ACON, in consultation with members Sydney’s Asian, Arabic and Aboriginal communities, has launched a new social awareness campaign aimed encouraging the queer community to take a stand against racism.
The poster campaign, ‘Would You Wear It?’ will be advertised in the GLBT press and at community events.
ACON received some funding from the City of Sydney for the first stage of the campaign, which comprises three different versions of an image – one each from the Asian, Arabic and Aboriginal communities who were identified as being high targets of racism. The text that goes with each image reads either ‘Aborginals are all the same’ or ‘Asians are all the same’ or ‘Arabs are all the same’.
“Each image carries the same text calling on the community to challenge our own perceptions because we all have racism in us,” ACON’s Aboriginal Project Team Leader Michelle Sparks told SX. “So it’s how do you deal with that? How do you challenge yourself when stereotyping thoughts present themselves?”
The posters direct people to a website where they can anonymously report incidents of racism, which include more subtle forms such as offensive jokes, although John Wang from ACON’s Asian Project is keen to stress it ACON is “not trying to be the racism police and we’re not asking people to dob in their family or friends”.
The point of the online reporting is to build up a database to determine the extent of the problem so that ACON can seek further funding for stage two of the campaign, according to Sparks who said that racism can have a detrimental impact on the health of GLBT people from ethnic backgrounds.
“It has a big impact because if you don’t feel like you’re respected or are part of a community, or not accepted in the GLBT community it has an immediate effect on your mental health but the longer-term effects are that if you don’t feel included, public health promotion campaigns won’t reach you.”
Lawrence Shearer, the Aboriginal man in one of the posters, said he had experienced racism on many occasions over the years.
“It happens a lot at the door of a lot of gay venues,” he told SX. “It’s that underlying racism – you know why they’re not letting you in but you can’t get them to admit why. And then there’s the passing comments you hear in bars such as ‘Bloody Abos, they’re all the same’. It is something you do hear as well as people having derogatory conversations at the next table ... the gay community calls itself broad-minded but at the end of the day we’re not, especially when it comes to race.”
I think this is a great start to raising awareness. Some/most GLBT people do not realise just how hurtful and damaging this issue is to the people it's aimed towards.
Nobody wants to be, or feel, left out or excluded full stop - let alone be left out/excluded for something they had absolutely no control over.
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