Paper given at the Festschrift for Prof Devleena Ghosh

University of Technology Sydney

24 November 2023

Abstract: A fierce debate is growing about how to describe and intervene on issues associated with the measurement of cultural diversity and “race”. This paper explores the interests promoting various “takes” on the issue, in the lead-up to determine what questions will be asked in the 2026 Australian Census. Gender, differing colonial histories, and the varieties of lived “realities” of  prejudice and discrimination underpin the passionate but competing perspectives. In the wake of the 1950s decision of UNESCO to abandon “race” as an anthropological concept, and the late 1960s  Australian government decision to abandon “Race” as a statistical category, a battle  emerges for the heart of “woke”.

Bio: Andrew Jakubowicz, emeritus Professor of Sociology at UTS, provides consultant sociology services to clients in government and community sectors. Over the past three years he has been involved with the Disability Royal Commission, Waverley Council, the Vaccine Task Force CALD advisory committee, Sydney Multicultural Community Services, and the Commonwealth Multicultural Framework Review. HIs recent publications include Multicultural Arc (SMCS 2023) available through sydneymcs.org.au.

Celebrating Devleena Ghosh

When Devleena joined UTS in January 1997, a decade after my move from Wollongong University, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences as an organisation, was still very much what it had been for decades, a centre for White people talking about marginalised groups, of whom few were in evidence inside the tent.  Most organisations spend a lot of time reproducing themselves, distrusting those from outside their own bubble, to their own detriment. The Council of UTS is a prime example, with only the elected student or staff members occasionally reflecting the cultural and ethnic diversity of the university community. Having proposed during my time on the Council (which finished in 2016) that this issue be recognised and addressed, I note that nothing has been done through many cycles of appointments since that time. I am not surprised though I am disappointed by this resistance to change, though it helps illuminate why Devleena has been such an important part of the Faculty.

Devleena brought three important personal and intellectual qualities to the Faculty, helping to transform it in the longer term. As someone who came from a formerly colonised society she was aware of and sensitive to the impact of colonialism on the political, social and cultural development of societies and their citizens. Arriving in Australia from India in her young adult years she had experienced and was acutely aware of how Australia’s self-denying racism permeated the social space. As a feminist she framed her research through the grid of gender, interrogating the world by always asking how gendered relations of power revealed themselves in socio-political conflict.

These three intertwined sensibilities form the basis for my exploration today of one of the more fascinating moments in the contemporary woke wonderland. It is important as always to set context, and to specify the parameters at play.

In 2026 Australia is due for its next Census. As part of that process the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has been canvassing stakeholder views of what data might be better collected, and how this might best be acquired – conceptually and in terms of specific questions to be asked. The outcome of this process will be declared on 12 December, and unfortunately I am not privy to the decision. While there are issues around the recording of gender identity, my focus is on what until 1971 was known as the “Race” question.

For seventy years “Race” was a central concern of the Australian Government, its focus on racial sterilization a dominant part of its nation-building priorities. As with all its former colonies, Britain ceded to Australia a racialised social order, sustained inter alia by an administrative statistics apparatus in which Race played a critical part. While the First Nations suffered their own particular terrors under the White Australia colonising project, people of colour within the country and those trying to enter also faced systematic attention.

The recent referendum has revealed how the lingering mind-sets of the initial project find recurrent expression in the political moments that, as we have seen discussed, either were or were not about Race. In short the anti-referendum proponents argued that race is not in the constitution and recognising first nations would insert and solidify it there, when in fact we are “all equal”. Many pro-referendum proponents argued that the issue was not about race, but rather about ab-originality, that is the rights for recognition of the Indigenous peoples who were present in place and in control prior to the constitution that removed them.

While “race” is widely used in our political discourse, it has not been clearly defined in Australia. The Race powers in the Constitution (51 (xvii)), namely to make laws in relation to “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”, does not define “race”, though prior to the 1967 referendum, did include the words “other than the aboriginal race“.

