Racism in Australia Today 9811621365, 9789811621369

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Racism in Australia Today Amanuel Elias · Fethi Mansouri · Yin Paradies

Racism in Australia Today

Amanuel Elias · Fethi Mansouri · Yin Paradies

Racism in Australia Today

Amanuel Elias Alfred Deakin Institute Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

Fethi Mansouri Alfred Deakin Institute Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

Yin Paradies Alfred Deakin Institute Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-2136-9 ISBN 978-981-16-2137-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2137-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Marilyn Nieves/GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

The idea for Racism in Australia Today was conceived in late 2018. Then as ever, racism was an enduring global social problem. Yet, during the time that we were drafting much of the material for this book, racism has received unprecedented attention due to an epoch-making event in the US. When George Floyd was brutally murdered at the foot of a white police officer in Minneapolis, it sent shockwaves across the world, with white people in particular confronted with the ugly faces of racism and White supremacy. Racism has become a prominent moral issue once again, exposing the structural injustice in white-majority societies across the world. Confront as it did the white world, the Minneapolis murder also afforded people of colour across the globe the moral high ground to summon humanity’s conscience to join in the fight against institutional racism and white privilege. What happened in the US resonates with the situation in Australia where similar historical as well as ongoing institutional racism continues to traumatise generations of First Peoples. Nonwhite migrants share common experiences of racism that have invariably impacted their lives, across social, economic and cultural domains. This book thus aims to uncover and analyse the glaring and insidious manifestations of racism and its multi-faceted social impacts for individuals and society. We are aware of the longstanding debates on race relations that have preoccupied historians, politicians, journalists and activists around Australia. It is morally confronting that in the twenty-first century there remains a significant level of denial that Australia was founded v

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and sustained by racially exclusionary doctrines and policies. Yet, many Australians remain oblivious to these historical and contemporary traumas of cultural oppression and racial injustice. First Peoples still live under conditions that have been described as the fourth world within the first world. Many Australians from non-white migrant backgrounds are treated as if they do not belong, and are told to go back to where they came from. Politicians flex the threat of deportation to non-white offenders, as if Australia belongs only to people who do not commit crime, an irony in a country founded as a penitentiary colony for convicts, and one that proved human beings deserved second chance. Recent research over the last decade shows that there is considerable room for improvement in the Australian democratic space. Particularly in racial justice, the task may seem intractable, looking at the First Peoples incarceration rate, rise of far-right extremism, xenophobic nationalism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) related racism. The significance of the current book therefore lies in the contemporary relevance of racial politics in Australia and worldwide. It draws readers’ attention to the pervasiveness of race as a social category, exposing how racism remains an ongoing problem across social, economic and cultural spaces, affecting the current generation, across age, gender, ethnicity and other intersecting identities. This book draws on almost fifteen years of research in which the authors investigated racism within key institutions and social domains, debating major theoretical traditions and empirically testing racism and anti-racism theories in the contexts of education, health, governance and the media. The book therefore combines theoretical discussions and arguments with empirical findings based on our own and other scholarly research. Each chapter is designed to provide a complete treatment of the topic covered. A comprehensive introduction is provided at the beginning of the book, with every chapter linked to the preceding chapter via introductory and concluding sections. Tables and figures supplement the empirical chapters, all of which are adapted from peer-reviewed publications. At the time of writing, important developments have taken place in the world of racism, notably the Black Lives Matter movement and the emergence of ethno-cultural racism related to COVID-19. Although we have commented about this in relevant chapters, the emerging nature of these developments does not allow us to provide definitive findings.

PREFACE

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Connected to this is the task of this book itself. Writing under the extraordinary conditions of the COVID-19 crisis, as many would relate, has been daunting in many ways. With psychological pressures of strict lockdowns, particularly in Victoria where the authors are based, stress related to job security in the higher education sector, and challenges of homeschooling all connived to usurp much-needed energy for vitality and coherent thinking. Despite this, opportunities for writing with time flexibility and the absence of travel and commuting have afforded productive time that facilitated the completion of the manuscript. We hope this book will stimulate robust discussion on the question of racism and race relations in the current socio-political climate, based on historical, sociological and empirical evidence rather than populist and unreflective ideological positions. To this effect, we have attempted to present comprehensive reviews of the relevant literature and, as best we could, presented varied perspectives on the nature, causes, and effects of racism across societies to contribute to ongoing efforts to understand and address racism in ethno-culturally diverse societies around the world. Melbourne, Australia October 2020

Amanuel Elias Fethi Mansouri Yin Paradies

Acknowledgments

We benefited from several years of support and collaboration from our colleagues without which this book would have not been a reality. First, we would like to acknowledge the excellent and thought-provoking discussions we had with many of our colleagues at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Years of collaborative work with several colleagues as well as numerous seminars and conferences held in the Institute have stimulated us to critically examine our thinking and understanding of racism. We are grateful to our publisher Vishal Daryanomel who encouraged us to take up the challenge for this work. We are also grateful to staff at Palgrave Macmillan for continued support throughout the publication process. This book draws on our previous research published in several peer-reviewed journals. We are grateful for the permissions provided to reuse our publications. Chapter 5 on contemporary racism in Australia is partly based on a previous paper published in Social Science Research (Habtegiorgis [Elias] et al., 2014). Chapter 7 on social and economic impacts of racism is partly based on a paper published in BMC Public Health (Elias & Paradies, 2016). Chapter 8 on racism and young people is partly based on a report published in Education and Society (Mansouri et al., 2009), and Chapter 10 on anti-racism is partly based on Yin Paradies’ co-authored chapter, Ben et al. (2020). Finally, we would like to mention and thank specific individuals whose support has been critical in the preparation of this book. Leanne Kelly

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

has proofread the entire manuscript and provided valuable comments. Scheherazade Bloul has provided valuable research assistance, particularly in the writing of the chapter on media and racism, and Jenny Lucy has copyedited the introductory chapter. We are grateful to anonymous reviewers for critical comments that helped improve earlier manuscripts of this book. Amanuel would like to extend warm thanks to Ermias Zerazion for support in creating a graph illustration, and to Jehonathan Ben and Beyene Semere for years of stimulating intellectual discussions. Indeed, this book could not have been written without the selfless sacrifice of my wife Natsinet Ghebretinsae and my three children Senay, Lwam and Simret, during the long hours of my research and writing.

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Race Relations in Australia: A Brief History

33

3

Institutional Racism and Its Social Costs

95

4

The Causes of Racism

123

5

Contemporary Racism in Australia

169

6

Media, Public Discourse and Racism

211

7

Social and Economic Impacts of Racism

241

8

Racism and Young People

275

9

Travelling Racism: Global Forces and Their Impact on Racism

299

Countering Racism: Challenges and Progress in Anti-racism Efforts

319

Conclusion

353

10 11

Index

371

xi

Acronyms

ABC ABS AFL AIHW AIMA ATN BLM BoD CALD CI CMY COVID-19 CRP DALYs DDPA DFO EDS EOD ERD FECCA GBD GDP HREOC ICERD ICT IOM

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian Football League Australian Institute of Human Welfare Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs All Together Now Black Lives Matter Burden of Disease Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Confidence Intervals Centre for Multicultural Youth Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) Challenging Racism Project Disability Adjusted Life Years Durban Declaration and Programme of Action Dual Frame Omnibus Everyday Discrimination Scale Experiences of Discrimination Experiences of Racial Discrimination Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia Global Burden of Disease Gross Domestic Product Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Information and Communications Technology International Organization for Migration xiii

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ACRONYMS

IQ LEAD LGA MIRE MSC NAP OHCHR OMA OR PEDQ PFA PRS PTSD RACES RaLES RCIADC RR SBS SDH SOAR SRE UN UPF VSL WHO WTO YLD

Intelligence Quotient Localities Embracing and Accepting Diversity Local Government Area Measure of Indigenous Racism Experiences Mapping Social Cohesion National Action Plan Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Office of Multicultural Affairs Odds Ratio Perceived Ethnic Discrimination Questionnaire Population Attributable Fraction Perceived Racism Scale Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Racism, Acceptance, and Cultural-Ethnocentrism Scale Racism and Life Experience Scales Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Risk Ratio Special Broadcasting Service Social Determinants of Health Speak Out Against Racism Schedule of Racist Events United Nations United Patriots Front Value of Statistical Life World Health Organisation World Trade Organisation Years Lived with Disability

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.1 1.2 3.1 4.1 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Publications on racism since 1900 Racism as a self-sustaining system A temporal model of how institutional racism operates A multidimensional model of racism Prevalence of racial discrimination in Australia by age and gender A two-stage estimation strategy for the association between racist attitudes and self-reported ERD Participants, according to background, who have experienced racism Examination of variables that significantly affect health/wellbeing

5 10 100 125 182 200 286 290

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Table 5.4

Table 5.5

Table 5.6

Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3

Timeline in Australian race relations Australian population since the arrival of the First Fleet, 1788–2019 Attitudes towards other racial/ethnic groups among Australians Self-reported experiences of discrimination among Australians Odds ratio from ordered logistic regression models: association between self-reported ERD and racist attitudes in the 2001–2008 CRP datasets Odds ratio from logistic regression models: association between outgroup nomination and expressions of racist attitudes in the 2001–2008 CRP datasets Odds ratio from ordered logistic regression models: self-reported ERD by targets nominated as outgroups in the 2001–2008 CRP data Odds ratio from ordered logistic regression models: self-reported ERD by targets nominated as outgroups in the 2001–2008 CRP data List of Association between ERD and health outcomes categorised by major illnesses Population Attributable Fractions: The prevalence of illness attributable to ERD by age and gender Health cost of racial discrimination by gender and causes in Australia

35 48 179 180

186

189

194

195 252 256 258

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 7.4 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5

Sensitivity analysis: Health cost of racial discrimination in Australia Number of participants who witnessed or were involved in racist incidents Racist experiences in Australian schools, 2009 Correlation between health, experience of racism and various demographic variables Hierarchical multiple regression with health/wellbeing as dependent variable Trends of experiences of racism/discrimination among young Australians 2001–2020

259 284 285 288 290 292

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Racism—a belief in racial hierarchy, and the enactment of such belief—is ubiquitous in historical and contemporary discourse, permeating public and academic debates. While some groups are its perpetrators, others experience it as a lived experience that they encounter in everyday activities, practices, conversations, across workplaces, schools, media, political ideologies, justice systems and even within academic settings. As a concept, whether in ordinary conversation, media or in politics, it is used mostly in attribution to people, incidents or institutions, and is usually employed to ascertain whether some person, action, organisational decision or government policy is racist or not. Yet, individuals, organisations and governments usually downplay and in many cases deny the very existence of racism, even when they themselves are involved in deliberately carrying out racist actions and agendas. Such acts of denial, however, do not make racism any less real or significant as it continues to profoundly affect people’s lives and relationships with one another. Thus, while racism has been a subject of ongoing public debates, for more than a century it has also attracted substantial academic attention. Particularly, in the last five decades, scholarly interest in racism has flourished across disciplines as a result of the growing significance of racial politics in many multiracial countries (Bulmer & Solomos, 2004). This has led to the emergence of fields of research concerned with developing robust methods of measuring the prevalence of racism, accounting for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Elias et al., Racism in Australia Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2137-6_1

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the bias surrounding its reporting. This book seeks to contribute to this field of research through an interdisciplinary synthesis of current research evidence. The central argument of this book is that racism as an enduring socially constructed ideology represents a mix of beliefs in racial category/hierarchy and exclusionary power relations that have corrosive and pervasive implications in any society across multiple levels and domains. While racism can manifest as a deeply embedded psychological phenomenon, its cultural, political and economic roots result in enduring structural inequalities that are difficult to eradicate. As such, racism has persisted across history and geographies, continuously evolving and adapting to global social and political situations.

Defining and Conceptualising Racism Race and the racialisation of human relationships have long been used as the raison d’etre for the enduring ideology of racism.1 Based on an assumption of race as a naturally given trait that distinguishes one’s own group from other groups, on the grounds of ancestry, skin colour, facial features, etc., racism historically existed as an idea and praxis (Goldberg, 1992; Winant, 2006).2 Prior to the Atlantic slave trade, practices and laws, which enabled the subjugation and enslavement of groups of people, did not explicitly depend on the classification of race as a hereditary trait (Hirschman, 2004; Painter, 2010). Thus, until the seventeenth century, race was not considered a social category. The introduction of race in common legal usage coincided with the slave trade and colonial expansion, and was largely used to distinguish Europeans from those groups considered as socio-culturally inferior others. The study of race

1 Racialisation has been defined as ‘the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified social relationship, social practice or group’ (Omi & Winant, 2014, p. 111). 2 In her classic book first published in 1942, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict offers one of the earliest definitions of racism as “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority” (Benedict, 1983, p. 97). Compare this with a more comprehensive definition by Gee et al. (2019, p. S43): “Racism is an organized and dynamic system in which the dominant racial group, based on a hierarchical ideology, develops and sustains structures and behaviors that privilege the dominant group, while simultaneously disempowering and removing resources from racial groups deemed inferior.”

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as a biological category that emerged during the Enlightenment period opened the door to the phenomenon of scientific racism. Consequently, beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, the idea of categorising and ranking human beings into superior and inferior races profoundly influenced Western thinking, and spread through colonial expansion justifying the discriminatory treatment of Indigenous Peoples (Graham, 1990).3 Until the 1920s, pseudo-scientific racial theories had influenced a range of disciplines including biology, psychology and anthropology, to name but a few. Such racialised ideas and theories also informed social policies, both within Western countries and in the newly established colonial settlements. With the defeat of the Nazis in World War II and the social and political events that followed, culture rather than biology came to be seen as the basis of racial classification (Lentin, 2005). Today, the biological basis has considerably lost legitimacy although debate remains regarding the biological constructions of race and ethnicity both in academic/scientific and popular discourse (e.g. Blakey, 1999; Caspari, 2010; Tibayrenc, 2017). Racism remains a salient reality across the globe, finding expression in ways that are both overt and subtle, and affecting society through practices that drive and authenticate structural inequities. This poses a serious challenge to contemporary societies, particularly at a time when globalisation has led to a world characterised by growing international migration, super-diversity and increased social interactions (Doane, 2006; Vertovec, 2007). While growing levels of diversity and human mobility have engendered unprecedented space for intercultural interactions, the rise of racism in the form of xenophobia, anti-immigrant attitudes and Islamophobia, among others, is threatening progress that has been made in multicultural societies since the Civil Rights era. This has adverse human and social effects, with implications for social cohesion, human rights and democracy. In addition to its significance in the daily life of racialised minorities, racism is a subject of heated academic debate across many disciplines, 3 Our use of the term Indigenous Peoples encompasses Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples. We are aware that there are a range of words and phrases used in various literatures to refer to Indigenous Peoples, among which are Aboriginal people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, First Peoples, First Nations, and Indigenous. Given de-colonial misgivings about both the word ‘nations’ and ‘first’, we have instead used the phrase Indigenous Peoples throughout. The word Aborigines has been applied with an italics when referring to historical usage while words or phrases used in the original have been maintained with quotations.

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though the discourse of racism is not new. There is an argument that holds that racism is as old as the concept of race itself, although usage of the word racism itself is relatively recent (Arendt, 1944; Benedict, 1983; Sweet, 1997). According to an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (2008 edition), the earliest recorded use of the word was in 1902, when Richard Henry Pratt was the first to coin the word in a critique of segregation (Barrows, 1902; Demby, 2014). Academic inquiry into the historical root of race and racism, as well as their significance in shaping community attitudes and public policy, has gained momentum only recently. An online search of the word using Google n-gram viewer indicates that it was not commonly used in publications until the late 1930s and more notably in mid-1940s. Its usage surged in the mid-1960s and again in the 1990s until it became ubiquitous in both online and print publications. Across the social sciences, research on racism has increased considerably, particularly over the past decade. A database search using the keyword racism shows that 56% of publications on racism were produced in the last nine years (Fig. 1.1). Over the 2008–2018 period, 16,296 peer-reviewed publications on racism were produced, accounting for 64.5% of those published since 1904.4 Furthermore, research shows that racism has undergone substantial transformation in the way it manifests and its degree of influence on social policies (Goldberg, 1992; Mullings, 2005). The emergence of national and international organisations and the rise of anti-racism movements were instrumental in challenging overt racism. Yet, racism did not end with this, and contemporary research has shown that it has continued in both overt and more subtle forms. Whether overt or subtle, racism ultimately remains inherent to an ethos of inequity, which disproportionately affects minority groups (Jones et al., 2016). A substantial body of research has documented that racism occurring in the physical and virtual world adversely affects individuals and groups from ethnic-minority backgrounds, and is associated with mental and physical harm (Jakubowicz et al., 2017; Paradies et al., 2015). Although a global phenomenon, racism in the West derives from a unique sociocultural history that mixes ideology, political power and 4 Generally, 82% of all peer-reviewed publication on racism (N = 25,256) were produced since 2000. This data is based on a search of unique studies on six major databases: Scopus, PsycINFO, ERIC, Political Science Complete, Historical Abstracts, and MEDLINE undertaken on July 30, 2018.

1

Pre 1970 1%

(1970-1979) 2%

INTRODUCTION

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(1980-1989) 4% (1990-1999) 11%

(2010-2018) 56%

(2000-2009) 26%

Fig. 1.1 Publications on racism since 1900

economic privilege to produce race-based structural inequalities. Australia exhibits such orientations in its unique history of race relations, in particular vis-a-vis Aboriginal communities, that involved social policies ranging from social exclusion to structural injustice (Jupp, 2007). After more than two centuries of Indigenous social exclusion, cultural oppression and white privilege (Yarwood & Knowling, 1982), Australia has occasionally been hailed as a successful multicultural society with explicit policies and practices that promote cultural diversity.5 Yet, racism remains one of the enduring challenges, often resurfacing as an explicit issue across social and political platforms. Paradoxically, racism in Australia today exists within the context of broader community support for cultural diversity and multiculturalism (Kamp et al., 2017). It includes a strong denial and ambivalence towards the prevalence of racism, mixed with overt rejection and intolerance of certain ethno-religious groups, and strong support 5 It is worth noting that this claim is not universally shared by all Australians, certainly not by many Indigenous Peoples (Habibis et al., 2020).

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for assimilation (Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Kamp et al., 2017). Contemporary racism and the denial of its pervasiveness are conceptually different but can be equally entrenched in a system of exclusion that harms racial minorities (Augoustinos & Every, 2010; Van Dijk, 1992). In this book, we explore the conflicting lived experiences of racism within Australian society—a society characterised at once by support for cultural diversity, and pervasive expressions of racism—by focusing on race-relations as they manifest across history, contemporary discourse and everyday life. Theoretical Framework What is race? And what is racism? These apparently simple questions have been the subject of intellectual contestation across the humanities and social sciences for more than a century, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is difficult to provide a precise definition of either race or racism, as they continue to evolve as concepts, adding dimensions with emerging new forms of intergroup and intercultural relationships (Garner, 2017; Goldberg, 1992; Tibayrenc, 2017). In sociological research, race has long been conceptualised as a social construct (Better, 2008; Garner, 2017), while in anthropology it has been viewed as a “cultural category of difference” (Silverstein, 2005, p. 364). Rooted in the interplay of various and complex socioeconomic and cultural factors throughout history, race has come to be a categorisation applied in the mundane affairs of citizens across different societies. Yet, racism, as a system of power and oppression, has always existed side by side with the idea of race. Recently, the conceptualisation of race as a categorical and fixed characteristic has been replaced by a dynamic, relational and multi dimensional conceptualisation embodying the intersectionality of multiple integral features ranging across individual, psychosocial, ecological and structural components (see Garcia, 2017 for detail on this). Racism has its etymological root in the concept of race. Yet, its meaning goes beyond what is embodied in race as a constructed conception of identity. It does not stop in the supposedly intrinsic notion of race as a social or biological construct per se. Instead, racism is construed as a belief, an ideological assumption, which hierarchically categorises socially constructed groups based on race, ethnicity, skin colour, phenotype, and cultural background. It is increasingly analysed in connection to power

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relations, socio-political hegemony and imperial projects.6 Historically, race was conceived as a biological category of humankind, before this was widely critiqued as not having scientific objectivity (Tibayrenc, 2017). However, considerable debate remains as to whether the biological basis of race has validity, with one side equating race to a “biological myth” while the other maintains that the concept of race is “meaningful and informative” (Tibayrenc, 2017, p. 636). Despite the contested terrain of race as a concept, the ideology of racism still holds to the notion that race is a biological category (Hirschman, 2004; Winant, 2006). As such, race is not a sin qua non factor; but a theory of race—however flawed the concept of race might be—is essential for racism (Balibar, 2007). The wide debunking of the biological basis of race and the discredited notion of innate natural differences among racial groups did not stop it from informing various groups across societies today (Villarosa, 2019). Goldberg (1992) argues that race and racialised discourse set the social conditions necessary for the manifestation of racist expressions. Thus, according to this view, racism “began to emerge with the appearance of the concept of race, that is, with the set of interests the concept expressed at the time of its emergence” (Goldberg, 1992, pp. 543–544). Even in otherwise secular Western states, that are organised based on egalitarian ethos—where individuals are conferred the rights of citizenship—race has long served as a criterion for the exclusion of certain racial groups such as Indigenous Peoples (Dumont, 1966/1980; Morris, 1997). In fact, Dumont (1966/1980) has argued that there is a close association between egalitarianism and racism, with the history of racial discrimination and segregation in the United States being the prime example. More recent scholarship has focused on the notion of race as a social construct representing an essentialised concept of innate differences in relation to skin colour, ethnic ancestry, cultural heritage and religion, all of which serve as markers of identity in a social system advancing domination, oppression and privilege (Garner, 2017; Paradies, 2006; Smedley, & Smedley, 2005). Racism conceived as such maintains an ideological feature that is strictly based on the existence of unequal human races. Moreover, the practical conceptualisation of racism introduces economic and political dimensions to the ideology of racial hierarchy, as articulated 6 According to Hirschman (2004), the three main factors for the emergence of racism were: (1) the enslavement of millions of Africans, (2) the expansion of European colonialism and (3) the rise of Social Darwinism.

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six decades ago by Hamilton and Ture (1967/2011). After examining various definitions provided in the literature, Garner (2017, p. 21) proposed that an accurate definition of racism must contain these three elements: (i) a racialised historical power relationship, (ii) an ideology and (iii) forms of discriminatory practices. These three elements approach racism as a belief system and practice that manifests in the perpetration of unfair inequalities within the context of hierarchically defined societies (Berman & Paradies, 2010). Yet, even with such a clearly articulated conceptualisation, practical attributions of racism in everyday life are far from straightforward. At many levels, racism also remains a contested concept in social and political discourse (Doane, 2006). Whether certain acts, events or policies constitute acts of racism has been the subject of increasing contestation even within supposedly socially progressive societies that have adopted international conventions banning all forms of discrimination (see Schwelb, 1966; Nakata, 2001). While there seems to be near consensus that certain beliefs and behaviours, such as White supremacy, antisemitism and Apartheid policies, are racist and universally condemned, debates persist as to whether or not anti-immigration attitudes, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Affirmative policies or hate speeches directed against minority groups constitute new forms of racism (Tafira, 2011). Some researchers have conceptualised certain exclusionary attitudes, behaviours and policies that do not rely on group attributes such as colour, ethnicity, nationality or religion, as a new racism. These forms of racism do not rely on heredity—hence, racism without race or racists —but invariably target groups that have been historically the targets of biological racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). As Balibar (2007, p. 84) points out, such racism replaces biology with culture as a contour of difference: It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P. A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism.

Against this changing intellectual and socio-political context, this book seeks to contribute to the debate in racism research, providing a nuanced review of its evolution in history and contemporary application, within

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the Australian context. Building on Jones’ (2000) theoretical framing that conceives racism at three different levels—institutional, personal and internalised—we conceptualise racism as a self-sustaining and complex system involving ideology, behaviour, social structures and institutions creating and sustaining unfair inequalities based on race, ethnicity, skin colour, religion and ancestry. This aligns with Balibar’s (2007) conceptualisation that frames racism as an entirely social phenomenon engraved in practices, discourses and representations to provide the basis for the perpetration of exclusion and segregation of groups considered the other based on race, ethnicity, skin colour, religion, etc. In both formulations of racism, a racial hierarchy of racial communities is formed based on relative social distance and concretised through the stereotyping and stigmatisation of otherness. Like other forms of structural inequalities (based on gender, social class, etc.), a system of racism benefits certain groups that belong (with social, political and economic privileges) while adversely impacting the wellbeing of racial minorities or groups considered other (Gee et al., 2019). Figure 1.2 provides a framework for understanding racism, and the way the three levels interplay to create socioeconomic, political and health inequalities. Racism embodies beliefs and ideologies of racial categorisation, usually mediated interpersonally in terms of relationships, actions, attitudes and behaviours. According to Critical Race Theory, it also exists embedded in society, manifesting “in material conditions and in access to power” (Jones, 2000, p. 1212). While often existing as inherited disadvantage, it is reinforced institutionally through codified laws, societal structures, norms and privileges (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Lopez, 2000; Paradies & Cunningham, 2009). Minority groups internalise racism when they reflexively experience it as targets in terms of rumination, self-sabotage, resentment, self-devaluation and other coping strategies (Jones, 2000; Speight, 2007).7 The concentric framing depicts a feedback loop, whereby racism permeating institutions in society can create conditions for its manifestation in everyday relationships, and can be perceived or experienced by the target groups. Our theoretical approach thus distinguishes between racism expressed by perpetrators (interpersonal and institutional) and experiences of racism among targets

7 Jones (2000, p. 1213) defines internalised racism as “as acceptance by members of

the stigmatized races of negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth.”

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Racism Belief/ideology in racial categories

+ Enactment

Institutional Privileges

Laws

Inter-personal Reflections Institutions

Relationship

Attitudes

Internalised

Rumination Self-sabotage Resentment

Condoning

Behaviours

Policies

Practices

Coping Self-devaluation

Actions

Omissions

Norms

Structures

Economic

Political

Health

Educational gap

Marginalisation

Access to healthcare

Crime, violence

Income inequality

Exclusion

Physical illness

Unemployment

Domination

Mental illness

Access to housing

Disempowerment

Mortality

Profiling Sentencing Incarceration

Outcomes

Social Segregation

Disenfranchisement

Fig. 1.2 Racism as a self-sustaining system

(actual, perceived and internalised) (Habtegiorgis et al., 2014; Paradies et al., 2015). A large body of interdisciplinary research has produced theoretical and empirical evidence of perpetrator racism (Bobo & Smith, 1998; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Sears & Henry, 2003; Van Dijk, 1987). Another body of work in social psychology, social epidemiology, economics and education has documented racism perceived and experienced by target

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groups (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Codjoe, 2001; Kessler et al., 1999; Krieger, 2014; Paradies et al., 2015; Williams & Mohammed, 2009). As we show in the framework outlined above, research also indicates the importance of examining systemic forms of racism (Henricks, 2016; Henry et al., 2004; Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). Focus of the Book This book examines the politics of race and race relations in contemporary Australian society, by way of critically synthesising current empirical and theoretical research. While the prevalence of racism in Australia has been well-documented historically, particularly in relation to the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act —better known as the White Australia Policy—research on racism, and the legislations designed to address it, are relatively more contemporary (Jayasuriya, 2002). Until the mid-1990s, little had been done in Australian research in terms of the theorisation, understanding, reporting and measurement of racism (Jayasuriya, 2002). A more thorough analysis of this historical comparison will follow in the next chapter. Suffice to note though, that racism has persisted to this modern age and racial discrimination has not become obsolete as previously predicted (Balibar, 2007; Becker, 1957/1971). Today, racism in Australia affects Indigenous Peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees among others (Elias, 2015). A wide body of research indicates the pervasiveness of racism in modern society with the prevalence extending across a range of sectors and socioeconomic dimensions, both in Australia and internationally (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Bhopal, 2007; Darity & Mason, 1998; Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Markus, 2017). However, research also indicates that most contemporary forms of racism are less overt and expressed more ambiguously from the historically violent and more aggressive behaviours of the early twentieth century (Hage 2014; McConahay, 1983).8 For example, Ghassan Hage (2014, p. 233) argues that racism in Australia has qualitatively evolved from what he calls “existential racism” of the post-War era—based on “a sentiment of disgust from the very proximity of someone experienced to be ‘from another race’”—to the contemporary “numerological racism” 8 Although a minority view, there are those (e.g. Leach, 2005) who disagree with the view that racism has shifted from overt to covert form, but argue that old-fashioned/overt racism still remains, including in Australia specifically (Seet & Paradies, 2018).

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based on claims of “too many” immigrants from a particular geographic origin. This approach to racism reflects the more contemporary racialisation of certain ethno-religious groups who are discursively and affectively excluded from the possibility of cultural recognition, national belonging and economic justice (Honneth, 1996). Research in social psychology and behavioural studies on implicit prejudice particularly indicate that racism does not necessarily require animus and hatred towards racial minorities as a prerequisite, as is the case with explicit prejudice. It can unwittingly and uncontrollably occur as a result of implicit racial bias (Bertrand et al., 2005; Harding & Banaji, 2013). For example, in the labour market, employers who do not express overt animus towards racial outgroups may still make racially discriminatory labour market decisions. Research also indicates that these unwitting and uncontrollable but racially prejudiced practices and outcomes are pervasive in interpersonal life and in public policy (Harding & Banaji, 2013). Further empirical research supports this argument and contends that the impact of everyday and subtle racism affects the lives of millions around the world, despite overt racism substantially declining in the last few decades (Bobo & Charles, 2009; Codjoe, 2001; Habtegiorgis et al., 2014; Kessler et al., 1999). With this shift towards subtler discriminatory attitudes and behaviours, racism research has also shifted its focus. Whereas early research focused mainly on blatant racism, like the forms institutionally sanctioned by Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, White Australia and Apartheid South Africa, or overtly expressed by prejudiced members of society (Fredrickson, 2002; McConahay et al., 1981), modern research mainly addresses the subtler forms of racism as the relative prevalence of old-fashioned racism began to decline (McConahay, 1986). In the context of the growing influence of progressive social movements such as anti-racism, feminism and other human rights activism, racism has evolved to manifest differently across spatial and temporal settings. As mentioned earlier, it has persisted with culture, religion and migration rather than heredity serving as the contours of difference. Research has so far developed several theoretical constructs to explain how racism is framed within these contours of difference in contemporary societies. Some of the most widely used and adapted constructs in the literature are discussed in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book.

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Racism in Australia In Australia, racism continues to generate deep forms of social polarisation and contention in public discourse and policy. At the root of the racism debate is a pervasive discourse on the notion of Australia as a body politic founded on colonial settlement. The encounter between Indigenous Peoples and British colonists in January 1788 is the basis for the ensuing race relations in the country. Yet, race relations, particularly racism, have also evolved within other interrelated contexts such as immigration and cultural diversity. As in other settler colonial societies, preconceived ideas and assumptions about the Indigenous Peoples were crucial in solidifying racist attitudes. According to Yarwood and Knowling (1982, p. 9), the “debate over slavery, reactions to the Indian Mutiny, the vogue of Social Darwinism, and the racial tensions of post-Civil War America formed part of the context in which white Australians developed attitudes to and policies on racial questions”. Thus, preconceptions of European superiority and settler capitalism provided the basis for racism as a theoretical and ideological construct for the problematic race relations in Australian history (Cope, 1987). As Rigney (1999, p. 11) puts it, “the rapid growth of imperialism including the search for wealth and profits in the 17th and 18th centuries; the spiritual drive to promote the visions of God; and the quest for power, mastery, and collective glory”, represented ideological and imperialist projects that led to production and justification of racism they were invoked to justify. Claims that Indigenous Peoples lacked “recognizable societies, law, property rights or sovereignty” served as the basis for the colonisation of Indigenous lands while the notion of Australia as terra nullius —a phrase invented in the late nineteenth century—was later used to legitimise the European colonial project in the subcontinent (Buchan & Heath, 2006, p. 5; Fitzmaurice, 2007).9 This historical construction of the Australian national identity also became part of Australia’s legal tradition that informed the country’s social policies, and in many ways has continued to do so more recently (Buchan & Heath, 2006).10 For example, issues surrounding Indigenous rights, the recognition of Indigenous dispossession, and frontier violence against

9 The notion of terra nullius in the Australian context is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. 10 In the landmark case Mabo v. Queensland (2) (1992) the Australian High Court rejected the legal basis for terra nullius .

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Indigenous Peoples of Australia remain contentious topics in the media and public debates. While debates on Indigenous issues constitute part of the broader race relations within Australian society, racism in particular frequently surfaces around such debates. The study of racism has undergone major theoretical and empirical transformations worldwide. Early theorisations of racism, which focused mainly on blatant and unsophisticated racism, were inadequate to explain the more subtle, unwitting and less overt manifestations of racism in Australia and elsewhere. Recognising this theoretical shift, researchers in Australia have attempted to measure both overt and subtle forms of racism within Australian society. Studies that integrate old and new forms of racism indicate that racism is very prevalent in modern multicultural Australia (Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Hage, 2014). Racism in Australia is constructed through both denial of and ambivalence towards the historical violence and enduring discrimination against Indigenous Peoples, as well as in the more contemporary discrimination against migrants of non-white descent. Today, persistent inequalities reflected in the unfair distribution of social, economic and political power, which have marginalised Indigenous Peoples, are key issues that bring racism to the fore. In addition, emerging research indicates that the prevalence of racism in Australia, as in many Western societies, is increasingly becoming subtle and insidious, although overt racism is still prevalent (Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Habtegiorgis et al., 2014; Mellor, 2003). Denial is one example of subtle racism, with research based on national surveys showing its widespread prevalence involving a common denial of Anglo-Celtic privilege and Indigenous disadvantage (Dunn et al., 2004; Johnson, 2002).11 Thus, the nature of contemporary racism and the spectrum of its manifestations require further research, as emerging fields show that racism operates across diverse platforms, through contact in the physical space and the Internet, and across settings including public space, schools, entertainment, law enforcement, workplaces and so on (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Jakubowicz et al., 2017). This book examines critically the nature of racism in Australia and aims to explore how racism affects Indigenous Peoples, as well as minority ethnic, racial and migrant groups. It will examine how different factors 11 The phrase Anglo-Celtic Australians as used in this book refers to white Australians who are the descendants of people from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (Forrest & Dunn, 2006; Johnson, 2002).

