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Course of Study:
(ASC233) International Migration and Multicultural Societies

Title of work:
Race and racism in Australia, Third edition. (2006)

Section:
'Race': what it is, and is not pp. 24--39

Author/editor of work:
Hollinsworth, David.

Author of section:
D Hollinsworth

Name of Publisher:
Thomson/Social Science Press
■ Two
'Race': what it is, and is not

The meaning of 1 race'

Given that the word 'race' is extensively used in media reports, talk-back radio
and school books, it is surprising how much confusion about its meaning there
is (Bolaffi et al., 2003). Sometimes 'races' are defined as groups of people who·
are identified as different on the basis of parentage, skin-colour or other physical
features. At other times the defining characteristic may be nationality, language,
religion or culture or a combination of all of these. Sometimes the term 'race'
is avoided and alternative terms are used such as ethnicity, nation, minority
group, or migrant community (Graves, 2004). In this chapter we will examine the
differences between these and related terms and attempt to establish better ways
of understanding and describing social relations in the contemporary world.
The term 'race' is commonly used to refer to specific populations who are
thought to share certain characteristics ( often said to be genetic in origin)
the combinations of which allow them to be distinguished from other such
populations (Brace, 2005: t-16). We tend to take the existence of such categories
for granted. In the same way, we uncritically accept the process by which the
defining characteristics of such categories are chosen and applied in order to place
individuals within their racial group. That is, it seems a natural, logical process
and one that is universal. /
Significantly, such groups are typically understood in terms of their being
unlike 'us'. Often people are more willing to identify 'races' to which they do
not belong. They, 'the others', are noteworthy, their existence needs explanation,
their behaviour is highlighted and their presence problematic. This process of
· distancing and characterising can be called 'othering'; that is, our self-identity is
formed and secured through projecting marked and usually negative differences
onto 'others'.
Ways of seeing others and of accounting for their otherness are constantly
changing, although often we don't remember this. Within the relatively short
history of non-indigenous occupation of Australia, these shared understandings of
who 'we' are, and who is unlike us in fundamental ways, have changed enormously
(Gascoigne, 2002). For instance, for much of that history, adherence to different
Christian denominations was much more socially and politically significant than
is now the case (Thompson, 2002).
 'Race': what it is, and is not 25

Today religion remains an important influence in the categorisation process,

but usually the divisions are expressed in terms of Christian or Muslim or Buddhist
or Jew or atheist. Attitudes to the ordination of women, or homosexuality, �
gambling, unite people across different denominations and split existing churches
in new and evolving ways. In a similar fashion, distinctions between different
national or ethnic communities can fade in importance or be passionately
expressed as shifts in political and economic fortune occur.
David Goldberg (1993: 80-1) concludes that:
... race is not a static concept with a sing1e sedimented meaning. Its
power has consisted in its adaptive capacity to define population groups
and, by extension, social agents as self and other at various historical
moments ... race itself must be almost, but not quite, empty in its own
connota6ve capacity, able to signify not so much in itself but by adopting
and extending naturalised form to prevailing conceptions of social group
formation at different times ...
Race serves to naturalise the groupings it identifies in its own name.
In articulating as natural ways of being in the world and the institutional
structures through and in which such ways of being are expressed, race
both establishes and rationalises the order of difference as a law of
nature.

1
Race' and genetics
This changeability of group consciousness should serve to make us sceptical about
the allegedly fixed and fundamental nature of racial identities. However, despite
obvious fluctuations in labelling, there is a persistent belief in embedded racial
characteristics. The idea that there are distinct groupings of humans according
to inherited biological characteristics is widely accepted. 1 The assumption that
particular visible signs of genetic inheritance such as skin or hair colour or the
shape of faces and eyes allow us to recognise the 'race' category to which others
belong remains strong. So too does the belief that there are predictable linkages
between such physical features and particular moral, intellectual, cultural or
behavioural characteristics (Graves, 2001 and 2004).
Such popular opinion persists despite the general rejection by various scientists
and other experts since the 1950s of clear-cut differences between human groups
on the basis of their genetic make up (Tucker, 1994; Lieberman & Reynolds,
1996). 2 All humans (and many non-human species) share the vast majority of
genetic material. More importantly, the distribution of genetic codes is such that
there is enormous variability within groups thought of as different 'races' (Graves,
2004). This diversity within such racial categories is matched by the overlap of
most genetic combinations between apparently unlike groups. Paul Hofhnan
calculated that 'race accounts for only a minuiscule 0.012 per cent difference in
our genetic material' (1994: 4 ). Finally there is considerable evidence that the
function of genetic structures in humans is to establish the range of possibilities,
26 Race and racism in Australia

not to determine outcomes (Alland, 2002; Moore, Kosek & Pandian, 2002; Brace,
2005).
One of the reasons why people in any particular part of the world have such
variable genetic coding is the result of many thousands of years of population
movements. This intermixing meant that there never were pure 'races' that were
composed of people with identical chromosomes. Nor are there genes that are
'race' specific even though there are variations in the frequency of particular genes
and combinations of genes (CartmilI, 1998; Jackson & Weidman, 2004).

