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"What IS 'Diversity'?" with Antoinette Lattouf · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! Welcome to the safe space for unsafe conversations. This is your refuge from
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  the black and white world of right wing blowards and left wing complainers. This is the place beyond
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  the echo chamber of your social media feed and the partisan mainstream press. It's a place without
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  good guys and bad guys where the only thing that's banned is taking offense at a true statement.
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  And I suppose black and white world views as well are not welcome here. There are no taboos,
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  there are only good arguments, bad arguments. I'm here to sniff them out. Change doesn't happen
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  in an echo chamber friends. Welcome to uncomfortable conversations.
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  Today on the show a beautiful discussion debate argument disagreement conversation about what
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  diversity means. Antoinette Latouf is an Australian journalist and a diversity advocate. She
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  co-founded the media diversity Australia group in 2017. It's a non-profit that wants to increase
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  cultural and linguistic diversity in Australian news media. Now I spend a lot of time consuming a lot
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  of news media that has very diverse faces in it saying all broadly the same progressive things
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  and not spending a lot of time getting out of their thought bubbles and experiencing points of
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  view that come from perhaps less quote unquote diverse individuals meaning working class white
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  people. But may actually be quite diverse ideas in the context of the panel shows where those ideas
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  are not aired. What do we want out of diversity? Do we want a casting couch of different looking
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  people? Or do we want genuinely diverse ideas? Do you need diverse people from diverse backgrounds
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  in order to get those diverse ideas? We get into it all. Antoinette has a fabulous book. It's called
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  how to lose friends and influence white people. I hope you enjoy as much as I did this conversation
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  with the one only Antoinette Latouf.
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  So what was your input point into broadcasting initially?
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  Like the journalism. So I studied social inquiry over the road at UTS which doesn't exist anymore
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  but it's kind of like media policy research and comms. And I wrote a piece for Heckler. Do you remember
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  Heckler for SMH? It was where like randoms could write it. I wrote a piece when I was like 19
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  and then I got published and then SBS Insight asked me to be a guest. And I had this Ajibarji
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  with this awful bigoted professor at the time. And then really boldly went up to the EP afterwards
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  and said, you better hire me or SBS will. And then I got hired.
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  Oh wow. So threats are basically your main, the same tactic.
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  That was my, we don't have to wear the earphone if you don't want it.
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  Yeah, ultimatums and yeah. And so when you say he was a bigot, what was he, what was he arguing?
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  Oh, she was. So at the time there was a discussion in the UK about multiculturalism as a policy
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  being a failure and that we shouldn't even try. And so this was an exploration in Australian
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  context. And I had written this kind of tongue and cheek piece in Heckler and the Fairfax papers
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  at the time about what it was like interning at a rural newspaper. And they just kind of the
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  response from the rural community to me and the sorts of questions I got about where I was really
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  from and why my hair was so thick at the hairdresses. Yeah. And so it was just a bit of a light
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  exploration about our superficial connection. But where are you really from Antoinette?
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  Well, right now I'm from an illegally parked car. I'm sorry I couldn't get you parking either.
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  Should do a fair. Yeah. And so when I went on the program and she was in support of
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  assimilation and that we shouldn't try and you know and encourage people to be themselves and
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  bring their culture rich in Australia. And then I would I responded to it. And then when the
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  cameras were off us, she whispered to me, but you wouldn't know a thing about culture.
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  Which is like a really awful thing to say to someone. What's she talking about? What does she
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  mean by culture in that context? Do you don't go to the opera? Australian culture. I don't know
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  that I don't eat sausages at the beach. I don't know or I don't know how to swim when I
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  go to the beach. But you're a tip. Well, actually, do you not know how to swim? I mean, that is
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  relinquishing your passport right there. I just don't know how to swim. Actually, it's
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  admitted that when the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia released a report earlier this year.
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  It was entitled to Antoinette. It doesn't know how to swim. It was that one in four.
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  Immediately. One in four Australians either don't know how to swim or report swimmers.
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  See, this is the problem with multiculturalism. They're clearly not white.
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  Right. So, yeah, but I mean, I think of you as a very archetypal Australian, actually.
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  No, thank you. Well, I mean, half of the country has arrived since the Second World War,
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  including my parents. Yeah. We're all, I mean, we are a very melting potty, I think.
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  And so the idea is, are we a melting pot or are we a mosaic? Because a melting pot would suggest
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  that we all need to blend into one another. Oh, yeah, I've heard of this differentiation.
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  I mean, I use melting pot to mean mosaic, but yeah, articulate that difference because that's
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  interesting. Yeah, well, a melting pot, I would say, is more about assimilation that we all kind
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  of come in and we blend into the one sort of thing. And it's a probably the end product is
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  probably a little bit more bland. And you know, that that color you end up getting when you mix
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  like green and brown and everything, it ends up kind of just looking like a diarrhea color,
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  like a very undesirable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're a mosaic. I want to know what the color experts
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  at the color of the paint brands call that color. Yeah, diarrhea brown. Whereas a mosaic is where
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  you bring your richness and your vibrancy and it compliments one another and it's still unique
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  in your side by side. And it's much more visually appealing and far less like gastro issues.
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  Yeah, I mean, I remember you're talking about that in the book, but I think that's maybe
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  a bastivization of what melting pot makes because I mean, when America talks about the great melting
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  pot, I think they're talking about there being so many different communities in, you know,
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  in so many different cities that are all living their own ways and they're all exchanging their
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  own cultural norms and that it's becoming, you know, something greater than the parts of its whole,
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  not a simulationous worldview. What did you take the version of a simulation that this
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  woman was talking about to be? Because like my grandmother in law, who's a Cuban American,
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  will very firmly say that everyone who comes to America should learn to speak English
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  and, you know, should learn the proper etiquette to be polite in like American company.
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  But she would also say like she would be celebrating the richness of her Cuban background. And so,
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  like I sometimes don't, I'm not quite sure what we're actually talking about when we're talking
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  about a simulation. Like what is it that the migrant is expected to subscribe to? Because if it's
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  if it's just learning the language, then lots of people will be on board. Yeah, absolutely.
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  If it's changing their like religion, which might be the most extreme far version, then most people
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  wouldn't be. Oh, I think, I mean, again, it depends, this is semantic, it depends who you ask. But
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  if we look at learning the language of the land, I don't think many people would object to that
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  and having the resources to support that happening. You know, my, for example, my parents never
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  learned to speak English formally. They will put pulled out of school in Lebanon when they were
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  eight. And they never were never educated further in English or Arabic. And my mother learned
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  a little bit of English through school and we brought our worksheets home. And I got to maybe
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  year two and I realized that she, you know, that I surpassed her level of literacy. But she would
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  have loved to be able to speak the language. But I think assimilation is more than just
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  adopting the language of the land. It's foregoing parts of your culture and your identity,
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  and that might be religion and practices. And I think that's, I think that's the key thing you
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  talk about the Cuban grandmother. Yeah, I don't think she would hate to speak for her, but you say
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  she also celebrated her Cuban history. I'd imagine she also celebrated, maintained the language,
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  her position, her values. Yeah, I don't believe that that is assimilation. Being celebrated for
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  all of you and your whole identity is not assimilation. So then the critique of multiculturalism
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  then would be along the lines of sort of, I mean, even Angela Merkel made this critique of Germany
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  and over somewhere in the mid 2010s where there's concern about there being essentially ghettoized
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  communities in poor suburbs of big European cities. It's a phenomenon that we don't have so much
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  of in Australia, but where there's entrenched kind of cycles of poverty, poor education and
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  family breakdown that are associated with particular ethnic communities, and that that has to
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  be broken. And a way to break that is to have some kind of a feel to your allegiance to a higher
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  notion of the nation than just the one that you came from. I disagree. I would think the way to
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  break that is through policy, is through support, is through allowing pathways, whether it be
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  through education or better health outcomes, to break that often intergenerational poverty or
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  disadvantage, because then you look at places like, say, Sweden, which has quite, God, the
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  freaking Scandinavians do everything so much more egalitarian than we do. And they have a significant
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  North African side in Europe and Middle Eastern population, but they don't have the ghettoization
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  that's safe, Spain, or Germany has. So increasingly they do that. I mean, like you see, if you're
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  surf your white nationalist American website, as I occasionally will, to keep on top of what they're
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  talking about, they'll use places like Malmö as being an example, which is the Swedish city that's
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  just across from Copenhagen and has a very large Muslim Arab population, much of which is young,
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  high crime rates, social dysfunction, cultural breakdown. And they point to a lot of the right
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  wingers in America. We'll say, look at what's going on in Sweden. If you're too tolerant and you
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  just let things go, then you end up with these nightmarish scenarios. So I'm not sure they're
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  untouched by. They're not, but I think when they point to those examples, they're more isolated
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  examples fixed in time. If you looked at where I grew up in Western Sydney and the Middle Eastern
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  community, we had issues of where you want to call it integration or issues where we were
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  continued to be in some regards overrepresented in the criminal justice system. So many waves of
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  migraine. That's a polite way of putting it. We actually don't have the data, but if I was to do
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  a sample of my relatives, I can say that we are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
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  We commit well crimes, but that's another way of putting it. And so,
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  but now, and interestingly, there is some research that's going to come out that I'm aware of
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  that hasn't yet been released, that has found that, you know, say 15 years on from the
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  Cornelariates, there is so much more social cohesion and sense of belonging amongst Arabic speaking
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  communities than there was. In some ways, it depends on, I don't want to say, it's a teething problem,
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  but different waves of migrants often have problems when they first come to a new society.
