It had been a long week and I was shattered when I boarded a busy Sydney bus on Thursday afternoon. By the time I stepped off, I had a massive spring in my step because something very normal, yet extraordinary, had just happened.
It started with a man sitting in the back seat and berating three Asian men to move further into the bus so more people could fit on.
“Move down the bus, you monkeys!” he said.
“You’re in the way, monkeys!”
The men moved. There were murmurs, and a woman said, “Don’t speak to them like that. Where do you get off?!” Another man said, “Call the police, driver.”
The man in the back seat began yelling at the woman, “Oh sure, Madonna. You’re also a monkey,” who was a different skin colour to him. He also started berating another person of a different skin colour, all the while getting more animated and shouting louder.
I spoke to the driver as he pulled into the next stop, and asked him to boot the guy off, but he said his hands were tied – he wasn’t allowed to touch him and basically couldn’t do a thing.
“OK, no worries, keep the bus here, we’ll speak to him and he’ll go.”
The driver, who was of Asian heritage, radioed it in, closed the doors and kept the bus there. We weren’t going anywhere.
Meanwhile, other passengers had become involved in calling out the man’s racism and telling him to quit it. Collectively we told him: “You have two choices, leave now or leave with the police. We all want to get home and you’re the idiot holding all of us up”.
He called us further colourful names, flipped us off, convinced our bus driver to open the door, and left.
Folks clapped a nervous and awkward applause and someone said, “Racists aren’t welcome here!” Several passengers got up and asked the people who had been picked on if they were OK.
There was no physical contact whatsoever and it took under five minutes to shame the racist passenger off the bus. Police had been called but he’d exited well and truly before they got there.
What struck me about the incident was that it seemed normal, calm and extremely united for a bus of complete strangers. Most of us had probably seen videos of racists being horrible to people on Australian public transport and the whole scene becoming deeply scary and heated. Possibly we have thought about what we’d do and say in such a situation. Would we say anything? Would we yell? Would we whip out our phone?
Folks on the 399 bus to La Perouse simply manoeuvred the bad apple straight out of the cart with surprisingly little kerfuffle.
In Australia, people can be hesitant to stick out their neck. Maybe they want to speak up but they don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes. Many of us are still pretty far from being comfortable travellers in an increasingly diverse world. We may be curious, but we can lack confidence, erring on the side of silence rather than diving in and risk saying the wrong thing.
Perhaps we worry that no one will stand with us if we do speak out. That our fellow Australians indeed are the racists we’re stereotyped to be. That it’s easier to stay quiet than risk a debate with a Hanson supporter. Perhaps it all just makes us feel too nervous and we pretend not to hear over our headphones.
Whatever it was on Thursday, this was a pretty neat example of 50-odd people keeping their cool, making it calmly clear that none of us was tolerating racism, and having the confidence to sort it out. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept, so they say.