How to be a casual anti-racist

It's a nightmare but necessary .

But it's what happens next that's fascinating. I have never had a body check, I've never been tapped on the shoulder to get that explosive test happening. I've never been asked to do anything more.

I just get waved through.

On the other hand, in every queue I've ever been in the people targeted are mostly young and mostly black. Occasionally I feel like intervening but know this will only lead to more trouble for both the person being pulled aside and for me.

In no instance have I ever seen that search end up with anything more than a thank you, you can go.

I'm old, beige and a woman. So apparently that makes me a safe bet to fly.

A few years ago, I interviewed an extraordinary woman called Shannon Murdoch. She told me she was returning to the US because of extraordinary racism in Australia. She gave me an example of boarding a plane in Melbourne ready to fly to Brisbane, where she lived with her husband.

I remember she told me she boarded early and then a couple approached her row to find their seat and took one look at her. The couple argued. They told the flight attendant they wanted to sit somewhere else. All within earshot. Shannon is African-American and one of her grandparents is Native American.

She returned to the US last year and moved to Texas. She says there is racism in the US but it is not like the racism in Australia, around every corner.

I was stupidly surprised and devastated. As a Jew, I experience racism and bigotry but it's different because although I "look" Jewish, people aren't always sure so they keep their anti-Semitism to themselves.

But I was reminded of Shannon this week because of yesterday's shocking story of a young boy shopping for his school formal, reported by the ABC's Graeme Powell.

Shem Garlett took his son, Jaylen, 16, shopping for a shirt for his school ball. It's one of the fun parts of being a parent – doing the whole school formal thing. It's special, you are both spending money on something that is for a lovely rite of growing up.

But Shem stepped out of the fitting room to make a phone call and heard a "call over the store's intercom for security to attend the men's fitting rooms".

And then 10 staff "converged on the change room within 30 seconds".

Over my years as a journalist, I have interviewed Indigenous person after Indigenous person who all say the same thing. They are treated differently. They experienced monitoring and surveillance. I interviewed renowned author Bobbi Sykes in 2000 and she told me that when she walks in the street, white people move away, hold on to their bags more tightly.

It's casual racism but the effects are not casual. These acts structure the lives of Indigenous people and we allow it to happen or don't intervene.

There is a series of really brilliant ads supported by the Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, which highlight casual racism. A man holds a door open of a lift for a white woman but doesn't hold it open for a woman of colour.

The white woman elects to get out of the lift and wait with the woman of colour.

And all this sounds hopeless and soppy and trivial but maybe we need to have casual anti-racism, where we stop trying to think about the big picture and think about the small things we can do every single day.

I'm not sure how to be casually anti-racist because I feel so intensely about it. I know that my idiotic beaming at people of colour, of women in hijabs, must be deeply unsettling. I also know that my best intentions must look supremely patronising even though they are meant to be acts of solidarity.

But I know this. Unless we actively work together, we will keep marginalising young people like Jaylen Garlett, a kid who should have been having the best time spending his dad's money – but instead was made to feel like a thief.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a Fairfax columnist.