1
Race' as a social construction
Human populations are not sharply delineated by any biological or physical
characteristics (Brace, 2005: 4-16). Boundaries we might identify between racial
types are constructed socially and culturally in our imaginations. We learn to notice
particular differences that have been regarded as important, and to disregard the
overlap between groups, and the variations within groups seen as alien or other.
This creating and learning of difference is expressed by the statement 'race' is a
social construction (Berger & Luckn1an, 1966). That is, rather than standing for a
'real' or objective entity which is independent of the beliefs of the observer, 'race'
has no existence outside of its social or ideological meaning.
The understanding that 'race' has no biological reality but is an historical and
social invention expressing a false but persuasive belief in their existence, has led
some writers to urge we abandon the term completely (Miles, 1993; Carter, 2000;
Gilroy, 2000; Miles & Brown, 2003). I am sympathetic to suggestions that the
continuing use of the term gives it an undeserved legitimacy. However, given the
tenacity of the concept in public and academic discourse, many writers retain the
term but mark its artificiality through the attachment of quotation marks: 'race'. 3
In directing focus on the ways that concepts of race can naturalise social and
historical relationships, I agree with Diana Fuss who suggested that:
To say that 'race' is a biological fiction is not to deny that it has real
material effects in the world; nor is it to suggest that 'race' should
disappear from our critical vocabularies. Clearly it is no more adequate
to hold that 'race' is itself merely an empty effect than to suggest that
'race' is" solely a matter of skin colour. What is called for is a closer look
at the production of racial subjects, at what forces organise, administer,
and produce racial identities (1989: 92, my emphasis; see also Goldberg
& Quayson, 2002).
The concept of ideology is central to an understanding of the forces that
produce and organise racial identities. Ideology refers to the social processes
by which meanings are produced, reproduced, disseminated, resisted and
transformed (Hartley, 2002: 103-6). Ideology shapes the meanings we place
on things including ourselves, and others, and how we locate ourselves within
meaningful worlds. Most of these meanings are taken for granted and assumed
to be commonsense or universal while in fact they are historically and culturally
 'Race': what it is, and is not 27

specific. Over time the ideas, values and interests of dominant groups tend to
become prevailing (hegemonic) in that they are embedded in structures and
institutions, and are reproduced and disseminated in the media and schools (Hall,
1980). For example, over time images and meanings of the family, of beauty or
ugliness, are constructed and represented through narrative, advertising, art, and
humour in ways that socialise us into shared expectations of what these concepts
are and mean.
However, ideologies are never completely dominant or unitary. Other
ideologies co-exist, often resisting dominant images and meanings among diverse
populations. Making meaning is never a passive or automatic process. People have
their own subjectivities and are actively engaged in making and performing their
identities while those identities are being constructed and negotiated culturally
and socially4 (Brah, Hickman & Mac an Ghaill, 1999).
The related concept of discourse refers to the organising power of ways
of thinking, acting and expressing particular topics (Hartley, 2002: 73�5). It
is therefore like a language with its own vocabulary, grammatical rules, and
behavioural or performative styles and codes. A discourse includes not only the
content of that 'language', but what is appropriate and inappropriate to say and
in what form, who can speak with authority, and who is silenced, whose way of
speaking and authorising can be ignored.
Discourses produce effects. They provide the very means by which we
apprehend and experience the world .. Discourses generate knowledge as well as
the forms available for its reproduction and dissemination. Discourses are not
innocent or objective in that they empower some categories (or subject positions)
while disempowering or silencing others. Discourses can also be seen as competing
for dominance or authority, so for example, we could talk of a dominant discourse
of heterosexuality and oppositional discourses of lesbianism or trans-sexuality.
Discourses often intersect with, amplify or contradict other discourses. For
instance, in the issue of domestic violence, discourse around family values
may well confront discourses of privacy and patriarchy, with notions of welfare
intersecting each. The power of discourse in part lies in its ideological ability to
naturalise itself, that is, to appear inevitable and permanent rather than socially
constructed and historically specific (Wetherell & Potter, 1992; Van den Berg et
al., 2003).
Phil Cohen emphasises the artificiality of concepts of race:
Race is the object of racist discourse and has no meaning outside it: it
is an ideological construct, not an empirical social category; as such
it signifies a set of imaginary properties of inheritance which fix and
legitimate real positions of social domination or subordination in terms
of genealogies of generic difference (1988: 23).
While race has no meaning outside of discourse, racism is more than
discursive. As Cohen explains racial discourses establish and legitimate real
oppression. Lynchings, police harassment and high infant mortality are not (just)
28 Race and racism in Australi

