BLAIR AND BOLT: MURDOCH'S RACIST OBSESSIVES.

Both Tim Blair at Sydney’s ‘Daily Telegraph’, and Andrew Bolt at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’, both Murdoch newspapers, seem to think that the things that define race, particularly Aboriginal race, begins and ends with skin colour, eye colour and facial features.

For Blair and Bolt ancestry has nothing to do with race if you are an Aborigine that doesn’t look Aboriginal. At that point you are a white person and therefore not entitled to any of the benefits that one may be entitled to if one were Aboriginal. Bolt and Blair believe that Aboriginality is only bona fide when measured against the sensory function of sight. In other words, you are only Aboriginal if you meet the perceptions of what they consider an Aboriginal person should look like.

One wonders if there were special entitlements to other races because of their race if the same kind of criteria applied. For example, if there were, say, scholarships being awarded to Jewish students by a Jewish endowment foundation, would the students only be eligible for those scholarships if they looked Jewish? What if they looked like white Europeans as, indeed, many Jews do and the only way of telling if they were Jewish or not is to simply ask them to provide evidence of their Jewish heritage?

If these Aboriginal people that do not look Aboriginal are able to provide evidence of their Aboriginal heritage then who could deny them of their entitlements any more than a Jewish person could be denied of their entitlement just because they didn’t look Jewish?

For Blair and Bolt racism is in the eye of the beholder - both literally and metaphorically.