On race
PBS in the US did a documentary on race a while ago. I haven’t seen it, but I did come across the companion website, Race - The Power of an Illusion, recently. Being a show made by and for Americans, it traces the history of race in the US, but it does give a glimpse of what race meant - or didn’t mean - before European settlers arrived in the Americas. It also points out, as the title suggests, that race is not a biological fact but a social construct. The terms we use so casually today - ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘caucasian’ - have an interesting history. It doesn’t call for the abolition of racial categories though because they are useful in determining such things as social equality, which suggests that current social inequality is a function of the arbitrary classification of human beings into nonexistent subcategories, and not vice versa. And if you’d like to see evidence of how arbitrary this classification is, take a look at this page, where you are given 16 photographs to classify under four racial categories. Give it a go and see how many you get right.
But what’s most interesting and, I think, most relevant to Australia is the section titled What’s Race Got To Do With It? The third presentation, called “The Elephant in the Room” seemed the most directly applicable to what I’ve seen in Australia. I should point out that I don’t know all that much about the social and racial history of Australia and what I do know comes from references made in articles and conversations about current issues (such as the Apology to Indigenous Australians made by the Prime Minister earlier this year, the portrayal - or lack thereof - of Indigenous Australians in the media and art, and Australia’s rather intersting immigration policies through history). I have however been living here for just over two years now and while I honestly find it a wonderfully welcoming place, I have also found it to be one where racism is incredibly deeply ingrained. Not in the classic American sense of being discriminated against on the basis of your skin color (though it’s been known to happen) but in the constant classification of people into categories and sub-categories. People born and bred in Australia are still referred to by their parents’ race or, if they are of European ancestry, by their forebears’ country of origin. Nobody, it seems, is just Australian. Given the intermittent noise in the media about ‘Australian values’ and identity, that’s just bizarre.
The racism is so casual you almost don’t notice it. For instance, upon meeting my husband, several people have remarked that he wasn’t what they expected. They were expecting a Pakistani - and therefore presumably Muslim - male but he ‘doesn’t look like one.’ As if that wasn’t galling enough, some have remarked on how lovely that is and how lucky I am.
Another example is language. I have lost count of how many times I’ve received compliments on my command of English or been asked outright where I learnt it because it’s really rather good. I don’t think any of the people who have complimented me have meant any harm by it and have no idea that they were being insufferably patronizing. I have decided however that, rather than get annoyed, the simplest thing to do is to compliment theirs in return. You know, one native speaker to another.
My personal favorite is people who must assert a cultural difference no matter what. Everyone being spoken of belongs to some neat little category that immediately explains everything about them. What a convenient way to view the world.
Given the history of racism, these are minor irritations. But they indicate nonetheless how deeply ingrained the assumptions based on race actually are, even though most people would be hard put to explain why some people are categorized according to race while others are defined by their ethnicity, nationality, or religion and would be surprised to learn how often they conflate these categories themselves.
