It's not about being woke.
I've been DM'ed like crazy today by people getting very, very angry and defensive that there couldn't possible be racism in the Big Brother house, let alone Australia. The site might have been DDoS'ed tonight by these kinds of people.
They are wrong, of course. But the tricky part is they can't see past their own biases. Everyone has racial biases, it's like a primitive hardwired thing and it's very, very hard to get people to evaluate themselves on this. It's unpleasant to review your behaviour and find that you might have acted wrong.
When people excuse away the situation saying Laura didn't fit in, Allan was annoying, Soobong was a threat, that's just taking the mental easy road because you don't have to think about the fact that you may have biases.
But Kieren was just as annoying as Allan, the muscular white guys and Talia are just the same physical threat as Soboong and Laura was basically iced out because she wanted to talk about her heritage (based on her interview with Huff Post). I could argue that Xavier hasn't "fit in" in the house, he doesn't seem to be interacting with anyone.
It's the racial biases that target the people of colour and hold them to different standards compared to the white housemates. It's why they were the first three evicted for exhibiting the same behaviours than other white housemates are doing.
must everything be about racism?
This is by far the laziest excuse. It's even lazier than the mental easy road above because you're essentially sweeping everything under the rug. With this excuse you don't even have to acknowledge racism as a concept, you are saying it's trivial and not worth talking about. It's erasing all the hardship that people of colour have to go through.
I'm still trying to figure out why Australians in particular get so defensive when there is the suggestion of racism happening. Fairfax did an article on this just recently:
Inquiries and expert reports keep telling us what to do about Indigenous disadvantage. We keep not doing it - and not listening to First Australians.
www.smh.com.au
I think with Big Brother people are getting so worked up because the house is a concentrated sample of Australian society and they don't want to admit that Australia really is a pretty racist place.