What I'm working on, mixed with obvious lies. Always with the lying.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

I was sitting in Administrative Law class the other day and was a little bored. Looking around at the people I generally hang out with, I was wondering why my class didn't really mix. Quite seriously, in a class of forty people, there are people I have yet to speak to. Pedants might claim that there are people with whom I have yet to speak, but fuck them, right?
So. Idly wondering why this was, I looked carefully at my class. Turns out that we have racially segregated ourselves, in the quietest and most refined way possible. Despite my massive, unstoppable whitness (overbite while dancing, talking with as little accent as possible, that kind of thing), I have somehow ended up in the ethnic minority section of the room.
The left side of the room is Iranian, Greek, Jewish Singaporean, Punjabi, Mainland/HK Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Malaysian and three Caucasians. We're probably there because we're from the wrong parts of Australia i.e not the North Shore of Sydney. The right side is all Caucasian. There is no mixing.
There are so many troubling things about this that I'm not sure where to start. Why did this happen? Is it common? Am I race traitor? Is that something that you can even say with a straight face? Am I the last one to notice?
Whatever. My considered, intellectually unassailable analysis of this is that it's kind of weird.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

you answered the question yourself there ... my two bessie mates from uni, the ones i still *heart* almost ten years later, aren't whiteys. we segregated based on class i finally decided, the north shore / eastern suburbs kiddies stayed together, the westies and the southern-not-quite-beaches kids stayed together.

and now that i seem to have stopped dating white men altogether i'll cast off this blonde hair / blue eyed / pasty skinned hell in the next generation. of course, my imaginary progeny will still be working class losers, but less likely to get a nasty sunburn.

this, of course, ingores the basic undercurrent of racism inherent to all human interaction in the antipodes.

kath

Friday, October 27, 2006 7:03:00 PM

 
Blogger wai said...

I met my best friends when I went to law school and they also became my travelling companions over the years. When people look at my photos from my trips they say it looks like a Benetton ad:

http://www.benettongroup.com/40years-press/imgs/image_gallery/03_Our_Campaigns/Institutional_Campaigns/25_1991_camTongues.jpg

Glad to have you on our side of the room!

Thursday, November 09, 2006 9:39:00 PM

 

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