In fact, as Stuart Hall explains, race – a modern phenomenon that developed within the context of European colonial domination – unfurls in three stages: the religious, the cultural and the biological. The main problem we face in understanding race is the fixation on the biological. What functions does race perform? How does it continue to reproduce the idea of a natural social hierarchy? Not seeing racism is integral to what the philosopher Charles Mills has called “ white ignorance.” This is not real ignorance, but a wilful one that allows those unaffected by racism to maintain their “innocence” and ultimately protects their privilege, as the academic Gloria Wekker has powerfully argued.Ĭharles Mills describes how race continues to exist today in a social-political context.Īs the late academic Jose Munoz argues, because it is impossible to adequately theorise race as any one thing, we are better served by looking at what race does. Likewise, many Australians are only now becoming aware of the plight of detainees in Australia’s offshore detention camps, after more than five years. LeRon Barton has written that viral videos of police shootings of black people are the “new lynching postcard” – a reference to postcards that were sent depicting lynching scenes – and that white people in the US choose not to know the depth of America’s problem of institutionalised racist violence. When attention is drawn to white people’s racial privilege, or the assumptions and structures that prop up racist beliefs are challenged, white people tend to respond with anger and a refusal to engage in the discussion. Many denials of racism come from feelings of discomfort over this fact, a state referred to as “ white fragility”. This has endowed them with the birthright of neither being owned (as in the case of enslaved people) nor “in the way” (as in the case of Indigenous peoples whose lands were coveted).

As Cheryl Harris explained in her landmark 1993 article, “ Whiteness as Property”, white people in settler colonial countries such as the US and Australia have benefited directly from being white.

Define animosity