Australia signed up to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1966. Prompted by the massacres in Soweto of indigenous Africans protesting against Apartheid, and in the wake of the US Civil Rights Act, the Convention put into effect the 1963 UN Declaration against racism. However it also does not define race, using it rather to round out the protected categories of colour, descent, national and ethnic origin – suggesting that race is something other than what is covered by these terms. Racial discrimination can occur against people on the basis of any or some of these group descriptors.  The analysis critiques racialisation of people as part of a process through which discrimination, exploitation and subjugation (together or singly producing oppression), are implemented.

In its 1966 opening statement the UN asserts that “any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere”. That is, the process of racialisation has no scientific justification, has no moral basis and generates social injustice. But what counts as “racialisation”? Is it the use of race categories to distinguish between peoples only in order to discriminate, so that the naming of races and allocating people to them per se, even if anthropologically outdated, is not problematic? Are races real and if so, in what way? Or is it only the process (wrongly) of claiming that races are real rather than imaginary and socially constituted categories, that generates a political problem?

A personal example if I may. I am the child of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland who made it to Australia as almost the sole family survivors of the Holocaust during Nazi invasion and occupation. If the Nazis had caught them (as they did my father’s parents) they would have been annihilated. However they made it in 1939 to Lithuania where their Polish passports were replaced by identity papers over-stamped to prove authenticity by the British Embassy. The documents noted their nationality (Polish) and their religion (Mosaic) despite them being non-believers. Soon after their arrival there, the two allied but soon to be warring empires just to the South, Nazi Germany and the USSR, declared the Polish nation extinct. To the Nazis they were now members of a race (Juden) to be exterminated, while to the Soviets they were potential members of a national minority (Jews) separate from the Polish ethnic groups who were being forcibly absorbed into the extended Byelorussian SSR. The USSR let them out because they were Jewish, their exodus supported by global Jewish organisations, until they were trapped in Japan. For the Japanese their Jewish religion was fairly much unimportant though their ethnicity or participation in a global diaspora would have been more useful; their nationality as Polish mattered because despite the destruction of the Polish state in 1939, a Polish embassy continued to operate in Tokyo until July 1941. In coming to Australia in 1946, my family’s  designation as Jewish was important as an ethno-religious category and their Polish national identity also helped. After 1948 their Jewish identity line would however have served to prevent their entry to Australia, as new laws limited the number of Jews on a ship as they had Chinese in the previous century. How does all this work? My typical Ashkenazi DNA has similarities in part with the ancient inhabitants of Iberia and in part with inhabitants of Palestine, though the admixture is uniquely “Jewish”. But I look like an old White guy suffused with white privilege and the category of Other for all those protesting that #BlackLivesMatter. What is my race?

It was only in 1971, on the brow of multiculturalism that Australia abandoned the official concept of race – with the Australian Bureau of Statistics noting in its report of the 1966 Census results (the last time Race appears) that

the use of self-enumeration methods in Australian censuses has repeatedly produced problems….[due to] the inability of most people to readily identify themselves with a particular race defined in ethnic terms. [Even so the Census instructed people to] state each person’s race. For persons of European race, wherever born, write “European”,… Otherwise state whether Aboriginal, Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc., as the case may be. If of more than one race, give particulars, for example ½ European-1/2 Aboriginal, ¾ Aboriginal-1/4 Chinese … (O’Neill, 1966)

The results of this enumeration were then tabulated into one of two races or racial groups, “European” or “non-European”. To be European one had to be more than half “European blood”, while people with more than two racial ancestries were described as “mixed blood”.

The 1966 Census also provides a table of races from 1933 to 1966, with all Europeans placed in a single category, one which included all Australians of European descent. The non-Europeans consist of “Australian Aborigine” half castes (about half the numbers of all remaining males and three quarters of females) and small numbers of other races – though the definition melds country of birth, ethnicity, and ancestry, producing races such as “Asiatic Jew”, “Negro” and “Indefinite”.   Given that the Nazis described Jews as an Asiatic race, it was quite confusing, though Jews could pass as European in Australia for a while.

From 1971, following Australia’s accession to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)(1966) and the referendum on recognising Aboriginal citizenship through their removal as a  constitutional exemption to the wide Race power (1967), the approach was modified to retain a question about Indigenous status, while asking an ancestry question (self-identified) rather than one requiring a racial self-identification. An alternative focus on criteria such as country of birth, language spoken at home, and competence in spoken English was seen as more scientific while being less socially dangerous and threatening to harmony. Race and colour were effectively removed from Australian statistical discourses on population diversity at that time. Racism however remained and remains an omnipresent element in Australian society, widely recognised as such. However official data makes it almost impossible to generate a statistical picture of how racism works.

