The recent public uproar about the comments made by ABC journalist Laura Tingle, where she stated that in her view Australia ‘Australia is a racist country’, demonstrates how, as a society, we are still incapable of having a nuanced, mature and respectful conversation about a wicked social problem that continues to be a blight on our collective conscience.

I have been involved in research about intercultural relations, diversity governance, and social justice for over two decades now. I have looked at diverse literatures on these questions and analysed large data sets examining Australian attitudes towards various ethno-religious groups. I have communicated this body of work in large academic volumes, including most recently Racism in Australia Today, and extensive co-authored articles, such as the recently publishedRacism Data in Australia: A Review of Quantitative Studies and Directions for Future Research. These academic outputs, as well as numerous others authored by colleagues from across Australia, have all pointed to a persistent, even escalating racism problem in Australia. The recent public uproar about the comments made by ABC journalist Laura Tingle, where she stated that in her view Australia ‘Australia is a racist country’, demonstrates how, as a society, we are still incapable of having a nuanced, mature and respectful conversation about a wicked social problem that continues to be a blight on our collective conscience. I have discussed in other opinion pieces how racism remains an everyday reality for many groups in Australia despite the adoption of multiculturalism as a policy for diversity governance and migrant settlement more than fifty years ago.

But it is still difficult to talk about racism today without first acknowledging the historical legacy of Australia’s settler colonialism, which was an inherently and irrevocably racist encounter between white British and European colonialists and the Indigenous populations of this country. Indeed, settler colonialism in Australia, like elsewhere in the world, is a system of bloody oppression expressed in genocidal practices of dispossession and subjugation that aims primarily to displace the Indigenous populations and ultimately replace them with a new settler population. It is this system of power that perpetuates the oppression of peoples and cultures that has shaped the country’s attitudes towards First Nations peoples as well as later non-European migrant groups.

This historical legacy of settler colonialism was further compounded by the 1901 immigration restriction act, better known as the White Australia Policy which basically formally introduced and entrenched one of the most racist immigration policies not only in Australia but anywhere else in the world. The policy had the explicit aim of maintaining Australia as a nation populated mainly by white Europeans and remained in place for much of the twentieth century.

It is both the racism of the early settler colonialism aimed at First Nations peoples as well as the racist immigration policy aimed at migrants that have provided the institutional foundations of the contemporary manifestations of racism that we see today in our society. And the targets of this racism have tended to be members of non-White groups including First Nations peoples; asylum seekers; racialized migrant groups such as Africans, Asians, and Arabs, as well as religious minorities, in particular Muslim and Jewish Australians with both Islamophobia and Antisemitism being presently at record levels.

Whilst there is still a need nationally for more extensive, robust data on racism that can better inform government policy and community practice, the collective evidence we have at our disposal through academic research and organizational analysis all point to the same conclusion: that racism remains a serious problem that tends to spike to even higher levels during times of crisis and conflict both locally and internationally.

Part of the problem remains that whatever academic knowledge and scientific evidence we have collectively gathered does not seem to be impacting public narratives and government policies. We are simply avoiding any serious conversation about racism as a country and tend to be rather defensive whenever the question is posed. To me this explains the backlash from politicians to the statement made by Laura Tingle.

Yet, as I have argued a couple of days ago in a piece for The Conversation on whether Australia is a racist country, I would not personally choose to label the whole country as racist, but would rather say that as a society we still have a serious and enduring racism problem. Indeed, Australia has made some progress in this space, most notably by moving away from the racist White Australia policy towards the more progressive multicultural framework and the adoption of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act.

But one of the key challenges around reducing racism in Australia is that key institutions are not resourced, nor equipped, to deal with discrimination when it is reported. This not only means that people stop reporting discrimination in all its various forms, but also that perpetrators of discrimination, including racism, know that they are most likely able to get away with their despicable acts, be they verbal, physical, or otherwise.

So, the question remains where to from here? And how can we, as a society, start making inroads in our battle against all forms of discrimination, hate and oppression. Firstly, there is an urgent need to change the frames of the public debate around racism. We need to accept and acknowledge that, yes, we do have a persistent problem of racism, like most other countries. Secondly, we should also acknowledge that admitting to our racist problem does not and should not obscure other progress made, particularly in relation to opening our immigration systems to diverse groups, establishing a decent multicultural infrastructure, including services such as ethnic media, migrant resource centres and community language schools, to name but a few.

Nevertheless, reforms are still needed if we are to reduce experiences of racism in our society. These reforms must include key institutions, such as education, where the curriculum still does not reflect the diverse students it is meant to cater for, media, which, particularly in the mainstream, remains predominantly white, as well as the judiciary and law enforcement agencies, where the rates of incarceration of certain groups such as Indigenous and African youth are disproportionately much higher than for the rest of the community. And perhaps, our own political system must also start reflecting the high levels of diversity we currently have, with the latest census data showing Australia becoming for the first time in its history a migrant-majority country with a combined 51.5% of the population born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas.

All of this requires political leadership, industry involvement and community support if we are to start the long journey of minimizing, if not totally eliminating, racism from our midst.

https://johnmenadue.com/we-need-to-talk-about-racism-in-australia-today/

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