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contribute to its prevalence and effects, and explore possible complex antiracism interventions. Beginning with an historical exploration of racism in Australia, the book examines the embeddedness of race and racial discourse in the society’s national identity. In addition to the historical discussion, the book also examines the contemporary state of racism and its multifaceted impacts across diverse domains. Through synthesis of the literature and analysis of current data, it seeks to answer key research questions related to the significance of race and racism in Australian society. To do so, the book will address the following interconnected questions that reflect issues in racism research within the Australian context: • How does current research engage with the history of race and race relations in Australia? What narratives of race relations and racism are produced and how are these accepted or contested? • To what extent and how does race play a role in Australia’s approaches to cultural and national identity? • What role have racialised discourse and racism played in Australia’s social policies, laws and institutions? • What are the economic causes of racism? Which groups do racial hierarchies and discourses serve, both globally and within Australia? • What is the state of race relations and the level of prevalence of racism in Australia today? • What can explain the prevalence of racism reported in some national surveys, such as the Challenging Racism Survey and the Scanlon Mapping Social Cohesion Survey? • How does racism affect—psychosocially, culturally and economically—both majority and minority groups in contemporary Australian society? • What are the underlying individual, intergroup and structural forces that affect race relations in Australia? • To what extent have current anti-racism efforts been effective in combatting racism? • What does the future hold for race relations in Australia’s multicultural society? The book engages with the above research questions by critically examining evidence from current theoretical and empirical research findings. Although there are studies that discuss the history of race relations in

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Australia, little has been done in relation to the recent and contemporary dynamics in the country (Hage, 2012; Hollinsworth, 2006; Markus, 1994, 2001; Moses, 2004; Yarwood & Knowling, 1982). The shifting dynamic in racism and race relations requires a more critical and robust analysis that incorporates recent and emerging knowledge. Advances in political theory, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, behavioural science, communication and economics have shown that the way racism is constructed is changing and adapting to new global forces. Yet, its impact on society is as, or more, significant than decades ago (Markus, 2017). However, despite research showing racism as a determinant for a range of outcomes, data limitations have long precluded the investigation of racism at a national scale (Dunn & McDonald, 2001; Nazroo, 2003). This has changed over the last two decades, with the generation of a number of relevant state and national surveys. The book takes advantage of these new data to examine the contemporary state of race relations. Deploying innovative analytical methods, based on secondary sources that include quantitative and qualitative data, it investigates the prevalence and patterns of racism in Australian society. It also employs historical and current data to synthesise generalisable research evidence on the past and current state of race relations and their implications for public policy. Combining methodological advances in public health and economics, the book analyses the evidence on the economic impact of racism in Australia and proposes innovative approaches towards tackling its local and global manifestations. Structure of the Book This book is organised into ten chapters, plus this introduction. Each chapter has a specific area of focus, ranging from historical narratives, to critique of social policy, analysis of current political discourse, empirical data and evaluation of public initiatives. Chapter 2 briefly surveys the history of race relations and the political implications of racism in Australia, highlighting the key moments that shaped the place of race in the country’s collective national identity. This will include a discussion on how racism, both globally and in Australia’s settler colonial project, evolved within the context of the capitalist demand for labour, and was used to justify the continuation of settler colonial policies. It explores the two distinct but interconnected aspects of Australian racial history, relations between settler-invaders and Indigenous Peoples, and

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the White Australia Policy that racially restricted immigration, particularly from Asian countries. Australia has a history of murky race relations, beginning with colonisation and the consequent racial conflicts. The roots of racism are very much embedded in a history marked by wars, dispossession and colonial expansion that advanced racist violence, conceptualised in the literature as settler colonialism (Paradies, 2016). Such sustained racist and exclusionary colonial projects have ensured the continued dominance of Anglo-Celtic whites for more than two centuries with longterm adverse impact on Indigenous Peoples who endured violence and other racist policies that denied their dignity and rights, and forcibly removed Indigenous children. A vast body of interdisciplinary research documents the adverse impact of racism on Indigenous Peoples (BodkinAndrews & Carlson, 2016; Larson et al., 2007; Paradies, 2018). While colonial expansion and racist policies oppressed Indigenous Peoples for a long period, the White Australia Policy that was institutionalised in 1901 pushed against immigration, particularly Asian, countries. The rise of Chinese settlement in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century was historically received with strong hostility, arising from deeprooted fear of demographic change. As a reaction, the White Australia Policy was introduced to ensure Australia remained exclusively AngloCeltic. Scholars have argued that this, and subsequent segregationist and assimilationist policies that institutionalised racism in Australia, have helped maintain Anglo-Celtic hegemony(Armillei & Mascitelli, 2017; Johnson, 2002). Post-War skilled and unskilled labour needs played a key role in affecting immigration policy in Australia, and led to the arrival of nonBritish migrants from Europe. As Australia’s demography kept changing as a result of the migration pattern, the racially motivated assimilationist project faltered. The White Australia Policy was abolished in the 1960s, and Indigenous Peoples were included in the census 1971. The government gradually opened up to the idea of Australia’s multiracial identity when multiculturalism was officially acknowledged in 1973. Since then, Australia continued to receive migrants from across the globe, and is now one of the world’s most culturally diverse countries. Yet, there is strong argument that Australian multiculturalism unequally positions different ethnic groups and privileges Anglo-Celtic heritage within the national framework, including in institutional power and in political leadership (Armillei & Mascitelli, 2017; Hage, 2002). In addition, despite the

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acknowledgement of multiculturalism, studies indicate that both interpersonal and institutional racism remain entrenched, as evidenced in everyday racism, anti-migrant sentiments, high level of Indigenous incarceration and so on (Dunn et al., 2004; Henry et al., 2004; Mellor, 2003). Chapter 2 also discusses the social climate of Australian race relations in the context of various policies including the White Australia Policy, the Racial Discrimination Act and Australia’s multicultural policies and their impact on both interpersonal and institutional racism. Chapter 3 focuses on the contemporary institutional aspect of racism, examining the systemic structures that perpetuate exclusion and racial inequality, and critically interrogates the policy environment that has shaped the discourse of race relations in Australia. Coined in 1960 by Hamilton and Ture (1967/2011), institutional racism refers to racism perpetrated through “the apparatuses of the state and the structures of society” (Bourne, 2001, p. 9). The purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether and to what extent there are structural and systemic barriers in Australia that preclude racial and ethnic minorities from attaining racial equality across multiple domains (e.g. law, political representation, education, employment, health and business). We look at this in light of the historical interplay between the politics of identity and racial socioeconomic and political reality in Australia. On the surface, institutional racism officially ended in Australia in the late 1960s, with the abolition of the laws that promulgated a White Australia Policy. Ever since, particularly since the late 1970s, the majority of Australians have come to recognise Australia as a multicultural society. The Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 affirms the equal rights of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, prohibiting racial discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. Despite this, Australian society remains largely dominated by the Anglo-Celtic population with minorities frequently experiencing disadvantage, discrimination, social exclusion and less representation socially, politically and economically. A widely held view among researchers and social policy practitioners postulates that the socioeconomic circumstances and political underrepresentation of minority groups point to ongoing systematic and structural racial inequality and injustice. To what extent these are indicative of an underlying institutional racism, with race/ethnicity still determining one’s place in Australian society, is a heavily debated issue across public policy spheres and academic discourse. Therefore, in addition to depicting the structural processes that perpetuate unequal and disparate outcomes for minority

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racial/ethnic groups, this chapter discusses the ethical dimension of institutional racism to provide a more nuanced perspective to this ongoing discourse that sometimes tends to be simplistic and polarised. Chapter 4 discusses the economic causes of racism. Building on the summary of the historical roots of racism provided in the previous chapter, this chapter looks at the traditional rational theory explanations of racism, and the interpretation of racial discrimination as a cost minimising and profit maximising choice of economic agents that result in unfair inequalities. This conception differs from the psychological prejudice-based or unconscious bias interpretation of racism, and explains racism as an economic phenomenon. Economic theorisation of racism has primarily focused on taste-discrimination (Becker, 1957/1971), statistical discrimination (Arrow, 1971) and occupational segregation (Bergmann, 1974). Yet, other than documenting statistical evidences of discrimination, racism research in economics has not adequately explained why racism continues to be pervasive and engrained in the societal system, as is argued by critical race scholarship (Reich, 2017; Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). Within structural inequality research, social stratification and intersectionality provide analytical tools to understand the relationship among different contours of inequalities (race, gender and class) and locate the economic dynamics of racism (Browne & Misra, 2003; Darity, 2005; Walby et al., 2012). Elsewhere, Fraser and Honneth (2003) have argued that, given contemporary racism has both class and status dimensions, “overcoming the injustices of racism, in sum, requires both redistribution and recognition” (p. 23). In this chapter, we explore the racism and structural inequalities literature, to examine how race, gender, and class interplay, and understand the extent to which particular groups in society stand to benefit from continued prevalence of racial discrimination and consequent inequalities. We explore any causal links between racial discrimination and socioeconomic outcomes, by examining current evidence from cross-disciplinary research. Chapter 5 analyses and reviews existing cross-sectional and longitudinal data in light of theoretical discussions and empirical research that map the state of racism in contemporary Australian society. Our aim is to resolve actual or perceived gaps between research evidence on racism and race relations and the ongoing narrative that informs public policy in the country. A commonly held view in Australia, and one that has some validity, is the notion that the majority of Australians detest racism. Yet, they also have a very specific view of what constitutes racism and, tied

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to such conceptualisation, reject the notion that they themselves may be racist. This assertion is usually supported with the claim that there are no state sanctioned laws that discriminate against racial minorities and that overtly racist violence is absent or infrequent (Dunn & Nelson, 2011). The claim rests on the notion that racism must be overt or legally coded to have adverse impact on racial/ethnic minorities. However, research widely indicates that new forms of racism prevail today that are unwitting and covert (Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Habtegiorgis et al., 2014; Mellor, 2003). Research also indicates alarming levels of racism in schools, with young people from minority racial backgrounds facing increasing exposure to unfair discrimination (Aveling, 2007; Priest et al., 2019). The chapter, therefore, examines the two conflicting narratives regarding racism in contemporary Australia and attempts to present a more balanced picture of ongoing race relations. Media plays central role in modern society by setting agenda for public discourse and disseminating information across time and space. It is vital for the protection of modern democracy and regulating state power and holding it to account. Yet, like any other public institution, media can also be used and abused for various purposes that promote unfair inequalities. Racism is one such negative social outcome that is widely perpetrated in media with significant adverse effects on racial minorities (Nairn et al., 2006; Simmons & Lecouteur, 2008; Van Dijk, 1989). At the beginning of the twentieth century, racist tropes in the media (e.g. Associated Press) and the film industry encouraged racist hatred against African Americans. Similarly, the media was instrumental in carrying racial propaganda for White Australia. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, media was at the heart of racial polarisation that continues to this day (Titley, 2019; Van Dijk, 1993). The recent spike in anti-Asian racism on social media during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic further indicates the role of media in perpetuating institutional racism (Ziems et al., 2020). Chapter 6 examines the role of Australian media in the production, propagation and enactment of racism. It discusses how media racialises particular groups and influences political discourse around immigration policy, diversity and national identity issues. Chapter 7 offers a synthesis of empirical findings from crossdisciplinary research on the effects of racism. Drawing on current national and local empirical research, it discusses the socioeconomic impact of racism on Australian society. It shows how racism results in avoidable inequalities that affect minority racial groups disproportionately. A wide

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body of research across disciplines and geographic jurisdictions has documented such inequalities with multiple factors exacerbating the problem. Research also shows that exposure to racism is a stressor for racial minorities (Clark et al., 1999; Pascoe & Smart Richman, 2009). Experiences of racism have strong associations with mental and physical health, labour market and educational outcomes, socioeconomic status and economic inequalities (Paradies et al., 2015; Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). Exposure to racism, in combination with other adverse factors including poverty, joblessness and unstable residential accommodation, can also increase the likelihood of committing violent crimes (Cunneen, 2005). The chapter reviews some of these associations in the Australian context, focusing on the experiences of ethnic minorities including migrants from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds and the Indigenous population. The empirical findings reviewed in the chapter corroborate the arguments advanced in relation to the structural processes that constitute institutional racism, as detailed in Chapter 3. While racism affects all genders and age groups among Indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and migrants, young people within these groups are more likely to be exposed to both online and face-to-face racism (Ahmed et al., 2007; Gee et al., 2012; Priest et al., 2011). This arises from their exposure to intercultural environments such as schools, community, sports and entertainment settings, as well as their hyperactive engagement in social media. It is therefore worth closely examining these groups, to understand how young people in Australia are impacted by racism and to what extent they engage in its production and dissemination. Thus, Chapter 8 draws on a mixed methods study that investigated the impact of racism on the health and wellbeing of young people in Australia. It also contextualises this within current research on the state of race relations within this important demographic group. Today, fast Internet-based communication facilitates the temporal and spatial spread of racism, with its occurrence in one country quickly reported globally resulting in both condemnation and solidarity. Chapter 9 looks at these global dynamics in relation to racism, and discusses whether and how global forces affect and shape race relations in Australia. In postcolonial research, global racism has been conceptualised and understood in connection with capitalism and colonial expansion (Batur-Vanderlippe, 1999; Cox, 1948/1959). Yet, racism in post-World War II Western societies has largely been localised, usually

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reflecting internal national structures of racial and ethnic inequalities. Country-specific socioeconomic, cultural and political factors have largely determined prevailing intergroup dynamics. In Australia, racism was as much a colonial legacy as it was an outcome of the country’s institutional structures, which systematically excluded and disenfranchised Indigenous Peoples and minority ethnic groups. International race relations can have direct influence on Australian race relations. Historically, high-profile global anti-racism episodes such as the US Civil Rights movement and anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa reverberated across the world, affecting global race relations, including in Australia. The recent Black Lives Matter movement have similarly affected race discourse in Australia and beyond. Yet, race relations in every country remained inward looking and locally specific. This changed with the advent of the Internet over the last three decades, with cyberspace becoming an evergrowing domain of intercultural encounter. Racism has now intensified as a global phenomenon, with racially conscious groups (for example, White supremacists) gaining access to global audience. Racism today is no longer perpetrated by mere physical proximity; the culprit is not necessarily one sharing the same jurisdiction with the target. In addition, racism is not necessarily an immediate outcome of the local episodes or circumstances that have allegedly disenfranchised the perpetrators. Groups and individuals with racist ideologies may vicariously import racist hatred, targeting local minorities. The chapter, therefore, explores how international forces influence race relations in the contemporary Australian nation state. It examines the role of an evolving global security environment on local racial discourse, analysing how episodes of racial strife abroad can have a snowball effect on local racial politics. Chapter 10 focuses mainly on anti-racism strategies and interventions. The chapter discusses the key challenges and progress in tackling racism, evaluates some of the major strategies that have been formulated to date, and proposes additional potentially effective strategies. The relative global decline of overtly blatant racism over the last five decades is an outcome of a long history of anti-racism efforts. Enlightenment thoughts and concepts of liberty and equality provided the seeds that inspired the struggles against various injustices. This was evident in the abolitionist anti-slavery campaigns. Later, anticolonial struggles, the widespread repugnance over the gross historical injustices of different social policies (Jim Crow laws, the Holocaust, Apartheid, the White Australia Policy, etc.), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and

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the triumph of liberal democracy in Western countries have rendered racism and ethnic segregation unsustainable (Mullings, 2005). These global pro-equality social movements put pressure on nation states and culminated in legislative sanctions against racism and racial discrimination. In Australia, the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act offered a legislative framework for anti-racism efforts and the Race Discrimination Commissioner has overseen national efforts that countered racism and racial discrimination over the last three decades. Over this period, Australian society has shown growing support for a multicultural identity, although some monocultural sentiment remains. Although anti-racism efforts have targeted everyday racism in a range of settings, including in schools, public spaces, sports settings and workplaces, structural inequalities that are construed as manifestations of underlying institutional racism have persisted. To what extent anti-racism strategies can be deployed to address these structural inequalities is an empirical, as well as practical, question. So far, a wide body of research has documented the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of different anti-racism strategies (Aveling, 2007; Ben et al., 2020; Howarth & Andreouli, 2015; Kowal et al., 2013; Pedersen et al., 2005). This chapter synthesises current anti-racism research, summarising the theories, empirics and strategies that have been proposed to address racism and discrimination. Chapter 10 also reviews existing and potential anti-racism strategies that could mitigate the adverse impact of various forms of racism. It examines how these different strategies have been implemented in Australia, the progress that has been made in reducing racism, and what the main challenges are to achieving a racism-free society. Finally, Chapter 11 provides a reflective post-script as a conclusion that connects the various elements of contestation discussed throughout this book. Like many socially constructed beliefs, racism is a potent force with a far-reaching adverse impact on a culturally and racially diverse society. In Australia, the impact of racism goes back to the country’s colonial invasion, with race and racial discourse embedded in the colonist’s national identity since the late eighteenth century. Although Australia today is a longway from its historical racial past, and the majority of the population currently sees it as a successful multicultural state, racial justice and equality remains an enduring issue with unwitting racism prevalent, alongside unsanctioned institutional racism that limits the human rights of racial minorities. This book provides a unique contribution to the contemporary state of racism and its multifaceted impacts across diverse

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domains. Through the synthesis of the literature and analysis of current data, it analyses afresh the evidence on the prevalence as well as the socioeconomic and health burdens of racism on racial minorities in Australia. The book also reviews and examines dominant and emerging anti-racism strategies, drawing on national and international evidence and practice. Finally, the book concludes with a reflective discussion on the emerging frontiers in racism research, highlighting possible directions for future research agendas.

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CHAPTER 2

Race Relations in Australia: A Brief History

An Overview The history of race relations in Australia is murky and complex, and so is the contest over truth telling, particularly, in relation to the country’s settler colonial past and its enduring legacy (Mckenna, 1997). Ideological views have long clouded the appraisal of factual evidence, and denial of racism around historical injustices and racial violence permeate current racial discourses. In constructing and celebrating collective national values and identity, many Australians would forget or gloss over the long history of discrimination and injustices against Indigenous Peoples that continues to haunt Australia as a nation (MacIntyre, 2004). However, those who think that Australia should own the legacies of its past and come to terms with the historical wrongs its Indigenous populations have sustained, find themselves constantly conflicted by the unpopularity of such ethical stances. The contestation over history and truth telling has indeed become a source of political polarisation. This is particularly so today, in a period of increasingly resurgent populism where scientific evidence receives less enthusiasm and disinformation spreads unabated. Despite the growing political polarisation, resurgence of nationalist ideologies, and subsequent crystallisation of identity politics in Australia, interest in Indigenous Peoples and racial minority research has grown over the last few decades, and we now have a growing understanding of the history of race relations. Today, thanks to emerging research, the past © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Elias et al., Racism in Australia Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2137-6_2

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and its scars on the Indigenous population are becoming more accessible to more Australians. Scholars are challenging the way history (of race relations) has been taught in settler societies for more than a century, and we are now able to make some sense of what settler colonialism has meant for Australia’s Indigenous Peoples (Coombes, 2006). Many scholars have argued that racism is deeply embedded in the Australian social and political structure (De Plevitz, 2007; Every & Augoustinos, 2007; Henry et al., 2004). As we discuss the history of race relations in Australia, it is worth noting that, while racism existed prior to being publicly debated (Cox, 1948/1959),1 the concepts of race relations and racism did not firmly enter modern social and political debates until the late nineteenth century (Barrows, 1902). In Australia, while racial oppression was intertwined with the colonial project, it has evolved over time. Australian race-relations, as experienced today, began with the inception of colonial expansion during the era of settler colonial exploration. It is well understood that racial conflict is deeply embedded in the country’s national identity. Central to the Australian story of race relations is the role of settler colonialism in establishing a modern capitalist state built through conquest, enslavement, dispossession, displacement and massacre of the native population. For many years, this story has hinged on the narrative of Australia as terra nullius at the time of colonisation. Thus, a history of race relations in Australia must begin by engaging with this colonialist claim and its impact on Indigenous Peoples. Hundreds of generations of these peoples marked continuous cultures, which were subjected to considerable atrocities over the last two hundred plus years. Recognition of this fact does more justice to the historical inquiry into race relations, while not doing so undermines its credibility. This chapter succinctly surveys the complex history of race relations and the political implications of racism in Australia, highlighting the key moments (see Table 2.1) that have shaped the place of race in the country’s collective national identity. It explores the two distinct but interconnected aspects of Australian racial history. The first is the long and ongoing relations between British colonists and Indigenous Peoples, and the second is the relationship between the Australian state and non-white

1 The next chapter will discuss the historical roots of racism and how it is closely aligned with colonialism and capitalism.

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Table 2.1 Timeline in Australian race relations Period/Decade Prehistorical period App. before 45–67 millenniaa Eighteenth century 1644 1720s 1769 1788 ”” 1790b Nineteenth century 1817 1818 1824 1838 1851 1900s 1901 ”” ”” 1903 1904 1905 1906 1910s 1915 1916 1920s 1928 1930s 1930

1934

Important event in race relations

Arrival of the First Peoples Naming of New Holland and “discovery” of Van Diemen’s Land Trading relations: Macassans from Indonesia across northern Australia Captain Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay British First Fleet arrives at Sydney First encounter between Indigenous Peoples and white people First recorded incident of hostility The name Australia was adopted by Governor Lachlan Macquarie Australia Day publicly celebrated for the first time The founding of the Australian newspaper Myall Creek Massacre Gold Rush and anti-Chinese racism Federation Immigration Restriction Act Denial of citizenship to Indigenous people Naturalisation Act Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act West Australia Aboriginal Act Deportation of Pacific Islanders Anti-Greek riots occurred in Perth Ethnic riots in Kalgoorlie Aboriginal activist Anthony Fernando pickets Australia House in London Victorian Yorta Yorta man William Cooper petitions the King to have an Aboriginal representative in the Federal House of Representatives David Unaipon lobbies the Australian government to take over responsibility for Aboriginals from the states.

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Period/Decade

Important event in race relations

1934 1938

Ethnic riots in Kalgoorlie Aboriginal protest of Australia Day, and designation as the “Day of Mourning” First mention of Australia as terra nullius The first-ever mass strike of Aboriginal people occurs (the Cummeragunja walk-off)

1939 1939 1940s 1949 1950s 1955 1957 1958 1960s 1963

1966 1967 1970s 1971 ”” ”” 1972 1975 1977 1977 1978 1980s 1980 1981

Deportation of Chinese refugees The Nationality and Citizenship Act The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines established Migration Act of 1958 The Yolngu people of Yirrkala in Australia’s Northern Territory send a bark petition to the House of Representatives to protest against mining on the Gove Peninsula Anti-discrimination legislation Commonwealth Referendum on Aboriginal Rights Inclusion of Indigenous people in national census Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) at Redfern National Aboriginal and Islander health organisation (NAIHO) Aboriginal Tent Embassy is pitched outside Parliament House calling for land rights Racial Discrimination Act The Galbally Report The first land claim hearing to Crown land at Borroloola in the Northern Territory Implementation of multicultural policies Jim Hagan is the first Australian Aboriginal person to address the United Nations. Human Rights Commission Transfer of ownership of the Ayers Rock (Uluru) to the Pitjantjatjara people

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Period/Decade

Important event in race relations

1988 1988 1988

National Inquiry into racist violence Restoration of the Uluru Barunga Statement delivered to Parliament. Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke affirms that the government is committed to working for a negotiated treaty with Aboriginal people.

1990s 1991 1992 1992 1993 1995 1997

1999 2000s 2005 2007 ”” 2008 2010s 2016 2017

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Prime Minister Keating’s Redfern Park Speech Native Title: Mabo Decision Ayers Rock officially renamed Uluru Racial Hatred Act The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families Multiculturalism Policy Cronulla Riots Close the Gap campaign Northern Territory Emergency Intervention measures National Apology to the Stolen Generation Treaty processes commence in Victoria The Uluru Statement from the Heart

a This represents a long period of Indigenous population of Australia, with remarkable adaptation,

sophisticated culture, ecological knowledge, and egalitarian social structures b Pemulwuy spears John MacIntyre, and hostility broke between the Eora people and colonists, in

1800, conflict led to the death of 26 whites and many more Indigenous Peoples

immigrants. While the latter goes back to the mid-1850s, its salience crystallised with the White Australia Policy enacted from Federation in 1901, which racially restricted immigration, particularly from Asian countries. The roots of racism in Australia are very much embedded in the country’s settler colonial history. In the seminal book The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes (2010) notes that “Australian racism started with the convicts” who “needed to believe in a class inferior to themselves” (p. 95). Yet, racism in Australia was far more than the prejudice of the convicts, as it has been marked by wars, dispossession and colonial expansion that advanced racist violence, conceptualised in the literature

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as settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006). Such sustained racist and exclusionary colonial projects have ensured the continued dominance of white Anglo-Celts for more than two centuries with long-term adverse impact on Indigenous Peoples who endured dispossession, violence and other racist policies that denied them equal rights, forcibly removed their children, and undermined their human dignity (Paradies, 2016). There is now vast interdisciplinary research documenting the deleterious effects of racism on the historical and contemporary life of Indigenous Peoples (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016; Larson et al., 2007; Paradies, 2018). While settler colonial expansion and associated racism have long subjugated the Indigenous Peoples, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, commonly referred to as the White Australia Policy, signalled a push against immigration from certain, particularly Asian, countries (Walker, 2012). The rise of Chinese settlement in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, has historically received hostile reaction with deeprooted fear of demographic and cultural change, including loss of social and political power for white settler-invaders. As a reaction, the White Australia Policy was introduced to ensure that Australia remained exclusively Anglo-Celtic. Scholars have argued that this and subsequent segregationist and assimilationist policies institutionalised racism in Australia, and have helped maintain Anglo-Celtic hegemony(Armillei & Mascitelli, 2017). Post-WW II skilled and unskilled labour needs played a key role in driving immigration policy in Australia, and led to the arrival of nonBritish migrants from Europe. As Australia’s demography kept changing because of these immigration patterns, the racially motivated assimilationist project faltered. In the 1960s, the White Australia Policy was abolished, and the government acknowledged multiculturalism in 1973, gradually accommodating the idea of a multiracial Australia. Since then, Australia began to receive migrants from across the world, and is now one of the most culturally diverse countries on Earth. Yet, there is strong argument that Australian multiculturalism unequally positions different ethnic groups and privileges Anglo-Celtic heritage within the national framework, including in institutional power and in political leadership (Armillei & Mascitelli, 2017; Hage, 2012). In addition, despite the acknowledgement of multiculturalism, studies indicate both interpersonal and institutional racism remain entrenched as evidenced in everyday racism, anti-migrant sentiments, high levels of Indigenous incarceration and so on (Dunn et al., 2004; Henry et al., 2004; Mellor, 2003). Drawing on

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the historical evolution of race relations in general, this chapter discusses these phenomena with a particular focus on some key questions: How has research engaged with the history of race and race relations in Australia? What narratives of race relations and racism are produced and how are they accepted or contested? To what extent and how does race play a role in the country’s cultural and national identity? These questions will allow us to critically explore the history of race relations by looking at the significant milestones that shaped Australia’s social and political history.

Pre-Colonial Indigenous History The history of race relations in Australia, as shown in this book, largely depicts the history of settler colonialism and its impact on Australians. This history represents a narrative of how Indigenous Peoples and minority groups have endured racism and discrimination for more than two century. However, this should be understood against the backdrop of a long period of Indigenous survival, of which we humans have very limited knowledge. Indeed, Indigenous life has been represented as homogenous and unchanging over thousands of years, a view which can be considered part of the racist repertoires of settler colonialism (Lourandos, 1997). With more research, nuanced understandings of Indigenous life as evolving and more complex than has hitherto been appreciated are emerging, challenging previous assumptions of the Indigenous prehistory (Lourandos, 1997). Archaeological and genetic research demonstrates that people have lived in Australia for more than 45–67 millennia (Clarkson et al., 2017; Matchan et al., 2020; O’Connell et al., 2018; Tobler et al., 2017). The Indigenous Peoples of the continent are a diverse mix of hundreds of peoples and nations, spanning thousands of generations living across mainland Australia and the adjacent islands (including in the Torres Strait). They spoke more than 260 languages and 500 dialects, and maintained cultures that survived a significant proportion of human existence in the world (Dudgeon et al., 2010). Over this long period, they had a largely peaceful and prosperous society, although with some collective conflict (Darmangeat, 2019). This included a pan-continental system of trade, social interaction and exchange, which was sustainably balanced with the natural environment. Evidence suggests that Australia’s Indigenous Peoples worked about four hours a day for subsistence using sophisticated fire, hunting, gathering, agricultural and aquacultural

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skills to curate abundant, convenient, predictable and sustainable landscapes (Gammage, 2011). They sowed, irrigated, tilled, weeded, cropped, stored, altered rivers with dams, channels, weirs; and, in many parts of the continent, lived in permanent grass and stone houses of various sizes (Pascoe, 2014). Much of their remaining time was spent on song, dance, art and story-telling across long and healthy lives of more than 60 years, on average (Blyton, 2009). Indigenous scholars and leaders emphasise the strong connectedness of Indigenous life with Country. This encompasses a deep spiritual and kinship relationship to land, sea, air, fauna and flora within a living cosmos (Kwaymullina, 2005; Moreton-Robinson, 2003; Neidjie, 1989). This entails communicative connections among life-forms, human-animal ambiguity and metamorphosis, continuations between life and death, and sentience of natural landscapes (Merlan, 2020). Such intricate and continuous systems involving mutuality of being with all life have been variously expressed in the Dreaming (Mountford, 2020; Rose, 2000), which combines both the literal and metaphorical into an immanent enacted reality (Law, 2004). Dreaming stories make up the cultural, religious, and governing principles of Indigenous life and culture, setting out relations and obligations for renewing all creation that privileged autonomy within embodied constitutive, compassionate and interdependent communal relationships (Watts, 2013). Over the last two and half centuries, historians and anthropologists have documented the Indigenous Peoples’ traditions and cultures, largely from simplistic and orientalist Eurocentric perspectives. Paradoxically, this body of literature portrays that Indigenous way of life was primitive and in a state of nature while reporting the nuanced intricacies of the cultures and knowledge that were relayed across generations. Today, modern anthropologists and historians have come to recognise the Indigenous way of life as the longest continuous civilization in human history (Gammage, 2011), which continues to represent vast human wisdom about society and the natural world, gained over millennia of experience and kept from generation to generation without the disruptions of catastrophic wars and man-made calamities. In the wake of European colonialism, the Indigenous Peoples life and culture was subjected to traumatic disruption. Settler colonialism has not only exacted oppression, dispossession and exploitation on Indigenous Peoples, but it has also caused irreparable damage to the Indigenous Peoples ways of life, resulted in the loss of irreplaceable wisdom and

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inflicted irreversible impact on the physical environment. They have seen their familial, communal and traditional culture that respected mutuality, reciprocity and harmony trampled by British culture based on rationalistic and egotistic individualism. However, despite the ongoing oppression of colonisation, the Indigenous Peoples continue to practice their dynamic, vibrant and unique cultures across urban, rural and remote areas of Australia.

First Contacts The millennia-old cosmic relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Country was exposed to Europeans in the early seventeenth century. The earliest known European explorers to visit the continent were the Dutch. In 1606, William Janszoon, captain of the Dutch East India Company, landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula aboard the ship Duyfken. He became the first European to map Australia, having charted about 300 kilometres of coastline. From 1644, Europeans knew continental Australia as New Holland, after explorations of the western and northern coasts by Dutch navigators like Abel Tasman, Luís Vaz de Torres, and Pedro de Quiros. The Dutch, however, did not settle it as they saw that this strange land seemed to lack water and fertile soil in addition to lacking tradable merchandise of value that attracted their mercantile imagination. William Dampier, the British pirate captain was the other notable explorer to navigate Australia in 1688–1689. The European colonisation of Australia instead awaited the arrival of another British navigator and subsequent imperial claim. Yet, Indigenous Peoples pre-British contact with the outside world was not limited to Europeans. As early as the 1720s, there have been contacts with people across the Indonesian archipelago, most notably the Macassans, fishermen hailing from the town of Macassar who traded with Indigenous Peoples in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley in northern Australia (Clark & May, 2013). Some accounts suggest Macassan trade going back to 1640 or earlier (Ganter, 2008). However, it was not until the British exploration and colonisation that the landscape and people of Australia were irreversibly transformed. In three years of navigation in the Southern Hemisphere, a team of British explorers led by James Cook circumnavigated New Zealand/Aotearoa in October 1769 aboard the HMS Endeavour (Beaglehole, 1974). The next year, the team made further discovery as Captain

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Cook’s ship sailed west and sighted the eastern coasts of Australia.2 These discoveries, along with his two other voyages, cemented Captain Cook’s place in history, and established his name among the most courageous and farsighted explorers. However, while the Western world hailed the Captain as a hero, there is another story that mars his achievements, as his eureka moments were deeply ominous for the natives of Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. The M¯aori people had their first fatality at the hands of white Europeans when one of Captain Cook’s crew shot and killed a M¯aori man in October 1769 near the bank of T¯uranganui River (MacIntyre, 2004). At least four M¯aori men were tragically killed during these early encounters, and this marked the beginning of a traumatic colonial experience for the Indigenous Peoples of Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. In April 1770, the HMS Endeavour sighted the east coast of Australia, first landing at Point Hicks before arriving in what is now Botany Bay. In August 1770, the Captain laid claim to the south-eastern coast for the British Crown, naming it New South Wales. Cook’s mission clearly showed the colonial intention of the British Empire. Based on a letter entitled Secret Instructions, Cook was instructed by the British Admiralty “with the consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the country in the Name of the King of Great Britain” (cited in Banner, 2005, p. 97). Unlike the Dutch, the British came to stay, and with this, an enduring historical relationship between European imperialism and the Indigenous Peoples emerged. Understandably, the Indigenous population resisted the encroachment since the beginning, and Captain Cook himself was well aware that his team was not welcome (MacIntyre, 2004). This is a typical example of the pattern Edward Said (1994) observed in Culture and Imperialism where “a historical experience of resistance against empire” (p. xiv) tends to be common among colonised people and nations. Captain Cook noted in his diaries that the Aborigines lived in a tranquil ethno-cultural harmony, at peace among themselves and in relation to the environment. In his own account, he stated that they were keen to maintain their way of life and their millennia long custodianship of the continent (MacIntyre, 2004). This directly contradicted the Western culture rooted in possessive exploitation and self-conscious utilitarian 2 Cook was actually a lieutenant by rank although he became captain of HMS Endeavour.

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production. The British imperialist drive evolved over time as the colonists began to develop the land, expand mercantile endeavours, mine natural resources, engage in rapid human population growth and import a range of flora and fauna from Britain, instead of living within local ecosystems. Indigenous life thus became an immediate sacrifice for this imperial project, to which the Indigenous Peoples, who were in no position to negotiate their way of life and their traditional sacred grounds, vehemently opposed. From the colonists’ viewpoint, the Indigenous Peoples were regarded as mere nuisance to the settler colonialist endeavours. The first encounter between whites and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia was marked by curiosity. However, like other contacts between white Europeans and other peoples, we can hardly consider this curiosity as a mutually reciprocated relationship. It was asymmetric in terms of power dynamics and lacking in imperial regard for the Indigenous way of life (Strong, 1986). The strategically minded explorer, colonialist or conquistador whose purpose was exploitation, control, and imperial expansion could hardly be considered as sharing equal curiosity with an Indigenous person who was not prepared for conquest as a mode of engagement that was unlike anything they or their ancestors had witnessed. The Indigenous relationship with the land and its resources was purely shared custodianship, where humans are seen as an extension of the land, completely at odds with the capitalist-minded explorers and colonialists whose worldview was based on possession and competition, and conceived the land as part of enemies to be conquered (Bolton, 1981). The first contact was not just a contact between two groups of people, black and white, Indigenous and colonist; it was also a contact between two distinct worldviews, a contact between two different cultures. Both sides were entering uncharted relationships in the sense that they knew little about one another. Thus, it is not surprising that the arrival of Europeans in Australia represents an epoch in the continent’s history, an event that disrupted the long history of the Indigenous Peoples, and eventually had a radically detrimental impact on the environment, significantly changing its cultural and topographic landscape (MacIntyre, 2004). By opening the continent to Western imperial security and commercial interests, British colonialism introduced a political economy that exploited the continent’s resources on an industrial scale. This was made possible by the expansion of European settlements, commercial agriculture and mining. European settlement in Australia occurred in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, when man was asserting dominance over all nature and

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life (Hutton & Connors, 1999). This extended to their massive exploitation, with significant cultural and ecological effects that are evident to date. Research has documented the environmental degradation and irreversible changes European settlement unleashed across the breadth of the continent (Butzer & Helgren, 2005; Kingsford, 2000). Understandably, these changes were challenged by environmental movements, which were active throughout Britain’s colonial history across the globe (Bolton, 1981; Hutton & Connors, 1999). While the industrial expansion and concomitant degradation of the environment became a matter of concern for environmentalists in Britain, the colonial administration remarkably failed to curb human tragedy that was taking place in the colonies. Indigenous Peoples were treated as either obstacles or a cheap human labour force in the capitalist expansion of the colonists. Historians have only recently began to recount more fully the human aspect of the impact of Australia’s colonial history (Rogers & Bain, 2016). It has only been fifty years since Indigenous Peoples have been acknowledged as citizens of their own country, with their experiences receiving interest in the social sciences. Yet, this colonial history, which is dominated by oppression and racial exploitation, is yet to be fully told, with scholars beginning to uncover substantial levels of colonial atrocities and massacres that have been masked by rewritten histories (Dovey, 2017). The contact that began with Captain Cook was continued throughout the early and mid-nineteenth century by explorers who travelled deep into the interior. As these explorers opened up the interior, as well as the southern and western coasts, inevitable conflict with the Indigenous Peoples intensified. These conflicts usually deteriorated into violent clashes, leading to Indigenous deaths. Indeed, the settlement of convicts in New South Wales, which was premised on the assumption that Australia was uninhabited, had set the stage for conflictual relationships between the colonists and the Indigenous Peoples. Various interrelated socioeconomic and political factors that played out over an extended period have contributed to the conflicts we explore later in this chapter. In January 1788, the First Fleet led by Captain Arthur Phillip arrived at Botany Bay, before docking a week later in Sydney.3 His instruction from the Crown was to establish a convict colony by taming the natives and dealing with them peaceably. Governor Phillip at first sought to take a 3 Of the 1066 people who have sailed aboard eleven ships, 31 people are said to have died during the voyage that took more than eight months (MacIntyre, 2004).