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  Some of it needs to be put down to policy and the way in which they're supported to integrate
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  and to flourish. And at every point in time, of course, the people who've been there for a few
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  generations always regard the most recent newcomers as being uniquely problematic in a way that
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  therefore forebears weren't. My mother is a refugees against refugees. She wants to shut the
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  door behind her and I was like, but mum, you would never have been allowed in. And so when Peter
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  Dutton a few years ago, this was the immigration minister. Yeah. So when he said that it was a mistake,
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  it was a mistake to let Lebanese into Australia post civil war. Or during the civil war, my mum was
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  like, I agree with him. I was like, um, you were one of them. You were literally one of them.
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  You were literally one of them. And so that's not in Australian multicultural history. That is not
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  an uncommon phenomenon. No, or anywhere, anywhere really. It's the same. I mean, my Cuban grandmother
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  as well voted for Trump. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, again, that's a, that's a, and I explored that
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  a tiny bit of my book, but there's so much more literature about that. And that's as much about
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  waves of migration and multiculturalism as it is about socialism and a fear of socialism versus
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  perceptions of what a democratic and free of society is. And definitely among the Cuban diaspora,
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  there's obviously a lot, you know, a lot of that. But but I think there is also a sense of,
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  uh, you know, we came in with the right values and the people who are coming in now are just
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  trying to scam the system and they're not coming in with the right values. They're trying to jump
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  the queue in some way. They're trying to, like this happens a bit less in Australia because
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  Australia has had, I think, such a hard line approach towards unauthorized arrivals. They can't
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  jump the queue because I can't get off the island. Exactly. You're not going to get it. Uh, but in
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  the States, obviously, where there's a significant problem with border crossings, uh, you know, that,
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  that just becomes the thing that she, you know, will, will hang out on. I'm like, yeah, but you
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  came here on a boat. Yeah, right. So that's interesting. Um, I mean, so there's, there's obviously the
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  right wing sort of nativist, racist attitude, you know, opposition to multiculturalism and diversity.
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  And then there's one that is a little bit tricky to get your arms around, which is the
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  as smaller liberals, we believe in individual rights and certain universal values. And some of
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  these new communities don't share those same values. So for example, who's sticking up for the 15-year-old
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  girl in Western Sydney, who's in a very conservative Muslim family, where, uh, you know, maybe the
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  father doesn't want her to express the kind of feminism or maybe she's a lesbian or whatever it is.
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  And she's in a highly conservative environment. And that that doesn't mesh with our progressive
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  vision of liberalism in Australia. What do you make of that clash? Dominic Perotay and Scott Morrison,
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  because I don't think the leaders of this country, a spouse, or advocate for the progressive
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  views that you're talking about. I mean, Perotay was, you know, actively campaigning against
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  euthanasia. This is the premier of New South Wales. Scott Morrison has very interesting views about
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  gender equality through the prism of his wife, Jenny, and apparently having two daughters, which
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  makes him care about women allegedly, who apparently care about women who are sexually assaulted.
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  So some of these, right, but just because there are some people who are hypocrites who say something
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  doesn't mean that the most powerful, the most powerful leader of the country was, and the most
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  powerful premiere in the country didn't espouse these values that you're suggesting Western Sydney,
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  Muslim people don't have. So I'm just I'm just wondering what's the what's the what's the what's
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  the got where's the goalpost and who's there guarding it? What are you saying that those people
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  are hypocrites for articulating supposed care about young girls in Western Sydney? Well, I'm just
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  wondering what what this egalitarian progressive society is given given given who our leaders have
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  been up until a few weeks ago. Well, we may not have it, but let's suppose that we've got someone
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  who believes in it. Let's suppose that we've got a Germaine Greer or someone who wants, you know,
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  female empowerment and and and whose main load star, the main guiding light is to ensure that young
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  girls are as emancipated as possible. And there are cultures that are routinely more sexist and
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  more oppressive towards young women than the Germaine Greer ideal, maybe not them the, you know,
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  the old fashioned white racist sexist Australian ideal. Yeah. How do you reconcile those?
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  Well, again, I think that comes down to the avenues and support migrant families or new
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  arrivals have. So the situation you describe is not dissimilar to my family upbringing. So I had
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  a very patriarchal upbringing. My father's very conservative Arab told me to drop out of school in
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  new 10. I was discouraged from finishing school, let alone go into university, told that nobody
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  would marry me and nobody wanted a woman who was too smart or had too many opinions. It was
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  education. It was access to public education, free education that allowed me to navigate a path
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  where I could challenge that and I was equipped to do so where I could break the intergenerational
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  reliance on men and women in domestic violence situations, which was my mother and all of my
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  aunts who were economic prisoners to awful relationships. So I think with access and, you know,
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  with things like free education change my life and the course of my siblings life.
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  What did you make of your relationship with your dad when you were young?
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  I understood that he was a product of his time and his limited education because he was pulled
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  out of school when he was, I think, seven or eight. He was a shepherd before he came to Australia.
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  And so perhaps I don't know, this is the benefit of hindsight. I now understand that he thought he
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  was doing the right thing. Whether that makes it okay, probably not. Was there a time where you
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  believed him, the way you believed that his sexist worldview was the way things are? Well, in many
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  ways, I mean, in some ways he's right. Nobody does like an outspoken Arab woman. I like you.
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  Yeah, good. Thanks, Josh. But, you know, in some way, in some ways, he did set me up for the,
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  sort of the unspoken sexism that still permeates Australian society, that we're still an unequal
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  society. But the funny thing is that the guys like him both perpetuate and also make excuses for
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  that same thing that they're wanting you about. Exactly. They're like, don't go and get an education.
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  People don't like girls with an education. My people, I mean me. Yeah, exactly. And now, you know,
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  he's super proud and he's come a long way. But yeah, I guess I'm, thankfully, I just didn't listen
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  to him. Yeah. And I just, you know, and that's kind of set me on my life course. I don't
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  only just didn't listen or hear the advice before me. I mean, I guess what I'm sort of channeling,
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  when I point to Jermaine Greer is a number of ex-Muslim, a really powerfully intelligent ex-Muslim
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  women who I've worked within in the States and in Europe who feel that maybe sometimes we can
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  be a little bit glib about our attitude towards those communities in the sense that we're extremely
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  self-conscious on the left about avoiding any charge of Islamophobia. Yeah. So we will, we have an
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  instinctive knee-jerk, you know, desire to yield to whatever the opinion of the most vocal member
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  of that community is. But the most vocal member of that community may not be a guy who is all
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  that wonderful and may not share the ideals of the ex-Muslim women. They certainly don't feel
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  that that guy did and they would sort of like it if progressives in Western societies were more
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  able to say, well, hang on. Yes, it is your culture that, you know, I don't know, girls can't swim
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  with boys. But here in this country, we do, we do it that way. So, you know, you can't stop your,
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  your daughter from going to swim classes or whatever it might be. Yeah, no, I understand. And
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  there is this perception that when it comes to sort of progressive values, it's okay to be progressive,
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  provided you're critiquing the mainstream. But then it's kind of all head-like. Step back, don't
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  attempt to critique those who historically have been more marginalized or minorities even if they
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  are problematic. And it is difficult to reign. Yeah. Because it will, I mean, it sort of just means
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  that anyone can put on the label of an oppressed group and all of a sudden you can't, you can,
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  all rational arguments that you might have about any of their practices of a boatant because
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  you can't raise them otherwise you're the bigger. Look, I'm not a member of the Muslim community,
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  so don't purport to speak for the Muslim community. But what I have through, through my advocacy
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  work and my connections with lots of different multicultural groups, as particularly women,
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  would say that it comes down to patriarchal religious, the patriarchal religious institutions,
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  where the imams or the sheikhs set agendas that are out of touch and out of step with where
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  modern Australians want to, you know, want to be. And it's too difficult even from them,
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  from within, you know, we call it lateral violence, we kind of punch to the side, to openly critique.
