Extremist rallies, far-right organised groups and racist dog-whistling have been regular features of the news over summer (and, well, for more than a year). But what looks like a clear-cut case of racism to some is often described in the news with vague terms: “protests”, “activists” or “extremist”.
And when a person is called racist, it’s often strongly refuted. Late last year, Sky News presenter Rowan Dean threatened legal action against anyone who suggested on social media he was racist, among other descriptors, after his co-host Ross Cameron was sacked for racist comments about Asian people.
And after Indigenous academic Marcia Langton made comments on the ABC’s Q&A in 2014 that commentator Andrew Bolt said implied he was racist, the program’s host Tony Jones and Langton herself apologised to Bolt — a man who has previously been found by a court to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act.
Minter Ellison senior associate Sam White, whose firm advises media outlets, including Crikey, on defamation and other legal matters, said that a reason journalists might avoid labelling someone “racist” is to avoid defamation action. “It’s clearly defamatory to call someone a racist,” he said. “And one of the first things that we look at when advising clients on defamation is, ‘can we prove this is true?’, and when you start getting into semi-abstract terms or terms open to interpretation, whether or not it is true becomes a bit blurred.”
White said that in order to prove someone was a racist in court, that person would need to have admitted, perhaps in the witness box, to holding racist beliefs. “It’s going to be difficult, if not extremely risky, to hang your hat on someone having a certain belief,” he said. “So if you use less forward language when talking about someone, you can rely on saying you never called that person a racist, and didn’t intend to call him a racist.”
And, he said, media outlets are less likely to take that risk in a time where defamation payouts and claims have skyrocketed. “There’s no doubt that the proliferation of defamation actions in Australia in recent times has had and continues to have a chilling effect on free speech in this country,” White said. “That’s, in a way, demonstrated by what appears to be media organisations’ unwillingness in certain circumstances to engage in a frank way on matters of public importance.”
Why do people get offended if you call them ‘racist’?
Monash University linguist Dr Howie Manns said that taboo words evolved over time, and were driven by socio-cultural changes. In the past, words associated with religion, and then words related to bodily parts and functions were considered most offensive. Now, words associated with people are touchiest.
“Taboos and taboo language evolve in societies, and in contemporary English-speaking societies, words associated with people happen to be the taboo of the early 21st century,” he said.
Another issue at play, Manns said, is that words “invoke narratives”, so while someone’s actions and words might fit a description of “racist”, the people involved sometimes don’t think it describes them.
“I think some people in these movements are avoiding these labels for obvious social reasons (for example, you can’t really be a racist and have a job in a mainstream organisation), but I think that some people in these movements generally don’t think that they are ‘Nazis’,” he said. “Ultimately, the narrative they’re creating for themselves is immediate and local, and unrelated to the deeper history of ‘Nazi’, so they perhaps might not see an issue with drawing on some of the linguistic or bodily iconography associated with it.”
Manns said that while the media might avoid calling people racist for defamation reasons, politicians tended to use slippery and more distant words like “racial” as a dog-whistling tactic.
“The word ‘racial’ has largely dropped out of use, but in the last few decades was a more neutral way of describing relationships,” he said. “When Scott Morrison used it [regarding the St Kilda protests], it was either a mistake on his part in the use of the term or it’s a bit of a dog-whistling exercise. The truth is in the intent and only the user or the user’s handlers know that.”
Dog-whistling on law and order matters is not new, Manns says, and politicians did it to avoid alienating fringe voters. “The words we choose impact the way people understand our debates … The slipperiness of language among political types is nothing new but it seems to be a little slipperier and this is an interesting age in that way. Words in this battle for the truth seem to be getting a little slippery.”
Emily, settting aside the legal nuances of doing so, there’s a fundamental intellectual problem in calling a xenophobe, a nativist, the religiously intolerant or just a person bigoted about a specific ethnicity ‘racist’.
The problem is: they’re not.
A racist is a person who believes in the superiority of one race over another, and there’s no doubt that some people do still believe this: that meaning of the word remains current.
However, people who believe in superiority of traditions (for example of the Westminster system, or Christianity), or people who believe that immigrants from poor countries are more prone to crime, or who believe that people who already speak the language may integrate better, or who just had a bad experience with one particular ethnicity growing up (or had a friend or family-member who did) need not believe in intrinsic superiority of racial bloodlines in order to hold those views. They may not support common racist policies like segregation, ghettoisation or oppose miscegenation for example.