discourses, even though discourses shape the conditions in which these very real
events occur, and explanations for why. Discourses of merit, good parenting,
racial mixing and risk, combined in complex ways to require the removal of many
indigenous Australian children. Therefore we can see that social constructions
become 'social facts':
But nation, race and ethnicity are not only imagined, or part of political
discourse. There are real and sometimes deadly consequences for those
who are named as belonging to, or outside, particular boundaries.
Nations, race and ethnicity are constructed through, and as, relations of
dominance and subordination ... They are social constructions, and they
constitute and represent unequal power relations (Pettman, 1992a: 3).
Because people believe in these socially constructed ideas they are made real
in their consequences.
Race and nation as imagined communities
One way of understanding how such social constructions come to exert such a
hold over our consciousness and shape so powerfully our sense of identity, comes
from a study of nationalism by Benedict Anderson. He defined the nation as 'an
imagined community' in the sense that 'the members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion' (1991: 6 ).
Anderson notes that modem nations were the products of capitalism and the
emergence of printing and mass media that underpinned the sense of national
belonging. Nations developed a shared sense of their common destiny as a people,
as much as their common origins (Nicholson, 2001). While this sense of belonging
works around an 'us', and an implicitly foreign 'them', in modem societies there
are almost always some of those living among 'us' who are regarded as 'outsiders',
never able to become part of that community.
It follows that similar modem social categories including race and ethnici.tS,
can also be regarded as imagined communities in which the 'communion' is based
on a belief in a common ancestry, and common cultural heritage, respectively. In
practice, these distinctions between past and future, between ancestry, language,
culture, terr_itory, and other ways of constructing and experiencing group
boundaries tend to interpenetrate. A sense of patriotism and national identity
can be invoked in terms of all of these constructs, as can ethnicity and race
(Nicholson, 2001). While race is frequently used to assert that there are inherited
and unchanging biological features which demarcate the boundaries of racial
groups, we will discover that such explicit references are not essential to 'race
talk'.
Codes to talk about race can develop around issues such as immigration,
welfare, dysfunctional families, delinquent children, urban crime, and terrorism
where the race of targeted groups is not specified, but rather is understood. It
is part of a shared 'commonsense' created and circulated by mass media·-and
 'Race': what it is, and is not 29

political rhetoric (Ferguson, 1998). For example, debates about eliminating

public drinking and street fighting in Bourke and other country towns are often
conducted without reference to the fact that most of those who drink and fight in
public are Aboriginal. When the drunken brawlers are non-indigenous, they are
treated as individual episodes not as a community problem (Cowlishaw, 1997).
Indeed, we could see such 'race talk' as the principal way in which races are
socially constructed or social groups are 'racialised' (Omi & Winant, 1986; Miles
& Brown, 2003). Thus race is an unstable complex of discursive meanings, which
compete and are transformed through political and cultural contestation. For
example, in following chapters we will trace the many shifts and contradictions
within the process of racialisation of indigenous Australians.
Consequently, rather than look for genetic or other physical differences as the
cause of racial difference, we need to remember how such categories came to be
generated and seen as important. As Stuart Hall warned:
... paradoxically, the category of 'race' alone cannot provide an adequate
explanation of racism ... Here is a phenomenon which one only begins
to understand when one sees it working within different institutions,
processes and practices of whole societies, in their full complexity
(1981a: 59-60).
In particular, while groups of people have presumably always seen themselves
and been defined by others - as belonging to different communities, the
placing of such groups into a hierarchy of superior and inferior races is a recent
phenomenon, accompanying population growth, migration and displacement,
trade and empire.

