What race is a dickhead, indeed

Reading the recent news items about an Australian senator with Muslim background being abused in a pub by a bunch of racists, two thoughts occur to me. The first regards the oh so clever comeback by one of those racists after being called a racist: "what race is Muslim?"

The thing is, of course, that there are legitimate and illegitimate cases of people being called racist. If, for example, a hypothetical atheist were to say, "mainstream Islam as currently practised is problematic to me because so many of its adherents consider homophobia and sexism central to their beliefs and identity" then calling that statement racist is just wrong. Maybe that atheist is also mistaken, and maybe they are also incidentally racist, but the argument as stated would be explicitly about a belief or behaviour, regardless of what particular person holds the belief or shows the behaviour. It is not a racist statement.

This present case, however, isn't that. Somebody who says, "why don't you go back to Iran" and calls their opposite "monkey" is clearly not making an argument about theology; they are just being racist. Those statements are what is called a dead giveaway.

The second thought is the same that I always have when reading about white racism in countries like the USA or Australia: I gawk, open-mouthed in amazement, at somebody whose ancestors lived in Europe a mere two hundred years ago telling somebody else to "go back" to the country of their parents. Ye gods, one of those guys apparently called himself an "original Australian". The mind boggles. One wonders which Aboriginal tribe he identifies with, and what the other members of the tribe think about that...