Antoinette Lattouf’s mission to make Australia’s media less white & More News Here

At Lattouf’s suggestion, we’re consuming lunch at La Shish, a Lebanese restaurant in Guildford, the western Sydney suburb the place she grew up. Guildford has one of many nation’s highest concentrations of Arabic-speaking refugees, and it’s the place Lattouf’s mother and father settled after fleeing Lebanon’s sectarian civil battle within the Nineteen Seventies. “This is very familiar territory for me,” she says.

When I arrive, Lattouf has already ordered an array of dishes for us to share. Eager to exhibit the vary of their menu, the restaurant workers deliver out much more programs throughout our interview – sufficient, certainly, to feed a hungry household. There’s fried cauliflower and vine leaves; lamb skewers and fattoush salad.

Lattouf insists I strive her favorite menu merchandise, sambousek: fried pastries stuffed with ricotta and feta cheese, plus one other serving stuffed with minced meat and pine nuts. The meals is delectable in addition to plentiful.

Lattouf says she determined to change into a journalist in main faculty, for causes that stay considerably mysterious to her. “There wasn’t anyone around me who had been to university, wasn’t anyone who was a professional. I just knew I wanted to be a storyteller.”

When she instructed her highschool careers adviser that she needed to research journalism at a high college, the adviser replied that the native TAFE could also be a extra lifelike possibility. Incensed at being inspired to stymie her ambition, she moved to a selective public faculty and made it into the University of Technology Sydney’s extremely regarded journalism program.

“Throughout my life I’ve had to fight for everything,” she says once I ask the place she will get her gutsy perspective, her willingness to problem authority. “I’m the fifth of seven children so I had to fight for the slice of pizza on the table. I had to fight to be heard because I was a female in a very patriarchal Arab family and was brought up to believe marriageability was my biggest currency. My father said to me: no-one will like a woman like you with so many opinions.”

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Lattouf says it may be uncomfortable to be her pal or boss: she challenges folks on their racial blind spots and expects these round her to work at self-improvement. “Even in writing this book there are a couple of friends I’m no longer in contact with, but that’s OK,” she says.

Last 12 months Lattouf referred to as out the Kennedy Awards – which recognise excellence in NSW journalism – on Twitter for a 60-person judging panel that included 5 white males named Peter however solely 15 ladies and no folks of color. Among the white judges was her boss on the time.

In her e-book, she criticises Waleed Aly for a controversial 2017 interview during which The Project host questioned the credibility of former Collingwood participant Héritier Lumumba’s claims he had suffered racial abuse, together with being referred to as a “chimp”, on the membership. Lattouf notes that she considers Aly a pal and he sits on the board of Media Diversity Australia, however she felt it necessary to make her objections identified.

Lattouf notes that whereas white Australians sit on the high of the racial hierarchy, they don’t have a monopoly on racism. For instance, in her e-book she writes that some Arab-Australians – together with members of her circle of relatives – maintain discriminatory views in direction of Indigenous Australians and African migrants.

And she doesn’t exempt herself from criticism. “If I’m asking white people to hold themselves, their families and their employers accountable I have to do the same,” she says. “We need radical honesty and self-accountability.”

When Lattouf was getting ready to launch Media Diversity Australia in 2017, then ABC host Yassmin Abdel-Magied was beneath assault for posting “LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …)” on her Facebook web page on Anzac Day in 2017. Lattouf and co-founder Isabel Lo determined to not converse out to defend Abdel-Magied as a result of they feared they’d change into targets for abuse themselves and injury the model of their fledgling organisation. After receiving deaths threats Abdel-Magied left Australia for London and just lately instructed The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age she is contemplating giving up her Australian citizenship.

“It’s something I regret, it’s something where I was a bad ally,” Lattouf says of her silence. “I put my own self-interest ahead of doing what was right. I wasn’t prepared to lose friends or career opportunities.”

People of color, she says, are sometimes punished mercilessly for talking out whereas white folks discover it a lot simpler to discover forgiveness. That’s why Lattouf stayed silent in 2019 when Kerri-Anne Kennerley humiliated her dwell on-air for carrying a brief white playsuit.

“Did you forget your pants today,” Kennerley requested, earlier than describing Lattouf as “thirsty”.

Only just a few months earlier presenter Yumi Stynes, who’s of Japanese heritage, had accused Kennerley of sounding racist throughout a dialogue about Australia Day and sexual abuse in distant Aboriginal communities. “I saw the disproportionate backlash directed at Yumi and the ‘poor white woman’ sympathy that Kerri-Anne got,” Lattouf says. “I knew that she was denigrating me on air and it was awful, but if I pushed back I’d probably be framed as the angry brown woman an

d slut-shamed further. One of us would come out unscathed and it wouldn’t be me.”

She has discovered that difficult white dominance can lead to backlash from stunning locations. In 2020 Media Diversity Australia printed Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories?, a serious report on cultural and linguistic variety in Australian tv information and present affairs. This research discovered that solely 6 per cent of tv presenters, commentators and reporters have an Indigenous or non-European background in contrast to 24 per cent of the inhabitants. All of the nation’s free-to-air tv nationwide information administrators have been white males.

Lattouf had anticipated hostility from conservative shock jocks and complaints from business tv executives. She was shocked to discover one of many report’s most vocal critics was a former journalist whom Lattouf had thought of a mentor: they’d even attended every others’ weddings. In social media feedback sections, the previous mentor labelled the report “junk” due to its estimates (drawn from the Australian Human Rights Commission) about what number of Australians have an Anglo-Celtic background. He then printed a bit in The Australian attacking the report. “I cried because I was so disappointed and hurt,” Lattouf writes in her e-book. “I cried because I thought he was an ally and friend.”

Lattouf has now stepped again from operational duties at Media Diversity Australia and is engaged on reporting tasks that don’t have anything to do with race. “Do I see my life and my future as an anti-racism diversity advocate? No, because I never sought to be one in the first place. I’m looking forward to going back to being a journalist and a storyteller.”

While the Australian media nonetheless lags nations such because the United Kingdom and Canada by way of variety, she sees promising indicators of enchancment. For instance, the ABC and Channel Nine breakfast packages now have Indigenous co-hosts in Tony Armstrong and Brooke Boney respectively.

“There is a renewed interest and appetite for change,” Lattouf says. “People are not necessarily ready to take everything on, but there’s less defensiveness. I think there is a change and I’m excited about it.”

La Shish Lebanese restaurant, 265 Guildford Road, Guildford, 9632 1847. Open: Monday-Saturday, 9am-10pm, Sunday 9am-9pm.

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