European discourses of race, 1500-1750

Some of the earliest uses of the term race referred to differences between groups
in the same community, these differences being of rank or station in life. We would
now refer to such group inequality in terms of class. While the lives of such groups
were very different from each other, today we would not regard such differences
as racial (fixed and inherent). In such sixteenth century usage, race could stand for
the modern term 'type' or 'kind'. For example, following the colonisation of Ireland
by the English during this period, the invaders came to regard the vanquished as
so unlike them as to be of a different race. Here the term was being used to imply a
gross inferiority on the basis of another religion (Catholicism) and language. For
the next four hundred years criticism of the rebellious Irish used language and
imagery that is striking in its parallels with later representation of 'non-whites',
that is, difference we would now see expressed in terms of race (Ignatiev, 1995).
In this gradual shift in the meaning of race, the expansion of European
colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is crucial because it gave
rise to the mass movements of both colonisers and subject peoples around the
globe in unprecedented numbers. The slave trade in particular, shifted millions
30 Race and racism in Australia

of Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean, setting up the dispersal of their
descendants throughout the colonies and Europe itself. The development of
capitalism and the emergence of European nationalism depended fundamentally
on the labour of non-Europeans. Many Europeans came to see their economic
and military domination as evidence of their cultural and racial superiority.
This superiority came to be interpreted as caused by the differences between
the dominated and the dominant and these differences were read as permanent,
fundamental and not the results of historical events and relationships (Kiernan,
1969; Wood, 1995; Malik, 1996).
Initially this otherness was understood as able to be corrected, the best example
being 'heathenism', which could be renounced with conversion to Christianity. In
the same way 'savagery' was a condition in theory able to be eradicated by training
or civilising. 5 Indeed, this missionary imperative to 'bring the light' became the
primary justification for European imperialism; in Rudyard Kipling's phrase, the
'White man's burden' (Bolt, 1971: Young, 1991).

Development of racial typologies, 1750-1880

By the end of the eighteenth century, belief in the capacity of colonised peoples
to civilise was losing support in Europe. Racial hierarchies were increasingly
seen as based on fixed, physical differences and therefore not able to be overcome
through education or the efforts of the inferior. Certain actual or imagined physical
differences were taken as markers for other differences which were thought to be
inbred or inherent. This sort of racial theorising had its roots in medieval writing
about monsters, devils and the supernatural but came into its own with the rise
of science as a dominant worldview (Stepan, 1982; Masse, 1985; Stocking, 1987;
Pieterse, 1992; McClintock, 1995: Brace, 2005).
In particular, the expansion of natural history, which tried to classify the
range of plants, animals and other natural phenomena, opened up revolutiona�
systems of collecting, measuring, describing, and comparing objects including
human beings. The spread of European power, which required explanations
for the diversity of people and their relationships, enabled scientists (and the
explorers, artists, botanists, hunters and grave-robbers who supplied them with
their specimens) to construct elaborate classificatory systems. For human groups
and their cultural products, such systems universally placed the group to which
the scientist belonged at the top, with other groups being ranked according to
how closely they were thought to approach the superiority of the dominant type.
In 1751 the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus categorised human groups into four
racial types: Europeans, Africans, Asiatics and American Indians (although he
allowed for an additional category of unplaceable forms he called Monstrosus).
Similar systems of racial groupings (however they were named) were arranged in
a hierarchy of development from the most primitive to the most advanced. This
hierarchy was described as forming a 'Great Chain of Being' (Lovejoy, 1964) that
effectively linked the world of the lesser animals through the ranks of human
 'Race': what it is, and is not 31

types to the Angels and the Almighty. 6 This model of multiple states of refinement
and complexity generated both a search for 'missing links' and a belief that
certain races rose and others degenerated, in accordance with natural laws often
interpreted as destiny (Brace, 2005; 24-32).
As these early scientists tried to comprehend the staggering diversity which
global exploration revealed, the issue arose of whether the differences between
peoples were the result of regional environments acting on a single 'stock' or
demonstrated more fundamental differences caused by the emergence at
different times and places of effectively separate species. The former position
was called monogenesis, and the latter polygenesis (Brace, 2005). For most
of the late eighteenth century, monogenesis was the dominant theory and the
more 'primitive' peoples were expected to eventually pass through the stages
of development traced by the 'superior' Europeans (often called Caucasians).
The relative positions of the different races were assumed to be maintained
because of the steady improvement of European sensibilities proceeding at least
as rapidly as the progress of 'non-white' races (Goldberg, 2002).
The displacement of monogenic beliefs with polygenesis was assisted by
arguments suggesting that cultural variations between peoples were caused by
underlying biological differences between different races. This linkage of culture
and biology strengthened towards the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1850
the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox published The Races of Man, followed in
1853 by Joseph Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in France and
Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's Types ofMankind ( 1854) in North America. Knox
epitomised rigid notions of absolute racial difference that remained dominant
well into the twentieth century.
[He] incorporated many of the anti-environmentalist and polygenist
arguments of racial thinking that had made their appearance in science
between 1800 and 1850. Knox brought these elements together to create
a racial fantasy in which Saxons, Celts, gypsies, Jews and the dark races
of the world played out their biological destinies (Stepan, 1982: 41).
All these works argued that humans were divided into four or five discrete
racial types, which were profoundly and permanently different (-Brace, 2005; 110-
143). Their differences were so great that they could not be locally variable forms
with a common ancestry, but were separate biological entities or sub-species. They
were assumed to have evolved separately, and the differences in their cultures and
social institutions were not due to the differing progress made on a single ladder
of perfectibility, but reflected their fundamental, fixed inferiority compared to
Caucasians. That is, the biological differences determined the cultural differences
between races and caused differences in individual ability and morality (Mosse,
1985). Conversely cultural differences came to signify both inherent physiological
differences and the moral rightness of colonial domination and subordination.
This form of scientific reasoning led to an obsession with the identification
and measuring of biological variability, given the alleged explanatory power of
32 Race and racism in Australia