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conciliatory approach towards the colonising mission, which was reflected in his attempt to establish contact and amity with the Eora and Darug peoples. He even made friendship with Bennelong, the Indigenous man who acted as an adviser to the Governor. However, the Governor later succumbed to rage and vengeance at the fatal spearing of one of his officers, a suspected murderer of Indigenous Peoples, John Macintyre. Later, his successor took a hard-line approach. Within a few years of the First Fleet’s arrival, we have the first recorded incident of hostility that occurred in 1790s (Blainey, 2004). In 1794–1795, colonists massacred 14 Bediagal Indigenous Peoples of the Eora Nation (Ryan et al., 2019). The conflict quickly descended into a cycle of violence, as the Indigenous Peoples attempted to defend and regain control of their land and the colonists reacted with vengeance. Historians dispute over whether the convicts had agency over their behaviour towards the Indigenous Peoples or they were acting on account of the official policy of the colonial administration (Rogers & Bain, 2016). This dispute aside, it did not take long before the relationship evolved into a full-fledged race relations war, as the European settlement expanded into the interior (MacIntyre, 2004). The extent of this racial conflict is becoming clearer today with emerging findings in latest historical and anthropological research (Dovey, 2017; Ryan, 2010). The history of race relations in Australia is replete with persistent denial of historical injustice, sanitisation of genocidal acts and collective forgetting of oppression. This forgetting manifests in discourses around the dispossession, exploitation and elimination of Indigenous Peoples and their way of life. Many argue that these injustices were tragic episodes that should be seen within the context of the violent reality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conquest, brutality and oppression were the rules rather than the exceptions across territories vanquished by Western imperialist expansion. Enlightenment ideals were new (and largely restricted to white men), while humanitarianism had not emerged in the global order of international relations. Human rights were alien to the world and might determined what was right. In this context, genocide and the exploitation of the weak would be considered a legitimate right of the strong. This is an argument that attempts to sanitise the past by normalising injustice. It indeed is a common trope narrated to appease the moral guilt of privileged groups and powers. Yet, even by the standards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, neither genocide nor dispossession was acceptable, at least to human

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beings who considered themselves civilised. Then, as now, some protested the ongoing genocide, racial injustice and oppression (cf. nineteenth century correspondence: Reynolds, 1996). More humane views since as early as sixteenth century (e.g. Bartolomé de las Casas in Latin America), anti-slavery initiatives (among Quakers in the eighteenth century and beyond) and in the nineteenth century (e.g. the abolitionists Clarkson, Wilberforce and Douglass, in England and the US), tell us the repugnance of such injustices to the human conscience (Clayton, 2010; Hochschild, 2006). Across religious and philosophical traditions, there have been numerous voices repudiating prejudice and bigotry based on race, ethnicity, religion and ancestry. In Australia, particularly in the 1830–1840s, there were a few humanitarians who mounted faint protests against the injustices and massacres of the Indigenous Peoples. However, they were powerless against the colonists whose economic interests coincided with the then British imperial objectives (Elbourne, 2003). In the end, the settlement policy was left to the colonial administration itself, which enabled or ignored the rampant frontier violence occurring in the Australian outback (MacIntyre, 2004). The human dignity and rights of Indigenous Peoples were considered of marginal significance to the pressing territorial needs of the Empire. Australia was chosen as a place for British colonial expansion following the loss of North America. Historians point to two particular motives for British colonial expansion in Australia: (1) penitentiary needs: as a dumping site for dangerous criminals (i.e. convicts) and (2) geostrategic benefit, as a source for raw materials for shipbuilding (MacIntyre, 2004). After losing part of the American colonies, the British Empire needed Australia for its century-and-half old practice of convict transportation (Kercher, 2003; Maxwell-Stewart, 2010). Thus, like many settler colonial outposts, the establishment of colonial Australia was not modelled after the full system of British statecraft. The colonial administration was governed as a military outpost, and convicts toiled as self-sufficient labourers. In the absence of civilian laws that regulated and protected the rights and responsibilities of the colonists and Indigenous Peoples, the British colonial history has been one of protests, mutinies and frontier conflicts. The conditions in the penal colony were harsh to say the least, both due to the scarcity of supplies and the disciplinary regimen enacted to subdue the convicts. The writer Robert Hughes has described Australia

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then as a harsh place, an exiled world, strange, a gulag only fit for banishment and privation. Due to the harsh conditions, and a variety of social and economic issues, the early British colonisation were rife with riots and rebellions. Occasionally, convicts absconded and fled to the bush in search of freedom, with many vanishing without trace while the remnants of some were found (MacIntyre, 2004). Ordinary colonists were not at ease either, with rebellions occasionally breaking out. A notable incident is the Rum Rebellion of 1808 instigated by disgruntled officers led by John Macarthur, which led to the overthrow of then Governor William Bligh. The harsh treatment of the convicts persisted until conditions improved in the 1820s under Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Yet, the stigma attached would continue for generations until it dissipated as mistreatment of convicts grew into disrepute among growing native-born Australians (Hughes, 2010). Under Macquarie, significant reform and infrastructural activity made the colony more liveable for the colonial settlers. However, Macquarie’s reform was resisted within the colonial establishment, and at the insistence of commission of inquiry reports by J. T. Bigge, convicts were reinstated as gang labourers from the 1820s. This was strongly resented by the emancipists. These native-born colonists who called themselves Australians were becoming increasingly assertive for the equal rights of all colonists including ex-convicts. A decade later, there was heavy pressure against the convict system, and transportation to New South Wales was totally abandoned in 1840. In Tasmania, which remained a penal colony under Governor Arthur, transportation continued until 1853. Meanwhile, in the 1830s and 1840s, free immigrants had began to replace the transportation of convicts, as the newcomers scrambled to take advantage of the profitable pastoral opportunities. The arrival of more immigrants meant more land grab and continuous demographic transformation. Within sixty years of colonisation, the white population grew to more than 405,000 by 1850 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019: see Table 2.2). By then, most of the major colonies were established, with 40% of the white population living in the towns. A place that began as an exile for the social outcasts, gradually, through expropriation of land and the dispossession of the traditional owners, and through controlled and systematic colonisation, became a thriving free society for white colonists.

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Table 2.2 Australian population since the arrival of the First Fleet, 1788–2019 Period 1788–1790 1791–1800 1801–1810 1811–1820 1821–1830 1831–1840 1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1870 1871–1880 1881–1890 1891–1900 1901–1910 1911–1920 1921–1930 1931–1940 1941–1950 1951–1960 1961–1970 1971–1980 1981–1990 1991–2000 2001–2010 2011–2015

Total population as at Dec. 31sta

Year

Indigenous peoples population

2056 5217 11,566 33,543 70,039 190,408 405,356 1,145,585 1,647,756 2,231,531 3,151,355 3,765,339 4,425,083 5,411,297 6,500,751 7,077,586 8,315,791 10,391,920 12,663,469 14,807,370 17,169,768 19,141,036 22,172,469 23,984,581

1788 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1933 1947 1954 1961 1966 1971 1976b 1981b 1986b 1991b 1996 2001 2006 2011 2016

314,500 180,402 155,285 131,666 110,919 94,564 83,588 75,604 73,828 87,000 100,048 117,495 132,219 150,076 160,915 159,897 227,593 265,371 386,049 458,520 517,043 669,881 798,365

a Since 1961, the numbers include First Nations, and prior to 1971 numbers indicate actual residents

while thereafter they include estimated residents. For Indigenous Peoples, the numbers indicate minimum Estimated Resident Population except the years indicated in b which are based on Census counts Source Australian Bureau of Statistics (2019)

British Colonialism and Dispossession Well Mitter … all black-fellow gone! All this my country! pretty place botany! Little pickaninny, I run about here. Plenty black-fellow then, corrobbory; great fight; all canoe about. Only me left now, Mitter—Poor gin mine tumble down, All gone! –Mahroot, cited in MacIntyre, 2004, p. 66

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These are the words of Mahroot, an Indigenous Elder in Sydney, whose recollections of the changes he witnessed in his lifetime were recorded by a British visitor in the 1840s. In Sydney in those days, the Indigenous population declined significantly, with most of the survivors camped at Botany Bay.4 The deplorable conditions were similar in other European settlements. The depopulation was continuing unabated so that “within five years the Aboriginal people on the outskirts of the new settlements at Melbourne and Adelaide were reduced to beggary” (MacIntyre, 2004, p. 66). This is just one example of the dozens of stories of depopulation that have been enacted within a century of colonisation, prior to the Australian Federation. Yet, it tells with remarkable clarity the catastrophic nature and effect of a settler colonial project on the natives. The goal of settler colonialism is the removal or elimination of Indigenous Peoples of an occupied territory to give way to the colonists (Hixson, 2013; Wolfe, 2006). This need not be expressed explicitly, yet it has been implemented in such a way that it realised the objectives despite lukewarm concerns voiced from some quarters of the Empire. Indeed, when the British government made its decision to settle Australia fifteen years after Captain Cook’s exploration, the rights of the Indigenous Peoples were not taken into consideration (MacIntyre, 2004). It was apparent that the Crown had little interest in their conditions, as long as the colonial objectives were achieved while the settlers pursued their violent expansion, and considered their actions a matter of necessity (Elbourne, 2003). The Indigenous Peoples were considered as enemies against enterprise (Macintyre, 2004) and enemies to be conquered (Bolton, 1981), and this attitude inevitably led to conflicts that resulted in massacres. Looking at the history of Australian settler colonialism from a race relations perspective, the contact between Europeans and Indigenous Peoples in Australia has always raised political tensions. The contested narrative is that while many Australian historians have seen the arrival of Cook and other colonists as peaceful, postcolonial narratives consider the contact as asymmetrical and one of the prime examples of intercultural conflict. As such, many—including Indigenous people—regard Captain Cook’s claim of the continent for the British Crown as illegal (Banner, 2005). In Indigenous tradition, the arrival is seen as traumatic colonial invasion that 4 Among the early Indigenous Peoples who resisted the settler colonists were the Eora, Bidjigal and Wiradjuri peoples.

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unjustly and traumatically subjugated, displaced and dispossessed Indigenous Peoples in Australia (Konishi, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2003; Reynolds, 2006; Watson, 2005). Once the brief amicable attempts of the colonists faltered, the enactment of violence as a method indeed had genocidal effect, with intergenerational repercussions. There is no doubt that the prolonged exclusion and marginalisation of the Indigenous Peoples in Australia provides ample material to show how settler colonialism and the European way of life unsettled and traumatised the original population. Was intercultural conflict inevitable? This is difficult to answer, yet the contribution of the colonial mentality of the colonists towards the tense race relations is beyond doubt. The condescension of the colonists towards the Indigenous Peoples was a norm shared by everyone. Even the relatively benevolent Governor Lachlan Macquarie was not immune to violence against Indigenous Peoples. “While he was still ‘determined to persevere in [his] original plan of endeavouring to domesticate and civilize these wild rude people’, it was apparent that this could only be done by removing and remaking them” (MacIntyre, 2004, p. 49). As in many colonial settlements, the Indigenous Peoples were treated like captives, which could be dispensed for the benefit of the colonists. One of these practices relates to the preparedness of the colonists to permit the convicts to intermarry with Indigenous women during the first contact and the early colonisation periods. In a typical colonial disregard, the settler approach towards cultural considerations could hardly be conceived as sustainable for amicable relationships with Indigenous Peoples. Across the settlements, the colonial practice involved active campaigns of land grab, Indigenous depopulation, and encirclement within reservations, which were standard practices. Until 1828, the colonists were largely confined to Van Diemen’s Land (i.e. Tasmania) and New South Wales. In the 1820s, expeditions into the interior began to open up the continent for further colonial incursions. Pastoralists took advantage of the exploration taking possession of vast grasslands, and over the next decade, settlements expanded along much of the southeast, with grazing grounds stretching from Adelaide to Brisbane. With this, production of livestock expanded, leading to the exponential growth of the wool industry. By 1850, there were 13 million sheep in New South Wales, and Australia supplied half of the British wool market (MacIntyre, 2004). The continuous pastoral incursion was consequential for the Indigenous Peoples who found themselves in frequent confrontations with the

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colonists over land and resources. As they continued to be pushed and removed from their hunting grounds, they mounted occasional resistance. Although their resistance proved unmatched to the colonists’ firepower, it did slow the incursions. With their resistance, they were able to strike alarm to the effect that there was talk of Black War among the colonists. Subsequently, in the 1830s and 1840s, the colonists in Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and Western Australia mobilised regular troops and mounted police in pacification expeditions that resulted in heavy casualties (MacIntyre, 2004). Conveniently, the colonists increasingly relied on lethal force, unwilling to respect the Indigenous peoples’ property rights or accommodate them within the colonial labour force. To be sure, neither were Indigenous Peoples prepared to accommodate their colonial invaders. At this stage, the pastoral invaders were increasingly assuming racist attitudes (Rogers & Bain, 2016). Many of them being ex-soldiers/officers, they easily resorted to the massacre of Indigenous Peoples (MacIntyre, 2004, pp. 58–59). For example, the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell reports killing many Indigenous Peoples, while many other massacres occurred over the decades of pastoral expansion. Until recently, accounts of frontier violence were largely suppressed in Australian history (MacIntyre, 2004). Such accounts only emerged in recent decades (from the late 1970s) in the works of historians such as Henry Reynolds, Geoffrey Blainey, Bain Attwood, and Andrew Markus. Yet, a denial of the frontier violence remains with historians calling for the inclusion of Aboriginal-European warfare casualties in the country’s war memorial (Attwood, 2017). Such denial belies the significant impact frontier conflict had on Indigenous Peoples. For example, the pace of depopulation of the Indigenous Peoples in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land between the 1820s and 1840s was staggering. The concerns by some civil society members against the colonial injustices and martial law imposed over Indigenous Peoples did not deter the colonial expansion and the extermination of the latter. According to MacIntyre (2004), Indigenous Peoples in Van Damien’s Land were completely eliminated, and many were deported from Tasmania while the last remnants forced into reserves near Hobart. Indigenous Peoples had no option, after the expropriation and dispossession of their hunting grounds, but to succumb to poverty, famine and restricted living within reserves. The situation in South Australia around 1835 shows an example of the tragic disregard and destruction of Indigenous Peoples and property. Despite a lukewarm injunction by the Colonial Office for the respect of the native

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proprietors, the massacres that led to the elimination of the Indigenous Peoples were not prevented (MacIntyre, 2004). Frontier violence was enacted in concert with the continuous subsequent denial of prior organised colonisation of the continent. Until recently, the colonial establishment of Australia has been assumed to be based on the doctrine of terra nullius (no one’s land) (Scott, 1940). However, this has been widely rejected (Borch, 2001), with evidence that at least 300,000 Indigenous Peoples were living in Australia when the British colonists arrived (see Table 2.2).5 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, international law specified that sovereignty could be established on a new territory under three conditions: conquest, cession or settlement (Banner, 2005). Yet, the British Crown never claimed either of the first two conditions. In fact, there is still apprehension surrounding calling the arrival of the First Fleet an invasion. Therefore, implicitly the justification has rested on the doctrine of terra nullius , despite the fact that Indigenous Peoples continuously inhabited the land for millennia. The British colonists found Indigenous Peoples to be localised with complex social organisation, customary law, and culture (MacIntyre, 2004). Scholars consider the doctrine in its reference to Australia as a rationale adopted a century later to justify “the territorial acquisition of this continent and expropriation of Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, [that] denied their personhood, culture and governance systems, and legitimated their exclusion from most benefits of modernisation” (Havemann, 2005, p. 57; Wolfe, 2006). To be sure, the Australian colonies did not explicitly invoke the terra nullius doctrine throughout the 18th while the idea of “land inhabited by hunters and gatherers to be ownerless, became fairly widespread in legal thinking in the nineteenth century” (Borch, 2001, p. 238; see also Fitzmaurice, 2007). This was a retrospective twentieth-century assumption, and has been criticised as a legal fiction (Evans, 2002; Havemann, 2005). Thus, the colonial dispossession of Aboriginal lands remains a strongly contested issue, particularly so after the Australian High Court effectively rejected, in the 1992 landmark court case Mabo vs. Queensland (No. 2), that Australia was terra nullius at the time of British occupation (Fitzmaurice, 2007; Ritter, 1996). 5 Estimates of the number of Indigenous Peoples at the time of British Colonisation in 1788 vary from 300,000 to around 1.5 million (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019; Bultin, 1993; Dudgeon et al., 2010).

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The British Empire colonised Australia on unclear legal ground. Ex post facto, the colony became Crown property, and the territorial claims did not clearly indicate that Britain invaded an already inhabited country. Nor did it negotiate treaty or purchase territory from the Indigenous Peoples. When a proclamation by Sir Richard Bourke, the Governor of New South Wales, rejected the treaty signed between John Batman and Aboriginal chiefs in October 1835, the Crown effectively declared possession of the colony as terra nullius —no man’s land (Fry, 1946). From the outset, this has been a complex and contentious issue in Australian colonial history. Historians indicate that the colonists were clueless about the demography of the continent. For example, MacIntyre (2004) contends that there was misunderstanding regarding the number of Indigenous Peoples at the time of occupation, which may have subsequently led to the adoption of terra nullius : Phillip and his officers were therefore surprised by the number of Aborigines round the settlement. They quickly came to appreciate that these people had social organization, settled localities, customary law and property rights. The whole claim of sovereignty and ownership on the basis of terra nullius was manifestly based on a misreading of Australian circumstance. (p. 33)

However, given the temporal gap between colonisation and terra nullius , we do see a clear misappropriation of the legal term in later scholarship and legal discourse. In spite of this, claims of terra nullius supplied an international legal ground, while the justification for colonisation also rested on another doctrine stipulated in English Common Law. According to this alternative claim, Australia was desert and uncultivated, and hence no property rights could be established by Aboriginal inhabitants (Secher, 2007). This colonial claim imposed a Eurocentric view that rejected traditional Aboriginal laws until the Mabo vs. Queensland decision in 1992 (Banner, 2005; Secher, 2007). Indigenous Peoples have always resisted British occupation. Captain Cook’s statement that “All they seem’d to want is for us to be gone” captures this sentiment (MacIntyre, 2004, p. 28). Indigenous resistance became more apparent during Governor Phillip’s tenure, and thereafter as the relationship worsened. The colonists knew that this resistance stemmed from the knowledge that the colonial settlement was dispossessing the Indigenous Peoples, taking their traditional land and

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resources. After Governor Philip, open conflict, notably the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, occurred from 1794 to 1816, resulting in the deaths of 26 colonists and more than 80 Indigenous Peoples. One of the most notable feats of Indigenous resistance occurred during this period when an Eora man, Pemulwuy, fought against colonial invasion using guerrilla tactics to create confusion, frustration and injury. After more than a decade of triumphs, daring escapes and near-death experiences, Pemulwuy was eventually assassinated in Parramatta in 1802. During the violent frontier expansion of the 1820s–1840s, the Indigenous Peoples mounted another wave of resistance. Yet, the result of the asymmetrical conflict was a swift decline in the number of the population (Reynolds, 2006; Wolfe, 2006). Although Indigenous resistance intensified in the 1830s, it was largely localised, and only succeeded in delaying the white Australian advance into the interior. It did not amount to a unified Black war (MacIntyre, 2004). Whenever the confrontations occurred in a direct battle, the Aboriginal spearman had no chance against the musket, but Indigenous Peoples found better success by using guerrilla tactics. Yet, this intensified the conflict as surprise attacks by Aboriginal spearmen provoked brutal retaliations from the colonists, which sometimes resulted in gruesome massacres. The most notable is the Myall Creek massacre of at least 28 Kwiambal people in 1838.6 Progressively, the colonists who wielded superior arms and had the institutional backing of the colonial administration inevitably quelled the resistance. To put an end to the Indigenous resistance and subsequent conflict, the settler colonial strategy then changed with the pacification—a euphemism for extermination—of the natives (MacIntyre, 2004). The effect was the swift dispossession, degradation and ultimate subjugation of Indigenous Peoples. The colonists had the next challenge, a scarcity of labour to work the vast farmlands they had commandeered and controlled. They resorted towards exploiting the Indigenous Peoples for their labour. Hartwig (1972) describes the condition of native employment as equivalent to slavery in the American south. Not only were they treated in a patronising manner, they were treated like objects and did not receive wages; they survived on rations (see for example May, 1994). Hartwig (1972) thus writes:

6 The Myall Creek massacre led to an exceptional inquiry that resulted in the trial and execution of seven colonists.

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the settlers rationalized their exploitative dominance in an ideology of paternalism and racism, regarding Aborigines as inferior, unintelligent, lazy, irresponsible grown-up children, acceptable and even lovable, as long as they were ‘kept in their place’. (p. 14)7

Colonial Massacres An account of race relations in Australia must begin with the physical violence that underlined the policy of colonial administration during the early days of colonisation. Although the violence began before the use of the words race or racism in academic and social discourse, scholars have used the concept of racial discrimination to describe historical acts of violence perpetrated against perceived outgroups (Sweet, 1997). In Australia, the exclusions and genocidal treatment of Indigenous Peoples began with the earliest colonial settlements. As the colonists began to assert their authority, they quickly started to operate as owners of the continent. However, this could not be enacted without the imperialist mind, the possessive spirit that is accompanied by the dehumanising and othering gaze towards native people, and their representation as uncivilised and ignorant savages (Said, 1979, 1994). The dehumanisation of a particular group provides an ontological condition for the removal of that group (Savage, 2013), and as such plays a critical role in a genocidal project (Arendt, 1968). In the Australian context, the inferiorising and othering outlook towards the native people appears in the accounts of the explorers, which inevitably must have enabled the ease with which the massacres took place (Strong, 1986). Beginning with William Dampier, many of the explorers (e.g. Tasman, Cook, Banks, Eyrie, etc.) had a prejudiced and dehumanising view of the Indigenous Peoples that they encountered, and in their accounts, considered the latter little more than animals. These sentiments were the harbingers for the brutal outlook and instinctive fear and hatred that would unleash wanton killings of Indigenous Peoples, in reaction to the slightest provocation (Evans, 2004).

7 This conception of the Indigenous Peoples reflects the colonialist imagination of Indigenous societies as primitive and savage. Elsewhere, the representation of colonised societies as alien other, irrational, indolent, decayed and despotic has been conceptualised as Orientalism (Said, 1979).

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The persistent colonial view of Indigenous Peoples as subhuman, in addition to providing the pretext to claim colonial sovereignty, has laid the foundation for the utter disregard for their lives. While there were initial orders to treat the native people fairly and humanely (e.g. Captain Arthur’s initial orders), they were quickly ignored as they came to be seen as hindrance and colonial violence became frequent. On several occasions, any attempts of the native people to defend themselves and their country was met with brutal attacks (MacIntyre, 2004). A vicious cycle of Indigenous attacks and violent colonist retribution characterises race relations throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, within the context of the settler colonial expansion, an immediate effect of the successful British colonisation of Australia was the catastrophic demographic decline in Indigenous population. Scholars have used the word genocide to refer to the continuous depopulation of Indigenous Peoples (Moses, 2004; Rogers & Bain, 2016). This decline was a result of discriminatory policies, including displacement, violence and infectious disease. The colonies saw the extinction and extermination of the Indigenous Peoples as essential for successful settlement (Rogers & Bain, 2016). While states such as Western Australia stated this as an official policy, there were also those who saw that there was no need for actions to cause unnecessary cruelty to Indigenous Peoples who were approaching inevitable extinction (Rogers & Bain, 2016). The extent of violence in the frontiers involved massacres of thousands of Indigenous Peoples over several decades. Researchers have recently started to document the massacres that are directly related to the colonial expansion in the frontiers (Dovey, 2017; Ryan, 2010). An Australian Research Council project by the University of Newcastle mapped and documented 311 sites of massacre that included 8271 Indigenous victims over the 1788–1930 period (Rogers & Bain, 2016; Ryan et al., 2019). The report indicates how deliberate the acts of violence were: The act of massacre is usually a planned rather than a spontaneous event. It takes place in secret. No witnesses are intended to be present. The assassins and victims often know each other. It is a one sided event in that the victims lack self-defence. (Ryan et al., 2019)

According to some estimates, British colonists killed 20,000 Indigenous Peoples (Kiernan, 2002; Reynolds, 2006). However, massacres were not the only causes of Indigenous deaths. Infections from diseases

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brought by the colonists (such as influenza, pneumonia and smallpox) killed the majority of the Indigenous Peoples (Butlin, 1983; Campbell, 1983, 1985). The exact death toll from the infectious diseases as a result of contact with the British is not clearly known, and estimates vary between 200,000 and 600,000 people (Campbell, 1983; Kiernan, 2002; MacIntyre, 2004). Some scholars estimate the death rate associated with smallpox and venereal diseases to be as high as 80% of the Indigenous population in New South Wales and Victoria (Moses, 2004). While settler colonialism effectively led to significant deaths of the Indigenous Peoples—extinction in some areas (e.g. Tasmania)—until recently the notion of genocide was applied with strong resistance from some historians, politicians and writers (Rogers & Bain, 2016). A notable example is the rejection by Prime Minister John Howard who strongly disagreed that the historical injustice against the Indigenous Peoples amounted to a genocide (Barta, 2008; Davidson, 2014).8 This contradicted the historic acknowledgement of such injustice by Prime Minister Paul Keating in his 1992 Redfern Park Speech.

Race Relations in the Nineteenth Century The widespread denial of basic human rights for Indigenous Peoples continued unhindered for much of the nineteenth century (Chesterman & Galligan, 1997). In the 1830s, this reached a point where some people raised humanitarian concerns over the potential extinction of native people in Australia and other colonies (Moses, 2004). A Select Committee of Inquiry, established in 1837, “urged the British Government to take moral responsibility for Indigenous people” (Moses, 2004, p. 7). However, this remained a faint light in a sea of brutal campaigns against the native people, particularly in the period when scientific racism became dominant. Ideologues, writers and scholars (e.g. Charles Dilke, Anthony Trollope and Charles Darwin) saw the oppression, injustice and genocidal violence visited upon Indigenous Peoples, as the inevitable examples of “the strong extirpating the weaker” (Moses, 2004, p. 5). For others, including politicians, business people and community leaders, this was a tragic but inevitable outcome of the civilizing mission. 8 In a 2014 interview broadcast, Channel Seven’s Sunday Night program, the former Prime Minister categorically stated: “I didn’t believe genocide had taken place, and I still don’t” (Davidson, 2014).

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial states confined the majority of Indigenous Peoples in reservations (Moses, 2004). This measure, which aimed to protect the natives from frontier violence, succeeded in significantly destroying the Indigenous way of life. While the reservations were designed to be safe places for the Indigenous Peoples, in reality they became instruments of oppression where they were subjected to stringent regulations, and racial discrimination (Moses, 2004). In addition, the reservations had been designed to meet the exploitative economic objectives of the settler colonial project, and Indigenous Peoples served as the source of unpaid or poorly paid labour (May, 1994). While land was the primary factor in the expansion of colonial settlements, the cattle industry had immensely benefited from Indigenous labour. Yet, this had not prevented the widespread racial discrimination and exploitation within the industry (Stead & Altman, 2019). Until the 1850s, the expansion of colonial settlements and associated frontier violence dominated race relations in Australia. With the discovery of gold in 1851, Australian history of race and labour relations has been transformed (Curthoys & Moore, 1995). The racialised labour market conditions Indigenous Peoples face persisted after Federation. Larkin (2013) provides a detailed account of the racialised utilisation of Indigenous labour and institutional racism in Australia during the colonial period. The prospector Edward Hargraves was among the first colonists to claim discovering gold beyond the Blue Mountains in a place he named Ophir. Months after his discovery, hundreds of prospectors flocked to the site in search of the precious metal. This quickly gained more attention as thousands of locals in other districts, particularly Victoria, camped, digging in licensed blocks. By the end of 1851, around 20,000 diggers were engaged in prospecting activities in the Victorian goldfields (MacIntyre, 2004). News of the successful goldmines boosted the immigration sector, and within a decade, the non-Indigenous population tripled to 1,150,000. Victoria alone accounted for nearly half of this population, and produced a third of the global gold production (MacIntyre, 2004). The majority of the immigrants that arrived during the Gold Rush came from the United Kingdom. However, the search for gold has also attracted non-British migrants from many European countries including the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary and Poland. Another significant number of migrants arrived from China (approximately 40,000 by 1858) and the Pacific Islands (Markey, 1996).

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The Gold Rush lasted until 1888, with goldfields extending from Charter Towers (Queensland) to the Pilbara (Western Australia). It fundamentally transformed the Australian economy, with gold revenue financing infrastructural projects ranging from railway to shipping, manufacturing, and building. Meanwhile, as the Gold Rush continued to stir economic development across Australian colonies, immigration and social issues became instrumental in introducing political reforms that reshaped the colonial administration. With this, the colonists gained significant concessions from the Crown, and the states were invested with self-government powers, respective constitutions and representative parliaments. Subsequently, self-government, which was modelled after the Westminster system, gave the colonists the right to elect their representatives while the property owners secured the Upper House allowing them to protect their interests. In the long-term, this would become Australia’s enduring source of structural inequality. Meanwhile, the interests of the property owners and squatting colonists were in direct collision during the second half of the century. This gave rise to political contestation over the inequitable land distribution within the colonies. Unlike earlier squatters who benefited from the land grabs of the first half of the nineteenth century, many who immigrated during the Gold Rush did not possess land. This became a cause for agrarian reform movements, which were subsequently defeated in the Upper House. Those who managed to purchase enough land later emerged as successful agro-pastoralists, capitalising on modern railway and mechanised farming. Anti-Indigenous Peoples Racism White colonial relationship with Indigenous Peoples in the second half of the nineteenth century was confined to the frontiers, and was usually violent (Pope, 1988). Racial tension in the labour market was limited, as they were not integrated in the formal economic activity (Markey, 1996). Those who were employed in mines during the Gold Rush were exposed to smallpox and measles, which had a toll on the rural Indigenous workers. Indigenous labourers had greater involvement in pastoral activity in Queensland while, as mentioned above, some were employed in other industries (e.g. shipping, horticulture, and domestic service) (Curthoys & Moore, 1995; Stead & Altman, 2019).

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Racism against Indigenous employees was not limited to the agricultural sector, it was common across all industries in which they were employed. Despite many attempts by Indigenous Peoples to settle after successful employment spells, they were far from being accepted as part of the colonial society. Even those supporting employment of Indigenous Peoples maintained that “the two races can never amalgamate—the white labourer, and the native (be he ever so useful) cannot be brought together on equal terms” (Dr. Richard Penny, cited in Pope, 1988, p. 14). Pope (1988) concluded that “This attitude meant that no matter how well the Aborigines worked, or how long an employee he proved, there was little chance he would be allowed a permanent place in the labour force of the colony” (p. 14). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous Peoples found themselves complete outsiders to Australia’s emerging political economy that combined representative electoral democracy with entrenched patronage and political opportunism. Within this system, racism was allowed to embed itself, enabled by a combination of institutional and interpersonal racial conflicts. The ideological base of white superiority and dominance from the outset enacted exclusionary policies that worked against the incorporation of Indigenous Peoples and certain racial minorities, e.g. Chinese, Pacific Islanders, etc. (Markey, 1996). Anti-Chinese Racism One of the immediate effects of the Gold Rush was the attraction of immigrants from various countries. Among those who flocked to Australia were migrants from mainland China. However, their arrival was not welcomed by the colonists, and they were treated viciously as a community with distinct appearance, culture and language (MacIntyre, 2004; Markus, 1985). Certainly, this anti-Chinese racism was also flaring across other Anglo-Celtic colonial societies, particularly in the US during the Californian Gold Rush (Kanazawa, 2005; Markus, 1979). In Australia, this had both social, economic and institutional dimensions. In the 1850s, Cantonese Chinese immigrants accounted for the largest non-European immigration in Australia. Most of them were labourers recruited by emigration agents from the southern provinces of mainland Chinese ports, mainly from the Guangdong province (MacIntyre, 2004). The majority were indentured, assigned to work until their contracts expired,

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with their wage earnings repatriated to China. Despite this, they experienced vicious and outright racism (Hage, 2014; Markey, 1996). For example, in 1857, race riots erupted in Victoria, and in 1861, there was another anti-Chinese racial attack in New South Wales. The Victorian and New South Wales governments responded by imposing strict regulations that required Chinese immigrants to pay entry taxes and reside in separate protected areas in the goldfields (Cronin, 1982). When Chinese migrants arrived, they were detested and were seen as competitors in the goldfields. In Queensland (1860s) and the Northern Territory (1870s), most were forced to relocate into horticulture and other industries. Between 1878 and 1888, worker’s unions across Australia waged intense anti-Chinese campaigns, usually accompanied by strikes, rallies and public gatherings. For example, in 1878 a seamen’s strike took place in Sydney opposing the appointment of Chinese crew at below standard wages. This triggered prolonged anti-immigration political debates. Subsequently, the popular radical nationalist newspaper, the Bulletin, intensified its established anti-Chinese campaign in 1886. Anti-Chinese Leagues sprang up throughout the colonies in 1886-88, when some urban Chinese were physically maltreated and some Queensland shearers were involved in a number of strikes over Chinese employment that peaked in 1889. (Markey, 1996, p. 350)

Chinese migrants in turn protested the restrictive immigration policies, yet they barely had an impact on the growing anti-immigration sentiment. As the campaigns intensified, the unions finally achieved their demands when the government imposed tighter restrictions on immigration in 1888. Social and economic factors strongly contributed to the hostility towards the Chinese immigrants. Infused by white superiority sentiments, the colonists saw cross-racial breeding as a potential social threat, since most of them were bachelors. The response was extreme intolerance towards non-white communities, and anti-Chinese “attitudes were forged in an environment of fierce economic competition, [and] declining incomes” (Markus, 1985, p. 88). The notion of class-based exploitation was vital, particularly for the early labour movement that aggressively pushed for racially exclusive policies. There was fear that the replacement of convict labour by indentured non-white labour could undermine union standards. The idea that “class exploitation through the use of non-white

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labor at substandard wages and conditions … would undermine union standards and unionism itself” (Markey, 1996, p. 346), thus became a powerful motive for anti-Chinese sentiments among workers. Among the craft unionists who were dominant within the labour movement of the nineteenth century, racial exclusion “was an extension of exclusivist policies that maintained high wages and favorable working conditions by restricting entry to the trade or calling” (Markey, 1996, p. 346). Such an exclusionary attitude included opposition to immigration broadly and specifically towards non-whites such as Chinese immigrants. During this period, racial issues based on white racial superiority became a powerful organising platform for the labour movement. It cut across social class divisions, and was embraced among white colonists. Racial exclusion was politically profitable as evidenced in the expansion of political support for the labour movement. While the notion of cheap Chinese labour as an economic threat provided the basis for anti-Chinese hostility, overt racism that flared throughout the campaigns raised greater enthusiasm than anti-immigration activity generally. At meetings, the same speakers who located the issue in a class perspective of economic threat always returned to outright racial antagonism. They linked the Chinese with corruption, disease, opium smoking, and the desecration of white women. If the Chinese were wayward or criminal, in any way, white fears confirmed; if well-behaved, Chinese were cunning. (Markey, 1996, p. 351)

These racist tropes conveniently glossed over the restrictive policies that rejected admission of Chinese workers to union membership and denied them the right to bring their spouses. Yet, they provided a political platform that broadened the social-base of the labour movement. This persisted well into the 1890s when the Chinese population declined significantly. Anti-Chinese hostility was the precursor to the racially exclusive immigration policies of the early twentieth century (Markey, 1996). Anti-Pacific Islander Racism The Labor movement’s agitation against Chinese immigration culminated with the passage of restrictive legislations in 1888. Over the following decade, Labor’s attention turned towards the Melanesian labourers in

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Queensland (known as Kanaka). Like the Chinese, significant numbers of these South Pacific Islanders were brought to Queensland to provide agricultural labour in sugar plantations (Corris, 1968; Stead & Altman, 2019). Between 1863 and 1904, more than 62,000 Pacific Islanders were transported. The first ships that brought the Kanaka people arrived in Queensland in 1863. They were mainly indentured labourers tricked or kidnapped and forcibly transported from their islands to the colony because they were considered suitable for hard labour in the tropical climate. Some of them were minors aged as young as 12 years when they were kidnapped (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017). In the sugar plantations, the Kanaka toiled under slavery conditions. The plantation owners euphemistically called the kidnapping Blackbirding (Corris, 1968). Trade unions lamented the employment of Kanakas, albeit for their own self-interest rather than the conditions. The unions rejected union membership for the Kanaka who were abused and lived under harsh working and living conditions. They suffered death rates that were three times higher than those of the white population. In addition to their appalling living conditions, the Kanaka were subjected to overt racism, and they were considered by white settlers as inferior and uncivilised races (Markey, 1996). Opposition to the importation of Kanaka intensified across the colonies towards the end of the 1890s as the colonies drew closer to Federation. The unions were apprehensive that the Kanaka system could be detrimental to the cause of white labour post-Federation. This led to the extension of the labour movement’s agitations towards comprehensive anti-alien legislation (Markey, 1996). Towards the end of the century, outside Chinese and Kanaka, hostility broadened towards non-white groups including Japanese, Indians, and Afghans who emigrated in the 1890s and were also considered undesirables. Almost all Asian immigration to Australia ceased by 1901. That year, nearly 98% of all immigrants arrived from Britain and between 1901 and 1914, the predominant arrivals were from the British Isles (Irish, English and Scottish) or New Zealand/Aotearoa (Mence et al., 2017).