The 1975 the Racial Discrimination Act also does not define “race” though the process of oppression based on racialisation seems to be the point of the law, not race as an objective scientific concept. The Human Rights Commission describes the law as promoting “equality before the law for all people regardless of race, colour or national or ethnic origin. It is unlawful to discrimination against people on the basis of race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin.”  Religion is not included and religious discrimination has been a problematic interface, and remains so. However my mob, the Jews, are deemed to be covered by the RDA, though Muslims are not. So we are carrying the continuing imprint of the Nazi use of race to define us as a group, transposed into our own consciousness and Australian law.

The Galbally Report of 1978 describes ethnicity as a concept the attributes of which are culture and race. Culture it defined by drawing on Taylor’s 1911 book Primitive Cultures, as that “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities acquired …as a member of society”. The concept of race the Report states “is clear”, which of course it is not. If Galbally in 1978 uses a definition of culture going back to 1911, then that was a period when race was understood through a classification system of the races including “Caucasoid”, “Mongoloid”, “Capoid” , “Negroid”, and “Australoid” (Harman, 1987), suggesting “colour” (White, Yellow, Black, Brown, Red).

As the multicultural debate developed in the mid 1980s, the ABS established an advisory committee on ethnicity, which drew out what it identified as the subjective and objective dimensions of the social realities. W.D.Borrie who chaired the group, was a demographer at the ANU well known for his work on migration. The subjective element reflected the ways in which people identified themselves, while the “objective” referred to groups characterised by a range of shared qualities – including a shared experience which was memorialised in the culture, sustained cultural and religious traditions, a common geographic origin (at some point prior to the diaspora), a language and literature, a sense of minority status, and being “racially conspicuous”. 

It is not clear what makes people racially conspicuous, though it would presumably relate to some physiognomic features. The merriam-webster dictionary defines “conspicuous” as obvious to the eye or mind, attracting attention, or “marked by a noticeable violation of good taste”. Conspicuousness therefore lies in the eye of the beholder, suggesting race is a quality of the viewer’s interpretive framework, rather than an essence of the person being viewed. Leaving the philosophical quibbling aside, ultimately the committee argued that ethnicity could involve ancestry, personal identity and group recognition.

By the time ABS was ready to move forward, the 1996 Census had passed, and the Government had changed from ALP to Coalition. It was now led by the man who on 2 November 2023 said he always ”had trouble” with the concept of multiculturalism (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/02/john-howard-multiculturalism-comments-alliance-for-responsible-citizenship-conference-london). While his goal was the closure of the multicultural agenda, in the time remaining the head of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research Dr Bill Cope, pressed ahead with a revamping of the data priorities of the “ethnicity” area.

It was in this context in 1999 that the ministers of multicultural affairs or similar agreed that the new framework would be called “cultural and linguistic diversity” (shortened colloquially but never officially to CALD), with four core criteria, and an additional five features collected on the Census. A “race” criterion survived, framed as Indigenous or non-Indigenous (though as the Referendum debate exposed, Indigeneity may or may not be considered a “race” concept). The remaining core categories were country of birth, proficiency in English, and language used at home. There are no “colour” proxies, with only Ancestry providing a potential insight into the “race” issue from the additional questions. 

The previous single factor label of non-English speaking background (NESB) had been deemed discriminatory and confusing. CALD as its replacement was to face further criticism especially from African and Asian perspectives, which were concerned that it avoided “race”, by linking together many groups that shared nothing other than not being White or English-speaking Australians.

Also “Ancestry” dealt with the past – so what of ongoing ethnic diversity? Or identity? What of identities that were “civilisational” rather than national or linguistic? Asian Australians who were uncomfortable about reasserting a racial identity gravitated towards argument that a voluntary self-identification with an ethnicity should be part of the Census, with a revised Australian Standard Classification of Ethnic Groups providing the framework. African Australians who spoke fluent English or came from English-speaking countries were less drawn to linguistic categorisation, and more concerned to confront racializing barriers.

