White lies: how a misunderstanding of race is empowering racism

I am white. I am VERY white. I am so white, in fact, that I would not have been thrown out of the Australian Parliament for obscure dual nationality reasons. Growing up as a middle class, educated white person, I was sympathetic, but quite blind to the racism in my country. I knew it happened, I saw it occasionally, but I never really thought about or noticed subconscious or structural racism. It took a sojourn in Germany to open my eyes. Now I can’t stop seeing it.

During my postdoctoral work in Heidelberg, Germany, I saw first-hand the differences in the way I was treated compared with the way my fellow non-European, but non-white friends were treated. I got a visa for three years — they had to come back every three months. When asked where I was from, my response was greeted with enthusiasm, my friends were told they were terrorists or spat at. My attempts to speak German were praised — my friends were harassed for their mistakes. The scales had fallen from my eyes.

Returning to Australia, I found my country was no different. As a multicultural country where one in four residents was born overseas, it was difficult to understand. And yet the overt and unconscious racism still existing in this country is measurable. The Australian Human Rights Commission released a report into racism in June 2019. This report revealed that around a third of Australians had experienced racism at work, in an institutional setting or in everyday life.

Furthermore, a 2012 study published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics undertook a detailed examination of ethnic discrimination in Australia through a field experiment. The authors submitted more than 4,000 applications for entry-level jobs — but the applications were fictitious. The names on the applications were varied to reflect a number of different ethnic groups from the history of migration to Australia, as well as Australia’s Indigenous people. Their chosen groups were given Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle Eastern names. In this way they could examine in a real world setting not only the prevalence of racism in Australia, but also how the relative length of settlement in Australia changed discriminatory practices. They sent out the applications and measured the rate of calls for interview.

The authors found a significant reduction in the rate of call-backs for recent migrant groups (Chinese and Middle Eastern names) and Indigenous people — with only 21, 22 and 26% of “applicants” receiving a call, respectively, compared with 35% of applicants with an Anglo-Saxon name. Interestingly, applications with Italian names did not differ significantly in the rate of call-backs from those with Anglo-Saxon names, suggesting that as a migrant group becomes more established over time, they are treated with less discrimination. In fact, it is almost as if they become…white.

When Pauline Hanson moved a motion in the Senate to declare that “it’s OK to be white” I wondered who she was talking about. In fact, I wonder who anyone is talking about when they refer to ‘white people’. The truth is, the definition of whiteness is not based on race at all. Those who are considered to be white changes with time and with place — not least in Australia.

When we had a White Australia policy, what was really meant was British. Although many people assume that all Europeans were welcome under the policy, this is in fact not the case. As John Curtin confirmed in a speech made during the second world war, it was those from the “Mother Country” who were welcomed here. In fact, during this time even the Irish were not white. Long considered to be dirty, thieving and lazy, British Australian children were warned not to play with the Irish in case they caught diseases. Their eligibility to become white in Australia came through a gradual process of assimilation and not making waves. Eventually, this assimilation allowed them to celebrate their culture and traditions, a practice then accepted by the mainstream. It made Australia a safe place for them, where their “otherness” could no longer be seen. This process of blending in and becoming white has occurred with the subsequent waves of migrants. Sadly, as we have seen with the Irish in America, those very people who were once abused often close the door of whiteness firmly behind them, grateful they are no longer the target of racism.

In an interview with two Australian icons, George Megaloginas and Magda Szubanksi, the discussion turned to race. They both explained how in their lifetimes, they have become “white”. Once clearly foreign to the eyes of the British descendants, they would now be described as white by most people. They even mused about who would be next to become white — and thought it would probably be the Chinese. If this seems unlikely, it should be remembered that only a few decades ago, people from Greece and Poland were definitely not white, and now we barely even see them as different. It is entirely plausible that we will, in the next century, come to see people from East Asia as white.

Race and whiteness can also vary from country to country. A friend, who was born in Turkey, told me that in Australia she feels white. She does not have the feeling that she is considered to be “other”. When she goes to Germany, however, suddenly she is no longer white…or more specifically, people want to know IF she is white. She conducted an experiment the last time she was there. When asked where she comes from, she would sometimes say “Australia” — at which point she was treated warmly and enthusiastically, and sometimes she said “Turkey” — at which point the next question was inevitably; “When are you going home?”. My friend was white, or not white, without changing the colour of her skin.

In fact, there is no genetic or phenotypic basis for race — something that has been accepted by geneticists and anthropologists for decades. Although it may be fairly simple to guess the ancestral background of someone with very dark or very light skin and hair, races are not defined at the middle but at the edges. If you were to line up everyone in Australia based on skin colour, for example, the overlap between “races” would be so large as to make the comparison laughable. Defining race by geography is also fraught. One would hardly call Libyan people “black” and yet they live in Africa. The people in Northern India are often as fair or fairer than their Asian and Middle Eastern neighbours to the north, whereas many people in the South of India have skin as dark as people in sub-Saharan Africa. The people from the South of France and Germany often have olive skin and dark hair, looking a lot more like their Southern neighbours than their northern countrymen.

Finally, consider an albino child of black parents growing up under Apartheid in South Africa. Despite skin whiter than any Afrikaner, this child would not have been considered to be white. Furthermore, a former colleague of mine had a genetic mutation giving her black hair and dark brown skin. When abused by a neo-Nazi, her friend told him that she was “actually white” and just had a genetic difference. The neo-Nazi then apologised and left her alone. Thus, even racists acknowledge that race isn’t skin-deep!