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  Like, for example, there was, there was a situation recently where a bunch of progressive,
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  largely female Muslim women, Australian women came out because a large Muslim body predominantly run
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  by Muslim men was bringing out a speaker, like a Taliban, someone from the Taliban. And they
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  were like, how can you, and this was after the Taliban sees control in Afghanistan, like how is
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  this okay? What is happening to women? How is this a sound choice? And it was kind of like a quiet
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  revolt internally and quiet pressure internally. And it wasn't just women, but it was in a more
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  progressive Muslims, but there was a reluctance to take that grievance and that internal dispute
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  to the mainstream, because there was already so much widespread, kind of broad brushes like
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  ophobia. And so I guess that's the danger. And I don't know if it's the same, but I imagine,
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  you know, there's differences of opinion and approaches within the LGBTQI plus community,
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  but a community that is so, for so long, being oppressed and mistreated and discriminated
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  against. You don't want to be seen to be critiquing even when it's valid. Of course, I'm just a
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  bit of an obnoxious vibrant, so I would rather have the conversation out loud, but I take the,
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  I take your point that there is a utility in having quiet conversations as well, you know, within
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  the community, rather than allowing the culture, the internal civil war inside the community to
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  spill out and be perceived by be used as fodder by right wing bigots. Exactly. Yeah. Because then
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  nobody was even, even myself, like whenever I talk about, you know, fairness or representational
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  race or diversity, I just, I always have people going, yeah, but what about representation in
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  Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia? What about women's rights in Saudi Arabia? And those things can be,
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  those things can be valid, but it's just a bit of what aboutery. Like we're talking, we're talking
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  here, we're talking Australian politics, we're speaking Australian media, we're talking, you know,
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  we're talking about, yeah, I think what they've seen, what maybe what they think is that like anyone
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  who is an Arab or a Muslim in Australia is secretly keen on recreating like a Saudi,
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  the Saudi kingdom in Australia. But if it's the case that over at the course of the first few
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  generations, each community in Australia becomes more moderate and becomes, you know, and
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  inherits a growing field to ideals of liberalism and fairness and egalitarianism and things
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  that Australia holds here, then it is very much what aboutism because like, well, what's the point?
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  Like there are things that are worse abroad than here, so we're not allowed to fix any of our
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  problems here until we fix those problems that aren't even our own. Exactly, exactly. And I think
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  when, when we look at radicalisation, and I just firstly would like to make the point that, you know,
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  radicalisation at the moment that's taking up most of ASEO, our security agent's time is radicalisation
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  of white men aged 18 to 25 on the far right. But I've done some work with D, in terms of D radicalisation
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  of Middle Eastern specifically Muslim men, and it's when there isn't that opportunity to integrate
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  and be part of Australian society that they're more likely to double down on some of these views.
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  Yes, and actually that's mirrored in the right wing phenomenon as well, in the sense that,
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  yeah, when you have a very cloistered claustrophobic community that feels besieged from outside
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  and feels like it can't, you know, say things and flourish, then it becomes toxic.
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  Yeah, absolutely. And so I just think, you know, if and when done well, you know, in one generation,
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  like my father's views and approach to life, differ so wildly from mine, and that's one generation.
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  But I honestly believe it was education, and I had this wonderful Indigenous teacher at school
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  who just fed me with books and back in the day, even in the 90s, she was teaching me Australian
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  Indigenous history, not in the way that it was taught back then that James Cook was a
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  savior of Australia. So I was taught critical thinking from a young age, and I just think it's
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  so important to ensure that newly arrived communities have that access to education's power,
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  and I can see the difference between myself and say my aunt, who's illiterated in both English and
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  Arabic. Absolutely. When I think about the strides that have been made from, you know, my dad's
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  parents to me, thanks to public education, and all the opportunities this country offers,
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  it's amazing. I mean, just to close the door on the multiculturalism versus assimilation argument,
• 25:36
  I guess the my sense is that the main concern that white conservatives have about multiculturalism
• 25:43
  is that you would end up with a country that is so fractured into small fragments that it can't
• 25:48
  really talk to itself about common goals anymore and becomes unmanageable or dysfunctional.
• 25:55
  And when I think about countries that actually do manage to kind of vaguely work in spite of
• 26:03
  incredible civil divisions, I do think about Lebanon as a country that that stumbles through and is
• 26:11
  anti-fragile and sort of makes do despite incredible cultural and religious rifts that it's
• 26:18
  got going on inside it. Do you go back and what do you make of it? Is there a lesson in Lebanon?
• 26:22
  I do. I don't think so. Unfortunately, I think Lebanon is as much a victim of its sectarian and
• 26:32
  religious divides. It's probably more so of its geopolitics and the fact that it shares a border
• 26:36
  with Israel. And I don't think they're the poster child for how we have a melting pot of ideals
• 26:43
  and views. Canada probably does cohesion and representation better than Australia.
• 26:48
  In terms of... I mean, I'm not saying they're a poster child. I'm saying they would be a warning
• 26:52
  sign. I mean, they're not, they're not, they're not Syria during the Civil War, but they would be
• 26:57
  the thing that a white conservative might be worried about. Oh, right. Sorry, I misinterpreted that
• 27:03
  question. Well, I don't know. I'm not sure the two are comparable because one is in a migrant country,
• 27:14
  a new, a relatively new country founded on waves of migration. I'm just not sure that you can
• 27:19
  compare apples with oranges. Australia boasts politicians over the years continually use the line
• 27:27
  from both sides of politics that we are the most thriving, the most successful multicultural
• 27:32
  country on the planet. It's what we pat ourselves on the back floor. It's essentially how we define
• 27:35
  ourselves. We need to get that right if that's our defining quality. We haven't been able to
• 27:40
  reconcile our brutal colonization. We haven't been, we haven't been able to face up to or
• 27:48
  to manage and deal with the ongoing impacts of that. And I think because our foundation is so
• 27:55
  unequally unfair that that's why newly arrived migrants aren't able to get that fair go and become
• 28:02
  Australian because the foundations aren't right. Do you mean the foundations in terms of our
• 28:07
  relationship to First Nations? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, our foundations to fairness into racial
• 28:11
  equality. I think it's so fraud and problematic that any, and unfortunately, what then happens,
• 28:17
  and I explore that a little bit in my book, is that, and what I, what I saw during Black Lives
• 28:23
  is a lot of people from the Arabic speaking community posting shit like all lives matter and blue
• 28:28
  lives matter, and really quite openly, and fiercely turning their backs on First Nation and Black
• 28:35
  communities in Australia, which I always thought was cops like I was cops smacked by that because
• 28:39
  growing up, it was Middle Eastern men and Muslim men who were targeted, who were constantly
• 28:45
  reported, who were, who were, there was a Middle Eastern crime squad that wasn't, there was only
• 28:50
  disbanded a few years ago. We were the subject of targeted police, you know, the amount of times my
• 28:58
  my relatives got pulled over just that like they weren't doing anything and searched and they cut
• 29:02
  in the boot search, and you know, it was just that we there was an assumption that they were part
• 29:06
  of a gang just because of the way they looked or because they had a beard and I just thought, wow,
• 29:10
  so how quickly you have forgotten that and so many, and I talked earlier about my representative
• 29:16
  family sample of over-representation in prison, and so many of my, you know, when we talk about
• 29:20
  coming out parties, it's not about like coming out with your sexuality, it's like coming out
• 29:24
  of prison, and we have parties, gatherings where we welcome out, we're family members, done their
• 29:30
  time. Yeah, it's a rainbow pride flag for how many years you are. They've come out of prison,
• 29:33
  and so I found that really interesting, and I put that down to, you know, if we're not Black or
• 29:40
  at the bottom of the heap, then perhaps we'll progress. Well, I mean, it's a little bit like what
• 29:46
  you were saying earlier about drawing up the draw bridge, you know, on a recent, a more recent
• 29:50
  arrival, listen to them, there's lack of empathy between different communities. I mean, it is notable
• 29:56
  to me that, you know, Asian American friends of mine will be far more casualy racist towards Black
• 30:03
  Americans than any white American would dare to be at the moment, so, you know, we can still, I don't
• 30:09
  think we need to deny the reality of the picking order of white racism in order to nonetheless also
• 30:15
  acknowledge that racism is not an exclusively white phenomenon. But there isn't much discussion
• 30:19
  about that. There isn't much discussion. There's so much in the race discourse about, you know,
• 30:24
  white, white versus black racism, and I understand that's the predominant, and that's the structural
• 30:28
  racism, and that's where power lies, but equally, not equally damaging, but also damaging is those
• 30:34
  communities in between, especially when they're growing, like in Australia, after England, India,
• 30:39
  and then China are the most common places of birth for Australians. And so we have a really
• 30:45
  significant overseas born non-white population, and so I think we need more exploration of that
• 30:51
  inequality in racist attitudes from, I call it like brown on black racism. Yeah, and you think
• 30:56
  that is racism. I mean, there's a semantic game that's going on at the moment, you know, in the
• 31:02
  worker part of the discourse that says that racism is just is bigotry plus power, that you,
• 31:07
  that if you're, if you're being racist down, then it's racist, but if you're being racist up,
• 31:12
  then it's not actually racism. In other words, a person of color actually can't be racist,
• 31:16
  because they don't have the structural power to inflict, I mean, I don't, I don't think this
• 31:21
  makes a huge amount of sense, because I think bigotry is bad regardless of what it is, but
• 31:25
  it depends how you look at it. Some way argue the very title of my book is racist. So it's
• 31:29
  called How to Loose Friends and Influence White People. I have actually had a complaint to the
• 31:33
  Australian Human Rights Commission on the basis of race that I am racist based on my book title.
