McQueen responded by saying she didn’t “see the growth of white supremacists” as a concerning issue.
This denial was on full display when Gay appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program last month, she says.ĭuring the program, Gay's co-panelist and Liberal Party vice-president Teena McQueen responded to a question from Wiradjuri and Māori woman Latoya Rule, who said she was worried about the rise of neo-nazism in her home town Adelaide. “I find that to be inexplicable given the very real statistics that are not the only story about the Indigenous community, but do speak to historical inequalities that are very much at play right now.”
“Australians are very attached to this narrative that Australia is a land free of racism,” Gay says. But that hasn’t stopped the disgraced Senator from being able to register his own political party. The senator has since been censured in a bipartisan motion and expelled from an exclusive Qantas lounge. Anning blamed Muslim immigration for a massacre perpetrated by a white supremacist from the mid north coast of Australia. Her visit coincided with a statement released by Queensland Senator Fraser Anning in response to the Christchurch massacre. Gay returned to the country in March for a discussion with conservative thinker and self-titled ‘factual feminist’ Christina Hoff Sommers, and used the trip to deliver some pointed observations about the country’s race relations. “I learned more about the Indigenous community here, so it ended up being a good thing.” “Australians are very attached to this narrative that Australia is a land free of racism” “I was thinking about how I was going to need to get my hair done while I was in Sydney and I was wondering if there were any black people of African descent in Australia, and I did not know at the time that Indigenous people consider themselves black,” she says.
Speaking to NITV during her recent visit Gay explained that she simply wanted a hair relaxer.
The interpretation of the tweet by many was that Gay was erasing the experiences of Indigenous peoples in a colonised country. The reaction was swift: ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Just wow.’ Some simply commented, ‘Odd’. ‘Are there any black people in Australia?’ she tweeted. Roxane Gay has been to Australia three times, but her first encounter with the country’s Indigenous people in 2015 came before she’d even stepped off the plane.