When I was 21 I made plenty of mistakes.
I hooked up with the wrong people. I drank too much and didn’t eat well or exercise. And, I was pretty self-obsessed — my value on transient fun far outweighed my value in family or quality time with people who genuinely cared about me.
For my 21st birthday, I wore a tiny sparkly dress and spent the subsequent hours with my arse out and at least two nip slips caught on camera. Not my finest moment, but an innocuous rite of passage that I could laugh about afterwards.
What I didn’t consider when choosing my outfit, however, was whether to paint my face black or don an egregiously racist uniform — a “mistake” that far too many privileged white men seem to have made or be making.
And let’s be straight: It is always privileged, white men.
The NSW Premier’s admission yesterday that he made a “shameful” error in dressing in a Nazi costume for his own 21st birthday isn’t a slice of information we, as voters, should let go of quickly.
Dominic Perrottet wasn’t uneducated and he wasn’t a child. He knew the exact connotations of what this choice meant. He knew the exact harm it would cause. As pointed out by Angela Priestley, less than five years after the horrifying decision, Perrottet was named president of the NSW Young Liberal. A fresh law graduate with the world at his feet, the man was far from a naive numpty.
Prince Harry, who made the same grave “mistake” in wearing a Nazi uniform to a Native and Colonial-themed party in 2005, was egged on allegedly by his equally privileged brother, William, who laughed uproariously.
The then 20-year-old Prince was heavily condemned for the decision after a photo of him in the costume (complete with a red swastika armband) was published on the front page of The Sun newspaper with the headline ‘Harry the Nazi’.
While Harry has since claimed that the action caused him deep remorse and spurred him to meet with survivors of the Holocaust, the point remains: How, with everything afforded to him in life and education, could he have been unaware of what he was doing?
The same eye-twitching question applies to Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with a yearbook photo leaked a few years ago showing the leader covered in dark makeup across his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy– a private school where he taught. He was 29 years old.
The list goes on.
I could pull up hundreds of examples where white men, handed everything in life, have felt compelled to do the unthinkable. Privilege personified, their racism highlights their own supreme fortune — which is incidentally their ultimate goal.
This brand of laissez-faire attitude is only bred through ultimate wealth, education and social capital. It is only bred through gender and cultural privilege.
Living on campus at The University of Sydney when I was 21, I witnessed this regularly. Not from the women I shared space with, but with many of the young men. Raised like Perrottet, they were there with teeming silver platters. They weren’t stupid, but they had never had to truly think; to feel and to empathise about the lived experience of others.
If Perrottet had come forward apropos of nothing except his own genuine regret, I may feel differently. But the fact is, he was waiting for it to be leaked. Someone had tipped him off that the information would soon be made public. And with an election around the corner, he banked on his own admission creating less fallout than the alternative.
I suspect if the media hadn’t outed Harry or Justin, we may never know their “grave remorse” either.
Privilege is the problem here. And without some heavy-duty analysis and reform across all facets of society, the next-gen of Harry, Justin and Dom will just be waiting in the wings to do the same.