• 31:39
  But you're not denigrating white people. Right, but people with the argument is, and I've had
• 31:44
  series of tweets and trolls who'd say, imagine you change the word white in your title.
• 31:49
  Right, I see. Imagine you change the word to brown, or to Asian, that would be deemed. And so
• 31:55
  I guess it depends which way you look at racism. Is it an individual act of nastiness or violence
• 32:00
  or vitriol, in which case we are all capable of being racist, and we all have, and we'll continue
• 32:05
  to be racist in many different forms, unconsciously or not. If you talk about structural racism,
• 32:10
  I wouldn't fess up to that. I think in the individual sense of racism, I can comfortably say that
• 32:15
  I'm not at all racist. But you can't though. But I can. I mean, I can say that I never hold
• 32:22
  the belief that one race is superior to another. But maybe not consciously, maybe not consciously,
• 32:27
  but when you read the tea leaves about what might be going on. But if you walk into like, I did it
• 32:32
  the other week at a, I mean, not race on gender, when I was at an orientation for my daughter's
• 32:38
  school, and they were like, all the principles giving their address in the auditorium, and then I
• 32:42
  just asked a random student, I was like, oh, where's the principle giving his address? And they
• 32:46
  were like, it's a woman. It's a female principle. In my, I don't think statistical assumptions are
• 32:52
  the same as bigotry. Like, I mean, I take your point. But I mean, it's like some people think
• 32:59
  that it's bigotry to think of an Australian as being a white person. But I think that's just
• 33:06
  rolling with numbers. I mean, I think if you had to, if I was on a game show and they were
• 33:11
  behind this door, there's Australian, I would go with like, it's a straight cisgender female white
• 33:17
  person because that's the group of which there are the largest number. What I'm saying is that I
• 33:23
  that I will consider, I think the respect in which we're all racist is the structural respect,
• 33:27
  in the sense that we're all complicit in living in a society that has its finger on the scales
• 33:34
  towards certain races. And it is, it just is easier to be a white male who goes to a private school
• 33:40
  than it is to be a woman of color. And that is just a, a fact of life.
• 33:44
  But do you know what? So many would dispute that. That's where race discourse is up to in this
• 33:48
  country. So many would be like, but no, it's not. But I was raised even though I'm a white male,
• 33:53
  I had a single mum or I have a big mortgage or there is still. Holding all other variables
• 33:57
  equal, it's harder to be a woman of color than just to be a white man. Absolutely. Well,
• 34:01
  I think indisputably so. Yeah. I mean, of course, the difficult thing. I think what,
• 34:06
  then what people who dispute that now might be pointing to is that if you do hold all of the
• 34:12
  variables equal and you assume that those two people are of perfectly equal talent, equally
• 34:18
  articulate, equally good at their job. And those two people are currently going for a job in 2022.
• 34:24
  Then on that, on that particular criterion, the woman of color probably does currently have an
• 34:28
  advantage because we're, we've at least taken the diversity, inclusion, and equity,
• 34:34
  you know, policy now. That's certainly like at the ABC or in a big corporation,
• 34:39
  it's certainly an advantage to be a woman of color if you're exactly as competent as a white man.
• 34:44
  I don't know if it's an advantage rather than there are now avenues and doors open that were
• 34:48
  previously shut. And so making things more equitable just means you need a different pathway.
• 34:52
  So so many people would say, oh, but you know, this is reverse discrimination. And now,
• 34:58
  and I've heard this so many times, as a white man, I will never be promoted. But the reality is,
• 35:05
  when you look at say, for example, ASX 300 boards, 95 percent are white. And so it's almost,
• 35:10
  if we let things roll out as they are, the status quo is you pretty much have to be white to be
• 35:15
  promoted. Well, no, but that's reflecting the the hiring decisions of the past 30 years or
• 35:21
  something because people stay on these things for quite a while. I mean, you'd have to look at
• 35:23
  what the actual hiring is right now. And like I have tons of friends on in big companies who say like
• 35:30
  that I was just talking to a friend of mine who works at a big drug company abroad. And he has
• 35:34
  been wanting to come back to Australia. He's been wanting to apply for jobs maybe in Singapore.
• 35:40
  And he was basically saying because the company has a 50 50 quoted goal as so soon in I think
• 35:46
  2030 and they have so far to go, there's basically no way that any that any male can be promoted.
• 35:52
  I mean, they so that's that is just understood. And that's widely understood in many companies at
• 35:56
  the moment. But I think and that individual grievance that your friend may feel is not the same
• 36:02
  as discrimination because it's trying to correct it in perfect and in imbalances. Yeah, he was
• 36:06
  simply saying that there is no I mean, it may be a price worth paying the individual discrimination
• 36:12
  against him in order to remedy the historical injustice. Yeah, but it probably feels shit. It's still
• 36:18
  yeah, it's still worth recognizing that there there is a you know, a firm policy of discriminating
• 36:25
  on the basis of something over which he has no control that people have not experienced really
• 36:30
  since the flagrant bigotry of the 70s and before. I mean, in the 90s and 2000s, you wouldn't have
• 36:35
  been doing that towards you wouldn't have actively been saying we're not actively, but it was
• 36:39
  happened. It was happening silently and unconsciously because there's so many studies that have found
• 36:44
  whether it's on through a gendered lens or because of an ethnic sounding surname that people just
• 36:50
  their CVs weren't progressing simply because of their names. And so there were unfair barriers
• 36:55
  to your mate. They may have had the exact same qualifications and they weren't getting a looking. So
• 37:00
  all this is doing is opening the lens so people get a look in. And so I just think people need to
• 37:04
  remember that. This is not pushing I mean, when it's done badly and it's tokenistic, it's pushing
• 37:10
  people into roles where they don't have the qualification and then they don't strive and then there's
• 37:14
  resentment and then everyone fails and it's just shit. Well, how do you avoid that? You have
• 37:19
  how do you avoid the tokenism? Well, then it's the ensuring the timeline is realistic. Like,
• 37:26
  for example, with Labour, they got 5050 gender parity. It took 20 years. And so I think so many,
• 37:33
  particularly in the corporate world in response to stakeholder or customer pressure or just the
• 37:38
  political will of the time that they want these things to happen quickly. And so they'll push people
• 37:47
  or hire, in my view, people into roles where they're not ready for. There needs to be a pathway.