The Federation and White Australia Racial attitudes greatly shaped how Australians imagined the nation as it entered a new phase of colonial settlement. These attitudes were reflected during the parliamentary debates about who should be included and/or

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excluded, and what the newly established Federation would constitute its national character both culturally and politically. They also reflected the prevailing socioeconomic conditions of the period, which influenced how the society responded to non-British migrants. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, more than 3.7 million people had settled in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019: see Table 2.2).9 Within four decades, the economy, which was largely based on wool export, was transformed from one dominated by pastoral, agricultural and mining sectors into an industrial economy financed through raw material and commodity exports. Unlike the colonial empires of Western Europe, Australia’s economic prosperity was based on a combination of imported capital, local capacity aided by massive immigrant labour, and a growing population that settled exclusively in the coastal and hinterland towns connected by railroads. More than a quarter of the population resided in Melbourne and Sydney, the two sprawling capitals that enjoyed construction booms in the 1870s and 1880s. In just over a century, the colonies, initially dependent on convict and indentured labour, later achieved remarkable feats of economic success and were transformed as destinations for those searching new life and fortunes. Yet, the economic fortune was not equitably shared, ethnically or across class distinctions. Those without property and capital had to settle for employment in fledgling agricultural, manufacturing, construction, shipping and other sectors. Various unions were formed to protect workers’ interests against low wages and cheap labour sources, including immigrant labour. By agitating for racially exclusive policies to achieve political goals, the then labour movement left its mark on the national character of Australia as a country of fair go for the white population. By then, the Australian colonies had become self-sufficient in every aspect of life, socially, economically, culturally and politically. Importation of migrants allowed the early demographic gender imbalance to give space to the family as the core social unit.10 Underlying the emerging sense of national identity was adherence to Anglo-Celtic heritage, the notions of

9 The steady growth of immigration halted in the 1890s because of recession and severe droughts that led to widespread unemployment. 10 In 1840, more than 67% of the Australian population were male, and until 1868, nearly 85% of those transported as convicts were male. In the 1890s, the male population was just 53% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006).

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individual autonomy and utilitarian sensibilities, and the collective attitudes towards non-white immigrants. By 1888, the epitome of British colonisation of Australia was on display when Sydney and Melbourne celebrated the centennial of the First Fleet with great pomp and exhibition that paraded two million visitors (MacIntyre, 2004). In just over a decade, the colonies managed to reimagine themselves as a homogenous society of Anglo-Celtic heritage, with approximately 94,000 Indigenous Peoples left to survive in obscurity, and thousands of non-white immigrants disenfranchised or deported. In spite of these glaring anomalies, vis-àvis the Indigenous Peoples and non-white immigrants, the architects of the Federation convened, and embarked on a vision of a Commonwealth designed as a worker’s paradise for the white population. White Australia is a culmination of milestones of race relations, which since the Gold Rush increasingly grew in the manifestation of overt racism. Agitated by the labour movement and the rising current of hostility towards non-whites, the colonies deliberated over a vision of democracy based on racial exclusion. This new kind of democracy, a democracy of the working class that was revolutionary in its time, espoused the most progressive democratic society of the era where women voted and workers’ rights were protected by law. Yet, this egalitarian society that integrated ideals of democracy, freedom and equality was exclusively reserved for white people. In an age of utilitarian egalitarianism, the notion of White Australia would be considered a paradox— indeed a dilemma—to borrow Gunnar Myrdal’s scathing characterisation of the American society four decades later. Yet, it was democracy within a popular base demanding provisions for racial exclusion. True to the majority’s demand and attitude, this vision had no place for Indigenous Peoples and non-European immigrants. “The most the progressive democrats could think in relation to Indigenous Australians was to smooth the pillow for what they considered was a dying race” (SBS Documentary, 2011). Thus, for the Indigenous Peoples, Federation became the culmination of settler colonialism. As far as they are concerned, more than a century of Indigenous exclusion coupled with growing white privilege came to perfection at the turn of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia (Yarwood & Knowling, 1982). Once denied of a unique way of life and culture, the Indigenous Peoples were subjected to racism and oppressive regimes of confinement. Despite this, their fate was justified, in the wake of White Australia Policy, by an utter disregard of their condition and by racist ideology that

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attempted to trivialise their situation as the inevitable tragic extinction of a primitive race. At a time of its new beginning, Australia once again shirked taking responsibility of more than a century of injustice, dispossession and massacre of the Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, White Australia was not an accident of history. Rather, it was a continuation of a long-held British colonial policy, explicitly stated in 1841 by James Stephen, the Head of the Colonial Office in London, when he said, “the English race shall spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste” (cited in Mence et al., 2017, p. 7). The Commonwealth government was only reinstating the colonial vision in a reinvented white national identity. In September 1901, during a parliamentary debate, the first Australian Prime Minister, Edmund Barton said: I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races—I think no one wants convincing of this fact—unequal and inferior. (House of Representatives, 1901, p. 11)

Barton and his fellow parliamentarians were reacting to alarming predictions of non-white racial domination by writers like the historian Charles Henry Pearson. Writing in 1984, Pearson predicted in his National Life and Character: A Forecast, that what he called the black and yellow races would soon be free from the shackles of European domination and assert themselves in international affairs (Meaney, 1995). The book warned that in future, Africans, Asians and other inferior races, who would become economically independent and powerful, would dominate the white race. With these races controlling commerce and other sectors of the economy, white people would find themselves in a humiliating and desperate situation. This would threaten the influence and dominance of the civilised, white race, and that the maintenance of Australia’s Western values and national integrity depended on its ability to maintain a homogenous population. This alarmist forecast without disguise reflected that white people would be overrun by other cultures and our civilization would be swept if we did not do something (House of Representatives, 1905). During parliamentary sessions, politicians openly debated how to ensure the exclusion of alien races to prevent the scenario of impending racial domination and contamination. One parliamentarian vowed that he was: “ready to take all necessary steps to preserve Australia for a white

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people, and to prevent the contamination of our race by that racially tainted blood which it is so desirable to keep at a safe distance” (House of Representatives, 1905, p. 6309). This apprehension, fear of racial domination, and pre-emptive reaction towards race purification was attune to and informed by the scientific racism of the day. As Jupp (2001) has argued, “the idea of white Australia was born of mixed parentage out of the hybridity of the nineteenth century Western racial theories, polygenic, Darwinian and eugenic, that accompanied the presumptuous task of empire building” (p. 45). The fear against domination and extinction as articulated by Pearson was the main motive for the creation of White Australia while pressing economic, military and cultural concerns gave more impetus to the racial apprehension to get greater political considerations. The Australian Parliament in turn put forth the legislative instruments that cemented racism as the national character. As the sociologist Andrew Markus argued recently, “the rock on which this nation is founded so happens to be an enactment of racial discrimination” (SBS Documentary, 2011). Predicated on the inequality of races, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was promulgated to restrict the entry of non-whites and enable the deportation of undesirable aliens, essentially non-British and nonEuropeans. In addition, the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 was legislated to expedite the deportation of Pacific Islanders while the Naturalization Act of 1903 established the conditions that enabled European aliens to acquire Australian citizenship. These three acts established the legislative framework for what is commonly known as the White Australia Policy. The policy led to the deportation of South Sea islanders, and barred aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands from entering Australia. Far from being an aberration, this racial policy was widely supported by Australians who—regardless of class, ideology or religion—were keen on maintaining Australia’s identity as a white nation (Jayasuriya et al., 2003). While the Immigration Restriction Act did not explicitly refer to race as a parameter for exclusion, it had a key proxy, a dictation test that systematically restricted the entry of particular ethnic groups. Jupp (2002) argues that explicit reference to race was avoided to satisfy the British Parliament to approve the Australian Constitution. Instead, the racist immigration policy was disguised in the 50-word dictation test that required applicants to pass a dictation test administered in whatever European language the custom officers chose to set. Clearly, “the object of applying the language

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test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out” as Alfred Deakin, then Minister of External Affairs, clearly told the House of Representatives (House of Representatives, 1905, p. 6341). And customs officers administering the dictation test made sure that all non-European applicants failed the test (Mence et al., 2017). Delivering on the promise of the White Australia Policy, between 1905 and 1914, the Australian Government received approximately 390,000 predominantly British immigrants brought under the assisted migration programme. After halting during the First World War, an additional 340,000 Europeans arrived in the 1920s. The attitude of Australians towards immigration usually fluctuated with economic conditions, and the migration intake varied both in response to the economy and public attitude. Thus, immediately following the Great Depression of 1929, immigration significantly declined and subsequently halted during the Second World War. Public attitudes also hardened (Mence et al., 2017).11 This was particularly apparent in the case of anti-Southern European (Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia) sentiments in the inter-war periods. Greek and Italian settlement in Australia began in the nineteenth century. However, the twentieth century saw increased migration from Southern Europe and between 1922 and WW II, Australia received thousands of migrants from the region. These groups experienced hostility, particularly in periods of economic downturn and during the two world wars. For example, anti-Greek riots occurred in 1915 in Perth and in 1916 in Kalgoorlie, for alleged sympathy of the Greek community towards the German enemies (Alexakis & Janiszewski, 1998). During the Great Depression, the anti-Southern European sentiment intensified. In the 1930s, there was growing hostility towards Italians. Concerns of Italian migrant labour market influence led to the setting up of commissions of inquiry “to investigate the effect of Italian immigration on wages. Laws were passed to limit the types of jobs non-British migrants could take, and restricting land ownership” (Castles, 1994, p. 344). In Western Australia, riots broke out in the Kalgoorlie mine in 1919 and 1934. During World War II Italians in Australia were treated as enemy aliens, despite their naturalisation as British citizens. They were subjected to surveillance, with more than 4000 (10% of the Italian population in 11 A 1948 Australian Gallup Poll Survey indicates that 30% of respondents agreed that an Asiatic woman who married an Australian man should not be allowed to live in Australia.

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Australia) imprisoned in camps (Castles, 1994, p. 344). For the most part, the race relations affecting migrants during this period were as much outcomes of an economic downturn as they were the fruits of the racially exclusionary policies.

Stolen Generations One of the most traumatic periods in Indigenous Peoples history in Australia is the story of the Stolen Generation, which epitomised the oppressive acts of settler colonialism. This enactment of racist policy ensured the continuation of an ongoing displacement of Indigenous Peoples across generations. This section looks at “a policy which—if it had been successful—would have put an end to Aboriginality forever”, in the context of race relations and White Australia’s pursuit of its racially exclusionary policies (Read, 1999, p. xi). More than a century after the beginning of settler colonialism, as White Australia began to take hold as a national identity, the Indigenous questions remained unresolved. Yet, the general assumption that the Aboriginal race would soon be extinct never materialised and it became clear that the Aboriginal problem would haunt White Australia. Consequently, the government embarked on a mission to systematically assimilate (wipe out) the Aborigines through the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families (Jacobs, 2009). The kidnapped children came to be known as the Stolen Generations. According to the Bringing them Home Report, between 1905 and 1967, approximately 100,000 Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and placed in missions, foster families or girls/boys homes under the care of white protectors (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, HREOC, 1997, p. 27).12 This was a conservative estimate focusing mainly on the more systematic and government legislated removals, based on documentations and institutional records. However, the removal of Indigenous Peoples children did not begin after Federation in 1901. More frequently since 1870s—and randomly since colonisation began in 1788—white colonists have kidnapped 12 One of the terms of reference of the report involved tracing “the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies” (HREOC, 1997, p. 2).

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Indigenous children, and exploited them for their labour in farms and other workstations. At least five generations have been impacted by these government policies and missionary practices (Ranzijn et al., 2009). At least two interrelated factors, eugenics and economics, are considered to be the key motives for the removal of the Stolen Generations. First, a universal agreement was emerging among anthropologists, politicians, medical scientists and the media, in support of eugenics theories calling for assimilation. The Chief Protectors wholeheartedly accepted eugenics as a method to breed out the Aborigines through biological absorption (Haebich, 2001; Moran, 2005). For example, A. O. Neville, the West Australian Chief Protector, openly lobbied the government for legislative support. Chief Protectors had absolute powers over Indigenous Peoples, and as such were responsible for controlling movement, guardianship of children, employment, regulating marriages, and ultimately facilitating biological experiments (Short, 2016). Second, as the mixed descent population increased, the Commonwealth government needed to provide for their welfare, education and employment. Unless they were gainfully integrated in the economy, the appearance of a growing number of mixed descent children would put burden on government, posing further social and economic problems. This was met with public outcry, particularly in the media, with all social evils being ascribed to those designated as half -caste or with other derogatory labels (Short, 2016). As public opinion towards the half -caste problem gathered momentum, a radical action—the removal of the mixed descent Indigenous children—was considered as the ultimate solution to the Aboriginal problem (Haebich, 2001). This would allow for their training and incorporation as a source of cheap labour, thereby furthering the market imperative. While the forcible removal of the Stolen Generations through compulsion, duress, and undue influence was conducted with various justifications, it invariably struck at the core of Australian indigeneity.13 The reservation centres that began as protection missions in the 1830s began to serve as facilities for the furtherance of the racist removals. Historians argue that although some families may have adopted Indigenous children

13 Some of the justifications given include “sending for service”, “neglect”, “being Aboriginal”, “welfare”, “apprenticeship”, “at risk of mortality”, “orphan”, or “absence of parent”.

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with good intentions, since the early colonisation and later after Federation, the main purpose of the forced removal was to “breed out the colour” from Australian society (McGregor, 2002, p. 286).14 Removal was pursued as a national project based on miscegenation, and the notion of keeping Australia a white nation. Moreover, the removal offered great economic benefits to the colonists in terms of cheap labour. As they grew up, many boys worked in farms while girls worked as domestic servants in white families (Haebich, 2001). Most were paid substandard wages; many had their wages either stolen or withheld, and many starved because of low wages and poor living conditions (Banks, 2008; HREOC, 2001). Henry Reynolds (1990) writes that the greatest advantage of young Aboriginal servants was that they came cheap and were never paid beyond the provision of variable quantities of food and clothing. As a result, any European on or near the frontier, quite regardless of their own circumstances, could acquire and maintain a personal servant. (p. 169)

The pursuit of removal proceeded first with scientific guidance from the racial theory of assimilation, and subsequently as a matter of bureaucratic process. Indigenous Peoples were classified into groups based on their colour and phenotype, with the removal targeting children of mixed descent. The effect of removal on the Stolen Generations was understandably incredibly traumatic and psychologically damaging. The children were held under strict rules that banned them from communicating with their family members or any Indigenous Peoples, speaking Indigenous languages, and practicing traditional ceremonies. Many of these children would never see their parents again, a fact that has left them, and their descendants, with significant ongoing trauma, personal distress and loss. While under protection, many were subjected to abuse, neglect, humiliation, and sexual abuse (Walters, 2015). Any benefits the children received were far outweighed by the long-term psychological damages they have incurred as a result of their experiences. Studies indicate that on average, the socioeconomic benefits they have supposedly gained did not make much of a difference. According to a report by the Australian Institute of

14 Many scholars argue that the story of the Stolen Generation amounts to a state sponsored cultural genocide (van Krieken, 1999).

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Human Welfare (AIHW, 2018), the Stolen Generations and their descendants were (and are) more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic, health and cultural outcomes compared to Indigenous Peoples who were not forcibly removed. Compared to those who were not removed, removed Indigenous Peoples were more likely to have the experience of being incarcerated in the last five years (3.3 times), being formally charged by police in their lifetime (2.2 times), having government payments as their main income source (1.8 times), not being a home owner (1.7 times) and being more likely to have poor general health based on a composite measure (1.6 times). (AIHW, 2018, p. vii)

Post-War Reforms White Australia’s race relations entered a new phase in the post-War period, mainly in response to the growing need for skilled and unskilled labour. After a relapse in migration intake during World War I and the Great Depression, immigration to Australia, always a politically contentious issue, ironically became the main factor for its gradual change towards becoming reluctantly multicultural (Jupp, 2002). The government’s post-war recovery programme ushered in a period of long boom that transformed Australia into advanced industrial country. While this expedited the nation’s path towards social reform, it was mostly in response to the radical social movements that put pressure on the government to abandon its founding racially exclusive policies. Since the beginning of colonisation, immigration to Australia was based on an assisted migration system. Mass migration involved the longdistance transport of European and other migrants aboard passenger ships. With the advent of commercial flights, immigrants began to arrive more frequently, unhindered by long-distance sea routes. While regular migrants arrived for employment and family reunion purposes, the postWar migration system had a greater focus on filling the skills shortage for the booming economy. By 1945, Australia was entering a new era of prosperity, with unprecedented economic activity, population growth and social progress. As the West recovered from the devastation of World War II with a massive overhaul of public spending, aided by unprecedented large-scale government investments (the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, and the New Deal in the US), Australia had unveiled its own fiscal policy that committed to full employment. The landmark 1945

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White Paper on Full Employment would become the major economic policy for the next twenty-five years. It rested on Keynesian principles centred on economic recovery based on the regulation of aggregate demand. This policy “linked levels of employment with expenditure which in turn gives industry the signals and the motivation to produce” (Coombs, 1994, p. 4). The recovery proved to be successful in raising the standard of living by providing jobs and widening opportunities for the wider population. The state-sponsored economic activity boosted production across industries—manufacturing, housing, food production, etc.—and service delivery. This in turn had a significant effect on the social and economic life of Australians, with better access to education, healthcare and leisure. Australia now needed more workers to sustain production and the subsequent demand created by a prosperous middle class. With fortunes turning for the better, the colonial period mantra populate or perish was revived as the Chifley government ran an ambitious immigration programme (MacIntyre, 2004). Led by the Minister of Immigration, Arthur Calwell, the department at first pursued the strict White Australia tradition of restricting arrivals to those of British and Irish descent. However, this became untenable as the British government grew less enthusiastic, and discouraged emigration to Australia. The number of British migrants to Australia, which accounted for the largest component of immigrants until 1953 subsequently declined as Britain underwent its own economic recovery programme. To meet the demands for an expanding industrial workforce and retain the White Australia policy, Europe became the next best source for the supply of immigrants. Calwell thus turned attention to other European countries, first the Soviet occupied Eastern Europe and later the south European countries of Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece. Post-War non-British migration rose sharply, with Labor’s policy gaining support from the unions based on the full employment guarantee. However, non-white people were not welcome in Labor’s policy. Upholding old prejudice against the Chinese, Calwell insisted on the deportation of Chinese refugees in 1949 (MacIntyre, 2004). At the same time, the migration programme aspired to assimilate the new immigrants into new Australians by pressing them to relinquish their ethnic affiliation and adopt Australian culture. In 1949, the newly elected conservative government of Robert Menzies sustained Labor’s migration policy and maintained some of the economic management policies. The Menzies

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government oversaw an economic management programme under the H. C. Coombs’ economic policy that led to a decade-and-half-long growth streak based on full employment, rising productivity, and augmented wages. Despite being elected on an anti-socialist and pro-market platform, the government “was firmly committed to a strong public sector” (MacIntyre, 2004, p. 207). Although Australia was becoming increasingly outward looking and more engaged with the outside world, engaging in global affairs, its elite retained the exclusionary social policies. Even as decolonisation swept across the world, with the British government relinquishing India, Indonesia, and many of its colonies in Africa, the Commonwealth government insisted on a White Australia. Prime Minister Robert Menzies was adamant that Australia should remain homogeneous for as long as it could be maintained as such. To justify this, he even found himself defending the issue of Apartheid in South Africa as a matter of domestic affair (Pijovic, 2014). For two decades, Liberal coalition governments maintained close economic ties and diplomatically defended South Africa’s Apartheid regime (MacIntyre, 2004; Witton, 1973). Menzies’ tactical support for South Africa was related in his letter to the British Prime Minister in 1961: that the South African precedent meant it would henceforth be “quite legitimate” for the Commonwealth to discuss, for example, the Australian immigration policy which is aimed at avoiding internal racial problems by the expedient of keeping coloured immigrants out. I hope my fears are not justified. (quoted in Gladsworthy, 2005, pp. 26–27)

As far as the government was concerned, a multiracial society was a recipe for social division. Clearly, there was no question that Indigenous Peoples were seen as a source of multiracial Australia, for they were dismissed as a fringe in the society and not considered citizens (Brett, 2014). In the backdrop of the assimilation of immigrants into the Australian way of life, Australia’s Indigenous Peoples continued to experience exclusion from white society and severe forms of discrimination. Against this backdrop, a new generation of Indigenous activism emerged claiming recognition and equal rights for their peoples (Maynard, 2007). Indeed, beginning in the 1920s, the struggle for the rights of Indigenous Peoples has become more assertive, with Indigenous leaders playing a leading role (Dudgeon et al., 2010). Between the 1940s and 1960s,

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there have been numerous strikes by Indigenous pastoral workers for pay rises. In 1957, an organisation, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines, was formed to support Indigenous Peoples activism. A combination of the various social movements would finally put pressure on the government to heed the calls for social reform. In the midst of the Cold War rivalry (1953–1991), Australian society enjoyed unprecedented affluence, with more leisure affording space for pressing social debates. This in turn signalled the inevitability of social progress; as more people were added to the Commonwealth, the dated exclusionary policies were increasingly challenged. This trend also reflected the changing demography. The majority of the two million immigrants who arrived between 1950 and 1970 were from non-English speaking countries. With the Migration Act of 1958, the dictation test was quietly abandoned, and restriction on language gave way to tolerance. This took momentum, as social attitudes against exclusionary policies, racism and discrimination grew sharply, propelled by the wave of civil rights campaigns and social movements. By the 1960s, a change in direction became inevitable, and Australia’s restrictive policies put the government, both domestically and internationally, in a morally indefensible position. The final blow to the White Australia Policy coincided with the retirement of Robert Menzies from politics in 1966. A year later, Australia entered a new era when the restriction on non-European immigration was lifted. Perhaps, nothing in Australian history exemplifies the radical shift in public racial attitude than the landmark 1967 referendum (Crotty & Roberts, 2009). Before the referendum, Indigenous issues were the responsibility of the colonies that later became states and territories. Responding to mounting petitions, Robert Menzies introduced a Bill in 1965 proposing to alter the Constitution by repealing Section 127 that stated, “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted” (House of Representatives, 1965, p. 2638). On May 27, 1967, the referendum passed with 90.8% yes votes. The referendum also conferred on the Federal Government the power to make laws for Indigenous Peoples. Australians supported an amendment of the Constitution to allow for the counting of Australia’s Indigenous Peoples in the national census. With this reform, Australia entered a new era of race relations underpinned by an increasingly diverse society.

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Multicultural Australia Assimilation had been the bedrock of Australian migration policy since Federation. For decades, this remained a majority opinion, and acceptance in the Australian society meant relinquishing ethno-religious affiliation and adherence to the Australian way of life. Specifically, at least three features of assimilation remained central until the late 1960s: colour and phenotype, majority culture and the English language (Jupp, 2002). Groups perceived to possess one or a combination of these traits in distinction from white Australians were considered unassimilable, and hence barred from immigration to Australia. Assimilation in this sense was akin to acculturation, but restricted to white people who were encouraged to adopt British cultural norms and quickly integrate to resemble the majority Australian population. Debates and views on such issues are not entirely absent even today. However, the discriminatory European-only immigration policy was quickly losing favour in the 1960s. Belief in assimilation began to wane in the 1970s, as the arrival of more non-European migrants increased ethnic diversity within the society. The immigration restriction for non-Europeans relaxed in 1966 began to take effect in 1970, with the arrival of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and South America. Post-War immigration peaked at more than 185,000 in 1970; between 1947 and 1971, migration increased the population by almost 3.3 million, with around 1.5 million of those arriving between 1945 and 1976 being non-British (Mence et al., 2017). This in turn impacted on public attitudes and in exposing the dubious racial policies. Australia’s migration scheme began to extend to Eastern Europe in the 1950s when immigrants from more than thirty countries were encouraged to apply. More than two-thirds of arrivals during this period were non-British. With the number of migrants growing every year, Australians concerns were emerging regarding the new migrants’ loyalty. To fend of the fear, the Australian Government enacted a new legislation in 1955 with the purpose of naturalising migrants (the Nationality and Citizenship Act ). Among the key components of Australia’s migration programme, particularly in the post-War period, involved the humanitarian programme. During the War, Australia agreed to resettle Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust in Europe, of whom 5000 arrived in 1939, while the majority (17,000) arrived fifteen years later. In the aftermath, “[b]etween 1947 and 1954, more than 170,000 displaced persons arrived

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in Australia from countries across Eastern and Western Europe” (Mence et al., 2017, p. 29). Refugees arrived in various years from Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Chile (1973), Cyprus (1974), Timor and Indo-China (1975). Moreover, Vietnamese refugees arrived by boats in 1976, and following the 1975–1976 civil war in Lebanon, around 43,000 Lebanese nationals arrived in Australia. In 1981, the Department of Immigration announced a Special Humanitarian Programme providing persecuted refugees permanent residency in Australia. Between 1982 and 1999, migrants from diverse countries, including Southeast Asia, El Salvador, former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, East Timor, and Lebanon arrived under this programme. By this time, migrants were arriving in Australia under three different schemes, family, skilled and humanitarian. Since 1978 immigration reform, the Department of Immigration introduced a points system to assess eligibility to migrate to Australia. Further immigration reforms included the enactment of the Migration Act Amendment of 1983, which ended the preferential treatment of immigrants from British backgrounds. All of these reforms and periodic arrivals of new immigrants had a role in diversifying the Australian society, and thereby affecting political discourse around national identity. Globally, the Civil Rights movements of 1960s and 1970s brought anti-racism to the forefront of social justice struggles. Anti-racism received global solidarity and was high on the United Nations’ agenda in 1971, which was formally designated the International Year for Action to Combat Racism. Then UN Secretary General U Thant stated that, a general recognition that the theories, ideas and prejudices which lead to racism and racial discrimination are unjust and abhorrent, and that a great responsibility rests upon all to eradicate the shameful practices which they encourage. (cited in Koffler, 1971, p. 5)

During this period, pressure was mounting on the Apartheid regime in South Africa (Weissbrodt & Mahoney, 1986). This time Australia was on the right side, and the Whitlam government announced a strong anti-racism stance denouncing the Apartheid regime that was becoming increasingly unpopular (Whitlam, 1973). In immigration policy and in its international relationships, the Labor government wanted to send a strong signal regarding its commitment against racism, by abandoning racial discrimination and ratifying international anti-discrimination

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conventions. In a 1973 Parliamentary Debate, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated: We have an obligation to remove methodically from Australia’s laws and practices all racially discriminatory provisions and from international activities any hint or suggestion that we favour policies, decrees or resolutions that seek to differentiate between peoples on the basis of the colour of their skin. (Whitlam, 1973, p. 2649)

The struggle against racism gained a landmark legal recognition with the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, which came following the ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Act protected Australian residents against “distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin”.15 The enactment of this legislation came on the back of decades of migrant and Indigenous social activism (Jupp, 2002). Indigenous activism during the 1960s and 1970s was instrumental in Indigenous Peoples struggle for equality and recognition. In 1971, an Indigenous activist, Neville Bonner, became the first Aboriginal Member of Parliament in the Senate. During his tenure, activists set up a Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972 that would symbolise Indigenous Peoples land rights claims. Moreover, the government replaced its assimilationist and protectionist policies by adopting a policy of self-determination that upheld Indigenous Peoples rights to manage land and resources, and maintain cultures and languages. The Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs was established in 1972, and an Aboriginal advisory committee, the Aboriginal Consultative Committee, was set up in 1973 to advise the government on Indigenous issues. Under the Whitlam and Fraser governments, Australia embraced multiculturalism as formal policy with bipartisan support. Reference of the word multicultural in 1973 by the Immigration Minister Al Grassby is considered the beginning of Australian multiculturalism. As originally conceived, it encompasses the acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity, inclusive immigration policies, and legislations prohibiting racial discrimination (Ho, 1990). It has been viewed as an integral component of

15 Racial Discrimination Act 1975, Section 9(1).

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the Australian national identity, which emphasises normatively the overarching goal of achieving a just society that is inclusive of culturally diverse groups (Levey, 2012). Successive Australian Labor and Liberal governments have deployed multiculturalism in this normative sense, formulating a range of social policies, such as: “the pursuit of social justice, the recognition of identities and appreciation of diversity, the integration of migrants, nation building, and attempts to achieve and maintain social cohesion” (Koleth, 2010, p. 2). Indeed, a vibrant multicultural culture within different migrant communities was already emerging prior to the ethnic/multicultural lobby that saw sweeping immigration reforms in the 1970s (Jupp, 2002). Across metropoles and city suburbs, migrants were playing vital role in social and economic activities. Then, in the 1970s, the culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities began to have greater formal representation when Ethnic Communities’ Councils were established in Victoria and South Australia. In 1977, the government commissioned the Galbally Review to assess the programmes and services provided to migrants after their arrival in Australia. The Galbally 1978 report put in place a sophisticated infrastructure for various multicultural policies and institutions, ranging from migrant resource centres and ethnic media to language and education support (Koleth, 2010; Leeman & Reid, 2006).16 The report also led to the establishment of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) in 1979. FECCA advocates and lobbies the government and businesses on behalf of the multicultural communities with a focus on equitable access for migrants in education, employment, communication, and legal as well as social services. The formal organisation of ethnic communities afforded these communities with greater political voice. The push for the accommodation of ethnic and cultural diversity has led to the emergence of multicultural policies that had significant impact in challenging overt racism. In 1979, the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs (AIMA) was established to address the needs of the CALD communities, later (in 1986) replaced by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Over the next decades, attitudes towards multiculturalism varied depending on the political and 16 The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) was established to manage multicultural radio services, and officially commenced broadcasting in 1978. For more on media and race relations see Chapter 6.

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economic environment while patterns of racism evolved, mixing overt and subtle forms (Blair, 2015). The multicultural direction was not always smooth. In the 1970s, the policy faced its first challenge when the arrival of Vietnamese refugees by boats was met with public outcry. Among a context of high unemployment and social welfare, heightened anti-Vietnamese and anti-Lebanese migrants racism flared in the 1980s. A notable issue is the Blainey immigration debate that gave voice to a growing racial undercurrent during this period. In 1984, Geoffrey Blainey, a University of Melbourne professor of history, stirred a debate on immigration with a critique of the Hawke government’s immigration policy. In a speech in Warrnambool, Blainey argued that Australia was taking too large influx of Asian migrants (half of all migrants) from peasant backgrounds that would significantly affect its cultural identity (Lewins, 1987). According to him, the immigration policy turned the “White Australia Policy inside out” (quoted in Kirby, 1985, p. 61). When Blainey’s speech was reported, it raised a lot of controversy, anti-racism rallies, sparked the so-called history wars, and became an important issue in the 1984 election. In addition to stimulating immigration debate, the controversy brought the old anti-Asian attitudes to the fore. Three years later, in 1987, the Labor government’s immigration policy was reviewed, with the Fitzgerald Committee Report recommending greater focus on skilled migration that did not discriminate by country of origin. Since 1986, oversight of anti-discrimination in Australia has become the responsibility of the Race Discrimination Commissioner, a position created with the establishment of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.17 The Commission had its first inquiry (the Toomelah Inquiry) in relation to the Goodwindi riots that sparked in 1986, and highlighted the stark socioeconomic disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. A report published the next year reported the main causes of the racial conflict, recommending more resource allocation to address economic disadvantages affecting Indigenous Peoples. In 1988, the Commission also led a national inquiry into the reported increase in racial violence against Indigenous and non-white minorities across Australia. Indigenous and ethnic minorities reported numerous racist attacks perpetrated by various racist and extremist individuals 17 The Commission replacing the Human Rights Commission that was established in 1981.

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and groups. Churches and community leaders opposed to racism were subjected to a series of organised attacks while the Commission received growing complaints of racist attacks on Indigenous and non-white communities (HREOC, 1991). This coincided with the Australia Day march that saw Indigenous Peoples marching to celebrate their survival in the face of two centuries of colonisation. Around 1000 people gave evidence in the inquiry, which found that “Racist violence is an endemic problem for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in all Australian States and Territories” (HREOC, 1991, p. 213). The inquiry underscored that “[r]acist attitudes and practices (conscious and unconscious) pervade our institutions, both public and private” (p. 213). Racism against people from non-English backgrounds was also found to be prevalent, and “takes the form of harassment and intimidation rather than physical assault” (p. 213). While the Racist Violence inquiry had a broader focus, another inquiry, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADC) of 1987 investigated institutional deaths in Australia. In the 1991 report, the inquiry found systemic defects and failures to “the duty of care owed by custodial authorities and their officers to persons in custody”, in many cases contributing to deaths in custody (RCIADC, 1991, Section 1.2.3). Aboriginal deaths in custody in the period 1980–1999 accounted for 18–21% of all deaths in custody (Williams, 2001). Since the inquiry, Aboriginal deaths in custody remains a significant issue of institutional racism; between 1991 and 2016, it fluctuated between 11 and 30% of all deaths in custody (Gannoni & Bricknell, 2019; Lyneham & Chan, 2013).

Post-Multiculturalism Despite landmark progress made in anti-racism in the 1970s, racism and xenophobia have sharply risen in the 1990s (Forrest & Dunn, 2006; Vasta & Castles, 1996). Anti-immigrant attitudes and discontent with multicultural policies received voice in media and political discourse while racism manifested in many forms and across settings, including within professional sport. A high-profile example is the 1993 Australian Football League (AFL) event when an Indigenous player of the Collingwood football club, Nicky Winmar, was subjected to abusive racial slurs. Winmar responded to the racist fans by defiantly pointing to his skin, and shouting, “I’m black, and I’m proud to be black”. This would become a recurring refrain within Australian race relations over the coming decades.

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Amid the alarming rise in racism, there have been milestones in race relations, particularly in the early 1990s. Among these was the setting up of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, tasked with facilitating understanding between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of Australia. This process commenced with the Redfern Park speech in 1992 by Prime Minister Paul Keating, the first official admission of the devastating impact settler colonialism inflicted on Indigenous Peoples. That year, another landmark ruling acknowledged First Nations Australians’ Native Title rights in the 1992 Mabo decision (Secher, 2007). Previously, the struggle for Indigenous Peoples land rights had limited gains in 1970, with the establishment of the Land Rights Commission in 1973, and the Gurindji people’s leasehold title in 1975. In 1979, the doctrine of terra nullius was challenged, leaving open the notion of Indigenous sovereignty over the land. In 1982, Indigenous issues came into the spotlight when Indigenous activists protested for land rights during the commencement of the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. The passage of the Tjartutja Land Rights Act in South Australia in 1984 was another gain during the decade. However, the Mabo decision was by far the most ground breaking for its dismissal that Australia was unoccupied during colonisation and for its recognition of the unique connection between Indigenous Peoples and Country. The High Court decision paved the way for land rights legislations including the Native Title Act of 1993, which sets the rules for determining native title interests and recognition (see Secher, 2007). In September 1995, the Racial Hatred Act that allowed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act was enacted after three years of heated media and community debate about freedom of speech. Despite the passage of the Act, racism persisted, particularly among groups funnelling political opposition to Asian migration. Australia’s multicultural policy came under attack, with political figures emphatically capitalising on what Hage (2002) calls white paranoia. In the mid-1990s, anti-immigration, and anti-Aboriginal rhetoric was the platform for the far-right party, One Nation, which won a single seat in the Upper House. One Nation senator Pauline Hanson made controversial remarks in 1996, in her maiden speech to parliament, that Australia was being “swamped by Asians” and that “they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate”. Although Senator Hanson’s views drew wide condemnation, it also legitimised racist hate and violence (Ack, 2016; Sengul, 2020). The same year, the Australian Parliament passed a Statement on Racial Tolerance, condemning racial intolerance and reiterating

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its commitment to reconciliation. A bipartisan commitment was also made to pursue non-discriminatory immigration policy. In general, antimulticulturalism rhetoric within Australia had mixed reception.18 In other western countries, an apparent backlash on multiculturalism was building up throughout the mid-1990s, with countries like the UK retreating from multiculturalism, ramping up “a re-assertion of ideas of nation building, common values and identity, and unitary citizenship—even a return of assimilation” (Kymlicka, 2010, p. 97). In 1998, the Australian Commonwealth government launched Living in Harmony, a social marketing campaign to combat racism and intolerance. The campaign lasted for three years, 1998–2001, and involved partnerships with communities and media. Since March 1999, Harmony Day celebrations are held annually across Australia and coincide with the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Towards the end of the millennium, Muslim Australians emerged as a target group for a new form of racism, Islamophobia (Poynting & Mason, 2007). While anti-Lebanese racism was nothing new (Asmar, 1992; Hage & Jureidini, 2002), the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to a crescendo of anti-Muslim racism. These, and subsequent terrorist attacks, were instrumental in hardening anti-Muslim sentiments in general while they also fuelled a resurgent far-right nationalism across Western society. The rise of Islamophobia since 2001 has invariably triggered deeply held Orientalist sentiments that invoked a perceived clash of civilisation and apprehension towards Muslim migrants (Abrahamian, 2003). In this context, the racialised and securitised representation of religion for political purposes contradicted the highly publicised call for harmony and tolerance (Dunn et al., 2007). This appears to have emboldened the emergence of groups concerned with particular views on national identity. The Cronulla Riots of 2005 exemplify a clash between groups with conflicting views. In December 2005, a set of violent anti-Lebanese and anti-Muslim Australians began rioting on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach, provoking further retaliatory attacks. The riot, which has been widely depicted as an example of intergroup conflict in Australia, also signals the influence of public

18 In 1998, in a reversal of fortune, the One Nation Party lost in election and a second

Aboriginal person was elected into the Australian Parliament.

