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I’m a white Australian. I know that blaming myself and my cohort is illogical, but I can’t escape the feeling that all of white Australia is implicated in the deaths—a white majority that has fomented and let foment hate. Though he may have labeled himself a European, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant was an Aussie through and through, growing up in a country town north of Sydney, steeped in mainstream Australian racism and our particular national brand of Islamophobia. He grew up in the same Murdoch-controlled mass media environment that the rest of us did—one that recently trashed Islam 2,891 times in a single year—and under the same governments, with prime ministers who have repeatedly stoked anti-Muslim sentiment for votes, with one major party making it central to their electoral strategy.
I grew up steeped in the same environment, just two years younger than Tarrant, and when I was a child the omnipresent racism seemed, well, normal to me. Australia was a proud multicultural country, I was told, but this also seemed to encompass race riots and the turning back of boats filled with brown, black, and Muslim refugees. Publicly demonstrative racists like Australian Sen. Pauline “Please explain” Hanson were a national joke, not a national threat—the refugees were the threat, apparently. These days, as one local from Tarrant’s hometown told the New York Times, “There is still a lot of racism around the place. It’s usually sort of hidden a little bit.”
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