such differences in the anatomy, morphology and physiognomy of people (Stepan,

1982; Gould, 1996; Graves, 2001). One horrific consequence of this obsession
was the practice of grave robbing where the skeletons and skulls were removed
and sent to laboratories and museums in Europe (Griffiths, 1996). For example,
skeletal material from thousands of Aborigines was sent to Europe as well as
collections held in Australian museums. In recent years some of these remains
have been handed back to Aboriginal communities for reburial (Pardoe, 1992;
Murray, 1996 ). However, some prehistorians complain about the loss of important
research data, claiming 'prehistory knows no national boundaries' (Mulvaney,
1991; Bonyhady & Griffiths, 1997).
Again we find considerable overlap and synergy between social theory about
race, and that relating to other forms of inequality such as class, gender and
groups defined by poverty, criminality or disease. Just as the broad nose of the
African and the woolly hair of the Melanesian were seen as signifying intellectual
and moral flaws compared to Europeans, the shape of the eyes and the angle of
the forehead was thought to reveal a predisposition for violence and criminality
amongst the 'dangerous classes' of Europe (Malik, 1996: 84-114). The science
of phrenology was immensely influential, alleging that the external shape of
skulls revealed the internal structure of the brain. It followed that mapping these
bumps showed the characteristics of individuals and races, given that particular
moral and intellectual capacities were situated in specific sites in the brain. In
Australia, phrenology condemned Aborigines as indolent due to their 'lymphatic
character' which explained 'why the Aborigines have continued at the same point
in civilisation, and have not been enabled to cultivate and enlarge [their] faculties'
(quoted in Reynolds, 1972: 114).

Social Darwinism and evolutionary theory

Explanations of social inequality became increasingly influential in the face oj
increased suffering and rebellion accompanying industrial development arid
urbanisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Differences in the power,
wealth, intelligence and behaviour of individuals, sexes, classes and races were
attributed to inherent characteristics. Theories emphasising innate and inherited
causes were tt;rmed social Darwinism, indicating the parallel with the evolutionary
theories of British naturalist Charles Dan.vin (Jones, 1980; Larson, 2004).
It is important however, to note that such ideas were in wide circulation
before Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 (Graves, 2001: 37�51). The
biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer and other conservatives lamented the
dirty, uncultured and brutish nature of the English working classes in the same
terms as they justified slavery as the natural condition of Africans (Cohen, 1988).
Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase the 'survival of the fittest' and suggested
that:
 'Race': what it is, and is not 33