• 37:52
  You can't go from being the diverse cadet to having a really senior role. It's cultivating
• 37:59
  that talent and preparing them for success, not just hiring them to fail so that everybody
• 38:05
  then can go, oh, well, there's that difference in inclusion and let's not do it again.
• 38:10
  Yeah. I mean, this comes back to what you were saying about education as well. In the sense that,
• 38:15
  you know, there are two ends to this problem of representation. Excuse me. And one is the implicit
• 38:22
  bias or bigotry of people who might be hiring the implicit sexism or racism and that's certainly
• 38:27
  been a factor historically. But then there's also the problem with the pipeline problem coming up
• 38:31
  from the other end in the sense that if you want perfect diversity of everything, then they may
• 38:37
  just may not be as many indigenous female neurosurgeons to pick from when you're hiring your neurosurgeon
• 38:44
  at the hospital, right? I mean, if you're going to have to have a perfectly racially equitable.
• 38:48
  I think the data is that 85% of diversity and inclusion policies fail. They don't meet their targets.
• 38:54
  They even if people come through the door, they're out within a couple of years. And so very often
• 38:59
  it's done badly. It's poorly planned. It's not collaborative. There aren't reviews. There aren't
• 39:05
  key measurables. There isn't a willingness to go, you know, what we got this role? We need to go
• 39:09
  back to the drawing board and start again. Or it's not well communicated or middle managers are trained
• 39:14
  and prepared into how to be inclusive and people come into this hostile environment so they don't
• 39:18
  thrive. And so I think it there has to be an understanding that this takes time and you need to
• 39:24
  invest at all levels. And it's a longer term thing because any shortcuts, I think, just gives
• 39:30
  the naysayers more ammunition to go. This is just political correctness, gone mad. And I hate it.
• 39:34
  And let's go back to hiring the people I go play golf with. Do you think there's a... Do you think
• 39:40
  that in the media in Australia, there's a recognition of the importance of diversity? Do you want
• 39:44
  the long answer or the short answer? Whichever is more insightful? The long answer is no. The long
• 39:50
  answer is hell no. We lag so far behind and there's some research coming out in a couple of months
• 39:56
  that I've been a part of. So far behind. And they're not doing it perfectly, but they're certainly
• 40:01
  further along. We lag so far behind the US, the UK New Zealand and even Canada. Just recently I was
• 40:10
  watching only because I was at my sister's house, a commercial network was on that I don't
• 40:15
  ordinarily watch. It was the evening news. And I watched the whole hour of television and I counted
• 40:22
  every single person was white, every single person. This is a country that our census just recorded
• 40:28
  49% have a parent born overseas, a quarter were born overseas, more than 35% speak another language
• 40:34
  in during China after England. We are such a diverse society. Yet our television screens,
• 40:40
  especially legacy media, continues to look like its 1970s white Australia policy. There isn't even
• 40:45
  a recognition to do bad. There isn't in some major organisations. There isn't even a diversity
• 40:50
  inclusion policy. There isn't a plan. There's enormous amount of defensiveness. There's a
• 40:56
  enormous amount of pushback. They're not even trying because we know that you've got to try, fail,
• 41:01
  try again, maybe have one win. This is a long term. Again, I go back to the labour and gender parity
• 41:07
  has 20 years. Some media outlets aren't even trying. That's where we are in terms of actually not
• 41:14
  only realising that it's the right thing to do, but it's the financially astute thing to do.
• 41:20
  It also opens up. It just opens you up to a whole lot of more experiences. When it works at
• 41:27
  its best, it's bringing in points of view that are diverse, that are literally diverse. People
• 41:34
  people who have different takes on things. When it's done poorly, and you do see it done poorly
• 41:40
  in highly diverse media outlets in Australia as well, it becomes a tokenistic way of getting people
• 41:46
  who maybe don't have that diverse ideas altogether in a room to pat each other on the back,
• 41:55
  but look, that person looks diverse. One thing I have noticed, which is a significant
• 42:03
  disparity in terms of the diverse. There's probably five or maximum 10 of us in the media who
• 42:11
  visibly diverse, who are known in the media. Most of us, I'd say, are progressive and libra with us
• 42:16
  more L. It's at odds with the broader literature shows on migrant and refugee communities who are
• 42:26
  more likely to be culturally and religiously conservative, more likely to have voted no in the
• 42:30
  same sex marriage plebiscite, more likely to support ensuring that New South Wales doesn't
• 42:36
  rule out euthanasia laws. There is a diversity of skin color and yes, we bring a different perspective,
• 42:43
  but I still don't think it represents the views. You rarely hear from those people. You rarely hear
• 42:48
  from those. It's funny to hear you point out the hour of television on a commercial network
• 42:54
  because given the circles that I swim in, that is so alien. Every single day, I do a three-hour show,
• 43:01
  every single day, and every single day we're talking about diversity. Every single day we're looking
• 43:05
  at the gender and racial mix of every guest. Every single day, every single week my producers are
• 43:11
  filling out mandatory spreadsheets about... Because it's a concerted effort. Yeah, about the
• 43:15
  hitting certain quotas of diversity. To such an extent that it frequently, I think,
• 43:26
  becomes somewhat counterproductive and spills into what you were talking about about the tokenism,
• 43:29
  in the sense that if you're talking... If you're having a conversation in which what you're
• 43:34
  trying to do is gauge the opinion of Australia, then it makes total sense to make that diverse.
• 43:40
  But if you're having a conversation where you need to talk to the nation's leading expert
• 43:44
  on epidemiology or something like that, then again, you bump into this pipeline problem. There
• 43:50
  just may not be enough women of color to talk to about that who are available to talk to the
• 43:55
  speaker. I think it's a balancing act. But just for too long, every time we interviewed somebody
• 44:01
  and I have done the same thing, I'm guilty of this, it's you know, I call up a sandstone university
• 44:08
  and get a professor called Andrew and John and he talks to me about anything from North Korea
• 44:12
  to reproductive rights to Islam and the West and for too long that's been the face of our expert.
• 44:17
  So yes, we have to work a bit harder and yes, it's not a perfect science. I think but without
• 44:22
  that effort and without then going, you know, and perhaps that's where diversity inclusion policies
• 44:27
  need to be reviewed. Perhaps then you go back and go, you know, what this form that we fill out
• 44:31
  or all these measures, we need to change. Maybe it needs to be representation as a whole over the
• 44:37
  course of a month because sometimes all we're talking about is interest rates and everybody who's
• 44:41
  an RBA, XRBA is a white dude and that's just a freaking reality. So we're going to be interviewing a
• 44:46
  lot of Andrew Peters and John's. I mean, would you include diversity of ideas or diversity of
• 44:50
  political views? Yes. Well, I believe true diversity and richness of diversity will inherently
• 44:57
  bring that when it's not tokenistic that you will. But gee, it's hard to get fatuous like
• 45:04
  white lefties to understand true diversity. Yeah, because it's it's tolerable diversity.
• 45:09
  It's diversity that different melanin that essentially thinks like they want a bunch of central
• 45:14
  casting people who look different to them to reinforce the same ideas that I was working at the
• 45:19
  ABC at the time of the same sex marriage plebiscite and everybody I was speaking to on weekends,
• 45:26
  weekend barbecues, everyone I was having social engagements with was voting no and it was kind of
• 45:32
  unthinkable and kind of unbelievable in the corridors of the ABC that you would know or be friends
• 45:38
  with or related to no voters. And then as it turned, I remember the editorial team I was part of
• 45:44
  I'm like, I think I'm going to go to now the the Yes Campbell rule congregating at Alfred Park
• 45:50
  to celebrate. And I was like, I want to find out where the no I'm going to ask where some of the
• 45:53
  no voters are going to be for their celebration or their pity party. And then there was so much
• 45:58
  pushback that I was I was called a bigot for wanting to platform people who had voted no.
