at Work’, funded by the Australian Research Council (DP120101157).

4. ‘The Shire’ is shorthand and popular parlance for ‘the Sutherland Shire’ – the Local Government Area where Cronulla beach is located. Many Sydney-siders, and particularly locals of the region refer to it thus.

5. The Observer, until 1979; The Pictorial, until 1985; and ‘The St George and Sutherland Shire Leader’.

6. One of Sydney’s Western suburbs.

7. ‘Westie’ is Sydney slang for someone from the working-class western suburbs of Sydney. As Powell (1993) has shown, the term originally referenced white working-class people from the Sydney’s western suburbs such as Bankstown and beyond. As the city became more multicultural, it eventually came to include ‘wogs’ and ‘lebs’, but retains its meaning as catch all derogatory class descriptor and is still used to refer to both Anglo and non-Anglo-Australians.

8. ‘Ring-in’ is Australian slang for a person or thing that is not a genuine member of a group.

9. ‘Bogan’ is Australian slang roughly equivalent to ‘white trash’ in the US context, or perhaps ‘Chavs’ in the UK.

10. Conducted with Selvaraj Velayutham. We gratefully acknowledge the help of our research assistants Sudheesh Bhasi, Nour Dados and Kais Al-Momani. Likewise, I thank my research assistants Gillian Vogl and Jan Ali who worked on the project ‘Muslim-Australians and Local Government: Grassroots Strategies to Improve Relations between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP120101157].