27/04/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1822pkFz2g/
Cultural blindness is the most dangerous form of racism. Precisely because it sounds reasonable.
“Anzac Day is for everyone.” “One flag, one nation.” “Australian values.” “Stop dividing us by race.” It sounds like inclusion. It sounds like fairness. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing a reasonable person would say.
And “We are all Australians together” is a genuinely appealing idea. It’s warm. It’s optimistic. It’s very easy to buy into.
But nobody can tell you what “Australian values” actually are. Angus Taylor has built a career on the phrase. One Nation has weaponised it for decades. It remains deliberately undefined — because the moment you define it, you reveal what it actually means: monocultural, Anglo-centric, and hostile to any identity that doesn’t disappear into it.
This is what cultural blindness actually produces. Not unity. Exclusion.
Look at Uncle Ray Minniecon. Veteran. Son of a WWI serviceman. Brother of Vietnam veterans. A man who co-founded the Coloured Diggers March because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen were excluded from mainstream Anzac commemoration for decades. Not acknowledged. Not welcomed. Marched separately — or not at all.
That exclusion wasn’t accidental. It was the direct product of the same “one flag, one nation” logic that erases specific histories in the name of unity.
Aboriginal servicemen fought under that flag while being denied citizenship. They came home to discrimination, denied the soldier settlement land grants given to white veterans. They served in record numbers in every conflict this country fought — and were written out of the history anyway.
If you’re walking around believing the world doesn’t react differently to blackness — that Aboriginal people aren’t treated differently, and in the worst possible ways — then the objective data is available and I’m happy to point you to it. Life expectancy. Incarceration rates. Child removal. Mental health outcomes. Su***de rates. Employment. Housing. Education.
The world notices. The statistics confirm it. The lived experience of every Aboriginal person in this country confirms it.
The problem with “we’re all Australians together” is what it means in practice. It means we treat everyone the same — but only if they give up their culture first. It means racism doesn’t exist, because if we’re all Australians together, then acknowledging racism itself becomes the divisive act.
It doesn’t eliminate racism. It just makes racism unspeakable.
When you can’t name it, you can’t challenge it. When acknowledgment of Aboriginal culture becomes “identity politics,” and acknowledgment of Aboriginal suffering becomes “dividing us by race,” the mechanism that maintains inequality becomes invisible.
“We’re all Australian.” “I don’t see race.” “Stop dividing us.” Each statement sounds moderate. Each is a demand that Aboriginal people surrender their specific history — 60,000 years of culture, 400+ massacres, stolen children, stolen wages, ceremonies made illegal — and accept invisibility as the price of belonging.
That is not unity. That cultural exclusion; cultural whitewashing.
Cultural blindness doesn’t see colour. It just ensures that those who aren’t white continue to pay the price for that blindness — in silence.
And when that logic goes unchallenged, booing a veteran Elder at a dawn service stops being shocking.
It becomes the next logical step.
(Pic borrowed from a LinkedIn post by Sean Gordon)