• 46:05
  As it turned out, when the results came in, the two LGA's with the highest no votes was the LGA
• 46:10
  where my family was from. That's the council area, the local council area and the local
• 46:14
  council area my husband was at. So quite literally the people we were having barbecues with
• 46:18
  and socializing with were. Were these people? Well, they're culturally conservative.
• 46:24
  They're absolutely if they were religiously conservative or culturally conservative.
• 46:28
  And even though I didn't necessarily agree with their views and I didn't know,
• 46:34
  I didn't even feel that I had the bandwidth to express those views or to platform those views.
• 46:39
  Then I know you get you run down you run into the argument of like, do you platform hate?
• 46:44
  And is this a foot like, but I'm like, well, if there is a plebiscite and a national discussion,
• 46:50
  if you really want to challenge and understand views, you need to engage with them to a certain
• 46:55
  extent. How are you possibly going to persuade anyone if you don't understand what they actually
• 46:58
  believe? You know what I mean? That's how that's how that's how that's my take. Unless you actually
• 47:03
  talk to people about what they think, then there's no way you're never going to win them over because
• 47:07
  you're just going to be speaking from inside your own bubble. It's it's it's lunacy. And that's why
• 47:11
  what I have witnessed, especially in the past five to ten years is this perception that
• 47:17
  journalism as a whole is too left. It ignores conservative voices. It's anti religion.
• 47:23
  It's anti-nuclear family. It's anti, you know, and I think that, I mean, not quite as pronounced
• 47:29
  as the United States, which led to, you know, which contributed to the election of Trump. But I think
• 47:32
  that's really dangerous. I think a media that's really out of touch with regular people of all
• 47:37
  shape sizes and ethnic backgrounds is dangerous. At the federal election before this one,
• 47:42
  the Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison election, which all the polls were saying that Labor,
• 47:45
  the Bill Shorten was going to win the left-wing central left party was going to win. I was out of
• 47:50
  fancy party with a whole bunch of media elites on election night. And I was the only person saying,
• 47:56
  I think Scott Morrison's going to squeak it, squeak it in. I don't think Bill Shorten's. And
• 48:00
  everyone was like, oh, stop being such a party pooper. Like, you know, Shorten's got it in the bag.
• 48:05
  And it was amazing to me either sort of shameless partisanship of it all and be the
• 48:10
  cluelessness about how Middle Australia actually felt at the time. You know, the blindness
• 48:18
  to the suspicion that people might have of huge left-wing social programs, for example. And,
• 48:24
  you know, and the sort of the the mateship and sort of cultural ties that people might feel towards
• 48:30
  the a blokey center right leader. It just, yeah, I do think it's a worry. It's a worry if the media
• 48:36
  loses credibility by drifting too far from where the heartland is. Yeah. And I think, I mean,
• 48:41
  cultural diversity representation is part of that. I think it's also our our bureaus are so
• 48:47
  city-centric and by city like really CBD our regional presence and under the ABC because it's
• 48:53
  mandated still has and it's it doesn't have to worry about commercial pressures in the way
• 48:59
  commercial media outlets do. We almost negligible representation of regional stories. I mean,
• 49:05
  I think that all plays a part and that is all popular. Well, in the ABC's defense, they're
• 49:09
  really going hitting Western Sydney hard over the next decade or two. You know, there are there's
• 49:14
  a lot of the they they they have a pledge to to get a significant proportion of ABC employees
• 49:19
  out of capital cities and certainly out of out of out of ultimately. Yeah, as you know, as they
• 49:24
  should. And I did know during lockdowns and during the pandemic, we're still in the pandemic,
• 49:32
  even the Western Sydney reporter didn't look and sound like somebody for a Western Sydney,
• 49:36
  which I think is, you know, even if they're a great journalist, there are certain things and insights
• 49:39
  and connections, particularly for communities that were treated differently in public policy
• 49:47
  in restrictions about what they couldn't couldn't do. I just think the pandemic and the public health
• 49:53
  response, you're out of that. Someone born from from the Middle East was in Australia, like
• 49:58
  the Middle Eastern has born Australians 10 times. Now the data has shown 10 times more likely
• 50:02
  to die from COVID than white Australians. I mean, it has real real implications. This is
• 50:09
  beyond being PC and box, box ticking. Public health messages weren't cutting through. Trust in
• 50:15
  media and government wasn't cutting. How do you make sure that the PC box ticking doesn't actually
• 50:19
  undermine diversity of thought? Well, I mean, diversity is one thing and inclusion is another.
• 50:26
  And so a lot of diverse people who work in mainstream media have said they've had to leave their
• 50:30
  religious or political views, check them in at the door because it's such a secular, generally
• 50:35
  such a secular progressive environment. And yet everyone thinks that they're being terribly
• 50:40
  inclusive because you can be any gender or a liberal, and they'll be posting like falafel photos
• 50:46
  at the Eid festivals and be like, yeah, look at, you know, and so that's the inclusion part,
• 50:52
  and inclusion part is harder to know. And that's where people can really bring their whole
• 50:57
  selves and their whole skills and their whole perspectives to an organisation, not just their
• 51:01
  physical demographic attributes that can help fill out a form. I mean, when we're putting together
• 51:06
  panels, for example, you know, I'll often moderate panels and there was a policy of, you know,
• 51:11
  you should never appear on a panel that doesn't have a woman on it. There are certainly policies
• 51:16
  of like, if you're going to be talking about anything that has to do with First Nations affairs,
• 51:20
  then you need to have a First Nations person on the panel. I certainly support the,
• 51:26
  there's no need to have a panel that doesn't have a woman on it. On the First Nations thing,
• 51:31
  why do you not think that it's tokenism necessarily since there are such a wide range of views
• 51:38
  within First Nations people? I mean, for a start, there are so many hundreds of First Nations nations
• 51:43
  and different attitudes towards things. What I find that it can be used as an excuse for
• 51:50
  is for the organisers of the panel to pick a way to essentially launder their own point of view
• 51:57
  through the mouth of, because you can pick, I mean, you'll be able to find a First Nations person
• 52:01
  to say, basically whatever you want, because there are lots of them and they all have different
• 52:06
  opinions about things. So you pick the one that reinforces your opinion and you get it then
• 52:11
  has automatic credibility because it's coming out of the mouth of the right person.
• 52:15
  I don't know, I think it's more problematic to have, and what we have seen, especially in legacy
• 52:21
  media. I mean, yes, there's not a way of saying that you should just have white people talking
• 52:27
  about the experience of First Nations people. No, and there's not to be one First Nations person,
• 52:30
  and that's the other thing. There's this thing that there's a brown view or a black view.
• 52:34
  That's what I mean. Like when a homogenous whole that don't disagree with one another and have,
• 52:39
  even with the Uluru statement of the heart, not all Indigenous leaders agree or support it.
• 52:46
  I mean, there's a lot of disagreement about whether or not towns should be dry or whether there
• 52:51
  should be alcohol in some Indigenous towns about how much should be done by police intervening
• 52:59
  into domestic violence in Indigenous communities. There are all kinds of differences of opinion
• 53:04
  within the community about whether or not there should be COVID vaccines during the pandemic,
• 53:10
  whether those should be mandated, whether people should be removed from the community and put
• 53:12
  into quarantine so that they're not endangering the lives of elderly Indigenous people who live in
• 53:16
  the outback. I mean, there's a huge range of opinions, and I completely take the point that if
• 53:22
  what you're trying to do is understand the lived experience of somebody, then of course you need
• 53:26
  the person who's actually lived the experience. But if you're talking about policy, if you're talking
• 53:30
  about data, if you're talking about like, what should we do? Yeah, but there are Indigenous
• 53:37
  academics and authors and policy writers who are, whose expertise is those very things. I think
• 53:43
  it's a dual responsibility. It's a dual responsibility on the organizers and also for the
• 53:47
  panelists themselves. So I get asked to be on so many panels and speak to so many different things
• 53:52
  and it is my job to then go, you know what, I'm not the right person or I want to amplify
• 53:57
  this person who has a different view or who's the next generation think, oh, you know,
• 54:02
  I get asked to speak on panels about disability. I don't have a disability. I don't have a lived
• 54:06
  experience of a disability. And so I take, it's a privilege to be asked to have a... Why are you
• 54:12
  getting invited? I don't get invited on panels to talk about disability. Because, you know,
• 54:17
  diversity, umbrella term, I don't know, marginalised, I don't know, but it's... I'm being proactively
• 54:22
  discriminated against is what you're saying. In the casting of disability panels. And so I take that,
• 54:29
  you know, that role, you know, I understand it's a privilege, but I take it seriously and as
• 54:34
  often as possible, step down where applicable and suggest somebody else or push for, it doesn't
• 54:41
  need to be just one person, you know, like three cis white dudes, and me, you know. And so you can
• 54:49
  challenge the entire composition or give up your seat and suggest somebody else. Yes, I was just
• 54:54
  reminded when you were talking about that. I was just watching at my brother's place, some
• 55:00
  new Netflix show that has Chris Pratt in it and he plays like some right special forces guy.