The Diversity Council of Australia has become the most ardent advocate for the use of “race” as a concept in understanding and resisting discrimination. While “racism” and “race hate” have been well-tested though also contested in Australian political life (as through the attempts to modify the hate speech provisions of the RDA a decade ago), the DCA call to name racism has heightened another dimension of the issue (https://mailchi.mp/dca/inclusion-matters-enewsletter-715084?e=eefcb4569d). In its 2022 Racism at Work report (https://www.dca.org.au/research/racism-at-work?utm_source=DCA+Updates&utm_campaign=f812f704d0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_07_12_05_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-9b648390fd-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D) the DCA and its partners sought to increase racial diversity in the workplace. Racism is produced in a process of racialisation – which is understood as a process of marginalisation. While race is not defined, race is exemplified: marginalisation means racialisation as non-white, where examples are “Black, Brown, Asian or any other non-white group … who face marginalisation due to their race”. “Culturally” is added because culture may extend discrimination already present due to race and/or religion.

While I understand the DCA argument in relation to the othering produced through “racialisation”, what are we to make of the recognition that it is actions that occur by others as a consequence of racialisation that need to be addressed? Racialisation occurs “in response to people’s arbitrary physical characteristics” as well as accent, language, name, religion, and clothing (clearly all cultural). Race references “colour” as well as geographic origin (though Asia is a European concept). Suddenly we are back in 1911, well before the UNESCO debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Australian decision to do away with race as a meaningful (or even comprehensible) social concept over fifty years ago. As Amrita Mahli noted last year, race categories do not reflect the natural world, rather they help create social divisions (https://theconversation.com/should-the-census-ask-about-race-its-not-a-simple-question-and-may-reinforce-racial-thinking-185295).

This may all appear a rather woke exercise in navel gazing if it did not have two consequences. Just before the election the now Immigration Minister Andrew Giles voiced his concern about the lack of adequate data about race during the pandemic, which led to racist targeting of some communities through serious inequities in attitudes of surveillance and security authorities, the health and social care provided, and mortality/morbidity among different “races”. Giles has instituted a “data framework review” within his Department, which seems to have slowed down (partly as key staff in his office are engaged with the fall-out from the Israel-Hamas conflict).

Giles had excluded data (and research) from the much more public and full-steam multicultural framework review (MFR); the MFR has commissioned from me its own external report on research strategy and institutions, which has been asked to reflect on the data question and its importance in developing a national multicultural research plan. The research report went to the MFR in mid-October and the report of the MFR is to go to the Minister any time now.  The Review and the Ministerial response will be public in March 2024, as will its research chapter based on the commissioned submission.

The second consequence lies in how the broader public policy discourse will be reshaped by the campaign developing through the DCA. By reintroducing and asserting “race” and limiting marginalisation to a cultural frame, while specifically excluding language diversity, a whole range of major policy questions are diminished in importance. In the language patch alone emerging questions about how cultures are sustained through language, the importance of ancestral language learning for inter-generational cohesion and the survival of primarily oral languages, and the critical role of literacy in accessing accurate and comprehensible information in this time of digitally mobilised pandemics, require a recognition of both linguistic diversity and linguistic marginalisation. In 1911 the Census asked people whose first language was not English whether they were literate in any other language – this concern for literacy has been expunged from current data sets for at least quarter of a century. During COVID,  data available to community health teams was based on a question about the proficiency in spoken English (so not literacy) and the “use” of other languages at home ( no question of literacy).

As we meet today to celebrate the career and contribution of Professor Ghosh, I am reminded of our many engagements over the years around issues of imperialism, colonialism, racism and sexism. I can feel her presence in my interrogations of the questions I have been pursuing in recent years, as the diasporas from outside European imperial metropolises surge forward into the fabric of contemporary Australia. The agendas continue to be transformed as new perspectives and pressing priorities outweigh those of earlier generations, where the demanding hashtag of #BlackLivesMatter requires a sustained and effective response that doesn’t by accident (or worse than that, by design) hurl us back into a time when the five races of 1911 and the hierarchy of global power they sustained once more shape the edges of identity and conflict.