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rhetoric in generating racism and violence in a Western context (Bliuc et al., 2012). It is commonly described by many Australians as one of the most shameful episodes in Australia’s recent race relations. In conclusion, race relations in Australia has undergone over two centuries of evolution ranging from massacres, slavery, and racial violence to discrimination, prejudice and racial inequity. Widely available national data over the last two decades have made understanding the nature and extent of racism today easier. Contemporary race relations in Australia is characterised by various forms of old and new racisms exhibiting sentiments of racial hierarchy, anti-Aboriginal and anti-immigration attitudes, opposition to multiculturalism, denial of racism and postcolonial ideology of whiteness (Hollinsworth, 2006; López, 2012; Markus, 2001). In the succeeding chapters of this book, more focused analyses of contemporary racism are presented, reflecting racism across social, economic, communication and political domains.

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CHAPTER 3

Institutional Racism and Its Social Costs

In many societies, including Australia, race continues to define an individual’s place, with life opportunities and socioeconomic conditions predicated on one’s ethnic, racial, gender or religious group (Better, 2008). Particularly, the social construction of racial identity creeps in every aspect of life and crystallises into pervasive institutional racism. Indeed, racism does not concern only interpersonal and intergroup relations. It transcends negative attitudes and prejudices, with prejudice representing only one aspect of racism (Henricks, 2016). Racism can occur irrespective of individual attitudes and beliefs, with significant effects on racial minorities. This aspect of racism occurs covertly and “persists through collective actions of even the well intentioned” (Henricks, 2016, p. 1). Thus, racism, as such, is routinely perpetrated without intent through the structures of society, and is often embedded in institutions and social structures (Better, 2008; Henricks, 2016). The pervasive nature of racism has been a subject of considerable research over the last half century. Specifically, the persistence of practices, norms and laws that unwittingly discriminate and disadvantage racial minorities across countries is well-documented, and makes the concept of institutional racism relevant today. While interpersonal racism focuses on the attitudes and experiences of individuals, racism at the institutional level permeates social, cultural and power structures that perpetuate exclusion and racial inequality. By critically examining institutional racism, one © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Elias et al., Racism in Australia Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2137-6_3

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can better understand the effects on ethnic minorities of the policy environment that shapes laws, practices and discourses in a multiracial society (Cunneen, 2019; Farley & Allen, 1987; Miles & Brown, 2004). It is systemic, and exists in spite of the goodwill of the individuals and groups that constitute societies. There is no doubt that explicit forms of institutional racism that emerged with the rise of European colonisation, industrial capitalism and the Atlantic Slave Trade continue to manifest in twenty-first-century Western societies. Centuries later, these legacies continue to be foundational to modern nation states, with racism lurking beneath the structures and institutions that privilege whiteness and disadvantage racial minorities (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). Institutional racism, as we know it today is not limited to explicit racial policies. While some openly discriminatory policies and practices—such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, Apartheid, and the White Australia Policy—have been abolished, the systems they pioneered remain. Neoclassical predictions (e.g. Becker, 1957/2010) that racism would either be eliminated or driven out of the marketplace failed to materialise and race in the twenty-first century remains a defining factor of one’s place in society (Better, 2008; Darity et al., 2015). Our purpose, in this chapter, is not to answer why racism continues to exist today. However, we want to note that understanding the historical basis of racism is important for grasping the institutional nature of the underlying racial inequities that deeply impact various societies. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the state of institutional racism in Australia from an ethical and human rights perspective. The chapter discusses the various costs associated with racism occurring at the institutional level, and maps the ways in which laws, social structures and institutions perpetuate historical legacies of racial inequities, with or without the intention of individuals and groups in society. By merely maintaining existing structures, laws and social norms, society can impose social, economic and health costs on racial minorities that impinge on their wellbeing and human dignity. While the impact of interpersonal racism depends on the relative social power of the perpetuator vis-a-vis the target, racism effected by powerful social, economic, political and cultural institutions is far more consequential, as evidenced throughout the history of slavery, racial violence, segregation and discrimination. The chapter reviews empirical research with a focus on particular socioeconomic domains, and uses published evidence to demonstrate how institutional racism leads to social and economic inequalities in society.

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It explores whether and to what extent there may be structural and systemic barriers in Australia precluding racial and ethnic minorities from attaining racial equality across multiple domains (e.g. law, political representation, education, employment, health and business). We look at this in light of the historical interplay between the politics of identity and racial socioeconomic and political reality in Australia. The chapter will address the following key questions: To what extent may existing ethnic/racial inequalities in Australia reflect an underlying institutional racism? What role does racialised discourse and racism play in the country’s social policies, laws and institutions?

Conceptualising Institutional Racism Racism has been conceived as institutional injustice (Young, 2011). Indeed, in the traditional Rawlsian or ideal theory of redistributive justice, racism as structural inequity is not incorporated explicitly (Mills, 2009). Rawls rejected racism as unjust; yet, his notion of the ideally just society does not consider racial oppression among the most fundamental features of Western societies. In an alternative theory, Powers and Faden (2006) integrate oppressive structures like racism and sexism as “multiclausal and multifaceted social structural barriers to achieving self-sufficiency” (p. 8). They locate institutional racism as presenting itself in terms of the negation of justice, where the rights of ethnic/racial minorities are unfairly eroded by avoidable disadvantages in health and wellbeing (Powers & Faden, 2006). These manifestations of structural injustice are not only outcomes of direct episodes of racism, but can cumulatively build up from complex and multidimensional processes that may or may not involve overt racism. Consider the following three incidents across three countries that became national and international headlines, raising important debates on race and custodial injustices: On July 25, 2016, an ABC Four Corners program aired the abuse of Indigenous children in an Australian youth detention centre in Darwin. This shocked the nation, and initiated a Royal Commission that concluded racism had a part to play in perpetrating such abuses on systemic scales. (White & Gooda, 2017)

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In Britain in 1993, when a young black student, Stephen Lawrence, was killed in a racially motivated attack, accusations of racist conduct were levelled against the metropolitan police. This led to an inquiry into police reaction and handling of the criminal investigation that followed the attack. The inquiry chaired by Sir William Macpherson concluded that “institutional racism played a part in the flawed investigation by the police”. (Bourne, 2001, p. 7) In the US, in the summer of 2014, police shot and killed two unarmed young black men in Ferguson (Missouri) and New York City, prompting widespread protests accusing the police of racial profiling. Unlike Australia and the UK, there was no equivalent investigation in the US concluding these incidents indicated underlying institutional racism, nor was there complete data on police shootings in general. (Peeples, 2019)

Each of these incidents have at least one thing in common. They do not represent isolated incidents occurring randomly, but have been occurring almost regularly and reflect the systemic injustices that have affected minorities in these racially diverse societies. While the numerous fatal police shootings depict violent racism, they are manifestations of institutional racism that is pervasive within these societies. Generally, institutional racism represents various practices, procedures, patterns, and policies that privilege certain racial groups at the expense of others in society (Better, 2008; Paradies, 2016). It is inherently exclusionary, with some groups denied access to certain rights and privileges that are conferred on others in the form of unearned advantage (Elias & Paradies, 2021). Institutional racism creates racial power inequalities through exclusionary production, access and control of information, and material and symbolic resources in societies (Paradies, 2016). Institutional racism has been defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin” (Tendler, 1999, p. 3). It occurs within various corporate bodies including governments, organisations, corporations and institutions, participating in the production and maintenance of racial discrimination. These structural inequities are enacted, and often manifest, in formal and informal social institutions such as in social norms, laws, customs, as well as policies and practices. They are systemic in their nature, operating spontaneously, irrespective of individual agency. Thus, they do not disappear by mere changes of

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individuals and groups within particular institutions without effecting transformative reform in the underlying mechanisms that influence institutional behaviours and outcomes (Tendler, 1999). The concept of institutional racism was first coined by Ture and Hamilton (1967) referring to the structural nature of racial injustice that has been occurring in the US in the 1960s. Ture and Hamilton (1967) argued that racism occurred both in overt and covert forms, with white individuals participating in injustice against black individuals while the white community collectively acted against the black community. They called these two manifestations of racism individual and institutional racism, where individual levels of racial prejudice act to motivate institutionalised forms of racism. Likewise, institutional racism that occurs in a broader social context involves individuals who themselves are integral parts of various “relationships, social acts, and socio-historical circumstances” (Henricks, 2016, p. 1). This indicates that the multiple forms of racism simultaneously occurring at different levels can analytically be distinguished depending on how they operate and impact minorities. Racism is reciprocally produced through prejudicial attitudes and behaviours of individuals, and institutional enactments of racial discrimination through laws, norms and policies (Bourne, 2001; Gee et al., 2019). Indeed, institutional racism may not always be easily detected. Particularly, “it is rarely visible to those that are privileged by it, and is sometimes undetectable to those impacted by it” (Elias & Paradies, 2021, p. 47). There can be many reasons for this, among which is that it requires no overt behaviour or attitudes to unfairly exclude or discriminate individuals and groups, nor does it require self-conscious antipathy towards individuals or groups. Institutions can be racist without openly stating racist policies, and by perpetuating existing norms, practices, laws and bureaucratic structures. By becoming colour blind, meritocratic, or ignorant of existing privileges and injustices, people can enable institutional racism. The systems and structures can then reproduce the status quo, with deleterious effects on racial minorities. Institutional racism occurs across multidimensional contexts, pervading diverse settings such as healthcare, housing, education, employment and law and justice. Racism in these settings can manifest in many ways whether interpersonally or in practices such as recruitment, employment, reporting, service delivery, governance and policy implementation. At all

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levels of racism and across institutional settings, the effect is unidirectional with adverse outcomes for racial minorities. Figure 3.1 conceptually depicts how institutional racism and associated manifestations of injustice occurred in Australia’s race relations history. At the foundational level, institutional racism embeds the default practices, laws and norms in the society. These laws, practices, bureaucracies and institutional norms like in many other Western societies were set up for the privilege of Anglo-Celtic whites, and they remain intact. The diagram shows colonisation, slavery, and dispossession as peaking until the abolition of slavery. Colonisation, segregation, racial exclusion, continued with the White Australia Policy until the abolition of the latter, during the decolonisation of nation states. While it is argued that colonisation still exists, civil rights reforms associated with multiculturalism have had an impact on the Australian society. In the current context of post-multiculturalism, the conceptual diagram depicts ongoing racism manifesting in overt, subtle and systemic forms.

Fig. 3.1 A temporal model of how institutional racism operates

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Manifestation of Institutional Racism The systemic nature of racism has been recognised in Western scholarship since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Du Bois, 1903/2015). Years after the abolition of slavery in the US, the growing prejudice towards blacks and continued racism in the form of legitimised segregation, discrimination and violence, indicated that institutional racism was far from eradication. For more than a century, scholars have theoretically and empirically documented the various ways systemic racism pervades Western societies. Among the notable body of works on institutional racism are the works of American scholars W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Gary Becker and the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal who particularly highlighted the endemic nature of racism in the US, which impacts the entire social, economic and legal structures of society (Becker, 1957/2010; Cox, 1948/1959; Du Bois, 1903/2015; Myrdal, 1944/1996). The next chapter will discuss the economic aspects of institutional racism as it relates to the production and distribution of resources, and the organisation of labour power. The focus in this chapter is on prevalent aspects of contemporary institutional racism. Fifty years after the coining of institutional racism (Ture & Hamilton, 1967), a large body of research has been produced on the topic. Much of this research has primarily focused on racism in the context of law enforcement (Bourne, 2001), media (Kilty & Swank, 1997), education (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2014), healthcare (Henry et al., 2004), and immigration policy (Hage, 1998; Hing, 2009). Given the breadth of institutional settings and societal structures that racism embeds, Miller and Garran (2007) have conceptualised it as a systemic web of racism with interweaving societal structures of racial inequities. This notion conceives racism as having institutional roots at its historical foundation, and both interpersonal and internalised racism persist only if they are institutionally enabled (Ture & Hamilton, 1967; Seet, 2019). Whether in discriminatory laws, structures of inequality or the ascription of privileges, institutional power renders racism more devastating than personal prejudice per se. For example, the institutions of slavery, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Apartheid and the White Australia Policy were institutional racisms that caused considerable harm for racial minorities. In contemporary Western society, these overt racisms may be less explicit, despite the prevalence of various forms of institutional racism. However, their harmful effects continue

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to be significant, with various structural inequities documented across countries (Henry et al., 2004; Seet & Paradies, 2018). Institutional Racism in Egalitarian Society The idea that as egalitarian societies we are a longway from the old racism of the pre-1960s is one of the key arguments levelled against contemporary anti-racism. Today, democracy flourishes in many countries, fostering equality in multiracial societies. Indeed, some racial minorities have attained unprecedented positions of economic and political power, such as the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency (2008), election of Indigenous Peoples to the Australian Parliament (1971), and appointment of a black Cabinet Minister in the UK (2002). However, many of these individual achievements do not paint an accurate picture of racial equity in these countries. Despite the democratic ideals, such as freedom, fairness and equality, these countries espouse, their institutions are founded on racist attitudes and norms. In many ways, these institutions (e.g. police, criminal justice system, immigration system, media, and schools) have either enabled or sustained racism. Thus, in these institutions democracy can unwittingly lead to the continued existence of racism in society. For example, as discussed in Chapter 2, the architects of the Australian Federation have enacted racial discrimination by legislating the Immigration Restriction bill that established an exclusive white society (i.e. the White Australia Policy) (Willard, 1967). In democracy, the interests of powerful groups dominates. Therefore, less represented groups, such as racial minorities, become powerless to protect their interests. Thus, a democratic system by itself may not guarantee racial equality. Post (1991) highlights this as follows: The very aspiration to self-determination reinforces pre-existing inequalities by empowering those with the resources and competence to take advantage of democratic processes; it systematically handicaps socially marginalized groups who lack this easy and familiar access to the media of democratic deliberation. (p. 327)

As Post has argued, the democratic process, like the market mechanism, has its own handicaps. By definition, democracy is a majoritarian process, and through the anonymity of the ballot box yields results that are contrary to racial equality. Indeed, democracy has led to the election

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of the Nazi Party in the past. Today, a typical example for this is the election of politicians holding views that are considered racist in many Western countries. To the extent that those with such views can secure enough votes, they can influence policies to advance their agenda.1 It can be argued that democracy indeed responds to popular pressures if these pressures have reached a critical mass. As such, a representative system of democracy may not be immune to capture by systems of racial oppression. Thus, the democratic process alone does not lead to racial equality. Therefore, it is not surprising that “anti-discrimination activism and much of its gains (e.g. the Civil Rights legislations and the end of Apartheid) have come from beyond the representative democratic process” (Elias & Paradies, 2021, p. 50). The democratic deficit that is sustained through exclusionary effects of institutional racism often prevails under a state of denial. Indeed, there is a moral hazard in acknowledging racism. Accepting that racism exists to sustain white privilege in Western institutions amounts to admitting that these societies are not altogether meritocratic (Better, 2008; Littler, 2018). However, citizens are often educated to think of their nations as based on certain inalienable ideals (Australia: fair go; Canada: fairness, inclusion, equality, diversity; US: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; UK: democracy, rule of law, respect and tolerance). No wonder then, the notion of institutional racism unsettles the Western mind with a form of cognitive dissonance. Thus, members of these privileged societies find it “easier to blame the victims of inequality or lunatic fringe groups than to admit the reality of basic injustice that exists” (Better, 2008, p. 13). Controlling and reforming existing institutions at the macro-level represents a serious policy challenge, given they are products of a long history of prejudice. Developed over centuries of norms and practices, institutions have become engrained as part of a culture that privileges the majority groups while disadvantaging racial minorities. For example, “the dominant group in American society, Europeans, has justified its

1 Typical examples are: the elections of the anti-immigration politicians Nigel Farage in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France; the leader of an Austrian far right party Norbert Hofer; the Islamophobe Dutch politician Geert Wilders; the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic politicians Pauline Hanson and Fraser Anning in Australia; the election of Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

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rule and exploitation of minority groups by building into its social institutions ideology as well as practices that supported this domination” (Better, 2008, p. 13). Most public and private institutions (e.g. schools, local authorities, businesses, and media organisations, or congressional committees, service providing agencies, and consultancies), “though often in the hands of enlightened persons, remain dominated by practices that produce racial inequities” (Better, 2008, p. 13). Scholars therefore note that the struggle for racial justice should incorporate avenues that include a reforming of the democratic institutions (e.g. criminal justice and policing). One aspect of such reform requires a focus on the class dimensions of racism, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Fraser and Honneth (2003), for instance, argue that racism incorporates social status and class dimensions. While they admit that neither dimension represents a by-product of the other, race and class interact to produce racial inequity. Thus, Fraser and Honneth (2003), maintain that “[n]either can be redressed indirectly … through remedies addressed exclusively to the other. Overcoming the injustices of racism, in sum, requires both redistribution and recognition” (p. 23).

Institutional Racism in the Australian Context Australia has had its share of institutionally sanctioned racism, particularly since the establishment of the Federation, as detailed in Chapter 2. Scholars argue that various social and political institutions depicting racist norms and structures persisted in different ways. For example, Henry and colleagues (2004) have noted that: In Australia, institutional racism has been an almost constant feature of our history, from the British designation of the continent as terra nullius, through the 1897 Convention on Federation (where the question of whether Aboriginal people should be counted as “people” in the national census was covered in just 195 words), to the stolen generations and the failure of the federal government to issue an apology. (pp. 517–518)2

2 Prime Minister Rudd’s Apology speech in 2008 mentioned some of the institutionally racist policies, saying: “We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.”

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Today, institutional racism can be seen in the Anglo-Celtic privilege permeating the sociocultural and political structures that constitute the Australian society. While Australia has been established as an egalitarian democracy with progressive rights and privileges, these are exclusive to the white population (Bongiorno, 2013). Prior to Federation, colonial acquisitions and expropriations of Indigenous land, as discussed in Chapter 2, involved a process of institutionalised racism characterised by violence, dispossession, slavery, exploitation and discrimination (Havemann, 2005; Wolfe, 2006). To justify these actions, various governments pursued ideological narratives that denied Indigenous “personhood, culture and governance systems” in order to legitimise “their exclusion from most benefits of modernisation” (Havemann, 2005, p. 57). Institutional racism persists today through the denial of Indigenous rights and failure to address Indigenous disadvantage (Chesterman & Galligan, 1997; Head, 2008). In fact, some scholars have equated Indigenous disadvantage with institutional racism while others have highlighted it as a persistent, complex and intractable problem facing Australian public policy (Head, 2008). The concept of institutional racism rejects Indigenous disadvantage as a deficit discourse (Pyle, 2018); noting that the deficit discourse fails to adequately reflect the effect of long-term discrimination and racial oppression. When the White Australia Policy ended in the 1960s, and the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 prohibited racial discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, ethnicity, religion and national origin, this offered legislative ground against institutional racism. Indeed, there have been some progress over the decades that followed. However, minorities remain underrepresented across political and economic power structures in Australian society, which is largely dominated by Europeans. Despite more than four decades of multicultural experience, 95% of senior leaders in Australia are from Anglo-Celtic and European backgrounds although Indigenous and non-Europeans represent 24% of the population (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2018). Some scholars and practitioners maintain that the current social, economic and political underrepresentation of minorities shows an ongoing racial injustice (Larkin, 2013). Whether this indicates underlying problems of institutional racism, where race/ethnicity continue to determine a person’s place in Australian society, is an issue that is strongly debated in public policy and academic discourse (Bourke et al., 2018; Fuller et al., 2004; Mellor, 2003).

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Yet, a substantial body of research shows that many minorities, including Indigenous Peoples and culturally and linguistically diverse migrant communities, experience racial discrimination in many settings (Fuller et al., 2004; Henry et al., 2004).3 Additionally, asylum seekers experience inhumane treatment in onshore and offshore detention centres that have been condemned both locally and globally (McNeill, 2003; Silove et al., 2001). These discriminatory and exclusionary practices impact on the human rights of racial minorities and asylum seekers, and have adverse effects on their mental as well as physical health and wellbeing (Newman et al., 2008). Thus, in many ways, Australia is yet to realise racial equity and justice within its multiracial society. Groups invoking Anglo-Celtic nationalist heritage have always contested Australia’s gradual transition towards multiculturalism. The government’s identification of Australia’s cultural diversity as an indicator of the country’s progressive movement away from the racially exclusive history often generates criticism and sometimes hostile denigration of ethno-cultural heterogeneity (Moran, 2011). This perpetual racial apathy is demonstrated in the ongoing socioeconomic impoverishment of Indigenous Peoples, the frequent denials of their conditions in contemporary political debates, and in the lack of progress in Indigenous constitutional recognition. Occasionally, the reluctance to acquiesce with Australia’s growing hetero-cultural identity manifests in multiple forms of discrimination and denigration of minorities from migrant backgrounds. Non-English speaking migrants, and particularly those from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East frequently experience discrimination and social exclusion (Polonsky et al., 2011; Saunders et al., 2008; Taylor, 2004). All of these, in combination with resurgent far-right nationalism that has taken mainstream routes in the last few years, represent an ongoing challenge for racial equity in Australia.

The Cost of Institutional Racism The costs of institutional racism are often multidimensional in nature. As noted above, there is a broad social cost in terms of democratic deficit associated with institutionally mediated racism. Although much of the burden of racism is borne by minorities, it has wider implications on 3 These include the labour, housing, and consumer markets, healthcare, and criminal justice system.

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society arising from vicarious experiences and cumulative social burden. The Australian society bears the cost of systemic racism as a body politic, fulfilling the principle that “if one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it”.4 Scholars have previously attempted to quantify the socioeconomic costs of racism to society. For example, Elias and Paradies (2016) have recently estimated the economic costs of racism in Australia. The study examined racial discrimination as a health cost, based on burden of disease estimates that measured costs in terms of lost years associated with mental health disability arising from exposure to racial discrimination (see Chapter 7 in this book). This is equivalent to intangible costs attributable to a particular health risk factor. According to the Elias and Paradies study, Australia was estimated to have lost approximately 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) per year due to minorities experiencing racial discrimination. Other researchers have found almost equivalent results in the US. For example, Brimmer (1997) estimated that the US incurred approximately 3.8% of its GDP due to the racial discrimination experiences of African Americans. Indeed, racism is far more consequential for human rights and dignity than is indicated by this economic loss, which is based entirely on human capital and standard health economic approaches (Feagin & McKinney, 2005). The nonpecuniary human impact raises significant ethical issues that scholars and practitioners have debated for decades (Glasgow, 2009). Despite society as a whole incurring significant costs, institutional racism primarily hurts racial minorities. Yet, it can also be argued that this form of racism may benefit some privileged groups. The benefits include exclusive rights and privileges, social and economic opportunities, and political power. In a typical example of the US prison system, Henricks and Harvey (2017) demonstrate the way institutional racism functions and benefits some groups. Analysing black incarceration in the city of Ferguson (Missouri) and Cook County (Illinois), they found that entire industries and their associates—employees, businesses, contractors, and government agencies—tend to benefit from the continuation of high levels of black incarceration (Henricks, 2019; Henricks & Harvey, 2017). Thus, self-interest encourages the police to make more arrests, as 4 1 Corinthians 12:26 (Good News Translation). However, both the Christian Bible and Muslim Quran state the notion that membership within a group implies that individual suffering is shared more widely.

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more inmates mean enhanced job security for employees, better business for contractors, and increased funding for government agencies working within the criminal justice system. According to Henricks (2019) three bureaucratic dimensions sustain the systemic racial inequity that besets the prison system. They include: One, these sanctions are represented in ways that abstract the conviction process from its highly racialized context. Two, these sanctions enable legal actors to enact a multilevel mode of decision making, combining compulsory and discretionary judgment, that entrenches racial bias within the broader legal organization of punishment. And three, these sanctions redistribute the operational costs of justice through earmarks onto those who are processed through the system (i.e. disproportionately people of colour). (p. 1)

These bureaucratic procedures and practices work paradoxically to intensify ongoing racial stratification, albeit apparently in a non-racial manner. However, they clearly demonstrate that racism can operate unwittingly through measures and processes that in themselves may appear egalitarian yet with racially disparate impact. Therefore, institutional racism can manifest indirectly in terms of disparate impact and intangibly in the form of opportunity cost, associated with the necessity to keep the system. Intangibly, the cost of dismantling institutional racism is linked to the amount of resources that needs to be invested to maintain the institutions that produced the racial disparities. The extent of racial inequities that are left unaddressed thus determines the extent of intractable and socially costly institutional racism that is transferred across generations. It is not always easy to identify the costs of institutional racism given its multidimensional context, extending to the human, sociocultural, economic, legal and environmental spheres. For example, racial profiling can have significant mental health effects on racial minorities, which can be socially costly. Related to this are over-incarceration, recidivism and deaths in custody, which have direct connections with historical, sociocultural and environmental factors. In Australia, Indigenous deaths in custody between 1980 and 2016 ranged between 11 and 30% annually of all deaths in custody (Gannoni & Bricknell, 2019; Lyneham & Chan, 2013; Williams, 2001). Scholars in the US have shown how moral hazard issues deeply impact the prison system to the extent of becoming

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dependent on the number of inmates (Henricks, 2019; Henricks & Harvey, 2017). Contemporary prisons, particularly in the US, represent overlapping interests formed into prison-industrial complex, which is described as “a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need” (Schlosser, 1998). Research shows a link between the prison system and race (Henricks & Harvey, 2017), with racism in this law enforcement context perpetuating as a bureaucratic process, becoming an entirely self-sustaining system. Bhattacharyya et al. (2016) argue that the prisonindustrial complex has been highly racialised and serves the economic and ideological interests of the country’s economic and political elite. This renders the eradication systemic racism in the justice system an issue of conflicting interests. Research indicates that institutional racism can have social implications, with deeper impact on fundamental social structures, ranging from family breakups, homelessness, social exclusion, and criminal involvement (Kerr et al., 2018). These social problems can become culturally entrenched in the long term, as is the case in many minority neighbourhoods (Wilson, 2010). These structural issues are clearly visible in the socioeconomic contexts among, for example, African Americans in the US, Indigenous Peoples in Australia, Black people in South Africa, and migrants in many European countries. The discussion so far has broadly framed the cost of institutional racism, with emphasis on racism in effect rather than racism by intent. The racism in effect aspect of racism analytically seeks to uncover established “actions, practices, and processes that reproduce variable yet stable racial hierarchies” (Henricks, 2016, p. 2). In different societies, the way it is observed varies depending on sociocultural history, and contemporary political conditions. For example, institutional racism in Australia pervades the labour market (Larkin, 2013), education system (BodkinAndrews & Carlson, 2014), and social services (Fuller et al., 2004). In the US, institutional racism is shown to be costly, and is particularly visible in income and wealth disparity. This can be clearly seen in residential segregation, with Black people concentrated in poor neighbourhoods, a problem that perpetuates black poverty (Lichter et al., 2012). The racial income/wealth gap in Australia is also an enduring issue adversely affecting Indigenous Peoples (Fuller et al., 2004; Larkin, 2013). Indeed, the contemporary wealth gap in Australia is a legacy of settler colonial history and its exclusionary policies. Yet, ongoing

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labour market conditions have a significant role in the perpetuation of income/wealth disparity in Australia (Larkin, 2013). Scholars thus argue that ongoing colonialism and institutional racism are among the key determinants of chronic unemployment and underemployment among Indigenous Peoples (Booth et al., 2012; Button & Walker, 2020; Duncan et al., 2019; Larkin, 2013). Education is often one of the key drivers of the gap in income and employment outcomes. Racism in the education system, as reflected in Australian standard practices or policies (e.g. Eurocentric culture, English language as standard), can become institutional barriers with adverse effects on the performance of Indigenous students (De Plevitz, 2007; Moodie et al., 2019). For example, the 2018 Closing the Gap reports a persistent gap in student attendance and retention rates, with remote communities reporting the worse outcomes (Government of Australia, 2019). It is argued that these achievement gaps are reflective of the intractable institutional condition affecting the educational system. Healthcare is another area pervaded by institutional racism. Researchers have reported substantial evidence of implicit and explicit racist beliefs, emotions or practices among healthcare providers (Maina et al., 2018; Paradies et al., 2014; Williams & Wyatt, 2015). Racism in healthcare is often associated with “lower levels of healthcare-related trust, satisfaction and communication” (Ben et al., 2017, p. 1). In the US, Krieger (2020) found that minority health outcomes deteriorate as a result of poor health services and healthcare underutilisation. A similar observation has been made in Australia, where Indigenous Peoples experience poorer health outcomes relative to the rest of the population, as has been consistently reported in the annual Closing the Gap report. The report indicates that 53% of the health disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can be explained by social determinants of health and risk factors, whereas institutional racism alone accounted for some of the remaining 47% (Bourke et al., 2018). Indigenous Peoples are heavily burdened by institutional racism, effected through systematic exclusion from the healthcare system. Studies consistently show that Indigenous people overall have significantly lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and higher prevalence rate of major illnesses, in comparison to other Australians. They are also less likely to receive adequate and appropriate treatments for various illnesses (Bourke et al., 2018; Elias & Paradies, 2021; Henry et al., 2004). All of these, along with persistent

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inequities in healthcare funding, disparate treatment regimes, and healthcare service-related cultural barriers indicate acute levels of institutional racism (Henry et al., 2004). Another group that frequently face structural and institutional barriers, particularly in access to healthcare, are migrants and refugees. Research indicates that migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds often receive inadequate quality of care and have limited access for various reasons, mainly due to their race or ethnicity (Johnstone & Kanitsaki, 2008a; Richardson & Norris, 2010). Among the most frequent institutional barriers that prevent migrants and refugees in Australia from accessing optimal healthcare are cultural and social differences (Colucci et al., 2015), anti-workplace diversity attitudes (Johnstone & Kanitsaki, 2008b), acute levels of ignorance about Indigenous Peoples (Mapedzahama & Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017), and intersecting inequities (Bastos et al., 2018). Along with interpersonal and internalised forms of everyday racism that Indigenous Peoples and CALD migrants experience, the above institutional barriers impact their overall wellbeing and life functioning as well as their long-term health outcomes (Fuller et al., 2004). It is welldocumented that Indigenous Peoples have health outcomes equivalent to and sometimes below the poorest societies in the world, while CALD migrants tend to have poorer health outcomes than white Australians (Bourke et al., 2018). Indeed, these outcomes in a rich country with one of the world’s best healthcare systems represent an ethical challenge that we further explore in the next section.

Racism, Ethics and Human Rights Institutional racismis socially costly, and imposing unfair and unnecessary inequities harms the wellbeing of racial minorities. Researchers argue that racism represents an ethical problem with its relative neglect of the rights of these racial groups (Johnstone & Kanitsaki, 2010). This section therefore further explores the ethical dimension of racism as an institutional and interpersonal issue. Johnstone and Kanitsaki (2010), for example, argue that until racism in the healthcare system receives adequate moral scrutiny and “unless racism is reframed and redressed as a pre-eminent ethical issue by health service providers”, the avoidable harms of racism on ethnic/racial minorities “will remain difficult to identify, anticipate, prevent, manage, and remedy” (p. 489). Within the

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healthcare setting, a neglect of racism and ongoing systematic disadvantage could trample notions of Rawlsian distributive justice (Rawls, 2001) and justice conceived in terms of human wellbeing (Powers & Faden, 2006). Racism represents an unfair treatment of people based on socially constructed differences, and this arbitrary moral deficiency should make it a primary subject of ethics. However, its apparent neglect as systemic injustice and manifest form of privilege belies its harmful effects, while unwittingly legitimising and justifying its prevalence (Johnstone & Kanitsaki, 2010; Noah, 2002). An ethical discourse on the subject of racism is therefore urgently needed, focusing on the consideration of persistent structural inequities and injustices that particularly affect racial and ethnic minorities. This chapter argued that racism exists because it serves the interests of racial majorities, and that racism integrates ideology and unjust practices (Boxill, 2013). Chapter 1 detailed that racism involves attitudes, stereotypes and beliefs in racial categories, forming race relations organised as a “hegemonic social function” (Shelby, 2014, p. 66). However, this notion of racism poses an ethical question, particularly related to how it may be plausibly explained as unethical attitude or behaviour. Why is racism morally objectionable? Scholars have argued that it is easier to explain the moral flaw of racism when it is understood as an injustice rather than ideology (Boxill, 2013; Eidelson, 2015; Thomsen, 2017). While there are various reasons suggested in the literature, at least three reasons particularly stand out as the core moral failings of racism—namely, disrespect, unfairness and harm (Thomsen, 2017). First, racism can be conceived as a disrespect towards target groups, indicating an inherent ethical flaw (Eidelson, 2015; Glasgow, 2009). Such disrespect as manifested in racist attitudes can be seen in a person’s predisposition or specifically in “the mental state of the endorser” (Glasgow, 2009, p. 84). In whatever level of severity this predisposition is expressed, the ethical failure rests in the way the worth and conditions of particular groups are devalued and trivialised. Glasgow (2009) argues that “endorsing the statement ‘All Arabs are terrorists’ appears racist, but what’s racist here is arguably not the proposition but the mental state of the endorser” (p. 84). From this standpoint, it can be seen that the endorser is mentally assigning different valuations to human persons based on subjective assessments of race, ethnicity or cultural backgrounds. Glasgow’s conception also underscores the fact that racialisd

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disrespect demonstrates how individuals and institutions can perpetrate racism without holding racist attitudes (Levy, 2017). Scholars also identify the moral objectionablity of racism at the individual level in two types of attitudes, racial antipathy and racial inferiorisation (Blum, 2002). Racial antipathy is often expressed in terms of bigotry, hatred and hostility, however, antipathy may not necessarily be the fundamental or only basis of racism (Shelby, 2014). Inferiorising is another way racism can be “expressed in various attitudes and behaviour—disrespect, contempt, derision, derogation, demeaning” (Blum, 2002, p. 10). This represents an ideological aspect of racism. Blum argues that it is distinct from the racial antipathy framing of racism although it is also based on psychological affect. While the above propositions may explain some aspects of individual racism, they do not adequately explain why structural and institutional racisms should be conceived as disrespect. Indeed, individuals may be considered racist based on their attitudes and behaviours, which can represent racialised disrespect. Yet, racialised disrespect by itself does not necessarily constitute institutional racism. On the contrary, scholars have understood structural and institutional racism as forms of racism without racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Massey et al., 1975). Another aspect showing how racism represents an inherent moral flaw relates to its unfairness. Whether interpersonal or institutional, racism imposes bias and inequity on the grounds of socially constructed difference, and as such tramples on justice, equality and human dignity; hence, it is morally indefensible. In his theory of justice as fairness, Rawls (2001) argues that racial or gender discrimination are fundamentally flawed in a well-ordered liberal society. Before him, other scholars have considered institutional racism as a dilemma in Western society (Du Bois, 1903/2015; Myrdal, 1944/1996). Ethically, it can also be argued that the persistence of institutional racism in supposedly liberal egalitarian societies represents an inherent lack of other-regarding virtue, or a lack of empathy, or normalcy of indifference. In Rawls’ conception of justice, other-regarding virtue is not formally incorporated within the veil of ignorance framework, although this framing may be conceived as an aspect of self-othering. Yet, “a proper moral perspective is somewhat otherregarding and impartial” (Hill, 1989, p. 765). Racism as unfairness can be understood as disregarding behaviour, and as such, Rawls himself later

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recognised it as an important omission within his Theory of Justice (Rawls, 2001). Thus, other regard in this theory becomes integral in the proposition that discrimination would be justifiable only when applied to remedy historical injustice. Racism essentially embodies historical and contemporary injustice in its systemic perpetuation of inequity. By denying due attention towards unfair racial disadvantage, while conferring unearned advantages upon other groups (white privilege), it establishes institutionalised injustice (Nixon, 2019). This represents an ethical failure to alleviate the desperate conditions of racial minorities. At the individual level, this signifies an utter disregard or disinterest towards the condition of the racial other. This makes interpersonal and institutional racism entirely contradictory to other regarding morality as an ethical principle. The conceptualisation of racism as a disregard for racial minorities can capture many of the framings of racism that have been proposed in the literature. For example, modern racism, aversive racism, ambivalent racism, subtle racism, as well as Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and Apartheid, have disregard as an inherent feature in addition to aspects of disrespect, as has been proposed by Glasgow (2009). Indeed, disrespect can be seen as a special type of disregard for others. However, unlike disrespect, disregard for others does not necessarily reflect a person’s mental predisposition. Disregard can exist while all members of society possess some level of respect for racial minorities. For example, this is the case with institutional racism, which can thrive under conditions of respectful attitude towards black people. This indeed is what racism without racists entails. It refers to a situation where one holds some level of respect towards blacks despite being indifferent to their conditions. Finally, the third moral flaw of racism rests on the harm it causes the targets. There is a large body of research across countries, documenting the harmful effects of racism (Paradies et al., 2015). In Chapters 7 and 8, the health and wellbeing effects of racism in Australia are discussed in detail, based on empirical evidence. Racism is a significant stressor that harms people experiencing it across different domains, and as such it deeply impacts the targets’ human dignity. Both as a system of injustice and as a health risk factor, it is a morally objectionable phenomenon, irrespective of the underlying beliefs, attitudes or antipathy that are used as its justification. Thus, racism should be seen as an injustice whose existence represents a moral affront to humanity in contemporary societies.