society advances where its fittest members are allowed to assert their
fitness with the least hindrance, and the least fitted are not artificially
prevented from dying out (quoted in Markus 1994: 14).
When the 'lesser breeds' accepted their lot in life and were respectful to their
'betters', they were regarded as childlike and deserving of firm, paternalistic
guidance. If they were ungrateful and threatened the stable and profitable
hierarchy, they needed to be beaten into submission, as force was the only thing
they could understand.
These political and social theories received an enormous boost after Darwin's
theory of natural selection based on evolution was published. 7 Outlining an
explanation of the diversity of plants and animals in differing environments, Darwin
developed the concept of gradual evolution over a very long time, but according
to particular sequences of inherited biological development. These unilinear
evolutionary changes were subject to laws of natural selection, whereby particular
forms were more successful than others in a given environment and consequently,
were successful in reproducing offspring carrying those characteristics.
Darwin's theory, based on observations of birds and other animals, was widely
applied to the development of human races and their cultures; hence the name
social Darwinism. Social Darwinists distorted aspects of Darwin's evolutionism
that did not support their race theories. For example, Spencer spoke of fixed
qualities in races, while Darwin assumed constant change. Evolutionism saw
success as high fertility, for social Darwinists and eugenicists, the 'unfit' (the poor,
the Irish) had too many more children than the refined, the 'fit' (Hawkins, 1997;
Black, 2003).
Social Darwinism argued that different races were effectively different species
(even though able to interbreed) that had evolved separately, according to the
laws of natural selection. Cultural and individual differences were regarded as
expressions of underlying biological differences that caused them (see Gould,
1996). The sequence of embryonic development of an individual organism
(ontogenesis) was said to recapitulate the changes that occurred throughout its
evolutionary history (phylogenesis). In the same way, social Darwinists argued
that the more civilised person in their own lifetime passes through the earlier
(more primitive) stages of development at which various inferior races were
stalled; the original concept of 'arrested development'. This belief gave rise to the
orthodox view that savages were childlike, but with dangerous adult strength and
animal passions. Much of this thinking was linked to fears of sexual assault or
competition from subjugated males, presumably heightened by the systematic
sexual abuse of colonised women (Mcclintock, 1995; Malik, 1996). It also justified
"'
the extraordinary powers of surveillance and control that developed in most
colonial societies, and such practices as refusing access to education because it
was beyond the childlike natives.
Accompanying the equation of 'primitive' with 'child of nature' came the
proposition that lower races were much closer to the apelike forebears of the
34 Race and racism in Australia

Stone Age than to modern 'civilised' races. For example, in 1893 Fiske argued
that:
If we take into accountthe creasing of the cerebral surface, the differences
between the brain of a Shakespeare and that of an Australian savage
would doubtless be fifty times greater than the difference between the
Australian's brain and that of an orang-outang. In mathematical capacity
the Australian, who cannot tell the number of fingers on his two hands, is
much nearer to a lion or a wolf than to Sir Rowan Hamilton who invented
the method of quaternions. In moral development this same Australian,
whose language contains no words for justice and benevolence, is less
remote from dogs and baboons than from a Howard or a Garrison. In
progressiveness, too, the difference between the lowest and the highest
races of men is no less conspicuous. The Australian is more teachable
than the ape, but his limit is nevertheless very quickly reached (quoted
in Chase & von Sturmer, 1973: 3).

In the early 1 970s the Canberra Institute of Anatomy exhibited four skulls in the following order: male
gorilla, female gorilla, Australian Aborigine, modern European Englishman. The label read 'It is not
suggested that the Modern European is a direct descendent of the gorilla and Australian Aborigine buf
these skulls are used to emphasise the lines along which the refinements of the modern skull evolved'
(from McQueen, 1974, reprinted with permission).

The extraordinary hold such unconscious scientific racism had until the
second half of last century can be seen in the pre-war writings of Australian
scientists urging the physical and biological characteristics of Aborigines be
recorded 'before it was too late'; that is, before their extinction in the face of
natural selection (McGregor, 1997; Anderson, 2002). In 1931, Fry and Pulleine
explained the physical and mental inferiority they found in Aborigines in terms of
a lack of competition from 'higher' forrns which permitted the retention of 'stone­
age' features:
The Australian aborigine [sic], in common with the examples of his native
flora and fauna, represents a biological species which existed for a long
period apart from world competition. He may be expected, therefore,
to exhibit primitive features representing a survival of anatomical and
 'Race': what it is, and is not 35

