Anyone who’s lived it will tell you that growing up in a housing commission neighbourhood isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s where I cut my teeth as a kid, and where I warred against my dysfunctional home as a teenager.

The stereotype of public housing mightn’t suit the bureaucrats who prefer softer tones, accompanied as they are by candy-coated success stories, but the stereotype isn’t that far removed from reality.

Our housing commission estate wasn’t a ghetto.

Even so, while opportunity promoted some tenants to greater things, there were many others who remained chained to the cycle of government dependency, and with it, welfare despondency – complete with stale cigarette-stained walls, drawn curtains darkened by brokenness, and the smell of cheap beer fermenting in the carpet.

This was the stigma that sometimes reflected the truth behind welfare dependency. It’s why those higher up on the socio-economic ladder found reasons to keep “people like me” at arm’s length.

I was in the too hard, too much baggage, basket.

“People like me” included those who lived next to me.

From the time my family moved in, until I moved out, our next-door neighbours were Indigenous Australians. I remember them, and they remember me.

The closest our families ever came to a joust, it was more sporting, than hostile.

My late father, an army reservist, had installed a make-shift flagpole on the far end of the veranda.  One Australia Day, he raised the Australian flag, and our neighbours responded by putting the Aboriginal flag on their roof. There was no hostility. Just a warm exchange of support; a smile, a wave; understanding and respect. 

It was no utopia, but never a bad word was spoken.

The shade of our melanin didn’t matter.

I recognise that my context could be discounted as an anomaly, but my observations of the broader public housing community’s shared difficulties would question that conclusion.

On the whole, it wasn’t the shade of our melanin that defined us, it was similar circumstances and the government programs we lived under.

“People like me” translated, meant that both black and white shared common ground.

This isn’t to say that racism didn’t exist. The point here is to put my experiences up against Critical Race Theory’s assumptions that say I’m racist, because I exist.

For instance, I once asked an American academic, who subscribes to CRT, what my broken home life, the abuse, neglect, fatherlessness, pain, public housing welfare dependent, and dysfunctional upbringing meant for her claims about “white privilege.”

She answered that regardless of how broken my heart was, or how badly my life was affected by powerful external abuse, which I had no control over, I was still considered privileged because I had white skin.

Apparently, my pain, and problems didn’t matter. My lighter shade of melanin meant that my “white privilege” cancelled the legitimacy of my pain, and problems.

I had not right to call myself oppressed, or a victim of oppression. No justification for complaint, grief, nor any ability to empathise with those who didn’t share my shade of melanin, even if they share a similar lived abusive context.

In the world of Critical Race Theory, “people like me” now means racists. I’m measured, not by the content of my character, nor my response to overwhelmingly broken circumstances, but by the colour of my skin.

“People like me” is now defined by the “sin of whiteness,” by way of what Janet Albrechtsen called ‘collective shaming.’

Where, said Albrechtsen, ‘white skin and male chromosomes’ are ‘prima facie signs of wickedness.’

For example, in April, ‘a female youth worker from the Kingston Council conducted a session with Year 11 students at Parkdale Secondary College to discuss privilege, pronouns, and intersectionality.’

The youth worker, ‘asked the teenage boys present to stand up if they were white, male and Christian.’ Then told them that ‘they were responsible for being privileged and oppressors.’

This wasn’t a one off. Brauer College in Warrnambool, allegedly made male students ‘stand up at an assembly and told them to apologise to their female classmates for offensive behaviour on behalf of their sex.’

Albrechtsen noted that the first public tar and feathering by Critical Race Theory fanatics was ‘under investigation’, and the second had ‘been apologised for.’ (Not without a huge outcry from parents).

This, she rightly added, was a ‘new form of racism and discrimination.’

Jump over to the Daily Telegraph’s recently published a piece called ‘Terror Hit Probable’.

In it, Finn McHugh wrote that while ASIO’s (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), ‘biggest concern about terrorism remained Sunni extremist groups, particularly Islamic State, the threat from nationalist and racist groups was escalating rapidly.’

ASIO secretary is quoted as saying, ‘young Australians are being snared in racist supremacist and misogynistic ideologies in a way that is deeply concerning.’

He called this, ‘Right Wing extremism’, saying that ‘it now accounted for 40% of ASIO’s onshore counter-terrorism workload.’

Nothing was said about Left Wing Extremism, under the banner of Antifa, or even Critical Race Theory fanaticism.

If ASIO is correct, and not just vomiting Leftist agitprop, or working with “woke” groups as the CIA, and FBI do, and did against President Donald Trump, marginalising young white men, in the name of anti-racism is no antidote.

Communal shaming is like adding gasoline to a smouldering fire. There is (to quote Albrechtsen) ‘no justice in shaming innocent white boys.’

David Horowitz observed in 1999 (Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes) that:

“Ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry.”

He cites as examples,

‘Noel Ignatiev’s “Whiteness Studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that it is oppressive and must be “abolished.”

And, The magazine Race Traitor, who Horowitz names as

‘the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.”

I know from my public housing welfare despondent upbringing that we felt the impact of ‘you are what we say you are.’

Some were able to broke free of it, others didn’t.

A sure-fire way to create white supremacists is to embarrass, and humiliate, young, white impressionable men by telling them that their skin colour makes them white supremacists.

Many on the Left are that so far up their own version of racial purity, and “moral superiority”, that they can’t grasp the fact that they are creating the very thing their anti-white racism fears the most.

Then again, perhaps that’s the plan? Manufacture an enemy, and exaggerate the threat, in order to maintain political power, and social relevance?

Either way, if you support the current racist political manoeuvring by from the Left, you’re complicit in the consequences, and are as big of an idiot, as they are.

The answer to the alleged resurgence of racist Right-Wing Extremism might simply be restraining the equally vicious, domestic violence inflicted on society by “Hate Whitey” racist Left-Wing radicalism.

First published on Caldron Pool, 7th May 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.