Even at a genetic level, it is not possible to draw a line around a set of genes in order to declare them as belonging to one race or another. Due to millennia of global human movement, even the most British of people has a mixture of genes from Europe. I myself, despite being 95.6% British and Irish, have 0.3% “Iranian, Caucasian & Mesopotamian” DNA. Does that count as white? Where should the line be drawn? In fact, even if a line were drawn, the way people look would never align with their genetic makeup anyway — making it a useless exercise.

Racism is the consequence of a basic human fear — difference. The word that so confounded Pauline Hanson in 1996 — xenophobia — comes from the ancient Greek “xenos” (strange, foreign) and “phobos” (fear). It has come to mean the fear of other races, but its etymology reveals its true, and universal nature. As babies and small children, we tend to fear anything new or different. It is a survival strategy that prevented us playing with a lion on the plains of Africa. It also helped us pay attention to who is part of, or not part of, our group. When we used to bludgeon each other’s tribes to death every now and then, this was a useful skill. We are taught by our parents what it is reasonable to fear, and what is safe. We are taught to fear other races not because of their genetics or physiology, but because of the stories that come with that phenotype. When I was a child, we were apparently going to be “invaded by Indonesia” at any moment. Hence many people associated East Asian faces with invasion, loss of identity, and therefore fear. It was not the race per se that frightened people and lead to racism, it was the fear of difference.

Thus, racist people may appear to be full of hatred, but in fact they are full of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of disappearing, fear, dare I say, of being treated as they have treated others in the past. The hatred is a consequence of an irrational fear of otherness, usually given to them by their parents. To berate or belittle people for their xenophobia misses the point. Xenophobia is an unnecessary, but common reaction to otherness. While xenophobics or racists laugh at or dismiss what they call “identity politics”, it is in fact their own manufactured white identity they both cling to and fear the loss of. The construct of identity — which applies to every person — is often, wrongly, conflated with race.

Identity may include a concept of race, but it is a complex construction of how we define ourselves in a given moment. It can include gender, culture, heritage and historical narratives. As a consequence, people who share aspects of an identity gain a sense of validation, but also define themselves by who they are not — the so-called “out-groups”. Again, this identification with a group is often mistaken for race, as these identities are often given race names. But identities can change, even as your “race” doesn’t, as the character Ifemelu found in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah. In Nigeria, she was not really “black” as such, because so was everyone else. She states; “I came from a country where race was not an issue, I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.” Within America, her status as a non-American Black excluded her from what she thought would be her in-group — black Americans. She found herself defined by African Americans as a foreigner, someone who could not possibly understand or speak about their experiences. Upon her return to Nigeria, she was called an “Americanah” — a person who has been altered by their experiences in the USA to the point that they have lost their Nigerian identity. Thus, Ifemelu’s identity changed from place to place, but her skin colour certainly did not.

Similarly, my friend from Turkey also has several identities, that change depending on her circumstances, not her “race”. In Australia she is a highly educated Turkish-Australian, treated as privileged and white. In Germany, she is a Turk, treated with suspicion. In Turkey — well, she doesn’t have a race at all, so instead she is simply educated and comparatively rich. This is the experience of most if not all migrants, whose identities, including their racial identities, change with place.

Thus, because we conflate identity with race, the membership of a particular race is very much decided by who is accepted or rejected as such by a community. Herein lies the danger. Races do not exist but racism does; it allows and emboldens powerful members of society to draw the boundaries as they see fit and use them to divide society and further strengthen their power. For example, some Indigenous leaders are dismissed because they are deemed to be “too white”. And yet those same people have suffered discrimination based on their aboriginality. The use of the false concept of race to disempower Aboriginal leaders is designed to take the focus off their legitimate concerns, through a questioning of their legitimacy as people. Those with power or privilege can decide who is white or not white, who is Aboriginal or not, enabling them to include or exclude members of their club, to divide society, to fuel racial hatred.

This is exactly this that we see in the world right now. During the Brexit debate, the phrase “British white people” sprang up, and with the uttering of that one phrase, all the formerly white Europeans in the UK became foreign, diluting British purity and threatening “our” way of life. Where previously the Spaniards and Italians and Poles were just part of the big white melting pot of Britain, they have been carefully and deliberately excised from true whiteness for the purposes of populism. The fluid and artificial construction of race allows, ironically, racism and discrimination to blossom. People who probably never gave a second thought to the nature of their whiteness are now wondering if they really have been “taken over” by all those Europeans — not to mention the blacks and the Indians and the Asians! All of a sudden, they feel themselves to be a threatened minority — and that’s exactly what UKIP was aiming for.

In Australia, it seems hard to imagine a scenario in which we would exclude our Southern and Eastern European migrants from being white. However, this is not what we should be focussing on. The point is that as long as we cling to ideas of race, we will empower those who wish to legitimise their fear and hatred, or to gain power through manipulation and populism.

As a multicultural nation, Australians, and indeed people all over the world need to let go of race. We need to understand the lack of a genetic or geographical basis for dividing people into different groups. When there are no races, there is no more shutting the door behind us, safe in the knowledge that some other “race” is now the target of abuse. Instead, we should embrace culture. Black American culture is not the defined and cherished thing it is because people are black, it’s because people have had similar experiences, similar challenges, similar stories. Some of those will have arisen because of the colour of their skin, but as we have seen, it is not the colour of your skin that defines your race. Australians can rejoice in our culture without resorting to race to explain its foundation. Our culture is a direct result of our geography, our history (good and bad), and the people who have come here, from 60,000 years ago to the present day.

Letting go of race does not diminish us. We will still be who we are, we will still have our cultures and our stories and our heritage. We can still make amends for past injustices and ensure they don’t happen in the future. Racism will still continue, but its justifications will be dismantled. When we stop shutting the door of race behind us, and open it up for everyone, we can start down the long road to equality and justice. And that is in everyone’s interest.