mental characteristics of a former era in the evolution of the more

culturally developed human races of the present day (quoted in Markus,
1982: 86).
This dominance of certain cultures and the decline of others, including the
extinction of those who carried inferior cultures, were represented as the result
of inevitable and natural processes of selection. This social theory was perfect as
a justification for gender and class inequality as well as imperial conquest and
colonisation. The appropriation of land, the massive depopulation of indigenous
peoples throughout what was known as the New World, and the exploitation of
the survivors all came to be seen as the inevitable results of biological and cultural
inferiority.
Ann Stoler's powerful identification of race as 'organising grammar' captures
the critical shift in racial discourse following the adoption of such scientific racial
theorising:
[D]iscourses ofrace did not have to await mid-nineteenth-century science
for their verification. Distinctions of color joined with those of religion
and culture to distinguish the rulers from the n1led, invoked in varied
measures in the governing strategies of colonial states. In the nineteenth
century, on the other hand, race becomes the organising grammar of
an imperial order in which modernity, the civilising mission and the
'measure of man' were framed. And with it, 'culture' was harnessed
to do more specific political work; not only to mark difference, but to
rationalise the hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the
labor regimes of expanding capitalism, to provide the psychological
scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule (Stoler, 1995:
27; see also 66-9).
The concept of the survival of the fittest not only gave encouragement and
confidence to the colonisers to travel to far-off lands in search of profit and land.
It equally encouraged the settlers to actively assist the inevitable result of racial
contact. Indeed, as it was in the process of such fierce competition between peoples
that higher civilisation was forged, such frontier violence was itself progressive.
The extermination of the primitive and the degenerate cleansed the soil and
brought forth new and higher forms. This ideology of supplanting native forms
with refiried imports even extended to plants and animals as seen with disastrous
results in most Australian environments (Thorpe, 1996).
The invocation of natural selection as a Law of Nature sidestepped issues
of morality and legality in relation to the dispossession and extermination
of indigenous races. 8 When · metropolitan governments or humanitarian
organisations criticised the brutality of frontier conditions, their case was
refuted by assertions that dispossession and depopulation were beyond the
reach of normal moral or social concern, being driven by irresistible forces of
racial survival. Conversely, it was argued the extinction of the inferior races in
such settler societies should be celebrated rather than lamented.
36 Race and racism in Australia

The passing away of primitive forms of 'man' was regarded as beneficial

in breaking the ancestral link with the apes and widening the gap between our
animal forebears, thus helping to avoid degeneration to a subhuman state. Thus
newer evolutionary theories functioned alongside older notions of a Great Chain
of Being to present depopulation as a triumph of the perfectibility of 'man'. In the
words of D. Macallister in The Melbourne Review (1878):
... [T]he total extinction of these people [Victorian Aborigines], which
seems, and is, so certain is not without an important significance to
those conversant with the theory of 'Evolution' ... for being. admittedly
on the very lowest link of the long chain embraced by mankind, we
cannot fail to recognise in their extinction a decided widening of the
chasm by which mankind is now cut off from its animal progenitors.
Not only is the chasm thus widened, but the difficulty of its ever being
bridged over becomes greater (quoted in Reynolds, 1987: 126).
Macallister's bringing together of Darwinian dynamics with the fixed hierarchy
of the Chain of Being reminds us of the 'productive' nature of discourses. Ideologies
construct and impart meaning and their authority comes from their being taken­
for-granted, unquestionable. Ideologies are built up over time as accumulated
social or shared knowledge. As Omi and Winant explain in relation to their concept
of racialisation, which signifies :
. . . the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified
relationship, social practice or group. Racialisation is an ideological
process, an historically specific one. Racial ideology is constructed from
pre-existing conceptual (or, if one prefers, 'discursive') elements and
emerges from the struggles of competing political projects and ideas
seeking to articulate similar elements differently (1986: 64).
This insight not only helps us understand, for instance, the dispute between
monogesis and polygenesis. It also shows why, during the frontier wars and
dispossession, the status of Aborigines was constantly argued, but as settlef
nationalism became more confident and taken for granted early this century,
Aborigines were effectively eliminated from national history in what Starmer
(1968) called the 'Great Australian Silence'.
The diffi�ulty we now face in contesting and transforming racial ideologies,
despite newer knowledge such as the scientific debunking of biological races,
comes from their commonsense or unquestioned nature. From our perspective,
racist ideas may seem ridiculous and such 'science' obviously biased. We need to
recognise that just as they were 'of their time', we are of ours. We are subject, as
much as they, to different assumptions and partial understandings that powerfully
inform our beliefs, attitudes and actions (or lack of them).

Challenges to scientific racism after 1920

The belief that races were discrete populations, whose biology was fundamentally
different, reflecting their degree of advancement along a single path of evolutionary
 'Race': what it is, and is not 37

