Keywords in Australian Politics

Race

(racism, racist)

Aside from its most general use to distinguish humans as a species from other animals (‘the human race’), race has been used in three politically important ways. First, race is sometimes used as a synonym for ethnicity or national identity. Second, race has been used to refer to a set of apparently objective distinctions between humans based on biological, physical or genetic markers. The third way race is used is to attach cultural, political or ideological meanings to particular biological or genetic differences. Understood in this way, races are the results of groups defining themselves as different to others in socially important ways by virtue of one or more physical characteristics, such as skin colour or eye shape.

The first use of race is less common in contemporary Australian political usage than it once was, having mostly been displaced by the use of terms like ethnicity, national identity and nationalism to denote people with shared cultural characteristics. This meaning of race, however, has continued in words like ‘racial’ and ‘racism’. The 1975 Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act, for example, covers discrimination based on ‘race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin’, while racism is the term most commonly applied to prejudice and discrimination against ethnic groups or nationalities. Thus Pauline Hanson was accused of racism when she claimed, among other things, that Australia would be ‘swamped by Asians’ with their own culture and religion.