In defence of Racist Raquel

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZbCsrzrSY&w=560&h=349]

 

There's a genuinely interesting reality TV show being broadcast in Australia this week called "Go Back To Where You Came From". The concept is pretty simple: get six anti-refugee xenophobes to take the same journey that refugees endure to get to Australia, and see if their views budge at all.

Every reality show has to have its Simon Cowell, and so the producers must have been thrilled when Raquel Moore walked into the casting session. A self-professed racist who comes over as a white trash Victoria Beckham wannabe (wearing false fingernails and Rachel Zoe sunglasses to a Kenyan refugee camp, etc), she is an obvious hate figure whose every sneer was being pulled apart on Twitter tonight while the show was being broadcast. The closest she gets to an argument in her defence is to say: "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it."

I personally found her behaviour repellent--as Kate pointed while we were watching it, the lack of empathy at times appeared to be bordering on the psychopathic. But it also strikes me that it was very close to one of the main theories of international relations--so-called foreign policy realism. This is the view that however awful the humanitarian situation in another country, a government should not get involved unless its own national interests are directly at stake. Essentially, "This isn't my problem. However awful these people's lives are, they're stuck with it and there's nothing for me to do about it." But writ large.

It's very easy to comfort ourselves with a feeling of moral superiority to the likes of Raquel, but the further you get into the sum of human suffering worldwide, the harder it gets to decide where to draw the line. Clearly it makes both moral and economic sense for Australia to abandon its inhuman refugee policies and open its borders to more people in need of protection. We should do it tomorrow, and it would immediately make the world a better place.

But what makes crossing a border so special, when you're thinking about human welfare? There are 50% more internally displaced people than refugees in the world; what are we doing to give them a better life? Sure, they're not in your face like a refugee who turns up in your country--but what does someone's physical proximity have to do with their need?

Go further down this path and you start thinking about welfare in even broader terms. Why do we mostly think the living standards of the average Burmese man, or Somali woman, or gay Saudi, are beyond the scope of our politics? Why do we care so much more about human rights violations than other threats to human happiness, such as economic inequality? Certainly it's difficult to do anything about these problems, but it's also pretty difficult eroding a century of xenophobia and racism in Australian public life. And why do many of the same people who so easily condemn Raquel's lack of empathy for Congolese refugees find it equally easy to put their own empathy on hold when it comes to the plight of Libyans being bombed by their own government?

I'm not saying there's easy solutions to any of these problems and I'm not suggesting any--I'm completely conflicted what to think about Libya, especially as it drifts into a more and more entrenched stalemate.

Clearly, improving the problems in our own backyard is a good place to start. But I think we need to think a little harder about the fact that the main difference between Raquel and the rest of us is largely a matter of how widely we draw the radius of our empathy.