Ingrained racism | Blogotariat

The host of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Insiders show, David Speers apparently referred to Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for President of the US in the upcoming election, as a ‘woman of colour’1. You’d think that a supposedly professional journalist would eschew such idiocy. Calling anyone a ‘person of colour’ is simply a way of stating they are non-white. I gather that Kamala Harris has referred to herself as a ‘woman of colour’. I haven’t actually heard this, but I’d suggest that it shows how deep this ‘non-white’ terminology and its accompanying racism goes. This was how people who weren’t white were referred to in apartheid South Africa: nie-blanke. This is Afrikaans for ‘non-white’2.

It is also interesting that Kamala Harris has been referred to as an Indian Jamaican American. However, I have never heard Joe Biden referred to as an Irish English French American3; nor have I ever heard Donald Trump referred to as a German Scottish American4. This ‘non-white’ labelling and listing of a person’s family history only when it is ‘non-white’, is a simple way of reminding people that the person under discussion is not ‘one of us’.

To perhaps make this covert racism more overt, the Mango Mussolini (Trump) has questioned Harris’ racial identity. He accused her of misleading voters about her race when he said: ”I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”5 Trump has repeatedly attacked his opponents and critics on the basis of race. He rose to prominence in the Republican Party by spreading the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was not eligible to run for the presidency5.

This assertion that Harris has only recently acknowledged the Jamaican side of her family is, of course, another of Trump’s multitudinous and multifarious lies. When Harris attended Howard University, she belonged to an historically black sorority. When a senator, she was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, supporting her colleagues’ legislation to strengthen voting rights and policing reforms6. Trump even had the gall to say “I have been the best president for the black population since Abraham Lincoln”5. Whether he actually believes this or not is impossible to determine. If he does believe it, then calling him delusional is an understatement.

In Australia, Laura Tingle was pilloried by the Right-wing nutjobs at Murdoch’s Australian and others of his budgie-cage liners, and by the Liberal Party when she opined that Australia was a racist country in a panel discussion at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Those desperate to have you believe that Australia is not racist called for Tingle to be sacked as chief political correspondent of the 7.30 program. As the Human Rights Commission said: “As is often the case in Australia, the person who calls out racism faces far more scrutiny than the racism itself. This is partly why our media is so timid in addressing racism – because powerful voices try to shut down conversations that challenge the status quo”7.

John Howard effectively used the dog-whistle during his time as prime minister, and Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison followed on, and Peter Dutton has continued to use it; whining about everything from asylum seekers8, to African ‘gangs’9. This clearly shows that they believe there are enough racists out there for the dog-whistle to garner enough votes to win them government.

To maintain that Australia is not a racist country is to ignore reality. It may not be as overt as it was in apartheid South Africa, or even as grotesque as it currently is in the United States, but it is still there, enough to encourage the Liberal Party to use it as an electoral tool.

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