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Conclusion Racism has an institutional dimension reflected in terms of collective injustice that adversely impacts racial minorities. Over fifty years of research has shown institutional racism remains an ongoing issue in many multiracial societies. This chapter has discussed how, through structures and practices, institutional racism across these societies unfairly produces injustices that are largely historical legacies of colonial policies. Today, racist practices occur across settings such as education, housing, workplace, healthcare and criminal justice, where they manifest as outcomes of unwitting bureaucratic racism. Institutional racism is socially and economically costly, and minorities who experience ongoing systematic exclusion and discrimination bear most of the burden. It also raises fundamental ethical questions, particularly in nations that consider democracy and freedom as their central tenets. Racism restricts access for the fuller functioning and participation of racial minorities in social and political life, and this contradicts the egalitarian principles and equal representation promised in democratic systems. This has been one of the driving factors for the rise of the anti-racism movements of the 1960s (Ture & Hamilton, 1967). The leaders of the movements successfully invoked the promises of democracy to mobilise support for society wide anti-segregation rallies. As discussed in this chapter, three fundamental reasons—disrespect, unfairness and harm—have been suggested to explain key moral flaws of racism. The conception of racism as disregard for the rights of racial minorities locates the ethical question of racism within the unfairness paradigm. This is particularly the case with institutional racism. Another fundamental moral flaw of racism manifests in the moral failure of individual citizens and society to be respectful and other-regarding. Society in this sense can be seen as shirking responsibility towards its minority citizens. This represents an ethical dilemma that has been corroborated in racism scholarship dating back to the works of many scholars including Du Bois (1903/2015) and Myrdal (1944/1996).

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CHAPTER 4

The Causes of Racism

Theoretical Perspectives In Chapter 1, we have reviewed research that defined racism. Considerable research also exists showing who experiences what form of racism and the extent of racism occurring in a given society. In contrast, questions such as “What causes racism?”, “Why and when did racism originate?”, and “Who benefits from it?” are also important to consider (Roediger, 1999; Winant, 2000). In this chapter, we inquire into the causes of racism, and explore the social and economic factors that necessitate its occurrence. In Chapter 2, we surveyed the history of race relations in Australia, but did not explain why racism exists and why it endures. After exploring theories of racism that consider the social and economic systems underlying the history of Western race relations, we will explore and contextualise the fundamental questions in Australian race relations. There is evidence of racism from antiquity, with significant intensification since the advent of Western colonisation (Bethencourt, 2014; Fredrickson, 2002; Isaac, 2004). Since at least the sixteenth century, observations of religious figures that both slavery and colonisation are the direct result of economic imperatives clearly situate racism as a corollary of an (economic) power-based form of oppression and domination (van Dijk, 1993, 2021). Scholarship on race, racial prejudice, and racism as socially constructed systems of inequality can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910, Max Weber, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Elias et al., Racism in Australia Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2137-6_4

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in a German Sociological Association conference, contended that race was a social rather than biological construct, and concluded that racial belonging is a direct result of the urge to monopolise power and status (Banton, 2007; Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1979; Nelson, 1971). According to Weber, the human desire for economic and social privileges results in the formation of racial groups and group-based stratification (Nelson, 1971; Winant, 2000). However, it is important to critique this universalising approach to the human condition by noting that such a basis for racism was only possible in the last several thousand years of human history. Among the conditions that characterise this period are: the invention of money and accumulation of capital, significant population densities that enable social stratification and globalised (forced) migration that produced racially diverse societies (Paradies, 2020). Subsequent pioneering works by W.E.B. Du Bois attempted to provide empirical evidence to the underlying economic rationale for racial inequalities. During this period, the dominant sociological notion of race was as something equivalent to caste (Park, 1928). However, with the publication of Oliver Cromwell Cox’s seminal book Castes, Class and Race in 1948, we see the emergence of a theory of the causes of race relations—or in Cox’s terminology—racial antagonism that is distinct from a caste system (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978; Miles, 1980). Other influential works that saw the race problem, particularly in the US, as a social problem, including Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944/1996), the works of Drake and Cayton (1945/1993) and Park (1950), have significantly shaped the race relations scholarship of the twentieth century (Winant, 2000). Figure 4.1 depicts the variety of perspectives on what underlies the evolution of racism as an ongoing social problem. From an economic perspective, explanations of the causes of racism in social sciences vary depending on which school of thought one is engaging. Broadly, at least two schools of thought stand out in the literature: neoclassical theories and Marxist theories of race relations. In this chapter, we will explore both, before discussing our understanding of the causes of racism. Neoclassical economics conceives racial identity as exogenously determined, thus racism (specifically, racial discrimination) that entails the preference of a certain racial group to another based on individual tastes is entirely arbitrary (Becker, 1971; Darity et al., 2015). Within the rational theory framework, racism is seen as irrational to the cost minimising and profit maximising choices of economic agents in society. It results in unfair inequalities, but in the long-term, it is not

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Fig. 4.1 A multidimensional model of racism

sustainable, and thus leads to the ejection from the market of racist or discriminatory agents. Marxist scholarship offers a competing explanation to the origin of racism based on the theory of class struggle. Racist thoughts and practices, according to Marxist writers (Cox, 1948/1959), are specific to a capitalist system and are intertwined with the mode of production. Since the inception, the hierarchical organisation of labour power that placed blacks at the lower level of the production process was necessary for the sustenance of the capitalist system. In pre-capitalist societies, intolerance and ethnocentrism were prevalent, but did not constitute racism (Cox, 1948/1959). Both neoclassical and Marxist theories of racism have been variously criticised. Most neoclassical models of racial discrimination treat prejudice based on racial identity as irrational and exogenous to the market. However, recent behavioural scholarship has shown alternative explanations, with tastes and psychological factors being relevant in a rational decision process (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Goldberg, 1990; Kahneman, 2003). Some studies also indicate that the assumptions of these models do not always hold (Reich, 1978, 1981). While neoclassical theories may not adequately explain what the underlying causes of racism are, Marxist theories have been criticised for reductionist economism, a critique that we will return to later in this chapter, and a failure to

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account for racism in communist societies (Law, 2012).1 Factors (e.g. psychology, culture, and social issues) other than political class are essential in understanding the origin of racism (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978; Omi & Winant, 2014). Sociological research has examined the underlying causes of racism within three theoretical frameworks: ethnicity, class, and nation (Winant, 2000). Each of these represent research attached to particular historical trends. For example, research on race and class was more salient at the height of the Marxist school of thought while emphasis on race and nation flourished during the era of nationalism and decolonisation (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988; Miles, 1980; Reich, 1981). Contemporary racism research is highly diversified. There is an increasing focus on empirical measurements of racism, with the meaning of racism shifting, and with an ongoing, but relatively limited body of research addressing the nature and cause of racism (see for example: Augoustinos & Every, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Feagin, 2013; Omi & Winant, 2014; Roediger, 1999). The way racism is defined and conceived determines our understanding of its underlying causes and effects. Ethnicity, class, and nation-based racial theories as well as racial category and racial oppression theories offer us distinct perspectives. This is shown in the numerous reasons for the existence of racism that have been suggested in the literature. Some of the reasons are that racism is a result of fear, threat and competition, broader dynamics in intergroup relations, and processes of socially constructed identity formation (Allport, 1954/1979; Bobo, 1999; Duckitt, 1992; Lentin, 2004; Omi & Winant, 2014; Stephen & Stephen, 2000). Additional reasons include, the need to accrue, protect or preserve economic, political, and cultural power (Bhattacharyya, 2016) through embedded systems of privilege and oppression (Feagin, 2013), lack of understanding or ignorance of difference (DiAngelo, 2011), or historical contradictions or social anomaly (Myrdal, 1944/1996). All of these combine social, economic and psychological factors, emerging from considerable research and theorising across disciplines that have focused on understanding what

1 The concept economism, refers to “the reduction of all social relations to market logic”, and “often appears in critiques of political movements and neoliberal economics” (Norgaard, 2015, p. 1). In Marxist orthodoxy, Lenin coined it as a critique to “a determinism of the development of the productive forces” (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988, p. 3).

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underlies racism (Allport, 1954/1979; Banton, 1998; Miles & Brown, 2003).2 This chapter will explore racism and structural inequalities literature to examine underlying causes of racism. It will also explore how race and class interplay, and whether racism and its resulting inequalities benefit particular groups in society.

Economic Roots of Racism Early free market thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo understood the necessity of global markets for capitalist production. When they conceptualised specialisation, division of labour and comparative advantage, they underscored that surplus production could only be realised provided there is adequate market that accommodates the supply of commodities. During the Industrial Revolution, European surplus production, economies of scale, decline in transaction cost and the demand for raw materials pushed the limits of earlier mercantile trade towards a more efficient international trade (North, 1991). However, the economic structures of the rest of the world were not aligned to this capitalist thinking (Goldstone, 2009). Thus, European economic expansion had to force its way into societies with other economic systems through commerce, conquest and colonisation. We see here colonial expansion as the inevitable outcome of the economic drive for market expansion (Brewer, 2002). When Marx problematised capitalism as inherently fixated with insatiable dependence on profit (surplus value), he connected it with the inevitability of imperial expansion (Brewer, 2002; Marx & Engles, 1848/1969). In the New World, capitalist expansion that was premised on plantation economy required a large quantity of human labour. Slavery offered the best opportunity for expanded supply of labour in the form of free black and Indigenous labour (Williams, 2014). Whether slavery was contingent on capitalist demand for labour or the former was a condition for the expansion of the latter has stimulated considerable debate (Baron, 2000; Vaughan, 1989; Williams, 2014). The evolution of slavery, race relations and trans-Atlantic trade, and later historical developments of race relations, show the intertwined and complex relationship between race and Western economies. Scholars since Du Bois (1903/2015) have understood that economic factors are at the 2 See Chapters 5 and 6 for reviews of research focusing on measuring the prevalence of racism.

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heart of the racial problems that have persisted in the industrialised West for almost four centuries. As such, the connection between the evolution of economic structures and the historical as well as contemporary racialised organisation of society is not a matter of contestation. Rather, there is a strong understanding that race constitutes an important social factor in determining human behaviour, as well as economic and political dynamics across many countries (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Marable, 2015; McAdams, 1995). Many scholars have articulated these racialised structures (Cox, 1948/1959; Fredrickson, 1989; Lipsitz, 2006). The Color of Money, a recent book by Baradaran (2017), shows the structural relationship between racism and the legacy of racial inequality in wealth. This macroeconomic analysis of the history of banking and credit in the US demonstrates how racism is institutionally rooted within an enduring capitalist system that privileges white Americans.3 As Baradaran (2017) and other authors (Lipsitz, 2006) have argued, despite a publicly espoused free market economy, Western laws and regulations from the very beginning protected the interests of the dominant racial group. The outcomes of generationally exclusionary laws and practices are now reflected in the concentration of both wealth and land ownership, which racial minorities—who now disproportionately experience systemic levels of poverty and other disadvantages—have no or little access (Marable, 2015). Neoclassical Explanations of Racism The economic sphere is the realm of individual choices and decisions. Individual agents (consumers, firms, and nations) engage in economic activity, making choices that protect their interests. Groups, collectives, cultural and social structures are considered exogenous in the economic analysis of markets, but they are the objects of analysis in sociology. Yet, 3 In many Western societies, the category whites is heterogeneous. For example, in the US, Hispanic whites are distinguished from non-Hispanic whites. According to the US census, whites are defined as persons with origins from “any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa. It includes people who indicated their race(s) as White or reported entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian” (Humes et al., 2011). Historically, the majority White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants have shaped and dominated the political, socioeconomic and cultural life of the society until the early twentieth century, with Irish, Jews, Italians and others included as whites in the twentieth century.

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some phenomena can only be understood by the interplay between individual agency and group dynamics. Such is the case of racism, which is a fundamentally group-based relational phenomenon. Until recently, conventional economics considered racism as occurring because of individuals’ tastes for discrimination (Becker, 1971). Alternative theories, such as statistical discrimination (Arrow, 1971) and occupational segregation (Bergmann, 1974) offered rational informational explanations. Yet, other than documenting statistical evidence of discrimination, racism research in economics has not adequately explained why racism continues to be pervasive and persistent in societal systems, as has been considered by critical race scholarship (Mac Laughlin, 1998; Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). In Becker’s model, the origin of tastes for discrimination has not been adequately explained. Tastes were considered matters of attitudes and preferences that are entirely determined exogenously outside the market system (Reich, 1981). Thus, conventional economic analysis has primarily focused in determining the existence of racial discrimination, with the assumption that such discrimination was irrational and would disappear overtime. Because of this neoclassical view of discrimination, adequate economic inquiry directly tackling the question of what causes racism has been very limited. The persistence of racial discrimination contrary to Becker’s prediction of the competing out of racism (Charles & Guryan, 2008) pointed to the theoretical inadequacy of the neoclassical economics of racial discrimination. Racial disparity across diverse economic outcomes can and do persist, with racial minorities in most cases at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (Lundberg & Startz, 2018). The reasons for these persistent group disparities can be many, but we can point to at least two distinct theoretical explanations for racial disparities. First, racial and ethnic disparities are examined within the domains of conventional labour economics, which considers racial disparities as endogenous. Individuals are assumed to experience socioeconomic outcomes depending on their individual characteristics. Accordingly, the market rewards them based on their characteristics, and this can lead to racial differences in outcomes. Some of these characteristics can be inherited (fixed at birth, e.g. ability, IQ) or acquired (e.g. education, experience). In this framework, measured discrimination can be partly explained by controlling for an individual’s characteristics (Ashenfelter & Card, 2010).

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Alternative explanations of race and economic outcomes see racial disparities as exogenous, occurring outside or before the market (Darity & Mason, 1998). Racial discrimination in this framework is considered a significant factor in shaping individual characteristics. This explanation debunks most of the assumed individual differences (e.g. ability, IQ, education, and experience) as historically determined social outcomes rather than as innate differences. According to Darity et al. (2015), individual differences should not be seen as fixed and unaffected by social and historical phenomena, however, The over-emphasis on individual optimization and the under-emphasis on group formation and collective action leads orthodox economists to accentuate differences in individual attributes like human capital endowment, motivation and tastes as explanations for intergroup differences. (pp. 3–4)

Darity et al. (2015) argue that intergroup disparities require greater consideration than they are accorded in economic analysis. Some of the key intergroup inequalities, such as wealth, have stronger association with individual racial and ethnic background than with their labour market outcomes (e.g. employment, productivity, and wages). Yet, major national indicators (such as wellbeing, per capita income and Human Development Index) fail to incorporate group-based disparities as dimensions of social welfare (Darity et al., 2015). According to Darity et al. (2015), the intergroup dimension that has been lacking in conventional economic analysis could be addressed within the field of stratification economics, which extends intergroup inequalities to the domains of health, income/wealth, wellbeing, political influence and social inclusion. This framework integrates cross-disciplinary insights including group identity and social classification processes (sociology), rationality and selfinterest behaviours (economics), and social beliefs and perceptions and related concepts of implicit and unconscious bias, cognitive dissonance, and stereotype threat (social psychology). Furthermore, within this analytical framework, competition between social groups motivated by self-interest, and the intersectionality of different contours of inequalities (race, gender and class) are incorporated. Such micro- and macro-level interactions also offer analytical tools to understand the economic dynamics of intergroup race relations (Browne & Misra, 2003; Mac Laughlin, 1998; Walby et al., 2012). Unlike the standard neoclassical approach, stratification analysis does not assume racial

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discrimination to be an irrational individual behaviour, but “is functional in promoting the privileged group’s relative status” (Darity et al., 2015, p. 2). It explains persistent intergroup disparities by looking beyond individual factors, and focusing on the structural and contextual factors that lead to the maintenance of relative intergroup status, intergenerational transmission of wealth and resources, and exclusionary behaviours and practices. The conception of racial discrimination as a group privileging social structure has been alien in conventional economics. By introducing a social group lens to the analysis of economic disparities, the stratification framework presumably allows the theoretical plausibility to a persistence of discrimination under the competitive model. As Darity et al. (2015) have argued: There is negligible empirical evidence that discrimination inevitably falls under pressure from market forces. A review of the available time series evidence across the handful of market-based economies where estimates are available did not identify a pattern of declining discrimination. (p. 4)

As per the evidence (Quillian et al., 2019), competition alone may not eliminate racial discrimination. This can be partly explained by rational intergroup factors including the notion that dominant racial groups consider discrimination as an instrument of turf maintenance (Darity et al., 2015). While this can be one of many reasons, it does not adequately explain the origin of racial discrimination. A challenge thus remains for researchers to develop socioeconomic theories that adequately identify and establish the potential causal factors for racial discrimination, and to untangle the intertwined processes associated with the production and maintenance of intergroup inequalities. To date, economic reasoning in relation to liberal thoughts and racism show that economic scholarship and liberal thinking have diverged in their prescription towards addressing racial injustice (Colander et al., 2004). Ultimately, the prescriptions to address racism (discrimination) rest on whichever theoretical explanation is taken. Proponents of the endogenous explanation advise against intervention to correct the effects of discrimination, as the latter would correct itself by competing out discriminatory agents from the market (Becker, 1971). Those who argue that racism is inherently exogenous are in favour of anti-discrimination legislation, as the market alone cannot weed out discrimination entirely.

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Race, Class and Racism Marxist analysis examines race and racism from a class-based theoretical lens, one that is entirely different from the race prejudice paradigm of neoclassical economics theories. In his pioneering work, Oliver Cromwell Cox (1948/1959) constructed a political economy of race and racism in the US tracing the roots of racial inequality within the socioeconomic system that established the country. Later theoretical and empirical works by numerous scholars such as Reich (1978, 1981), Balibar and Wallerstein (1988), and Gilroy (1987) extended Cox’s Marxist explanations of racism further, by adding the concepts of collective bargaining, nationalism, and race formation to the analysis of race and class. While Marxist theories of race were later criticised for privileging class over race, and subordinating race within the class struggle (Miles, 1980; Omi & Winant, 2014; Roediger, 1999), they have immensely increased our understanding of some of the causes of racial inequalities. Critiques have argued that race and class are distinct, with class having an objective dimension in relation to ownership of resources or wealth while race being purely ideologically and socially constructed (Fields, 1982). According to social dominance theory, notions of race and racist ideologies play legitimising roles in the creation and maintenance of intergroup inequalities through positive social identities and social status hierarchy (Sidanius et al., 1992). Indeed, the interplay among the various social, psychological and behavioural constructs cannot be ignored, as alluded to in the discussion of stratification economics (Darity et al., 2015). Other theorists (Hartwig, 1972; Wellman, 1993) see racism as providing economic rationale for white privilege and domination of racial minorities. These economic conceptions of race and racism differ from the psychological prejudice-based interpretations that focus at either the (inter-)group or individual level through factors such as personality, unconscious or implicit bias, discursive/linguistic practices, and social norms/structure (Duckitt, 1992). They focus mainly on racial discrimination as an act rather than on racism as an attitude, and racial discrimination is understood as an economic phenomenon, emerging within the context of market forces, either endogenously or exogenously. Cox (1948/1959) was one of the earliest scholars to form a coherent Marxist theory to explain the relationship between racism and capitalism. His analysis assumed that “economic relations form the basis of modern race relations” (Roediger, 1999, p. 7). This notion depicted race relations

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as “a feature of the development of capitalism, with the consequence that a solution to the ‘race problem’ [depended] upon a transition from capitalism to a democratic, classless society” (Miles, 1980, p. 169). Thus, the relationship between capitalism and racism is considered a deeply rooted historical reality. Cox articulated his theory by distinguishing between four distinct concepts: race, ethnocentrism, intolerance, and racism. The focus of this historical analysis was particularly on race relations that Cox argued had “developed independently of the anthropological tests and measurements” of the previous century that sought to biologically classify different “races” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 320). Cox had a social constructionist view of race, and racism for him was an ideology or “a philosophy of racial antipathy” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 321). While he saw race relations as a historical and social reality, racism according to him was an abstraction of the rationalisation of race prejudice. In this sense, the origin and manifestation of racial antagonism can be traced to the rise of capitalism; accordingly, there is a direct causal relationship between race relations and capitalism (Miles, 1980). Cox’s historical analysis connects the emergence of racial prejudice and exploitation in Europe to the rise of capitalism and nationalism, with colonial expansion facilitating their global spread. As such, “all racial antagonisms” according to Cox (1948/1959, p. 322) “can be traced to the policies and attitudes of the leading capitalist people, the white people of Europe and North America”. For much of the history of the eastern and northern Mediterranean, the relationship between imperial ruling classes and subjects were based on culture rather than race. The Hellenic world defined in- and out-groups based on their mastery of the Greek language. Even during the Roman Empire, where slavery was commonplace, “we do not find racial antagonism, for the norm of superiority in the Roman system remained a cultural-class attribute” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 325). During and after the Middle Ages, the dominant marker of prejudice was religious belief, with Christian Europe competing against superior— Muslim, Asian and Jewish—cultures. According to Cox, the policies of the Catholic Church—promoting universal brotherhood of men—prevented racial prejudice from its full realisation (Genovese, 1965/2014).4 Cox contends that even during the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions of the fifteenth century, racial prejudice had not yet emerged. According 4 In Cox’s historical analysis, inclusion in this brotherhood within the Catholic doctrine depended on acceptance of the Christian faith rather racial identity.

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to this analysis, the economic rationale was premature during the period to warrant racial antagonism. The crusading spirit of the Portuguese and Spanish is said to have put a check on their pursuit, precluding them from appreciating the economic value of labour exploitation. Although the Church itself kept its share of African servants, did not comprehend the economic utility of segregation and its cultural equivalent. Racism and segregation as a technique and system of perpetuating the oppression and servitude of black workers was not developed. Thus, at this stage, “no rationalizations of inborn human inferiority in support of a basic need for labour exploitation” has been developed; instead, the Church’s “obsession with the spiritual values of conversion left the Negroes free to be integrated into the general population” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 329). According to Cox, racial antagonism began with European discovery of America, and particularly with the commercialisation of human labour. It emerged not out of a particular feeling of antipathy based on colour or race, but purely out of the economic necessity of the period. This drive to exploit the labour of coloured people was given legitimacy through Pope Alexander VI’s edict (1493) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Thus, two things were at work in this process of racialisation: “the primacy of a competitive over a religious spirit” and the attitudinal facilitation for the justification of exploitation (Genovese, 1965/2014, p. 123).5 The institution of slavery opened a new political economy based on an exploitative system that clearly demarcated the distinction between the dominating and oppressed groups. In so doing, it essentially caused racial antagonism to emerge within the capitalist plantation economy.6 According to Cox (1948/1959): This, then, is the beginning of modern race relations. It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socioattitudinal facilitation—at that time only nascent race prejudice. (p. 332) 5 The triumph of the capitalist/racist spirit over the religious spirit is illustrated by the conflicting views of Sepulveda and Las Casas, with the former being an outspoken propagandist of the Spanish Atlantic slavery project and the latter being against the institution of slavery (Cox, 1948/1959). 6 Many scholars accept the proposition that the institution of slavery was the precursor of racism. Wilson (1996, p. 37) writes: “Modern racism emerged out of slavery and colonialism. These economic institutions created clear demarcation lines between the oppressed and the oppressor, which overlapped with color lines.”

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For Cox, the main problem within the emerging exploitative relationship was the proletarianisation of labour, which occurred regardless of the race or colour of the labourer. In this arrangement, racial exploitation was indeed one aspect of the exploitation. Nonetheless, race prejudice was only the capitalist’s exploitative tool, an ex post phenomenon that was conveniently relied upon when the situation demanded. In the early stages of the capitalist order, white labourers occupied positions often reserved for people of colour. However, the enslavement of coloured people proved more profitable and this took the exploitative relationship to such a fundamentally new level that it required racial justification. The capitalist exploitation of the colored workers, it should be observed, consigns them to employments and treatment that is humanly degrading. In order to justify this treatment the exploiters must argue that the workers are innately degraded and degenerate, consequently they naturally merit their condition. (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 334)

In this sense, the nascent system of race relations could be conceived as the direct outcome—a necessary outcome—of the rise of capitalism. It was necessary in that the economic exploitation of the so-called inferior race needed to be justified. Moreover, according to Cox (1948/1959), the concomitant race prejudice constituted a psychological justification that was needed for the effortless exploitation of a particular racial group. This conceives capitalism as requiring both stratification along racist lines (economic necessity) and its justification to meet the desired political ends (Genovese, 1965/2014). When the ideology for the dehumanisation of the oppressed group of people was sufficiently established, the ruling class, Cox argued, was ready to announce implicitly or explicitly its claims that: The colored people have no rights, which the master race is bound to respect. The exploiting class has an economic investment in this conviction and it will defend it with the same vigor as it would an attack upon private property in land and capital. (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 335)

As far as Cox was concerned, race relations were not a moral consideration, but purely an economic issue. Moreover, he categorically rejected the notion that race relations and caste relations were identical. There is scholarly debate as to whether caste discrimination can be seen as racism.

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D’Souza (1995) argues that, although the Indian caste system cannot be considered racist since members of the Indian castes belong to the same race, he admits that castes display “many of the features that would be expected in a racist society. The caste system is hierarchical and hereditary. Lower castes are stigmatized and marked out as inferior” (D’Souza, 1995, p. 20). Yet, D’Souza considers the caste system as establishing religious and social distinctions, and cannot be considered a racist system because Hindus share similar physical features and do not ascribe to caste any biological features. Other scholars contend that skin colour is integral part of the caste system (Mishra, 2015) while D’Souza’s view has a narrow conception of racism as a system entirely based on biological differences. Contemporary scholars contend that social caste, such as the Indian caste system, qualify as racist systems (Goodnight, 2017; Pinto, 2001). The caste system embodies religion and ancestry as the bases for hierarchical categorisation of groups and discrimination based on such attributes. Indeed, based on the broader new racism definition that includes ancestry, culture and religion as the fundamental grounds of racist doctrines, the caste system constitutes a racist system. Coming back to Cox’s analysis, race relations are purely “labor-capitalprofits relationships”, which essentially present themselves as “proletarian bourgeois relations and hence political-class relations” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 336). To him, race prejudice is an outcome of capitalism, which is a cultural accident in Europe: “It is probable that without capitalism, a cultural chance occurrence among whites, the world might never have experienced race prejudice” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 345). Many Marxist scholars have shared this argument (e.g. Gilroy, 1987; Omi & Winant, 2014; Robinson, 2000). Robinson (2000) for example maintains that capitalism and racism are intertwined in such a way that social relations in the West can be conceived as racial capitalism. Western capitalism has emerged: within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West - most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. (Robinson, 2000, p. xiii)

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According this view, racial prejudice, which began under the auspices of modern capitalism, spread with imperial expansion, setting the rules of race relations wherever English rule set its foot. The nature of this prejudice was unlike anything that happened before, and it set the standard for all other cultural prejudices. Cox (1948/1959, p. 349) suggested that once it was instituted, the colour-based racial prejudice of whites functionally became the regulator of racial prejudices among minorities. For him, the prejudice of whites ranked at the apex of the race prejudice ladder, and where two or more races shared a racial situation with whites, the latter would have direct or indirect influence over the relationship among subordinate races. Cox saw the solution for the antagonistic race relations in democracy, where progress and the advance of democracy limits and reduces race prejudice. Since Cox sees capitalism as the cause of racial antagonism, he conceives class struggle as the ultimate emancipator of the racially oppressed black people. As a strategy, therefore, blacks should cooperate with their class allies—white workers—to ultimately defeat the ruling capitalist class through socialist revolution. The inherent problem of racial oppression would “most probably be settled as part of the world proletarian struggle for democracy” (Cox, 1948/1959, p. 583), and thus the advances that the oppressed people make would have actual or potential impact on the freedom of coloured people. Since Cox’s classic work, the Marxist explanation of racism has been criticised for its inadequacy and for failing to focus on the problem of whiteness (Miles, 1980; Roediger, 1999). There has been considerable discussion around the notion of racism being a determinate product of capitalism. Some of these discussions (e.g. Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978; Genovese, 1965/2014; Gilroy, 1987; Miles, 1980) reject reductionist economic explanations of the origin of racism, and call for a holistic approach to race relations as a social system. For example, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978) criticise the emergence of a strand of Marxist thought that conceives racism as an outcome of conspiratorial effort of the ruling class. The theoretical weakness of this conception is that it identifies racism with its effects that are in turn considered responsible for the production of racism. The concept of race thus appears not as a necessary function of certain economic laws, which are consequently seen to be responsible for real economic categories, but rather a deliberate attempt to weaken and

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fragment the working class through the production of utterly false biological/genetic criteria for differentiation: an incomplete economism is thus supplanted by a voluntaristic class reductionism. (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978, p. 125)

The logical outcome of the economism of a racism/capitalism thesis according to Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978) is “the collapse of anti-racism struggle into class conflict” (p. 144), thereby usuping the former from much needed solidarity of the masses. While Cox’s theory of race relations offered a Marxist analysis of the causes of racial antagonism, it has been criticised for some fundamental logical flaws (Miles, 1980). Three criticisms levelled by Miles (1980) are of particular significance. First, he argues that Cox’s theory conflated sociological and Marxist concepts of exploitation. Cox’s conclusion that black and white workers suffered similar exploitation under the capitalist ruling class was based on the Marxist notion of exploitation of surplus value. However, the exploitation coloured people suffered was racial, a stigma that never changed with change in social class. Second, Cox conceived the subordination of blacks as inferior race as proletarianisation of black labour. Yet, this ignores the fact that blacks were enslaved and owned as property, and did not freely sell their service nor were they voluntarily recruited for their labour. Besides, it is difficult to conceive blacks as a homogeneous proletariat class in as much as whites cannot be so considered (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978). Third, Miles notes that, by taking Cox’s concept of proletarianisation of black labour to the post-abolition phase, racial antagonism cannot just be considered political class conflict. In addition to being proletarianised, the racialisation of blacks provided the capitalists the opportunity to extract greater surplus value. This would ultimately result in the development of race consciousness that undercuts class-consciousness (Camfield, 2016). Miles’ critique highlights another contradiction in Cox’s theory, which establishes that racial prejudice is the creation of the ruling class for the exploitation of labour. Yet, the theory also noted that race prejudice can be reproduced as it becomes a social heritage, where groups in society— including workers—engage in its propagation without being conscious of how and why it originated. This contradicts Cox’s analysis, which does not permit the possibility of working class expressing race prejudice (Miles, 1980). Cox’s attribution of equal status to political class and ethnic system, and the subsequent theoretical inadequacy in connecting

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the two was one of the weaknesses identified in his theory. Miles (1980, p. 174) concludes his critique by noting Cox’s work as a pioneering attempt in theorising the relationship between political class and race relations; yet due to its fundamental contradictions, the theoretical relationship “between the capitalist class structure and racial categories” remains unresolved. Following up from this critique, Miles (1980) hints an alternative explanation where racial categories and political class are seen as evolving distinctly. For him, race category and political class are separate with distinct underlying social processes. While race as a social construct “presupposes the existence of a consciousness of physical difference”, class presupposes “the existence of a definite mode of production” (Miles, 1980, p. 185). One can cut across the other, but it does not distort or impede the other. Within the Western capitalist social formation, blacks have been regarded by the white majority, irrespective of class position, as deserving of second-class status. Hence, the continuous production of socioeconomic exclusion could be “potentially a motive for a political and ideological class alliance between the working class and the bourgeoisie” (Miles, 1980, p. 185). Racism, therefore, as a relation of the production process is closely intertwined with racism as an ideological system, and the two cannot be disconnected. Ultimately, race for Miles represents an ideological effect masking concrete economic relationships (Solomos & Back, 1995). Miles and Brown (2003) thus argue that racism should be seen as “a necessarily contradictory phenomenon rather than that it is functional to the mode of production” (p. 137), and class should be highlighted as one “dimension that interacts with racism in the production of inequalities” (p. 137). Racism and Social Systems The racism/capitalism thesis proposed by Cox and other Marxist scholars is just one explanation of the causes of racism. A number of scholars, among them Eugene Genovese, suggest alternative explanations, where slavery, rather than being the outcome of a capitalist mode of production, is itself seen as a deliberately conceived and established social order encompassing ideological, political, economic and psychological aspects of social life (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978). Rejecting the capitalist extraction of black labour hypothesis as inadequate, Genovese (1965/2014) argued that slavery was much more; other than being an institution that

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supported the plantation economy, it was an organised and integrated social system. It extruded a class of slaveholders with a special ideology and psychology and the political and economic power to impose their values on society as a whole. Slavery may have been immoral to the world at large, but to these men, notwithstanding their doubts and inner conflicts, it increasingly came to be seen as the very foundation of a proper social order and therefore as the essence of morality in human relationship. (Genovese, 1965/2014, pp. 7–8)

Drawing on Genovese’s holitic sysnthesis of the slave economy, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978, p. 127), note that the interaction between the complex historical experience that motivated the enslaving colonists and the emerging debates around the development of capitalist production were responsible for race relations within the New World. Race relations, in other words, emerged as an outcome of the institutional leverage of the enslavers, whose influence was critical on the pace of capitalist development. Thus in this sense, race relations appears to be “a complex determinate product of a multiplicity of forces” (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978, p. 127), including the socio-historical dynamics of the colonial community and the evolving production process. This alternative analysis of racism recognises the significance of the socio-historical context that legitimised the radically new race relations. However, Genovese’s Marxist theorisation of racism was criticised for its essentialism because of its focus on the ideology of the slaveholder community. Thus, both “Cox’s economism or Genovese’s voluntarism [slave-master relation], ultimately cohere in a common reductionism and essentialism” (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978, p. 129). Both approaches to race and class appear to ignore the notion that racism is independently constructed, and incorporates “its own contradictory determination” and “complex mode of theoretical and ideological production” (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978, p. 146), with consequences for the class struggle at the economy and state levels (Miles, 1980; Miles & Brown, 2003). One of the key problems in theorising and situating racism under a Marxist historical analysis in the context of capitalist mode of production, has to do with the continuous evolution of racism from crude biogenetic ideology to one incorporating cultural differences. As such, it is difficult to identify and attribute specific characteristics of an ideology of

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racism that are exclusive to the capitalist system. Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978) argue that “the complex, changing and at times contradictory nature of racial ideologies defy a straightforward reduction to certain forms of production relations” (p. 132). This posits a central question that Marxist scholars did not adequately address in their racism/capitalism thesis, namely that of establishing why racial categories inherently become the basis for conflictual relationship between capital, exploited labour and/or surplus labour (Solomos & Back, 1995). To state this differently, the key issue with Marxist analysis remains that the economy per se has no ground to establish an inherently racial basis for intergroup differentiation; thus Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978) suggest that the “racial dimension may only be superimposed from without” (p. 138). Noting the apparent difficulty of the racism/capitalism framework, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (1978) point to the inherent centralisation of capital within the capitalist system as a possible context for the emergence of racial antagonism. The perpetual accumulation that leads to centralisation of capital provides a basis for conflict within the capitalist relation. This can in turn provide a basis for the emergence of racial conflict, provided there is coincidence between the fractions of capital and racial categories. Consequently, racial prejudice results from the “competition between capitals in the course of their centralisation” (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978, p. 133). Racism, Nationalism and Capitalism As mentioned earlier, sociological theories conceive three distinct approaches to race: ethnicity-based, class-based and nation-based (Winant, 2000). The concept of nation has historically served as a discourse for collective identity formation. However, it is closely connected to the discourse of race, and the production of racism, particularly in Western capitalist societies. For example, the philosopher Étienne Balibar argues that there is a constant reciprocal relationship between nationalism and racism (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988). Both historically and in contemporary political discourse, racism has often presented itself in the form of nationalism. Thus, it is not difficult to see the ideological connection between the two, as they both embody the notion of biogenetic identity rooted in idealised national myth making (Hage, 1998; Seet, 2019).

