On Bogans and Racism

So, last night I got into one of those twitter arguments that I tend to (I have a bad case of "Someones wrong on the Internet").

In this case it was triggered by the following tweet:

Redglitterx: how do you know if youre an elitist, smug, over-priviledged racist? you make bogan jokes

Now, if you're not sure what a bogan joke is, a bogan is a name for someone who is considered ill-educated, with low income and not only ignorant, but revelling in their ignorance. As you may have noticed, this is actually a stereotype, a cardboard cutout that people use to mentally slot a group of people into the social heirachy. In this way, calling someone a bogan is very much LIKE racism.

However I have never considered the term itself to be racist.

This may be one of those cases where a term is whatever anyone wants it to be, but I really think that it doesn't help anyone to try and conflate anti-boganism with racism. If nothing else, "bogans" don't face the same extreme issues as those who suffer from racism. Bogans are not likely to be physically attacked because they are bogans, there is not a continual low level campaign by large sections of the media to seperate them out from the rest of the population, and let's be honest, there is a hell of a lot of government policy that is aimed at placating and winning the votes of those who might be called bogan.

As I said at the beginning, calling someone a bogan is like racism in that you are using a stereotype to mentally sort that person, just like calling someone an eastern sububs nancy boy, or a north shore soccer mum.