• 55:08
  About halfway through, my brother's wife goes, I think Chris Pratt and that other guy are the only
• 55:14
  white people in this whole thing, right? It's every single cast member, but it was all the bad,
• 55:20
  it was all like the junior roles, right? Are all people of color, this is an American show,
• 55:26
  obviously. Yeah. And it did seem like the kind of, like if you're going to invest all that money
• 55:34
  in Netflix, why don't you find actual interesting stories that are being produced by people of color?
• 55:41
  And they are doing some shows better than others. Yeah, sure, that's fine. But are we also not
• 55:47
  allowed to just have a Chris Pratt Iraq show where it's just what majority white people? How many
• 55:54
  shows like that are there? I'm quite frankly, I'm sick of like American lens shoulder, like
• 56:01
  shows through the lens of an American soldier in the Middle East. I've seen so many of them,
• 56:07
  I hate the way Middle Eastern as a represented. I hate the white saviorism and the good guy
• 56:13
  narrative, good guy bad guy narrative. So I would be very happy to never see a US based show set
• 56:20
  in Iraq. I mean, these weren't, these weren't people of color in Iraq. This was like back in the
• 56:26
  shadowy, like military industrial complex in Washington, DC, where like these evil board members
• 56:32
  are all around the table. And it's a black guy. It's an Asian woman. It's like, and we were just
• 56:37
  remarking on the fact that that that wouldn't be the racial makeup of this board at evil globo
• 56:43
  corp in reality. So it's a little bit jarring. Yeah, so like rather, rather than be, they're not,
• 56:49
  these people are not being given the opportunity to tell any interesting story. It's the same cookie
• 56:52
  cutter kind of Hollywood bullshit. And they think that they're doing the right thing by, you know,
• 56:58
  casting board member number seven. Yeah, yeah. As like an Indian, for an Indian woman, instead of
• 57:05
  just being like an old white guy, which is probably what the evil, you know, board member would be.
• 57:10
  I don't know. Yeah. In fairness, I mean, there are probably, I would say there are more hits
• 57:15
  than misses. Like when it comes to drama and the streaming services, like there is a variety of
• 57:22
  a broader variety of content, you see disability represented so much more and normalized so much
• 57:27
  more. Sometimes it feels tokenistic, you know, like a disabled person with disability just gets
• 57:30
  wheeled in into one scene says something to and then just wheels out and that's kind of it.
• 57:36
  But I think it's getting better. It's certainly further along than
• 57:40
  news and current affairs. And is the reason it's important because audiences wanted?
• 57:46
  Well, it could be because I was going to say because we want the things that we watch to reflect
• 57:52
  the society that we're in or because we want the we want actors of color to get jobs.
• 57:58
  I think it's a combination. People want to see and feel themselves. I know from myself,
• 58:04
  like for so long, all I wanted growing up was, you know, blonde hair and freckles. And
• 58:08
  now I'm very grateful for my olive skin that ages a lot better than people who have freckles.
• 58:13
  You know, but for so long, I never saw, I never saw myself in anything. I didn't see, I didn't,
• 58:18
  when people go, who is your career idol growing? I don't know. There wasn't anybody that I could
• 58:23
  aspire to that I that resonated with me. That's I had imagined even more pronounced for
• 58:30
  for black communities in Australia. So I think it's, you know, in some ways when it's drama,
• 58:35
  you want, you know, you want fantasy, you want to be you want to be taken elsewhere. Not
• 58:38
  everything is a story about life and a connection to the heart and identity. And sometimes it is
• 58:43
  just escapism as you binge on Doritos. But I think there's, there's so much, there is so much
• 58:49
  research. It is irrefutable that we connect with things that resonate with us and where we see
• 58:56
  ourselves. Not necessarily our skin tone, not only our skin tone, but our stories and our lived
• 59:01
  experiences. So the streaming giants aren't doing it to be politically correct. They're doing it
• 59:07
  because they have global audiences. No, they're doing that to be politically correct. I mean,
• 59:11
  hopefully when they're investing in people's actual stories and when they're supporting
• 59:15
  interesting, innovative creative voices from outside the mainstream, they're doing it because
• 59:19
  they think that they're going to create something good that'll resonate with people. But I don't
• 59:23
  believe that they're casting board member number seven. No, not that, of course, of course. And
• 59:28
  you know, that's that's the issue. When we talk about change, change takes time. There are often
• 59:33
  errors, two steps forward a step back. But so often people just want to focus on that and go,
• 59:40
  yeah, but what about the tokenistic board member, board number, you know, that that didn't work
• 59:45
  as though, oh, we should just stop trying. No, yeah, yeah. No, and I don't think that's the takeaway,
• 59:49
  the takeaway is what is trying look like in a, you know, in a form that is going to
• 59:55
  bring along with it the majority of white Australians who's hard to generally in the in the right
• 1:00:01
  place. But, you know, who don't exactly know what to do and don't want to certainly don't want to
• 1:00:07
  feel like they're complicit in some vast evil white supremacist superstructure.
• 1:00:13
  Well, one of the things I often talk about is people need to, they just need to do some work,
• 1:00:21
  do some reading, get it, you know, get educated. I don't know, it sounds really cliche, but there
• 1:00:25
  are so many people. It sort of does. Like, what does it mean? Like, what should they be reading?
• 1:00:29
  Because you're a merciless of them for start. But, you know, there are so there's so much,
• 1:00:34
  literally, you know, if reading's not your thing, there's so many First Nations thinker,
• 1:00:37
  even African-American, I know it's different context, African-American thinkers, Asian-American
• 1:00:43
  writers, comedians, podcast. There is so, you know, if reading's not your thing and feel me,
• 1:00:48
  some do it through comedy, there is, there's this thing circa 1997 called Google and you can find
• 1:00:54
  things like, you know, to, especially after Black Lives Matter. Well, you can watch Dave Chappelle
• 1:00:58
  and be cancelled. Oh gosh, that's, yeah. Do you want to go there? It's not homogenous, is it,
• 1:01:06
  is all I'm saying? Like, you know, you can, it's, you're simply going, I'm going to go and watch
• 1:01:10
  somebody who's Black and that's going to give me an enlightened moment of view. But just sitting there
• 1:01:14
  going, I don't know what to do and I'm so fragile and feel guilty and I'm just going to sit in that,
• 1:01:18
  that's not going to help yourself or anybody. So you need to do something and what you shouldn't
• 1:01:23
  do is call the closest brown or black person and go, Hey, educate me and tell me what to do. Let,
• 1:01:29
  let my, you know, my crap be your burden because they've no doubt got enough on their plate.
• 1:01:36
  And so you just need to figure it like learn and listen and try and you'll get it wrong. I've
• 1:01:41
  gotten it wrong. I'll probably continue to get it wrong. I try, I've realized in the past I
• 1:01:46
  haven't been the best of allies necessarily to indigenous communities. That's something I'm
• 1:01:50
  really conscious of and trying to do better. Yeah, me too. It does seem like the penalty for
• 1:01:55
  getting it wrong is getting harsher and harsher, which is why people might be more afraid to try.