Such people may be and often are tragically bigoted, narrow minded, reactionary, suspicious and incapable of seeing refuting evidence. They may be and often are, patronising, entitled, clannish, self-privileging, smug and do their best to try to turn multiculturalism back into Anglo colonialism or some sort of failed social experiment.
They may be and often are a legitimate concern for anyone who recognises that in a globalised world, nation-state governance of cultural homogenity and the primacy of ethnic majorities in the carcasses of 19th century multi-ethnic empires is creaking at best and reeking carrion at worst.
However they are not racist, and it’s neither ontologically defensible nor even intellectually respectful to say they are.
It is in fact, ignorant, dishonest, demonising, and a blight on intelligent public discourse.
And until the journalists and editors at Crikey routinely acknowledge this, Crikey itself is part of the problem.
That’s a bit of a precious definition of “racist”, Ruv, though I utterly sympathise with what you say. The way around the problem is just to say that person is acting like a racist: a Trump who suggests that all of a class of people are criminals for no better reason than that they belong to that class of people is acting like a racist. So, we can say that, regardless of their beliefs or admissions
So what’s your definition of “racist”?
Ian wrote: That’s a bit of a precious definition of “racist”, Ruv,
It’s an accurate, accountable definition, Ian — as opposed to the blind and ignorant non-definitions currently being used to demonise people in popular media.
It’s also important to distinguish real racism from (say) xenophobia or bigotry. Here’s why by way of a parallel.
You can hold a constructive policy discussion with someone who believes something you don’t — say, you’re an atheist and you want to discuss policy with a member of a Christian church. It might not always be easy, but you can work stuff out.
But if you try to talk policy with someone who thinks Jesus is coming tomorrow or the next day or very soon regardless, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. So any time they invoke that belief in a policy discussion, they’ve recused themselves from further discussion on that matter.
Real racism is like that. A person who thinks the melanin in your skin makes you lazy or if not lazy, stupid, or if not stupid, dirty, or if not dirty, dishonest, or if not dishonest, unrealiable, or if not unreliable cowardly, or if not lazy, stupid, dirty, dishonest, unreliable and cowardly, more inclined to tolerate those things and breed children who are… that’s not a person you can ever discuss (say) immigration policy with, because no evidence will ever lock down a shifting opinion, driven by unexamined emotion, that isn’t evidence-based in the first place.
On the other hand, you can have constructive policy discussion with a xenophobe, or a nativist, or a person who hates one particular ethnicity. It might be a slow discussion; you mightn’t enjoy it, but you can get somewhere.
All racists are scared, ignorant bigots, but not all fear, ignorance and bigotry are racism. We need to understand the difference, because we cannot hold constructive dialogue with people whose opinions we routinely misrepresent.
You could just look at a dictionary.
Racist (n) “A person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another.” (adj) “Showing or feeling discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or believing that a particular race is superior to another.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/racist
If you have a prejudice against people of a particular ‘race’, or against a person or group based on their ‘race’, then you are by definition a racist. It’s really that simple.
And ‘race’ is not just a particular skin colour or something – it can certainly describe cultural and/or lingual background as well (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/race#h46996774524760).
So if you hold and espouse views on ‘African gangs’ or ‘Muslims’ or ‘Jews’ or Indigenous people, you are a racist. If you hold blind views on the supposed superiority of ‘Western culture’, that is racism. If you harbour prejudice against people based on their background or physical appearance, or assumptions about their background, culture, etc. that is racism by definition. Doesn’t matter why that prejudice came about, or whether you feel yourself to be racist.
And don’t start on ‘reverse racism’, there is no such thing – it’s all racism. In fact the term ‘reverse racism’ is quite racist in itself, you are essentially denying the ability of the ‘other’ to be properly racist!
Hi Tim,
Dictionaries track the way words are used, even when words are used in vague, silly, unfactual and inconsistent ways. So what you’ve caught is a linguistic drift from what ‘racist’ has meant:
…to what is now a behavioural description of any kind of prejudice or discrimination that can be attributed to ‘race’ (whatever race might mean), regardless of an ideology of racial supremacy.
That courts the ‘is-ought’ fallacy, Tim: the idea that things ought to be as they are, because that’s how they are.
