The simple point is that someone can be ethnically Chinese (or anything else), but Australian by commitment and by their pbuttport. When you sort that part out of your argument, you might make it a bit clearer. The idea that they should disband their cultural bases completely is stupid. (But they can leave their ethnic and religious rivalries back in some other country where they have some relevance, I'll go along with that!)
But you are a racist, plain and simple, when you make a statement like you did above. You are a racist because of your buttumptions of cultural superiority. I am not a believer in the 'noble savage' image that someone will inevitably throw up at this point; pre-European Aboriginal culture was hard and often brutal and there was a lot about it that I would object to, but if you were to ask most Aboriginal people whether as a people they would have been better off if European culture had never taken over the best of their lands and left them on the margins of white civilisation, they probably would say they would have been happier without us. 'Living in the wild' is in no way an inferior lifestyle culturally - it's only our values that make it so.
Most don't. The live on the margins as a result of 200 years of unsympathetic occupation, and they don't live on those margins by choice. Bad decisions by white men with superior technology have been largely responsible for this.
And now I'll hear all the arguments about the past being the past and now Aboriginal people have all sorts of advantages that should make them suddenly make the cultural leap into successful white lifestyles.... and we've given them all sorts of wonderful medicines and opportunities they never have had before... yeah yeah - bring em on..... We've had them on this group half a dozen times in the past 15 years and I don't think I'll bother to try to jolt racial supremacists out of their complacency yet again. They're too thick and too ignorant.
Rifty -- Academic and Computing Help
