Lizzie, 25 years ago I would have agreed with you, but that was before I got married and my name changed to an Asian one. Sadly, I find Australia horribly racist, not so much in an overt in-your-face way but it runs like a dirty undercurrent through most parts of society. Just lurking below the surface.
I know how I was treated before, so I know how I would like to see my husband and kids treated, but there is a huge difference.
The worst is seeing it happen to your kids. You bring up your kids to have manners and be polite etc and then bam some ******* verbally attacks them. Especially when they are little and it's the first time. I will never forget having to explain to my daughter why another mother called her a " f@cking black cow" and wouldn't let her kids play with her.
Think about having to do that with your child. Just think about it. Explaining that mummy and daddy loved each other but lots of people thought they shouldn't get married and so like to call our kids names. Think about explaining that to a young child. How do you make sense of that to them?
How do you keep their self-esteem buoyant when every time they look in the mirror they can see why they are treated differently? When every day at school they are called names (as an aussie, larakin joke, of course
).
I also think that racism and how it feels to the victim is not something that you can understand unless you have personally experienced it. so it is easy to call someone precious and tell them to harden up about something you have not experienced. A bit like if you haven't had a parent die, you don't know what it feel like. you can empathise but you don't really
know, or how childbirth feels - until you have done it you don't really
know.
It does hearten me to see so many positive responses to the original post, and I live in the hope that in the future everyone will be so mixed that this won't happen anymore. To anyone.