One time, I shot myself in the foot with my opinions on writing culture, and sparked significant backlash among the Australian literary community online, by commenting on something that clearly struck a nerve.

Though that wasn’t my intention.

What happened is, I’d read a piece which discussed the literary journal ‘Overland’ adding a checkbox on one of its short-story writing competition forms which enabled entrants to signal if they were of Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander descent. In my own subsequent post about this, I suggested that this was not how literary competitions should work, as the background of the author isn’t relevant in this context, because what matters is the quality of the work, and if this information is required, that suggests that the assessment and judgement of the competition may not be about the work itself, but could factor in these other elements.

This was not well received by a literary community that’s very keen to prop-up marginalized voices. And while it wasn’t my intention to go against this, I was pretty quickly tagged as a racist, middle-aged, out-of-touch white author for my ignorant opinions on the topic.

But the point remains, regardless of what nationality or marker you actually include in such forms. If there was a box that let you indicate that you’re white, you’re Asian, that you’re gay, that you’re a person who supports Gaza, the actual indicator itself is irrelevant in a writing competition. The fact that the organizers were collecting this informaton suggested to me that it could play some role in the judging process, which, in my opinion, goes against the fundamental purpose of any skill-based judgement, in that it should be a celebration of the work itself, not anything else.

What I didn’t know at the time (and what the Overland team told me after publishing) was that a lot of people apparently enter these competitions with stories that are written from the perspective of, say, an Indigenous person, when they are not in fact Indigenous. As such, Overland was keen to avoid publishing stories written by non-Indigenous people that may misrepresent the Indigenous experience. Doing so also takes away opportunities from marginalized voices, and while I was surprised that there would be a significant number of writers doing this, I opted to remove my post that was critical of Overland’s approach, based on my lack of understanding of this perspective.

And it’s an interesting consideration. As noted, I hadn’t thought that this would be a major problem, but essentially, what the Overland team was trying to do was to protect marginalized voices from misappropriation, not use that indicator as a means to judge the competition differently.

The experience underlined to me, once again, that there’s a lot that people who don’t experience racism don’t understand about such within Australian culture, and that it’s extremely difficult to contextualize the impact without that first-hand experience.

We hear about things like this all the time, from subtle racism in sports, to subtle sexism in the workplace, and we’re often blind to such, simply because it’s always been that way. Definitely, growing up in regional Victoria, I experienced a lot of racist attitudes, which would be exchanged as common language, and would not be challenged in any way. These were just regular jokes and remarks, shared among regular folk, that you would hear every other day.

Yet, at the same time, my instinct is that Australia isn’t a racist country, but when you think back to all the things that you’ve heard and seen on this, across all of your years in school, in sports, out in public, maybe it is a bigger problem than you realize, and maybe there is a stronger undercurrent of racism than we actually want to acknowledge or accept.

Ultimately, the experience, which was confronting for me, as it quickly snowballed into a key topic of discussion among Auslit circles for a day or so, showed me that this is not an area that I should be commenting on, as I simply don’t have the understanding to hold an informed opinion on why such an approach might be necessary. So it’s better for me to shut up and try to understand what I can, as opposed to making assumptions.

But it was a good prompt for more self evaluation, in seeking to understand more about others’ perspectives.