This week Andrew Bolt is again in the media hot-seat for yet another failure to understand the extent of his white male privilege…

Andrew Bolt makes the rather odd claim that Indigenous Australians weren’t ‘Here First’. Whatever it is you think this means, you’re wrong. Bolt has something else in mind. For Bolt what matters is the individual, and the individual alone. No matter that you come from indigenous descent, what matters is who you are now. For Bolt this is axiomatic. For anyone who is not incredibly naive this is idiotic.

What Andrew Bolt fails to understand in taking each person as merely an individual is the way in which individuals are constituted by, continue to be effected by, and carry with them identities that go well beyond them. Indigenous Australians carry with them an identity that marks them as different from a lot of people, not just in the way they look, but in the way they interact with community services – medicine, education, support systems – and with other people in society. We all carry with us echoes of our past, these go towards making us who we are. Some of our deepest seated ideas about ourselves are drawn from categories and sources bigger than ourselves.

To say that you are Christian is to engage in a 2000 year old tradition. To say that you are Indigenous Australian a culture millennia older than that. What Bolt implies when he reduces each person to merely an individual is whitewash these traditions, these markers of identity. He fundamentally ignores reality.

Here is where things begin to matter in very serious ways. The disadvantages that Indigenous Australians face in our society have a history. We need to face up to that history as a way of undermining it and of repairing it. We need to recognise when in our past white men have misappropriated their power to unfairly disadvantage Indigenous Australians. Without this understanding we cannot properly make sense of our society, and cannot seek to improve it (however we wish to define “improve”). Not only does this blind us to disadvantage, it blinds us to advantage. It forces us not to see that wealth and education are often correlated with race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background. We need to face up to the reality that white men have a lot easier ride in our society. Reducing everyone to the individual ignores this.

There are some fundamental realities about society: we all speak languages we didn’t invent, in countries we didn’t found, with people we didn’t create, using ideas we didn’t originate and in buildings we didn’t build. We need to pay very close attention to when and where these things that come together to form us as individuals came from.