development, became hegemonic among those with a European education. This

included the elites from settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United
States, as well as imperial colonies like South Africa and India. The universalising
philosophy of humanism with its tenets of. fraternity, liberty and equality worked
because so many humans were dehumanised by racialisation that excluded them
from humanism's reach (Hall, 1992).
As explored by Frantz Fanon (1967 and 1970), the inferiority of indigenous
cultures was accepted by many colonised 'natives' who internalised the racial
stereotypes and the domination that sustained them. Alongside such subservience,
there were many examples of sustained resistance and subversive strategies that
fiercely rejected European superiority (Read, 1996; Loomba, 1998; McLeod,
2000).
The devastation of the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and
the Great Depression shook many people's faith in the superiority of Europeans
and their rational and civilised self-image. Reactions included a growth in interest
in 'primitive' artistic and cultural pursuits, and a return of racialised romantic
imagery associated with the assumed simplicity of non-Western societies
{Torgovnick, 1990; Thomas, 1994). These anxieties grew into revulsion after the
Second World War and the genocidal slaughter of civilians. In particular, Nazi
racist propaganda, enslavement and extermination clearly demonstrated the end
result of racist science (Weikart, 2004).
Scientists, politicians and religious leaders questioned orthodox beliefs about
biology and genetics, rejecting links between biology and culture, and between
biology and intelligence (Barkan, 1992; Lieberman & Reynolds, 1996; Montagu,
1999). Such shifts in consciousness were interconnected with post-war geo­
political changes, particularly decolonisation in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The
United Nations (established in 1945) gave legitimacy to anti-racist arguments and
encouraged civil and political rights for minorities in the developed countries as
well.
Such idealism has tended to slide into pessimism, as national and ethnic
violence seems undiminished in the post-war period, especially since the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Along with that loss of optimism has been a resurgence of
new forms of racial thinking and obsessions with ethnic and religious differences
(Back, 1996; Brah, 1996; Cohen, 1999; Miles and Brown, 2003). In the media
and in ordinary conversation, people routinely use racial and ethnic labels, not
only about others but increasingly to refer to themselves. The 1980s and 1990s
were often referred to as an era of identity politics associated with new social
movements around 'race', gender, sexuality and issues like the environment or
animal rights (Rutherford, 1990; West, 1990; Gutman, 2004). Apparent irrelevance
and fragmentation of nations along with a declining sense of our local community
in the face of globalisation provoke fundamental questions about the source of
one's identity and with whom can we share a sense of belonging (Chambers, 1994;
Appadurai, 1996; Gould, 2004).
38 Race and racism in Australia

In such troubled times, simply declaring that races don't exist in any genuine
way is unlikely to shake widely held beliefs in their reality. We need to find ways
of engaging with these intensely held and psychologically crucial beliefs as well as
examining the routine practices that are based on such beliefs. We will examine
contemporary forms of international and Australian racism, and strategies to
combat them, in later sections of this book.

Conclusion
With development of capitalism in Europe and the global expansion of colonialism,
the idea of race shifted from a generalised term for a group of people with
some characteristic in common, to a highly elaborated concept used to explain
fundamentals of human history and social inequality in terms of fixed attributes of
inferiority and superiority. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this
assumed cultural hierarchy came to be regarded as the inevitable consequence
of essential biological differences. This social Darwinism underpinned the
'manifest destiny' of Europeans to subdue and rule the world. It accompanied
and legitimated the dispossession of native peoples and their subordination, to
the benefit of settlers and the metropolitan powers. Eventually extreme versions
of such racist thought gave rise to systematic denial of non-Europeans' human
rights, and later the attempted or actual genocide of millions of people (Weikart,
2004).
While immensely important, beliefs in the biological existence of discrete races
are false and deluded. There are virtually no direct connections between genetics and
social practices or cultural beliefs. There is no meaningful genetic differentiation
that corresponds directly to accepted racial typologies. Consequently, the central
argument of this chapter is that races are social constrnctions that have no
reality outside of the beliefs that people hold about them. Despite being false, such
beliefs have been strongly held and generate powerful emotions and horrendous
conflicts (Graves, 2004).
In the next chapter, we will define and compare different concepts and
theories used to understand racism. This examination will assist in understanding
how racist discourses emerge and the ,.vays in \Vhich, often unconsciously, the
structures arid processes that developed in Australia over the last 200 years operate
to perpetuate racial inequalities, even today.

Notes
78% of Australians surveyed by Dunn believed that humankind could be sorted by natural categories
called races (2003: 7-8).
2
A significant minority of physical anthropologists would disagree, see Cartmill ( 1998). See Sarich
and Miele (2004) for arguments in favour of the biological reality of 'races'.
3
For convenience, I will not normally use the quotation marks as the point has been made already. It also
seems wrong to highlight the constructed nature of 'race' without also Hagging the constructedness of
gender, nation, sexuality, etc.
 'Race': what it is, and is not 39

4 Issues of identity, hybridity and the politics of difference are explored in Chapter Three.
s Goldberg (2002) terms the lwo discourses of racial difference: historicist {able to be eventually
overcome) and naturalist (biologically based and permanent).
6 For the inAuence of the Great Chain of Being on ideas about indigenous Australians, see Reynolds,
1987: 109-13.
7 On the reception of Darwinism in Australia, see Butcher, 1999.
s See Chapter Four for examples of this usage in settler ideology.