If you look at the numbers reported in the article, you see that about 85% of Australians aren't racist themselves, but are worried that lots of other people ar

If you look at the numbers reported in the article, you see that about 85% of Australians aren't racist themselves, but are worried that lots of other people are racist. Bit of a paradox, isn't it? I have a feeling you'd see very similar results in any first-world country. I'd be more interested in seeing interpretations... My own hunch is that people are externalizing their own conflicted racist sentiments. Racism is like "evil," if you'll permit the term -- almost all of us have some, of one sort or another; a nagging and distrusted primitive voice warning of "those other people," a fear as old as caveman tribes, which many of us have learned to despise and overcome, but which still speaks in whispers. In this, Australia's treatment of aborigines is no different from America's treatment of Africans, West Indians, and more recently Mexicans and Central and South Americans. They're different, with different languages or dialects and different customs; naturally, that innate human distrust of out-groups starts to bleat.