• 1:02:00
  Harsher for who though? Well, harsher for the white people who try. Do you think the penalty is
• 1:02:05
  harsher? And this, this comes back to the whole cancel culture and who does cancel culture really
• 1:02:09
  cancel and who comes back from it? Who survives it? Who survives a mistake and who's given a second
• 1:02:14
  try and who doesn't? Because I know that like the Pears Morgan will say that. Oh, yeah, there's
• 1:02:19
  totally a huge billboard, you know, and a show talking about being censored. I'm like, bro,
• 1:02:26
  you're not censored. Steve Price, a conservative commentator recently wrote a piece in Australia about
• 1:02:32
  if you're white and male and straight, you can't say anything without being cancelled says the
• 1:02:38
  guy who has a column at TV show and a radio show. So those who were proclaiming the loudest to be
• 1:02:43
  victims of cancellations still have platforms. So I think it just goes back. We need to ask who
• 1:02:47
  truly gets cancelled. Yeah, no, there's a there were the consequences felt the heart. Completely. And
• 1:02:51
  there's a huge amount of sort of disingenuous right wing stick around cancel culture. But I don't
• 1:02:57
  think that the existence of that sort of hypocritical stick is like disproves the caution and the
• 1:03:05
  trading on eggshells. Even even because even I'm cautious about things that when you mentioned
• 1:03:09
  Dave Chappelle, I was like, yeah, am I going to go there? Am I going to say the right thing? And I got,
• 1:03:14
  you know, so they so they come to they will come a point and you know, we could go into like the
• 1:03:20
  the causes of the rise in far right nationalism and the causes of Donald Trump and the causes of,
• 1:03:26
  you know, the appeal of far right candidates in Europe and so on. But I do wonder whether or not
• 1:03:34
  encouraging people to think about themselves as identities first and individuals second and
• 1:03:40
  encouraging us all to think about ourselves as sort of warring tribes fighting fighting for
• 1:03:46
  visibility whilst that may indeed be the the path that we need to go down in order to
• 1:03:53
  But the counter argument is the counter argument is that those who don't have to think about their
• 1:03:58
  identities because their identity has never been threatened or deprived of access to power. And so
• 1:04:04
  people who go, oh, I don't want the fact that the cut it's so funny. I so often see, you know,
• 1:04:09
  neo-Nazi types sharing Martin Luther King's, you know, I want my children, I don't know the verbatim
• 1:04:16
  to be judged by the content of their car. What's the content of the character in the color of their skin?
• 1:04:21
  As, you know, as they're like an anti-diversity anti anti-anti-anti-racism kind of pledge,
• 1:04:29
  as though it's like counters that like we shouldn't be told to consider. But women's identity
• 1:04:35
  is a does predetermine in many ways their access to education, health, Indigenous women's
• 1:04:42
  overrepresentation for the fastest growing prison population in Australia, being who they are.
• 1:04:48
  Well, women are much better educated now in Australia than men are. I mean, women are graduating
• 1:04:52
  universities at higher rates and they're performing in schools better than men.
• 1:04:56
  Yes, but then that doesn't translate in the corporate world when it comes to pay disparities
• 1:05:00
  and representation in board. So something is broken.
• 1:05:02
  Well, again, there's a 20 or 30 year lag, isn't there? Because most people have been,
• 1:05:05
  most people haven't just graduated.
• 1:05:06
  Yeah, sure. Yeah, well, I mean, for Indigenous women, the markers for migrant and refugee women,
• 1:05:11
  they're overrepresented in precarious and service industry jobs. And for those from the LGBT community,
• 1:05:17
  I can't, I'm not part of that community, so don't prefer to speak. For them, they many have said
• 1:05:21
  to me that their identity is in part political because the same sex marriage, the same sex marriage
• 1:05:28
  plebiscite, the national, there was a national conversation about whether or not these individuals
• 1:05:33
  can get married. It became political. And so it's easy when you haven't had to fight for certain
• 1:05:37
  freedoms and certain access to power or to fairness to go, oh, well, our identity shouldn't be,
• 1:05:44
  it shouldn't be identity first. It's like, well, if your identity is a precursor to your life
• 1:05:47
  chances and the doors that are open to you, well, it is political, whether you choose it or not.
• 1:05:53
  Yeah, I mean, the sort of naivety of the white male towards identity politics is precisely what
• 1:06:00
  I'm talking about. I mean, I think that naivety has been a blessing since the Second World War,
• 1:06:06
  and it'll be interesting. And as I said, it may be necessary for us to stoke up these
• 1:06:11
  identitarian grievances in order to rectify the situation of the past, but it's also worth
• 1:06:17
  bearing in mind that encouraging white males to think of themselves as white males is also
• 1:06:25
  hazardous. Is it because that's just what they are when they look in the mirror?
• 1:06:28
  I don't understand what that's what's so hazardous. Like I talk about privilege.
• 1:06:32
  Well, look through history at the times when like, you know, white young males have run a muck
• 1:06:37
  and really been proud of being, I'm not sure that we want people. Like as a gay Jew, I'm not crazy
• 1:06:44
  about straight non-Jews being really proud of how great it is to not be a Jew and to not be gay.
• 1:06:52
  Right. So you think that that asking people to look in the mirror about being a white man or
• 1:06:56
  whatever it is is just going to lead to them being more entrenched in there.
• 1:07:01
  Asking them is fine. Creating an environment in which they feel like they're being backed
• 1:07:08
  into a corner and they have to sort of defend their identity and everybody else gets to have an
• 1:07:13
  identity, but they don't. And everybody else gets to play the grievance card, but they don't.
• 1:07:18
  And that there was a peril there. Okay.
• 1:07:26
  One thing I had a conversation with a friend recently who said there's one demographic of
• 1:07:31
  people that nobody cares about in Australia at the moment, and that is a working class white man,
• 1:07:37
  you know, an unemployed working class white man. Nobody, it'll Australia cares. And this is from
• 1:07:41
  a man of color, a Muslim man of color. Nobody cares about that demographic who's intergenerational
• 1:07:47
  and unemployment, potential alcoholism, abuse, they're up against it as well. Are their life
• 1:07:53
  chances better still than yours Antoinette? For example, like, and I was like, I don't know the,
• 1:07:59
  I don't know the answer for that. I understand the collective empathy for white men is pretty small
• 1:08:05
  and probably diminishing. And if we can always conjure up individual, individual examples
• 1:08:12
  of where someone's worse off than others. And I guess all I ask people to do is to no longer
• 1:08:18
  think of privileges or dirty or bad word. Like, I'm privileged. Like, I know that for example,
• 1:08:23
  my name Antoinette Latoufa have a French name. My cousin who's, you know, Laila,
• 1:08:28
  it's Laila Abel-Sleiman have such a much more Arabic sounding name that my name will probably
• 1:08:33
  in a CV pile get, oh, that's a bit, oh, could marry Antoinette cute, you know. That I'm an Arab,
• 1:08:39
  but I'm a Christian that I have an Australian accent, not an Arab accent, I don't wear the veil,
• 1:08:43
  I'm university educated, I'm slim, I've got straight hair, like all of those things I know have helped
• 1:08:49
  my television career. They're not dirty words and they're not, they're not things I'm ashamed of,
• 1:08:54
  but I'm just aware of them and I'm aware of how that has enabled me to navigate
• 1:09:01
  power structures and the media is a power structure, not always with success and with definite hurdles.
• 1:09:07
  That doesn't make me a bad person, but what I do, how I acknowledge those who have less access
• 1:09:12
  and have more barriers, I think speaks more to my character than how much time I spend
• 1:09:18
  pitying myself and what I try to do and what I implore others to do is to sit and acknowledge
• 1:09:23
  their privilege, be cool with it and see what they can do with whatever power they have to then help
• 1:09:29
  those with less power than them. And I guess that's if you're an aggrieved white man wondering
• 1:09:35
  about feeling you're back into a corner, there's nothing we didn't, you didn't decide to be born
• 1:09:40
  a gay Jew, I didn't decide to be born as a povo, Western Sydney Arab girl, but they're the cards
• 1:09:47
  where Dell, it's what we do with them that I think matters most. Antoinette, a delight to talk to you,
• 1:09:52
  what's the book where can people get it? It's called How to Loose Friends and Influence White
• 1:09:57
  People, it is at all good bookstores and some average ones. Did you read the audio book for it?
• 1:10:02
  I did. Because I read the hard copy of the book, but I always love it when it's a story as
• 1:10:08
  personal as yours is to. I feel like I should listen to the audio book. Terrific to talk to you,
• 1:10:13
  thank you so much. Like, like, thank you.
• 1:10:19
  Uncomfortable Conversations is produced by Stefan Postumer. Follow me Josh Zeps on Twitter and
• 1:10:24
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• 1:10:31
  and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.