Yet there are multiple problems with accepting language as it’s now popular to use it (among them, what the heck ‘race’ even means, and who gets to define it.)
But more broadly, we have a moral and ethical problem with using ‘racism’ to define any kind of group prejudice or unfair discrimination.
To get there, I need to take you through a few steps. So with your indulgence:
I’d suggest to you that respect is the foundation of equity and justice. If you don’t have respect, you are not assured justice or equity: you get only custom and law.
I’d further suggest that respect is not the same as mere politeness or tolerance, but our capacity to acknowledge the good in others — especially people unlike ourselves. Politeness can just be adherence to custom; tolerance can simply be biting our tongue, but respect gives us a positive reason to embrace and engage diversity.
Tolerance and patronising politeness isn’t enough for multicultural success: we need more.
We need respect.
If you accept that, then it’s not a stretch to realise that all disrespect comes in only three flavours, namely: ignorance, indifference or dishonesty.
Certainly, ethnic or religious persecution require at least one of these: we don’t understand the good in the people being persecuted, we don’t care to understand it, or we understand it fine but are lying about it.
If you accept all that, then the conclusion should be clear: it serves nobody to assert implicitly in our language that people who are ignorant of or indifferent to the good in people unlike themselves are would-be Nazis.
We need the word ‘racism’ to capture a particular kind of thinking: the idea that privileges tribe and culture as inherently supreme, and which turns up time and time again.
We can’t be using it to capture something everyone suffers at times: ignorance and self-important indifference. Aside from being disrespectful and unfair in itself, it renders the entire distinction meaningless.
I hope that may help.
Apology: in a previous response (still under moderation), I wrote ‘supremacism’ twice when I should have written ‘superiority’. Racial supremacism is a special case of racism, but the two aren’t the same.
I agree with your definition of ‘racism’ Ruv…makes sense to me. However, as others have said, that doesn’t make the bigots any more tolerable!
CML wrote: that doesn’t make the bigots any more tolerable!
CML, I don’t advocate tolerating bigotry; just not misrepresenting it as something it’s not — a misrepresentation that prevents anyone from dealing with it effectively, or even realising when it can be dealt with effectively.
Dr Phil Zimbardo was author of the notorious Stanford University Prison Experiment — a sort of spontaneous Abu Ghraib of student psychology. After reflecting long and hard on what went wrong, he came up with a very useful definition of evil.
Evil, says Dr Zimbardo, is the willful and systematic use of power to hurt physically, harm psychologically or destroy mortally another conscious being.
Given that bigotry applied in policy is the use of power to at least harm psychologically, I think it’d meet Dr Zimbardo’s definition of evil — even if the bigotry is not deliberately malignant.
I don’t think any person of good will is in the business of tolerating evil.
But let’s not conflate matters. Bigotry is ignorance and bias harming people. It can be confronted through its ignorance, through its bias, or through its harm. Bigotry in power can be reformed, and has shown evidence of this many times. (Consider the policy significance of the apology to Indigenous peoples, for example.)
Yet racism is a kind of metaphysical tribal insanity. There’s no arguing with it or reforming it. There’s strong evidence that eventually it eats itself. All you can do is remove it from power, and keep it out.
Sorry Ruv…I was agreeing with you whole-heartedly. Perhaps it didn’t come across as such!
I don’t even understand the racism idea…I was a nurse for the best part of 50 years, and guess what? If you cut open a black, brown or polka dotted human, they all have the same organs in the same place, and they all bleed real red blood…believe it or not!!
And on balance…there are just as many ‘nice’ people as ‘nasty’ ones no matter what colour or race they happen to be…at least that is my experience having cared for all models. So…isn’t the racist just a bit muddled up? How can the colour of your skin change your anatomy, or your brain function for that matter?
There is no logical argument involved here…just a pack of ?bigots!!
Sorry for misreading, CML. I didn’t mean to lecture.
(And my compliments on your choice of profession! I met some absolutely brilliant nurses under dismal and tragic circumstances last year. Real people, doing real good. Go get ’em. ;))
I think this piece suggests that to prove that someone is racist you would need that person to admit that he or she has racist views.
Sorry, that’s just not correct! There are any number of cases where a person’s statements or actions are so unequivocally incapable of any other interpretation, that a ( very improbable) admission woukd be quite unnecessary
So it’s OK to doggy-whistle till you’re blue in the face, but politically incorrect to call a dog-whistler a ‘racist’? Yes, that’s the hugest irony of the ‘political correctness is out of control’ ranters; they’ve got their own PC.