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Balibar connects the origin of diverse forms of racism within the framework of social formation. He describes racism as manifesting in a “combination of practices, discourses and representations in a network of affective stereotypes” conferred on socially constructed “objects” or “subjects” that are distinguished from “a community of racists” (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988, p. 18). Racism as a social phenomenon evolves through the internal contradictions within capitalist societies, a fact apparent in the racist theories that support capitalism. For Balibar, “racist theories are indispensable in the formation of the racist community. There is in fact no racism without theory (theories)” (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988, p. 18). By race theories, Balibar is mainly referring to the pseudo-scientific theories of racism that intellectuals in Europe propagated and rationalised during the nineteenth century. Yet, he also notes that there has always existed “a racism which does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main driving force” (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988, p. 24), its prototype being anti-Semitism that goes back to European Enlightenment period. Racism of different varieties evolved from the myth of biological heredity to that focusing on insurmountable cultural differences (differential racism)—hence the designation new racism. Such evolution, according to Balibar, is only reflective of a repackaging of racism albeit with some form of camouflage: It may well be that the current variants of neo-racism are merely a transitional ideological formation, which is destined to develop towards discourses and social technologies in which aspects of historical recounting of genealogical myths … will give way to … psychological assessments … and optimal reproduction, … aptitudes and dispositions. (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988, p. 26)

Wallerstein and Cox reach almost similar conclusions about the origin of racism. Racism, according to Wallerstein is some kind of magic formula that through the ethnicisation of the workforce achieves a reduction in the cost of labour and the necessity of physical elimination of the unwanted races (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988). Reproducing Cox’s analysis, Wallerstein argues that capitalists create racism to maintain certain groups at the bottom of the occupational ladder. Racism and capitalism have a symbiotic relationship, given the exclusionary and anti-universalist nature of racism enables the capitalist system to perpetuate itself. This is made possible through the shrinkage of the rewards of the major segments of

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the workforce unjustifiable on the basis of merit (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1988). From a sociological perspective, Paul Gilroy (1987) provides a radically different analysis of race, nation and racism that connects racism and nationalism through the notion of cultural character distinct from a biogenetic orientation. For Gilroy et al. (2018), nationalism embodies a new form of racism to the extent that is “strongly cultural in character—so cultural, so different supposedly—from a biological racism that it could hold up its hands and plead that it wasn’t racism at all” (p. 182). In a critique of the relegation of race in British political economy, Gilroy (1987) revives the Marxist approach to race by adding a race formation component to previous theories of race and class. Such race formation is pervasive, and is displayed across social milieus ranging from the family to education institutions, to the nation state. Gilroy notes that national belonging and homogeneity inform the political discourse on race, blurring any sense of distinction between the nation and race. The notions of race and nation play out in new racism discourses of inclusion and exclusion. These represent rationalising discourses around which groups may legitimately belong in the imagined national community, and why certain groups may constitute outgroups who do not belong, and are thereby excluded (Gilroy, 1987). An inability to assimilate was considered by nationalists such as Enoch Powell as an adequate rationale for their exclusion from the British race (Gilroy, 1987). Thus, as Gilroy observes, British nationalist consciousness during the 1970s, invariably conceived the racialised Caribbean black and Asian as alien to the national character of the UK. One can see a parallel here between Gilroy’s analysis of the concept of national character and associated nationalist discourse in British politics and the Australian racially exclusionary discourse leading up to Federation.7 Today, amid serious global crises, racism, nationalism and capitalism are increasingly antagonising and challenging previous gains in civic and human rights, as well as the appeals of democratic participation (Paul, 2020). While the nation remains a dominant entity around which identities of imagined communities are formed, through everyday symbols, languages, and cultural representations, nationalism also remains an ideological force that consolidates groupist and exclusionary social identities

7 cf . Chapter 2 of this book, a discussion on Charles Henry Pearson’s book.

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(Edensor, 2020; Wimmer, 2002). Whether through the manifestation of xenophobia, patriotism, and militarism, discourse and practice of exclusion, or through idealised civilisation and cultural domination, racism and nationalism intertwine to create groups that are considered undeserving of inclusion. This continues to persist in the context of globalisation and international migration (Wodak & Reisigi, 1999: see Chapter 8 for detail). Ideology and Social Construction of Race In the book Racial Theories, Michael Banton (1998) discusses how the meaning of race has historically shifted in at least seven distinct conceptualisations. Race, according to Banton, has been framed in the US first as a designation to distinguish among diverse groups. Culturally, it was used as a lineage in genealogical texts. Controversially, nineteenth-century references of race as a type and subspecies of human beings assumed that humans could be classified into different breeds or stock sharing distinct traits. An entirely different racial classification emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century where race was conceived as a form of social status. The conceptualisation of race as class was a radical proposition of Marxist analysis that rejected people’s physiological or psychological taxonomy. Today, the notion of race as a social construct has gained more acceptance in social science. An analysis that conceives race as a product of the social construction of identity dominates contemporary theorisation of racism (Haney-Lopez, 1994). In this framework, race and class are seen as distinct social phenomena that operate in entirely distinct fashions (Fields, 1982; Miles, 1980). Fields argues that race should be seen for what it is, essentially as a ideological conception rather than a biological or physical reality (a thing ). Thus, for Fields, race is an “entirely socially and historically constructed as an ideology in a way that class is not” (Roediger, 1999, p. 7). The direct causality that class and racism are presumed to have is considered, according to many scholars, too simplistic (Miles & Brown, 2003). Thus, the scholarship on the nature and causes of racism, particularly since the 1980–1990s has diversified from the Marxist focus on race and class, and the neoclassical emphasis on the agentic rationalism. Many scholars now consider racism a complex concept, involving ideology, attitudes, behaviours, actions, policies, laws, and institutional practices (Bonilla-Silva & Baiocchi, 2001; see also introduction to this book for a detailed conceptualisation of racism).

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Politically, the post-War global environment had a critical impact on race and racial thinking and practice. In particular, the emergence of global political upheavals in the second half of the twentieth century had a significant role in shaping our understanding of race, racism and racial theorisation. Banton (1992), for example, considers how the concept of racism and its related but distinct variant racial discrimination, are ideological constructs that have been deployed with mixed political effects. Banton’s main focus was the utilisation of these concepts in producing consensus within the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Racism here “is usually assumed to be historically specific, something that originated in a particular time to rationalise an economic interest…. [It is] seen as an ideology which has given rise to a false consciousness” (Banton, 1992, p. 70). According to this argument, racism emerged and evolved in tandem with colonialism, and has therefore been exclusive to Western societies. Clearly, this analysis has largely been reflected in Cox and related scholars. Banton (1992) argues that the United Nations did not offer a clear definition of racism when the ICERD was ratified in 1965. This has led to the use and abuse of the word, sometimes serving as a powerful rhetoric for anti-colonialism in Africa, at other times creating discord in international relations (e.g. Israeli-Arab dispute), and inspiring claims and counter-claims of racism in the USA and Britain (Banton, 1992). Racial discrimination, according to Banton (1992) has been defined in legal documents such as ICERD with more precision than racism, and in turn has had considerable rhetorical power because of the legal backing. Moving away from the race/class discussions of Cox and other earlier Marxist authors, Banton (1992) notes that the ICERD and other legislations (e.g. UK Race Relations Act) have broadened the concept of racial discrimination by defining protected groups, including colour, descent, ethnic origin and national origin in addition to the unobservable category race. The addition of these categories to the concept of racial discrimination and later to the concept of racism, which has also been attached to culture, makes the argument that racism is entirely the creation of capitalism unconvincing. Yet, this by no means negates Cox’s conclusion, as it was based on a narrow definition of race and race prejudice. During the formulation of the ICERD, the United Nations located the causes of racism and racial discrimination in ideology and historical episodes (Banton, 1992). Racial doctrines, particularly of the Nazi type, lead to racist activities, which incite racist hatred; while colonialism

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resulted in segregation and discrimination. There is dispute among scholars regarding the temporal specificity of racism. Cox (1948/1959) and Puzzo (1964) locate the timeline to the Conquistador period. Some scholars (Allen, 1975; D’Souza, 1995) indicate racism appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, while others (van den Berghe, 1967) locate its emergence with post-Darwinian thought. Banton (1992) concurs with van den Berghe in locating the origin of racism in “attempts in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to account for biological variations among humans” (p. 78).8 For some scholars, the trajectory of racism in history, particularly since the Middle Ages, indicates why racism emerged as a historical accident through the interplay among political economic hegemony, ideology and pseudo-scientific thought in Western society (D’Souza, 1995). Racist ideologies have arguably sprung up with historical social Darwinian thoughts, yet there are also situations, where more discrimination has emerged as an outcome of “the association between skin colour and social class” that are distinct “from ideas of inherited inequalities” (Banton, 1992, p. 78). Typical examples for this is the role of skin colour in the social status of women of colour in the USA (Hunter, 2002), and the salience of skin colour stratification in Latin America (Villarreal, 2010). According to Banton, this indicates that racial discrimination can be produced in societies that are not attuned to particular period in history. He therefore argues that the answer to the question what causes racism? can be found in the socialisation of individuals in society rather than in specific periods or episodes. This argument holds that racial discrimination: does not have a geographical, historical and psychological origin, anymore than crime has such an origin. Racial discrimination can result from a variety of different causes; it can occur wherever people are distinguished by appearance or descent, and was practiced before the formulation of racist doctrines. (Banton, 1992, p. 79)

Based on this theoretical perspective, both individuals, groups, and institutions have a role in the production of racial discrimination. Before the creation of supportive ideology, racial categories can customarily 8 Indeed, there are also scholars who maintain that racism had its origins in classical antiquity, among Greeks and Romans (Eliav-Feldon et al., 2009).

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emerge as a social practice. Members of the society can then invariably participate in the continuation with or without supporting ideology. The crystallisation of social practices into ideologies may take place gradually, constantly framed and reframed to suit changing socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions. In this way, racism practice becomes normalised, and individuals can voluntarily practice discrimination “to express a prejudice, or unreflectingly in accordance with local custom, or involuntarily because someone has ordered it, or consciously so as to obtain an economic advantage, and so on” (Banton, 1992, p. 79). When discrimination is shared across groups with dominant political economic and cultural hegemony, the impact becomes consequential. A practice that began without supporting ideology may morph into one that has distinct norms and beliefs depending on the need for justification.

Beneficiaries of Racism It is logical for an inquiry into the causes of racism to consider an equally significant and fundamentally connected question: Who benefits from racism? Previous sections of this chapter have addressed the question in relation to the emergence of racism with the Atlantic Slave Trade. Racism during this period was produced and reproduced because it benefitted the slaveholder community (Genovese, 1965/2014). Through intergenerational transfer of resources, its perpetuation benefitted white-European descendants across many colonial societies. Therefore, it is beyond dispute that these dominant racial groups continue to gain from a system based on racial hierarchy, as do dominant groups in other non-Western and nonwhite societies, such as, for example, in Asia. Yet, scholars have different views about which section of the white-European population are the main beneficiaries. Both Cox (1948/1959) and Reich (1981) argue that the benefits of racism accrues to white capitalists while white and black workers stand to lose. For Miles (1980) and Roediger (1999), racism benefits the entire dominant racial group. Neoclassical economics on the other hand holds that racism ultimately hurts racist employers (Becker, 1971) while there is a diversity of views based on empirical studies (Arrow, 1971; Ashenfelter & Card, 2010).

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Capitalists as Beneficiaries Michael Reich (1978) posed a pointed question: “Who benefits from racism?” in an article contending that white capitalists stand to gain while black and white workers lose. This contradicts neoclassical models— particularly Becker, Krueger, Thurow’s—that predict racial discrimination ultimately hurts capitalists and benefits white workers (Reich, 1978). Other neoclassical models—such as Bergmann, Welch and Arrow’s— predict neutral effect or small gains for skilled white workers. Reich on the other hand contends the opposite to be the case. By exacerbating “racial antagonisms and divisions between black and white workers” (Reich, 1978, p. 525), racism causes division within the working class. As a result, the “collective strength of labor is weakened in its bargaining with capital over the wage rate and income shares. Capitalists gain and white workers lose, and the income differences between capitalists and white workers are increased” (Reich, 1978, p. 525). Based on this, the weakening of worker’s bargaining power and subsequent harm in their share of income occurs irrespective of how racial discrimination is created. Within the Marxist tradition, other scholars have developed alternative economic explanations of the causes of racism. Reich’s seminal book Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis is of particular significance, given its emphasis on market segmentation, bargaining power and subsequent racial inequality (Reich, 1981; Reich et al., 1973). In this rigorous critique of neoclassical theory of discrimination, Reich (1981) argues that racial discrimination primarily divides working class solidarity and reduces the bargaining power of the working class, thereby benefiting capitalists. Neoclassical theory, according to Reich, failed to take into consideration the significance of power and conflict as determinants of the distribution of income. From a class struggle perspective, he argues that discrimination is employers’ strategy of dividing the workforce, allowing them to reduce the bargaining power of the working class. In this framework, the capitalists’ profits are inversely related to the relative bargaining power of workers, the latter being an inverse function of racial inequality. Thus, Reich contends that it is in the interest of employers to pay premium wages to white workers, thereby creating racial inequality. Conversely, Reich emphasises that both white and black workers are better off when they have class solidarity. White workers in particular “have more to gain from overthrowing the monopsony”—the

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market system that produces racial inequalities—“than from supporting racial discrimination” (Reich, 1981, p. 213). Cox and Reich’s conclusion that the benefits of racism are reaped by capitalists at the expense of black and white workers may be economically plausible. Focusing entirely on the pecuniary distribution of gains in the labour market, the monopsonistic outcome would favour the capitalist. This is effected through weakening the bargaining power of the suppliers of labour. Yet, scholars have also argued that white workers may materially and psychologically benefit from racial solidarity with the white capitalist class (Miles, 1980; Roediger, 1999). Reich’s focus on the sole pecuniary remuneration in the labour market only partially explains the economic effects of racism. White workers’ perceived gains in social class could also lead to their support for racial discrimination. For example, this was historically the case during the Reconstruction era in the US, when most whites favoured black disenfranchisement because they feared that if whites split along economic lines blacks would hold the balance of power. It is ironic, therefore, that the rise of lower-class whites to power and political consciousness contributed to black disenfranchisement. (Wilson, 1976, p. 103)

As discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, white workers’ racism has a historical parallel in the Australian context. The labour union movement in the second half of the eighteenth century primarily organised to oppose non-white employment in mining and other sectors. Until Federation and beyond, Labor’s opposition to immigration was predicated on both economic and racial antagonism. Racism and White Privilege The question of who benefits from racism can be also examined from the theoretical lens of whiteness, which attaches inherent parallels between racism and the privilege of being white in Western societies (Roediger, 1999). In whiteness scholarship, racism is defined in terms of privilege, and is conceived to encompass “economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 56). As an ideology, “whiteness

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is used to maintain unearned privilege through the structure of institutional racism” (Better, 2008, p. 16). There is a bidirectional feedback between whiteness and institutional racism where whiteness capitalises on institutional racism to generate unearned advantage while the perpetuation of institutional racism is sustained by whiteness. As Henricks (2016) has argued, the institutional framework “related racism to protecting a group’s social, political, economic, cultural, symbolic, and psychological position as much as [to] explicit ideas of bigotry endorsed by individuals” (p. 1). While the meaning of the concept of “whiteness”, particularly outside the US context, is being debated in the literature (Garner, 2007; Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2004), it can still shed light on how dominant racial groups—whites in the case of European colonist societies—continue to benefit from systemic racism in the form of cumulative privileges. Racism as a system of oppression is intrinsically linked to privilege; it disadvantages minority racial groups and fundamentally results in some groups (e.g. whites) systematically accruing unearned advantage. Such privileges are not just contemporary facts, accruing from hard work or personal/group investments per se. In North America and the UK, to a large extent they are historically acquired as legacies of slavery, and have accumulated as unearned wealth over centuries (Oliver et al., 2006).9 The wealth from slave labour and associated black poverty were the basis of current inequalities, showing a direct link between slavery and modern racial inequities (Fredrickson, 1989). The abolition of slavery has affected the flow of new unearned income, but it did not compensate freed slaves, nor did it cause white slave masters to relinquish their unearned wealth. The repercussions of such historical exploitation, and the embeddedness of racial hierarchy had generational implications, as reflected in the persistent racial economic disparities (Oliver et al., 2006). Thus, in Western social contexts at least, we cannot adequately understand racism without considering white privilege. Racism was institutionalised and maintained through conquest, colonialism, slavery, and segregation (Du Bois, 1903/2015). Its legacy is maintained through the default sociocultural hegemony of whiteness. As articulated throughout this chapter, racism is not just about ideological racial symbols and identity construction, but it essentially incorporates the production, expansion 9 Unearned wealth refers to wealth that people accumulate both without having worked for it and by benefit from injustices such as slavery, crime, etc.

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and maintenance of white privilege and power (Feagin, 2004; Miles, 2004). Thus, sociological inquiry into the identification and analysis of the white privilege and power has considerably grown over the last few decades (Nevill et al., 2001). Coined by the critical whiteness scholar Peggy McIntosh in 1987, the concept of “white privilege” connotes “an invisible package of unearned assets” that a white person counts on cashing every day of which they are “‘meant’ to remain oblivious” (McIntosh, 2007, p. 377). Wellman (1993) argues that the racial hierarchy into which modern Western society is organised effectively serves its purpose—the maintenance of privilege and power. This concurs with theories that view racism as a “rational response to struggles over scarce resources” (p. 54). According to Wellman (1993), only an understanding of racism as a culturally sanctioned phenomena allows us to “account for its widespread character and avoid the inconsistencies and meaningless distinctions that arise when it is viewed as prejudice” (p. 54). This approach holds to the notion that a complex web of socioeconomic and structural interconnections can explain the persistence of white racism. For Wellman, racial stratification, like class division, is an integral part of the Western social structure. It is not just a legacy of the past, but also a critical component of how modern Western society is organised. Racism in this context is a carefully constructed structural relationship premised on racial subordination. In a US context, The subordination of people of color is functional to the operation of American society as we know it and the color of one’s skin is a primary determinant of a person’s position in the social structure. (Wellman, 1993, p. 55)

Wellman argues that prejudice towards blacks is secondary to the racial dynamics, and thus is not a critical determining factor in the racial relationship. Rather, it is the superior ideological and structural position that whites and their institutions enjoy that maintains and reproduces the prevailing racial inequality. Like Cox, Wellman puts strong emphasis on the dialectics between the practical production of racial inequality and the racism that is created as a justification. In a society organised on the basis of race, competition over resources between racial groups can be understood as a zero-sum game. Since one racial group’s gains become the dominant racial group’s loss, it becomes rational for white people in the

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West to have strong interest in the maintenance of the prevailing racial order. From this vantage point, racism can be seen to systematically provide economic, political, psychological, and social advantages for whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color. In Blaunter’s terms, racism generates unfair advantage, or privilege, to whites. (Wellman, 1993, p. 56)

The economic and structural justifications of racism are therefore to some extent rational and grounded on tangible material conditions with historical validity, and resonate with the contemporary thinking of race ideologues. Wellman (1993) argues that these justifications cannot be dismissed as manufactured reasons, misperceptions or psychological defensive mechanisms. They can be understood as ideological defences of white privilege within the context of a structure of racial inequality. Since racial inequality, unlike other forms of inequality, directly contradicts the ideals espoused in Western society, posing a visible dilemma (Myrdal, 1944/1996), it needs justification. According to Wellman (1993), this kind of inequality is an ascribed inequality, and its justification constitutes the heart of racist thinking —a dynamic thought process that adapts to changing context and circumstances. This racist thinking is able to accommodate new realities such as the assertiveness of racial subordinates or changing socio-political and economic forces that shake the social positions of subordinate groups (Wellman, 1993). To understand how white racism operates as an ideology for the defence of the privilege white people have in the society, Wellman (1993) poses a series of pointed questions that can be empirically examined: (1) Do white people recognize the existence of racial inequality? (2) If they do, how do they cope with it? How do they explain it? (3) How do they deal with challenges to the racial order? Do the ways in which they handle challenges indicate any consciousness of interests or privileges in the system of racial stratification? In other words, what, if anything, do their explanations of the situation defend? Finally, it is crucial to know (4) if and how they justify their racial interests. The last question gets to the heart of racist thinking in the current period of American race relations. (pp. 61–62)

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Wellman’s thesis is shared by more recent critical race scholars as can be seen in the works of Better (2008), Baradaran (2017) and Lipsitz (2006). For example, Better (2008) argues that the “use of race is thinly disguised rationale for economic exploitation” (p. 5). By falsely establishing the biological superiority of fair skin over dark skin, race offered a justification for the institution of colonialism, slavery and associated land acquisition. According to Better (2008) race as a construct. provided a “scientific” justification for the exploitation of inhabitants of conquered countries by using skin coloring and other physical attributes as a method for supporting white skin domination. Racism is a Western invention coming out of a need to explain the huge gap in power, wealth, and influence of European countries over the rest of the world. (p. 5)

Thus, in Better’s view, “the central reason for institutional racism is the desire for economic advantage. Negative attitudes and feelings are viewed as a by-product of the original need to justify the economic exploitation” (Better, 2008, p. 12). The perpetuation of the unearned advantage through institutions constitutes the main ingredient of systemic white privilege. Lipsitz (2006) observes in contemporary racialised contexts—particularly in US society—an enduring creation and recreation of what he calls possessive investment in whiteness. This possessive investment is created for the privilefe of European Americans through “[c]onscious and deliberate actions [that] have institutionalized group identity in the United States, not just through the dissemination of cultural stories but also through systematic efforts from colonial times to the present” (Lipsitz, 2006, p. 371). While whites have already secured these longstanding privileges, the structure also socialises and encourages them to invest invariably in whiteness and its maintenance as it perpetuates the provision of resources, power and opportunity (Lipsitz, 2006). According to Lipsitz, whiteness, as a social investment, has cash value, with privileges permeating the entire structure of society. Whiteness, writes Lipsitz (2006), accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the relatives

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and friends of those who have profited most from present and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. (p. vii)

Although the majority of discussion of whiteness and the privilege associated with it incorporates the US experience, its underlying premise is equally applicable to other Western contexts.10 In the same way that slavery exploited black slaves, causing enduring inequities, colonialism exploited the colonised people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and created a large chasm between the developed and the developing world. Particularly, the notion of white privilege and its contrast with racial minority disadvantage is clearly visible in the structural racial inequality in Britain, Apartheid South Africa, and the settler colonial societies of Canada and Australia. Scholars (Levine-Rasky, 2012; Salter, 2013) have shown that whiteness can be seen as having both universal and specific dimensions, in terms of its pervasiveness and local specificity, respectively. For example, across Western societies, the perpetuation of institutionalised racism through ghettoisation, reservations, and the segregation of black people or Indigenous people that has been described in the literature as internal colonialism reflects its commonality (Blauner, 1969; Short, 2005; Stone, 1979). However, the privileges of whiteness are contextually different in Australia, for example, with its small Indigenous population, compared to the US with its significant black population (see Moreton-Robinson, 2004). Racism and Power We have discussed at length the argument that racism exists as an ideological premise to protect certain economic interests (Darity et al., 2015). At its core, racism also presents itself as a system of domination strongly reflecting pervasive imbalance of cultural and political power (Collins, 2006). As such, it is difficult to imagine racial hierarchy without consideration of this power dimension. Without underlying social power, prejudice alone cannot meaningfully produce consequential racial inequalities (Wilson, 1976). Hence, scholars have often understood racism as 10 Some scholars (e.g., Garner, 2007; Gilroy, 1987) resist the American hegemony of racism theorizations, and caution against the imposition of US-based concepts such as the concept of “whiteness” in non-US context.

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incorporating both prejudice and social power (Operario & Fiske, 1998). Indeed, the power dimension recognises racism as an underlying system perpetuated for the benefit of white people in Western countries and therefore as one aspect of the white privilege that we have discussed earlier in this section. Racial power and the notion of racism as a system of oppression over people of racial minorities has its roots in the Atlantic slave trade (Leonard, 2003). Without this power dimension, racism is not conceivable in history or in contemporary societies. Cox (1948/1959) notes that, for its effectual realisation, “race prejudice must be actually backed up by a show of racial excellence, secured finally by military might” (p. 347). Thus, racism in effect mixes both action (often through the application of violence or its threat) and ideology. This nexus between racial ideology and power has manifested historically, in the expansionary colonial conquests that enabled European powers to dominate and subjugate the colonised societies of five continents. Across the histories of Africa and the settler colonist societies of North America and Oceania, the hegemonic aspect of racism was at play against black and Indigenous Peoples as the most oppressed groups. Indeed, the pattern of domination—including colonisation, dispossession, and exclusion—were not enacted in the same way across countries. Yet, all displayed power and various forms of racial oppression, with varying degrees of ideological justification (Hartwig, 1972). Often, these ideologies seek to justify: The projects that brought racism to ideological fruition and with it the independent capacity to shape the societies and polities of the United States and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were organized efforts to reverse or limit the emancipation of blacks in the former country and of Jews in the latter. (Fredrickson, 2002, p. 75)

While much of the history of colonialism and segregation had violence and dehumanisation as strategies (Fanon et al., 1963), the power dimension of racism may not always be enacted in overt conflict or violence (Wilson, 1976). Racial domination can also be subtle, not always requiring the display of brute force, and its perpetuation often predicated on the dominant group’s ability to enforce laws, norms and practices that sustain its interests (Lipsitz, 2006). The creation and perpetuation of racial inequities, in this context are effected through embedded institutional and social structures (although often backed by a monopoly on

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violence, force and coercion). Ture and Hamilton (1967/2011) understood this institutional nature of racism as a system of power established for the perpetual oppression of black people. This was evident during the American Civil Rights era when black leaders saw the problem of institutional racism as the main obstacle against the integration of blacks. Hence, many black—particularly the Black Power Movement— leaders were convinced that the solution lay in black people’s ability to control economic and political power. However, half a century later, in the post-Obama era, racial stratification and racial power differential in the US—and arguably across the West—remains widespread (Kinder & Dale-Riddle, 2012).11 Welsing (1974) provides a slightly different conceptualisation of the power dimension of racism, where racism is viewed as a survival strategy for white people in an otherwise non-white majority world. This reflex reaction conceptualised as the: Color Confrontation Theory postulates that whites are also vulnerable to their sense of numerical inadequacy. The behavioral manifestations or expressions of their sense of this inadequacy in their numbers become apparent in the drive or need to divide the massive majority of “nonwhites” into fractional as well as frictional minorities. (Welsing, 1974, p. 38)

This numerical inadequacy thesis is a rallying racial-political trope among those holding White supremacist views. One can see a clear parallel to this in the anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic aggression and rhetoric of contemporary global far-right movements (Blee & Creasap, 2010; Jung et al., 2011). An inference of potential powerlessness provides these racist communities a strategic group solidarity, tipping them against any perceived outgroup. The power dynamics of their racist agenda emerges from their pre-emptive strategy to capitalise on resurgent populism and collective grievances emerging with the decline of Western industrial capitalism.12 Furthermore, the notion of racism as a strategic response to maintain white privilege and power, works both in actions/practices as well as defensive avoidance. The concept of white fragility, which was 11 See Chapter 2 for a detailed treatment of institutional racism. 12 Far-right nationalism and contemporary racism are discussed further in Chapter 9.

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conceptualised by DiAngelo (2011) articulates this unique psychological phenomenon. DiAngelo (2011) conceptualises white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress became intolerable, triggering a range of defence moves” (p. 57). It is explained as part of the denialist aspect of racism, with the ultimate objective of suppressing guilt and accountability while enjoying unearned privilege (DiAngelo, 2011; Roediger, 1999). Racism within this framework creates a cushioning “social environment that protects and insulates … from racebased stress” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 55). Particularly in North America, argues DiAngelo (2011), racism benefits whites as a racial group while disadvantaging people of colour: Racism is not fluid in the U.S., it does not flow back and forth, one day benefiting whites and another day (or even era) benefiting people of color. The direction of power between whites and people of color is historic, traditional, normalized, and deeply embedded in the fabric of U.S. society. (p. 56).

The power dynamics effected by racism works both at the national level and discursively serves to maintain solidarity at the global scale. We will return to this in more detail in Chapter 9. But for now, we quickly note that racism remains a potent organising principle as the recent surge of race solidarity that has galvanised racist movements has shown us in ways that would be unthinkable three decades ago. Some scholars conceive race as an instrument of power applied to control and manage human differences. According to Lentin (2019), the ultimate goal of the instrument of race is maintenance of White supremacy at a global level (see also Jung et al., 2011). This view to some extent aligns with the global Apartheid thesis proposed by Gernot Kohler in the 1970s to describe the postcolonial global order underpinned by the Global North’s domination of the Global South (Kohler, 1982).

Causes of Racism in Australia In Chapter 2, we have detailed the evolution of race relations within Australian society. The historical survey detailed how the continuous colonial expansion and encroachment of British colonists into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander territories became a source of constant

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racial violence and massacres. While we can understand this settler colonial violence as predicated on local sociocultural factors, it can also be understood within the context of the global capitalist expansion predicated on economic factors. A similar proposition was made, for example, in McMichael’s analysis of settler colonial agrarian history. “The development of colonial Australia”, writes McMichael (2004, pp. xi–xii), was a constituent part of “the world-capitalist economy”, with settlements expanding in a “contradictory process of the expansion of the British state and capitalism”. While this contradiction was visible in the inherent inequality within groups of colonists, across time the contradiction would assume racial dynamics as European settlement expanded into the hinterland and as Australia attracted multi-ethnic immigration. Evidently, since Africa, Asia and North America provided ample material for Britain’s economic needs, the newly discovered continent of Australia was not sought, at least at first, for its economic potential. Rather, the security needs of the British Crown took priority over economic interests, until the colonists’ discovered that the continent was an economic breadbasket (MacIntyre, 2004). Thus, it was after British colonisation that economic factors began to take root. And this was mainly related to land. As the colonists began to realise the need for grazing ground for commercial livestock, this increased demand for more land led to further expansion of the colonies into the interior. The problem was that the continent had native inhabitants whose livelihood depended on large hunting grounds. This incompatible land use led to inevitable competition and frequent conflicts (MacIntyre, 2004). As McMichael (2004) observes, at least two economic factors can be identified as the main drivers of colonial territorial expansion within Australia. One was the economic interest of the colonists themselves, and another was the Crown’s economic and political interests in its colonial project (Genger, 2018). However, as the human toll of the colonial expansion grew, and with news of the frontier violence reaching the public, the need for justification arose (MacIntyre, 2004). Hartwig (1972) argues that this racist justification was an integral part of the colonial project. Thus: The need to rationalize dispossession and exploitation of Aborigines (especially the former, and the use of force and the devastating effects on Aboriginal society that settlement entailed) has obviously been felt in Australia from the outset. (p. 12)

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Racism thus emerged as an outcome of this necessity for ideological justification of violent dispossession and exploitation. The perceived notion of Indigenous Australians as savage, primitive and racial inferiors offered an explanation that was palatable to the then British political elite. For the colonist participating in the process of dispossession, it was psychologically desirable, at the very least, to persuade himself that Aborigines were inferior, being pests and nuisance who deserved their fate. (Hartwig, 1972, p. 12)

Racism in Australia, therefore, has settler colonial expansion and its ideological defence as its root causes (Ardill, 2009). The idea that whites are superior, more civilised, and better equipped to cultivate and maintain the land than the natives, and that Indigenous Peoples lacked the desire and capacity to develop/civilise, along with Biblical and pseudo-scientific theorising constituted the socio-biological narrative for justifying dispossession. However, this provides only part of the causes of racism in Australia more broadly, which have also consistently focused on perceived nationalist threats from non-whites, especially from Asia in which Australia is arguably situated (see Paul, 2020). In a selfcontradictory narrative, white colonists used civilisation as a rationale for colonisation while preventing other civilised groups from entry to Australia. Indeed, the causes of racism in Australia could hardly be different to that of racism in other Western societies. As we discussed above, the question about the root cause of racism has stimulated considerable philosophical and practical inquiry for centuries. Equally, a question that received significant attention is whether race and racial disparities can be considered endo- or exogenous within a capitalist economic system. Yet, despite the recognition of racism, few have attempted to explain why racism happens in the first place. What is the underlying reason for racism? In the literature, various scholars have proposed potential unified theories of racism that aimed at explaining racism as a system of inequality. These range from Marxist notions of race, nation and class, to socio-biological notions of race, heredity, and human difference, to psychological theories of prejudice, power and tribalism. In some ways, racial ideology may mirror a reflection of the basic human urge to protect self (economics) and group (sociology) interests within certain social configurations. This may be characterised by the

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potential for wealth, property and privilege to accumulate intergenerationally; significant population densities that enable social stratification; and globalised migration, sometimes forced, which result in racially diverse societies, now, often characterised by super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007). Within this social hierarchy, some groups are perceived ingroups while others are not. In this racial context, the basis for group membership is the race construct. While racial ideologues (such as White supremacism) overtly display this racial ideology, the subtle—or those who consider themselves colour-blind—do not need to display their racial ideology. They can consciously or unconsciously participate in favouring certain racial groups, electing racist individuals/groups into power and discriminating against racial minorities. This chapter has discussed how racial hierarchies and discourses around them serve particular dominant racial groups both in Australia and globally. It looked at particular groups who are considered beneficiaries of continued racial hierarchies, largely Whites but also other ethnic groups in power in various national contexts around the world. Indeed, racism does not essentially originate in a particular space and time, nor does it depend on certain innate psychological conditions. Like crime, it can occur anywhere under conditions where people are stratified by physical appearance or ancestral backgrounds. Prior racist doctrines need not exist for racism to occur. Looking at the history of racism, it cannot be seen as an accidental or unintentional aberration. Across settler colonial societies, colonisation and the displacement of native populations were enacted through racist acts and their justifications. In North America, its emergence was rooted in the strategic institution of slavery, and was later defended vigorously to preserve the interests of Southern slave-owners. Elsewhere, similar interests necessitated the maintenance of racism. In South Africa, the system of Apartheid protected the interests of White people; in Australia, the colonial laws that dispossessed Indigenous people protected the interests of European settlers and the British Empire. All of these depict why and how racism occurred across various societies, hinting at the causes of racism in economic, social and cultural factors intersecting in complex and nuanced processes.

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CHAPTER 5

Contemporary Racism in Australia

Racism Today1 In the last two decades, numerous studies have documented widespread racism—experiences and attitudes—in Australia, with prevalence across settings ranging from 9 to 34% in nationally representative studies (Blair et al., 2017; Dunn & Nelson, 2011; Dunn et al., 2004, 2007; Forrest et al., 2020; Markus, 2014, 2019).2 Racism remains an enduring phenomenon within society, frequently emerging as a source of heated political and ideological debates. This chapter discusses racist attitudes and experiences of racism within the Australian context, presenting findings from empirical analyses of racism across the country. The findings are based on repeated cross-sectional data, compiled between 2001 and 2011, by Western Sydney University (Dunn, 2012). We extend the discussion with a review of more recent research findings to map the state of racism in contemporary Australian society.

1 Part of this chapter has been previously published in a peer-reviewed article (Habtegiorgis et al., 2014). 2 This range excludes cyber-racism. Some studies indicate higher levels of racism occurring in social media such as Facebook. For example, Jakubowicz et al. (2017) report that 35% of Australians in a national survey (in 2013) witnessed cyber-racism, with 4.8% of them experiencing it as direct targets.