I like the Manns’ taboo words reasoning. The race card is all too often now resorted to by frauds and shonks deflecting criticism. The racism tag has become lazy short hand for those out of ideas when flummoxed by well presented ideas they dislike.
There is of course still plenty of racism but a lot less than there was. It’s import has become over emphasised. It’s just an opinion. As Ruv points out there are all sorts of prejudiced and illogical ideas around that are unpleasant but not actual racism. There are also lots of unpleasant and unpopular social statistics applying to particular racial and social groups. You can’t shout them away.
If only people could put this name calling energy into something useful.
One, if not the primary, reason that racism is almost useless as a denominator is that in the 70s when the bien pissants of crowbarred the word multiculturalism into being as a euphemism for multiracial. The founding concept, “all cultures are equally valid” covered a multitude of abuses but there was money to be had by the shed load for the wanker brigade, with their social studies BAs, to hold workshops talking to each other and pretending that shrouding or arranged marriage, religious obscurantism and bigotry against infidels was beneficent, vibrant cultural diversity.
They sowed the tiny zephyr and now society reaps the whirlwind.
AR wrote: One, if not the primary, reason that racism is almost useless as a denominator is that […] the 70s […] crowbarred the word multiculturalism into [..] a euphemism for multiracial.
Race itself has no scientific meaning the way (say) culture or ethnicity do. The human species doesn’t subdivide naturally into ‘breeds’, let alone ‘breeds with temperaments’ — which is my understanding of the racial discussions of the 19th century and earlier.
Rather, race is a linguistic construction, perhaps connoting the idea that people who look differently sometimes sound and act differently and vice-versa. Being purely an invention, it’s redefined constantly and needn’t classify the same way or mean the same thing in different places.
And the idea itself: that appearance predicts culture or vice-versa, doesn’t last long in multi-ethnic colonial empires anyway. Soon everyone at the periphery is speaking the language and adopting the customs of the metropole, while everyone at the metropole is eating foods and sporting clothes from the periphery.
By contrast, my understanding is that multiculturalism is a postcolonial idea: the notion that you don’t need the culture of the metropole becoming a monoculture; that people could be connected instead by common laws, security and prosperity and a shared language while retaining ethnic differences like food, costume, religion and language at home. Such an idea has a lot of appeal in young, progressive nations depending on immigration. Religious (really Christian) multiculturalism was a foundation for the US, while ethnic multiculturalism has had strong appeal in places like Australia and Canada.
But whether a country stays multicultural or becomes more of a ‘melting pot’ as did the US is an open question for me. And while diversity comes with numerous cultural and economic benefits, they also come at cost: new groups take time to understand; as AR pointed out, cultural relativism is not always conducive to sustaining equity and respect; and a multicultural society welcomes districts but not ghettoes so that requires (at least) sustained investment and some concerted community approach to integration and opening opportunities.
All of those issues demand open dialogue: what’s going on with this behaviour? Why do you see us this way? Why can’t we get these kinds of jobs? Is what you’re doing a harmless custom, or systematic oppression? Is your appropriation of our culture a mark of respect, or of exploitation? Can we build, rebuild and sustain common laws that guarantee human dignity while respecting diversity?
Some of the answers in that dialogue will not be very flattering to multiculturalism, or to cherished beliefs. Some will question whether it’s sustainable, and if so, at what cost and rate of change.
We certainly have challenges: we need conversations about immigration, how well multiculturalism is working, whether that’s even what we’re really still doing, whether multiculturalism needs cultural relativism or just common respect, whether immigrant groups that welcome economic opportunity yet do not like multiculturalism (not all do) should be as welcome as groups that embrace it, whether some sort of bridging education may sometimes be required. Those conversations are necessary, or we can’t make rational, evidence-based policy.
So it should not be assumed that critiquing multiculturalism is embracing colonial paternalism, or that criticising custom or belief is the same as asserting inherent racial superiority. Such kneejerk assertions would make it impossible to hold a nuanced conversation, and by definition, multicultural conversations need every nuance.
The comments by Ruv et al about the article are far more interesting and thoughtful than the article.
Fantastic debate from everyone.
The comments by Ruv et al about the article are far more interesting and thoughtful than the article.