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The chapter also attempts to resolve actual or perceived gaps between research evidence on racism and race relations and the ongoing narrative that informs public policy in Australia. A commonly held view in Australia, and one that has some validity, is the notion that the majority of Australians oppose racism (Markus, 2019). Yet, Australians have a very specific view of what constitutes racism and, tied to such conceptualisation, generally reject the notion that they themselves may be racist. This assertion is usually supported with the claim that there are no state sanctioned laws that discriminate against racial minorities and that overtly racist violence—like the 2005 Cronulla Riots—is absent or very rare. The claim rests on the notion that the only type of racism is overt racism.3 In this popular understanding, no consideration is given to the adverse impacts of racism on racial/ethnic minorities (Priest et al., 2016; Walton et al., 2013). However, research widely indicates that new forms of racism prevail today that are unwitting and covert (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Research also indicates significant levels of racism in schools, with young people from minority racial backgrounds facing increasing exposure to unfair discrimination within the school system (Priest et al., 2019). The insidious nature of these new racisms is that their deleterious impacts require no legal codes or blatant racist policies. Globally, the salience of racism varies, depending on the respective social, economic and political issues of each country or region concerned. In Europe, the revival of far-right racist ideologies, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism parallels a growing influence of populism and anti-immigration sentiments. This could be interpreted as a sign that old racism remains relevant in a context of rampant new racism. Likewise, we see anti-immigration sentiments and White supremacism gaining ground in the US, particularly in an age of populism, while ongoing police brutality against African Americans is stirring a growing debate about institutional racism. In other settler colonial societies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, while longstanding racism against Indigenous people remain significant, anti-immigrant racism has been part of ongoing racism debates. For example, in contemporary Australia, blatant and overt forms of old racism are prevalent alongside new forms of racism (Seet & Paradies, 2018). Racism in non-Western societies (e.g. Brazil, South 3 Jones et al. (2016) define overt racism as “explicitly negative demeanor and/or treatment enacted toward social minorities on the basis of their minority status membership that are necessarily conscious” (p. 4).

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Africa, India and China) is no less significant, particularly in the current context of resurgent nationalism. Some of this is discussed in Chapter 9, while the current chapter focuses on a Western context because of obvious cultural proximity to Australia. New racism takes the form of denial of Indigenous disadvantage; strong anti-Muslim sentiments; and stereotypic views of Asian, South Sudanese and other CALD migrants. Another major issue in Australia’s problem with racism is Indigenous Peoples’ overpolicing, hyper-incarceration (Anthony & Blagg, 2020) and deaths in custody (Cunneen, 2006; Williams, 2001). Scholars have pointed to at least two views surrounding contemporary racism discourse in Australia (Augoustinos & Every, 2007; Mapedzahama & Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017). One is what has been dubbed the silencing racism discourse, a discourse that attempts to diminish the occurrence of racism in Australia but cautions against overemphasising claims of racism. At the extreme, this discourse approaches a denial that racism remains an issue of concern in Australian society (Dunn & Nelson, 2011). Another discourse draws attention to Australia’s troubled historical past, reminding us that it is a racialised space, with the legacy of racist colonial policies still causing damage, particularly for Indigenous Peoples. This discourse points to Australia’s dominant social and institutional structures in demonstrating how it characteristically remains a white space, embellished with multicultural images (Hage, 2012). Racism in such context is depicted as an inherent feature built within the state system rather than an anomaly out of tune with the national narrative. Yet, much of the research indicates that the discourse that portrays Australia as a country of enviable social cohesion unlike the toxic race relations in other Western countries tends to dominate (Augoustinos & Every, 2007; Dunn & Nelson, 2011). It is difficult to evaluate how Australia fares in terms of racism relative to other countries in the absence of benchmark data for global comparison. Indeed, the World Values Survey provides some international comparison. However, its use of a single question that does not account for cultural variation and historical contexts limits its applicability for a robust racism research (Elias & Mansouri, 2020).4 Despite these limitations, there is ample national data to show the trend of racism within Australian society. This chapter takes into account the above two parallel narratives in explaining the contemporary manifestation of racism in Australia. We do 4 The question for racism in World Values Survey is: “Could you please mention any that you would not like to have as neighbors? [Q19: People of a different race].”

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so by asking two research questions. The first question focuses on the prevalence of racism: “What is the state of race relations and the prevalence of racism in the country today?” We discuss in detail how five years before and after the Cronulla Riots of 2005, nearly one in five Australians have experienced racial discrimination annually (Dunn, 2012). Second, we discuss how this heightened level of racism relates to expressions of Anglo-Celtic racism, and examine specific aspects of racism in light of key contributing factors. In other words, we ask the question: “What can explain the recent heightened levels of racism reported in some national surveys?” We also contextualise this in relation to implemented anti-racism strategies. The chapter details a novel examination of the association between perpetrator attitudes (as a proxy of perpetrator behaviour) and target experiences of racism. We also report on the influence of various racist beliefs on the propensity of specific groups to experience racism.

Measuring Racism Before detailing the findings, we would like to point out that there is no single way to define or measure racism. As we have alluded in the introductory chapter, defining racism has been a key challenge for social scientists. This has been particularly the case after the landmark victories of the civil rights struggles that saw the widespread rejection of so-called old-fashioned racism. If racism is no longer as clear as it was in the Jim Crow era, under Apartheid, or during the White Australia Policy, how can we measure it today? What does contemporary racism look like? To what extent can we confidently conclude what is racism and what is not? These questions have been the subject of considerable research across North America, Europe and Australia, and still stimulate a substantial body of research each year. Research indicates that we can measure racism in a variety of ways (see for example: Atkins, 2014; Barkan, 2018; Grollman & Hagiwara, 2017, 2019; Krieger, 2020; Lewis et al., 2015; Williams, 2016; Yoo & Pituc, 2013). One approach of measuring the prevalence of racism in a society is by focusing on those groups who have the social power to perpetrate racism. Racism in this case can be measured as a list of thoughts, perceptions, beliefs and stereotypes; a list of enacted behaviours; salience in words, epithets and symbols (e.g. signs, flags, and gestures); salience in text, conversations and (social) media discourse (Yoo & Pituc,

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2013). The second approach is to focus on groups that are the potential targets of racist expressions and behaviours. Racism here is measured as the frequency of racist episodes, a list of settings where racism occurs, the perceptions of minority group members, and the extent of internalisation of racist stereotypes or beliefs (James, 2020; Reihl et al., 2015; Williams, 2016). A third approach focuses on the salience of racism in institutions. This approach assesses racism as a set of discriminatory laws, regulations, and institutional structures; an enactment of racist and discriminatory practices; or a systemic pattern of racial disparities across outcomes (Better, 2008; Henricks, 2016). These three distinct approaches have been widely applied in racism research, with a substantial body of work documenting the pervasiveness of racism across Western countries. In this chapter, we mainly focus on the first two interpersonal aspects of racism, particularly racism as the attitudes of the perpetrators and racism as the experiences of the targets. By connecting these two, we show how racist attitudes in society can have an impact on the wellbeing of minority groups (cf. Mansouri et al., 2009). Racism as an Attitude Racism is a problem of dominance and oppression. This assertion points to its underlying beliefs, ideologies, behaviours and practices that perpetuate injustice and oppression against racial minorities (Paradies, 2006, 2016; Teel, 2010). In this sense, racism is expressed as a negative attitude of dominant racial groups (often, but not always, white people) against specific racial, ethnic and cultural groups. Such attitudes usually manifest in discriminatory practices, behaviours and systems resulting in unfair inequities. The beliefs that underlie racist attitudes are constituted from group-focused antipathies, preferences for cultural homogeneity, false beliefs and stereotypes, and convictions regarding racial or cultural hierarchies. The latter includes racial supremacism, which has a hold on a proportion of the population in countries like Australia (Dunn et al., 2004; Peucker & Smith, 2019), and may be associated with more overt behaviours—i.e. with more racist acts and experiences. This belief sometimes results in a higher level of racism against some groups compared to others. For example, racism is more prevalent against Indigenous Peoples and those who are more visibly distinct from culturally privileged groups. The persistent racism towards black Sub-Saharan African migrants is a clear indicator of such racist attitudes.

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Based on the theoretical conceptions of racism as an overt or a covert expression of attitudes, which as detailed above is one of several ways to conceptualise racism, researchers have developed numerous measures of racism. As noted in the introductory chapter of this book, racism has been depicted in a range of conceptualisations. For example, oldfashioned racism is commonly understood as the most overt form of racism, invariably expressed in attitudes of White supremacism, segregation and animosity towards racial minorities (McConahay, 1986). Over the last fifty years, less overt forms of racism have been identified as prevalent, particularly in Western societies. Among the most notable conceptualisations to date are symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981), modern racism (McConahay, 1983), ambivalent racism (Katz, 1981), aversive racism (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004), laissez-faire racism (Bobo & Zubrinsky, 1996), institutional racism (Hamilton & Ture, 1967/2011), and everyday racism (Essed, 1991). Each of these constructs details specific characteristics of privileged group members’ attitudes and behaviours towards racial or ethnic outgroups. For example, symbolic racism, according to Sears and Henry (2003), is “a coherent political belief system whose content embodies” (pp. 259–260) the denial of the continued prevalence of racial discrimination, blaming blacks for their experiences of disadvantage, and claims that blacks make too many demands and that they are getting more than their fair share. Ambivalent racism (Katz, 1981) holds that some whites can harbour hostile attitudes towards blacks while at the same time being pro-black. This is somewhat related to aversive racism, which is also characterised by inconsistent behaviour seen in racial attitudes of white people endorsing egalitarian values and regarding themselves as unprejudiced, yet subtly discriminating in rationalisable ways (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004). Some authors have adapted a few of the above-mentioned racism measures for use in Australia (Pedersen et al., 2004; Walker, 2001; White & Gleitzman, 2006). One study has developed a new scale unique to the Australian context (Grigg & Manderson, 2016). Yet, most studies of racist attitudes focus on attitudes towards specific communities, and are therefore limited in terms of generalisability for the wider Australian society. The data used in this chapter has advantages in terms of both sampling representativeness and item specificity to Australian racial discourse.

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Racism as an Experience Racism takes a significant psychological and emotional toll on racial minorities. Thus, empirical analysis of racism cannot be complete without a consideration of their experiences. In the literature, experience of discrimination has been conceptualised variously including as lived and perceived experiences. Irrespective of whether or not they harbour prejudicial attitudes themselves, the racism that racial minorities are exposed to is likely to deeply affect their wellbeing, as many studies have shown (James, 2020; Krieger et al., 2011; Paradies et al., 2015; Mansouri et al., 2009). Like racist attitudes, measuring experiences of racism is complex for a variety of reasons. First, racial minorities in different societies are exposed to diverse sociocultural issues, histories and circumstances. Their exposures to these diverse contexts usually shape their lived experiences and the way they understand such experiences. This has been conceptualised in the literature in terms of intersectionality, which highlights the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, gender and class when they are invoked to explain the discrimination, oppression and marginalisation of certain individuals and groups (Crenshaw, 1991). Second, racial demographic compositions in different countries vary. This can affect both the saliency and significance of race-related issues as well as who constitute majority and minority groups. For these and other reasons, measuring racism as an experience can be complex and difficult to evaluate within and across countries. In addition, the prevalence of racism can vary depending on how it is measured. Assessments based on self-report, field-experiment, implicit assessment or observed disparities can yield different results. Likewise, a measure of racism can vary depending on whether an actual or a perceived experience is being measured. Both actual occurrence and perception matter. When racism happens, it may or may not be perceived. However, in a society where racism is salient, it can still be perceived whether (or not) it actually occurred as an episode or event. The effect of such perceived racism is no less harmful than the actual event occurring (Pieterse et al., 2012). Despite these challenges of measurement, researchers across countries have developed dozens of scales to examine the prevalence of racist experiences (Atkins, 2014; Bastos et al., 2010; Kressin et al., 2008). Some

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of the most widely used measures include the: Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS, Williams et al., 1997), Experiences of Discrimination (EOD, Krieger et al., 2005), Perceived Racism Scale (PRS, McNeilly et al., 1996), Racism and Life Experience Scales (RaLES, Harrell, 2000), Perceived Ethnic Discrimination Questionnaire (PEDQ, Contrada et al., 2001), and Schedule of Racist Events (SRE, Landrine & Klonoff, 1996). While each of these scales measures experiences of racism among specific samples, they are unique in the number of questions asked, how they are framed, the response options provided and the intensity and duration of exposure assessed. For example, the EDS has nine items asking general questions with six frequency response options. It provides reason of discrimination (e.g. race, gender and age) as a follow-up question. Likewise, the EOD asks a question with nine items, but provides dichotomous yes/no options. Those responding in the affirmative are provided three-point frequency response options. The EDS focuses on the type of discriminatory experiences while the EOD focuses more on the settings where racism is experienced over a given period. Other scales have distinct features of their own depending on their underlying theory, research focus, and sample characteristics (Bastos et al., 2010). In general, more than half of racism scales (19/34 in one review) have been psychometrically validated for diverse samples, and had Cronbach’s Alpha ≥ 70 (Kressin et al., 2008). While nearly all of the scales originated in the US, the majority of the study samples were of African Americans. Other population groups including Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans were also included in 17 of these studies. Health was the main outcome of study assessed in connection with the perception of racism, with numerous studies showing experiences of high levels of racism, particularly among African American, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. In Australia, few racism measures have been developed to date (Grigg & Manderson, 2016). The only psychometrically validated measures are the: Measure of Indigenous Racism Experiences (MIRE), which was developed by Paradies and Cunningham (2008, 2009); Perceived Discrimination and Multiculturation scale, by Bodkin-Andrews et al. (2010); and Racism, Acceptance, and Cultural-Ethnocentrism Scale (RACES) by Grigg and Manderson (2016). Applications of these scales indicated high levels of racism reported by Indigenous Peoples. Racism was also strongly associated with depressive symptoms among Indigenous Peoples in Australia (Paradies & Cunningham, 2012). Such experience

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has persisted. In a recent study, Markwick et al. (2019) show that Indigenous Peoples continue to experience racism at a disproportionate rate to other Australians.

Linking Attitudes and Experiences Social psychologists have long understood the direct relationship between social categorisation of groups and intergroup behaviour (Abrams & Hogg, 2006; Tajfel et al., 1971). This relationship has been framed as social identity theory, “a social psychological analysis of the role of self-conception in group membership, group processes, and intergroup relations” (Hogg, 2018, p. 111). The theory also seeks to explain how social categorisation by emphasising intergroup distinction can reinforce forms of intergroup discrimination. In the current discussion, suffice it to note based on this theory that attitudes can indeed shape individual or group behaviour towards perceived outgroups. Studies in Australia and internationally have shown this to be the case (Grigg & Manderson, 2016; Talaska et al., 2008; Wagner, 2008). Negative stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples, Muslims and other CALD migrants are the common aspects of racist attitudes in Australia (Awofeso, 2011; Paradies et al., 2008). Another popular attitude is insecurity about cultural diversity though this may be less likely to impact target groups (Dunn et al., 2004). However, this and other forms of new racism attitudes could have a particular impact upon members of groups seen as not fitting into majority group cultures. The beliefs underlying racist attitudes may therefore convert unevenly into racist behaviours and the resulting experiences of racial discrimination (ERD).5 To date, numerous studies have examined either perpetrators or targets of racism in isolation, while relatively few have investigated both in conjunction (Dovidio et al., 1996, 2002; Flynn, 2005; Gaertner et al., 2005; McConahay, 1983). In fact, to our knowledge, with the exception of two of our papers (Forrest et al., 2016; Habtegiorgis et al., 2014), no attempt to quantify the association between attitudes and target reported experiences has been published in the literature. There is, however, an extensive body of evidence investigating the association between the racist attitudes of majority group members and their racist behaviours. For 5 Throughout the chapter, we use the abbreviation ERD to refer to self-reported experiences of racial discrimination.

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example, in two European studies, Pereira et al. (2010) found that prejudice is positively related to discriminatory behaviours while Kauff and Wagner (2012) showed that diversity beliefs are negatively related to discriminatory behaviours. Talaska et al. (2008) analysed 57 studies and found moderate relationships between attitudes and discrimination as well as some heterogeneity between attitudes and behaviour. Similarly, the relationship between attitudes/behaviours and target self-reported experiences of racial discrimination (ERD) may also vary across specific beliefs about ethnic relations, race and diversity.

Prevalence of Racism in Australia This section reports the findings of an Australian study analysing the relation between self-reported racist attitudes and ERD. It draws on data from the Australian 2001–2008 Challenging Racism Project (CRP) survey. The project was initiated by Professor Kevin Dunn (Western Sydney University), to understand the extent and nature of race-related attitudes in Australia. It was the first national survey on racism and has had significant influence on racism discourse in Australia, with wide impact in anti-racism policy and practices engaging local communities and various levels of government. The collection of the CRP survey data began in 2001 in the states of New South Wales and Queensland where 5056 respondents completed a questionnaire (Dunn, 2012; Dunn & Nelson, 2011). This survey was repeated in Victoria in 2006 with 4016 respondents. Other states that participated in the CRP in subsequent years included South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory in 2007 (n = 1484 and n = 454, respectively), as well as the Northern Territory, Tasmania and the city of Perth in 2008 (n = 300, n = 351 and n = 851, respectively). These surveys included questions about attitudes towards cultural diversity and racism, utilising probability-based random telephone sampling techniques that allowed a representative sample of each relevant state or territory. These findings were then consolidated into a single national dataset (n = 12,512). The dataset includes demographic characteristics such as age, sex, educational attainment and geographic location that are utilised as controls. The average age of respondents in the sample was 50 years and six months, varying between 18 and 97 years. In terms of gender, the data are slightly skewed with females accounting for more than half (59%) of

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Table 5.1 Attitudes towards other racial/ethnic groups among Australians Attitudes to other racial/ethnic groups Old Racism All races of people are equal NOT prejudiced toward other cultures Humankind is NOT made up of separate races Support racial cross-marriage New Racism: pro-assimilation Multiculturalism is good for Australia Feel secure with other ethnic groups Other ethnic groups DO NOT weaken Australia New racism: denial There is racial prejudice in Australia British descent Australians are privileged

Disagree

Agree

Indifferent

10.9 12.2 79.6 11.2

85.1 81.3 14.9 79.9

4.0 6.6 5.6 8.9

6.1 9.2 42.2

88.0 80.3 43.1

5.8 10.5 14.7

7.7 41.4

85.9 43.2

6.5 15.4

Response categories recoded as: Disagree = Strongly disagree + Disagree/Agree = Strongly agree + Agree/and Indifferent =Neither agree nor disagree. The sample size range is 12,054–12,413

the respondents. Almost 27% had a university degree or more, but more than 50% had no more than a high school certificate. More than 61% of the respondents were from Australian capitals with more than 58% of them residing in New South Wales or Victoria, 27% were residents of Queensland or South Australia, and only 15% were from the remaining states and territories. Almost 40% had a father or mother born overseas, or both. The CRP questionnaires asked respondents about their attitudes towards cultural diversity, assimilation, Anglo-Celtic privilege, racial equality, racial hierarchy, acknowledgement of racism, self-declared prejudice and nomination of cultural or ethnic groups that do not fit into Australian society (i.e. outgroups). The focus in this chapter is on nine attitude variables available across these datasets, each question has a 5-item Likert scale response set (see Table 5.1).6 Table 5.1 shows the attitudes of Australians towards diversity. The items classified into old and new racism indicate some variety in expressions of racist attitudes. Old racism was prevalent to an extent ranging between 11 and 15% of respondents. New racism tended to be more

6 The response categories for the Likert-type responses are coded on a scale of 1–5 ranging from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree.

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nuanced. Although only 6.1% disagreed that multiculturalism is good compared to 88% who agree, 42.2% believe peoples’ maintenance of racial/ethnic distinctiveness weakens Australia compared to 43.1% who do not. In addition, the CRP data has another six questions, each with 5item ordinal scale measuring ERD. These questions involve ERD in the workplace, schools, housing markets, shops and restaurants, policing, and sporting events (see Table 5.2). Reported experiences vary from as low as 3.5% (in renting/buying house) to as high as 10.1% (in schools). Discrimination tends to be more pronounced in educational settings, at sporting events, in the labour market and in shopping and restaurants. Out of the total sample (n = 12,512), 54.8% of those born overseas (n = 1757) reported ERD compared to 21.9% of those born in Australia (n = 2036). A similar result was also obtained at the state level (Dunn et al., 2007). For simplicity, we treat response items indicating the respondent doesn’t know, is not sure or refuses to give an answer as missing values (0–4% across all variables). Instead of the dichotomous dummy variables mentioned earlier, we construct another dependent variable—ERD—with a 5-item ordinal scale response. We aggregate the responses from the five frequency of discrimination variables to create this variable (α = 0.79, mean = 1.22 and standard deviation [SD] = 0.67) by selecting the highest discrimination experience reported across the five questions (see Habtegiorgis et al., 2014). Applying this procedure for the whole sample with available data (n = 12,505), the distribution of the aggregate ERD Table 5.2 Self-reported experiences of discrimination among Australians

Experienced racial discrimination Workplace Education Renting/Buying house Dealings with police Shops/Restaurants Sports event Average

Yes

No

9.8 10.1 3.5 3.8 8.6 8.4 7.4

90.3 90.0 96.5 96.2 91.4 91.6 92.7

Stem question: ‘How often have you experienced discrimination because of your own ethnic origin in the following situations?’ Response categories recoded as: No = Never + Hardly ever and Yes = Sometimes + Often + Very often. The sample size range is (12,160, 12,486)

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is never (65.1%), hardly ever (12.6%), sometimes (14.3%), often (4.6%) and very often (3.4%). This indicates that 22.3% of Australians reported an ERD of more often than hardly ever. Among racial minorities, the proportion is 35.8%. Alternative computation based on aggregation of the rates of exposure or domain counts yielded an overall exposure rate of 5.7 and 15.1%, respectively. The reported frequencies vary depending on which method is used to construct the ERD variable. However, this had little impact on multivariate associations since the entire raw sample is used to estimate the models. For example, the effect of re-scaling on the results is minimal with a difference in the correlation coefficient of just 0.04 (see the sub-section Relationship Among Forms of Racism). Similarly, using the domain count approach, we obtained (ordered logit/Poisson) regression outcomes that are comparable to those reported in this chapter. In fact, as we treated missing values in these alternative estimations as zeroes, our estimation is conservative with lower bound coefficient estimates. In general, these findings suggest that the discrimination variable is robust to alternative scaling. Comparing it to other national samples across age and gender, the prevalence rate is higher for the CRP survey. For comparison, consider two national surveys, the Mapping Social Cohesion (MSC, Markus, 2019) and Social Research Centre’s Dual Frame Omnibus (DFO) surveys. The MSC survey, annually conducted between 2007 and 2013 (n = 2000 in each wave), indicates that 9–19% of respondents reported ERD over the period 2007–2013 (Markus, 2019). The DFO survey (2012, n = 2000), conducted by the Social Research Centre contains three items on racism, and almost 20% of the respondents reported ERD. Figure 5.1 summarises the distribution of ERD in the three datasets based on age and gender. According to these three national surveys, the average prevalence of ERD among those aged 64 years and below ranged from 13.4 to 20.1%, with ERD declining by age and males reporting more experiences of racism than females. Statistical Modelling of Racism As an initial step in the analysis, we calculate correlations between racist attitudes and ERD. We first compute the average racist attitudes among Australian-born respondents who nominate a specific outgroup for each of the nine racist attitude variables. For instance, the percentage of anti-diversity attitudes (one of the nine attitude variables) among those

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A. ELIAS ET AL. CRP (Males) CRP (Females) MSC (Males) MSC (Females) DFO (Males) DFO (Females)

40 35

Prevalence rate

30 25 20 15 10 5 0 17-24

25-34

35-44

45-54

55-64

65-74

75-100

Age Categories

Fig. 5.1 Prevalence of racial discrimination in Australia by age and gender (Note Values are percentages of those who indicated they experienced racial discrimination in their lifetime)

who nominate Middle Easterners as outgroups is 16.5%. In general, the average rate of nominating Middle Easterners as outgroup is 36.2%, indicating that Australian-born respondents who nominate Middle Easterners as an outgroup hold, on average, more racist attitudes than other respondents. Following a similar procedure, corresponding values are then assigned to each member of the nominated outgroup. For example, we assign each respondent identifying as Middle Easterner a value of 0.362. Thus, the average value for racist attitudes is used as a weight variable assigned to target group membership. In this way, we can create a categorical variable anti-outgroup specific racist attitudes. Since members of the same group are assigned the same value, they can be considered as one category. There are 13 minority groups we assess in this analysis, each assigned a unique value as described above, after excluding some groups due to

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sample size and geographic contiguity.7 The result is a racist attitude variable—racism towards outgroups —with 13 categories indicating specific racist attitudes directed towards perceived outgroups. Multivariate analyses then examine the strength of the relationship between these attitudes and ERD. The ERD variable has been derived reflecting the prevalence of the highest ERD as reported by CRP respondents. This provides an individual level ERD measure along with another variable assigned to each minority respondent based on group membership (i.e. members of minority groups nominated as outgroups). These variables allow us to estimate an individual level association. The setting-specific correlation between ERD exposure and racist attitudes (outgroup specific racist attitudes) for the CRP sample ranges between 0.13 and 0.20 (p < 0.05). The strength of the correlation is higher for the aggregate ERD variable, r = 0.19 (p < 0.05). This indicates that there is some association between a person’s membership in an outgroup (as nominated by racist respondents) and the self-reporting of ERD. However, this is a crude estimate because the method used involved several steps in deriving the individual level variable racism towards outgroups. Thus, this is further explored using a more sophisticated two-stage estimation strategy to examine the association in a multivariate model. Relationship Among Forms of Racism We developed several multivariate models to understand what factors influence the relationship between racist attitude and ERD. Our data included dichotomous and mostly ordinal variables as dependent variables. Thus, the analysis involved binary and ordered logistic regression models to estimate respective multivariate relationships (for details on the estimation models see: Habtegiorgis et al., 2014). Using aggregate ERD as the dependent variable and other covariates including prevalence of racism, age, gender, education, region of birth, region and state as explanatory variables, we estimated ordered logistic

7 Two group categories Muslims and Balkans are excluded in the final analyses because the former are not geographically limited to a certain region category and the later are part of South Europeans in the UN regional classification. Jews, East Africans and Rest of Africans are excluded in the final analysis because their sample size is far smaller than other groups.

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regression to detect any association between racist attitudes and ERD. The key independent variable in this multivariate model was the prevalence of racist attitudes represented by the nine attitude variables that are included in separate regression models along with covariates and the dependent variable. Each attitude variable was recoded dichotomously taking a value of 0 if the respondent agreed or strongly agreed with items listed in Table 5.1 and 1 if they disagreed or strongly disagreed with these items. The main challenge in measuring the association between racist attitudes and ERD is attributing the attitudes to perpetrators and the experiences to targets. Such attribution is confounded by individual level data. It is methodologically inaccurate to measure the two variables (i.e. attitudes and experiences) in a single model because these two variables are not mutually exclusive. This is the case because one cannot attribute the racist attitudes in the CRP data solely to perpetrators and experiences solely to targets. Anyone can potentially be a perpetrator or target of racist behaviour, regardless of their ethnic background (Sawrikar & Katz, 2010). Thus, we effectively have two different samples to construct, the first sample consisting only of perpetrators and the second sample consisting only of targets. The confounding in the attitude and experiences variables could be corrected by introducing an estimation strategy (see Appendix “Linking Attitudes and Experiences of Racism”) that first examines perpetrators in relation to their targets, with these results then used to estimate another model involving only targets. To analyse perpetrators of racist attitudes in the first stage, the sample is restricted to Anglo-Celtic Australians. Clearly, other Australians can also perpetrate racism, but in this study we are primarily interested in the attitudes of the majority group. Furthermore, we are not suggesting that all Anglo-Celtic Australians perpetrate racism but simply that majority groups are usually in a better position (i.e. generally have more social power) to do so (Hill, 2011; Manglitz, 2003). Since there is no comprehensive ancestry variable in the CRP data, we restricted our sample to the closest proxy for ethnicity available (i.e. country/region of birth), including respondents born in Australia (n = 9311) as a surrogate for Anglo-Celtic Australians. Clearly, this group includes many non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, but arguably, nativity is another form of majority group membership, which to some extent, allows members more opportunity to perpetrate racism.

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Racism Towards Perceived Outgroups Our data indicates that racist attitudes are directly linked to perception of outgroup status (see Appendix “Modelling Racism Towards Outgroups” for statistical detail). From Table 5.1, we see that 12.2 and 11.2% of the respondents acknowledge their opposition to inter-racial marriage and self-declare racial prejudice, respectively. These attitudes are positively associated with ERD (Table 5.3). The odds ratios for the variable prejudiced against other cultures are statistically significant and range between 1.80 and 1.84, and for anti-cross-marriage sentiments from 1.09 to 1.25, indicating positive relationships. Racial supremacism, the other old racism attitude in the survey, has a strong direct association with ERD in all four models: 1.45–1.54. In addition, more prejudice against minorities and old racism attitudes are associated with an increased ERD (and vice versa). The new racism attitudes against diversity are directly associated with ERD. The estimated odds ratios for model 1 ranges between 1.42 for anti-diversity attitudes (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.14–1.77) and 1.98 for sense of insecurity when among other ethnic groups (95% CI: 1.66–2.35). The assimilationist belief that Australia is weakened by ethnic diversity is directly associated with ERD. This indicates that poor dispositions towards diversity and towards living in diverse culture with fairness are associated with worse cross-cultural relations (in the form of ERD on the basis of ethnic background). The covariate non-acknowledgement of racism in Australia is statistically significant for models 3 and 4, with the expected negative sign. The trend indicates that reduced acknowledgement of racism in Australia is associated with increased self-reporting of racial discrimination. Nonacknowledgement of racism has been described elsewhere as denial of racism, and it makes sense that non-acknowledgement could be associated with higher prevalence of racism. If acceptance is a first step towards addressing racism, then denial fundamentally undermines remediation of racism and allows it to flourish without check. Dunn and Nelson (2011) found that Australians with a language background other than English, and those who were born overseas, are less likely to acknowledge racism as a problem in Australia, even though they are the groups more likely to report experiences of racism. This trend aligns with the statistical negative trend outlined above, though not always significantly. Finally, odds ratios for the denial of Anglo-Celtic privilege covariate are non-significant suggesting no association with ERD.

Denial of Anglo-privilege

New racism: denial Non-acknowledgement of racism in Australia

Australia weakened by ethnic diversity

Sense of insecurity among other ethnic groups

New racism: pro-assimilation Anti-diversity attitudes

Prejudiced against other cultures

Belief in racial categories

Against racial equality

Old racism Anti-cross-marriage

Independent variables

0.868 [2.36]a 1.006 [0.02]a

1.423*** [10.25] 1.973*** [60.44] 1.197*** [10.08]

1.085 [0.94]a 1.451*** [28.62] 0.892 [2.5]a 1.822*** [66.52]

(1) df = 1

Self-reported ERD

0.922 [7.21] 1.003 [7.13]

1.529*** [7.547] 2.100*** [12.49] 1.285*** [7.60]

1.231*** [7.17] 1.494*** [9.75] 0.894 [8.57] 1.801*** [12.59]

(2) df = 11

0.722*** [12.56] 1.027 [12.78]

1.712*** [16.97] 2.032*** [15.25] 1.364*** [12.91]

1.249** [13.05] 1.549*** [18.19] 0.977 [12.73] 1.827*** [18.54]

(3) df = 35

0.707*** [11.73] 1.027 [11.64]

1.632*** [13.60] 2.063*** [14.95] 1.318*** [11.81]

1.167* [11.63] 1.542*** [13.57] 0.949 [12.07] 1.843*** [15.47]

(4) df = 28

Table 5.3 Odds ratio from ordered logistic regression models: association between self-reported ERD and racist attitudes in the 2001–2008 CRP datasets

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12,389 Yes Yes Yes No No No No No

No No No No No No No No

(2) df = 11

12,505

(1) df = 1

Self-reported ERD

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No

12,088

(3) df = 35

Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes

12,088

(4) df = 28

Notes This Table reports odds ratio from 36 ordered logistic regressions with each cell reporting the results of a separately estimated model given the independent variable of interest indicated. Across the board, the dependent variable is the response variable self -reported ERD, which has ordinal outcomes ranging from Never to Very often. Based on this, Model 1 is estimated with a single independent variable (reported in the first column of the first nine rows). Model 2 includes as control variables Age, Gender and Education. Model 3 adds additional residential controls: Region and State. Finally, Model 4 further adds ancestral origin variables: Region of birth, Father’s ancestry and Mother’s ancestry. Estimations are adjusted for population weights. The first number in each cell is odds ratio, and F -statistics are reported in squared. Significance values indicate: *** = p < 0.01; ** = p < 0.05; * = p < 0.1 a Model 1 is not statistically significant at the conventional levels when estimated with Denial of Racism in Australia, Anti-cross-marriage Sentiments or Denial of Anglo Privilege as the only independent variable

Observations Control Variables Age in years Gender (Ref: Male) Highest education attained Region (Capital city/Rest of Australia) State Region of birth Father’s ancestry not Australian Mother’s ancestry not Australian

Independent variables

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Anti-diversity dispositions are clearly linked within this sample to ERD, as is the belief in racial supremacy (i.e. against racial equality and selfdeclared prejudice). These analyses, therefore, indicate that both old and new racist beliefs can influence the reported ERD. The same is true to some extent for anti-cross-racial marriage and non-acknowledgement of racism. However, the effects of belief in racial categories and denial of Anglo-Celtic privilege did not have clear trends. So far, our interpretation has been based on models directly estimated from the CRP data. All estimations involved the whole sample excluding missing values (the sample sizes vary between n = 12,088 and n = 12,505). But, due to the nature of the individual level data, we did not clearly separate the perpetrators and targets of discrimination. Thus, the findings are showing crude association in that the racist attitudes in these models do not necessarily reflect only those of perpetrators. Similarly, as mentioned in the section Prevalence of Racism in Australia above, the ERD does not necessarily show only those groups we normally consider targets (i.e. minorities). For example, minority groups can have racist attitudes (Sawrikar & Katz, 2010) while the majority group can, in limited contexts, be targets of racism as well as potentially feeling disenfranchised and claiming reverse discrimination (Norton, 2011). Additionally, it should be noted that the majority group in Australia is not homogenous. The results for the first stage of our estimation are reported in Table 5.4. As stated above, we restricted the sample to respondents born in Australia to proxy for perpetration of racist attitudes by the majority group. All of the nine models include six demographic and human capital control variables (age, gender, education, region, state and region of birth) as well as the outgroup variables of interest, together with the nine racist attitudes as dependent variables. Estimates for the demographic and human capital variables have mixed results in terms of statistical significance, but for brevity, we only report estimates for the nominated outgroup. Each column reports one of the nine attitude items in the CRP dataset as a dependent variable. In these results, Asians (in general), North East Asians, South East Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims are consistently nominated as outgroups by Australian-born respondents who have old-fashioned racism expressed in anti-cross-racial marriage and anti-racial equality attitudes and self -declared prejudice towards other cultures (columns 1, 2 and 4, respectively). Respondents with new racism beliefs such as anti-diversity

South East Asians North East Asians South Asians Asians North Europeans South Europeans Balkans Middle Easterners Africans Pacific Islanders Indigenous Australians Muslims Foreigners East Africans Rest of Africans Observations F -Statistics Degrees of Freedom

Variables

1.572* 1.300***

9057 8.687 19

9057 12.75 19

2.897***

1.832*** 1.502* 1.608**

1.642***

0.354**

1.670***

1.422*

9057 4.687 19

1.530***

2.286***

057 10.86 19

2.031*** 1.459***

1.286*

2.454***

2.104***

(4) Prejudiced against other cultures

9057 21.66 19

1.599*** 0.553*

1.431**

1.893***

1.746** 2.148***

9057 17.44 19

1.236* 0.587**

1.442***

1.973*** 0.354*

1.447* 1.904***

9057 29.41 19

0.615** 1.819*** 0.810*

1.366***

1.666***

1.443**

(6) (7) Sense of Diversity weakens insecurity Australia among outgroups

(5) Anti-diversity attitudes

(3) Belief in racial categories

(1) Anti-cross-marriage

(2) Against racial equality

New racism: pro-assimilation

Old racism

9057 6.132 19

0.418** 2.419** 9057 3.206 18

1.159*

1.940*

(9) Denial of Anglo Privilege

(continued)

(8) Denial of racism in Australia

New racism: denial

Table 5.4 Odds ratio from logistic regression models: association between outgroup nomination and expressions of racist attitudes in the 2001–2008 CRP datasets

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