‘What Happens Next?’: Tackling Racism, Part I

Dr Susan Carland: Hello, I'm Dr Susan Carland, and welcome to another episode of What Happens Next?. This time, we're doing things a little differently and taking you to a recent panel discussion on the topic of positive and inclusive responses to racism.

The live event was called “Racism: It Stops With...?” and was held by the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre as part of National Unity Week. Our expert guests were Nyadol Nyuon, lawyer and human rights advocate, Professor Jacinta Elston, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous), and Div Pillay, CEO of MindTribes, and Emeritus Professor Andrew Markus from Monash University.

So sit back, join me and my fellow panellists for part one of our discussion on how we can effectively tackle racism.

[Applause]

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome, everyone. I am joining you from the lands of the Wurundjeri people and I pay my respect to their elders, past and present. And I would also like to pay my respects to the elders, past and present, of the lands that you are on this evening.

Well, we do have an absolutely stellar panel for you tonight. I think they're going to knock your socks off, because we are tackling a big question – “Racism: it Stops With...?” What, with who?

I'm going to start by asking each of the panellists, just to give us a very brief description. Tell us about your work. Give us a brief description of your work and what your work tells us about racism. Jacinta, I want to start with you.

Jacinta Elston: Thanks Susan. First, let me also acknowledge traditional owners, the land of the Kulin nations that we're on tonight.

I'm, as Susan said, Professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Monash University, leading the Indigenous agenda. For many years, I've been working in Indigenous Health and helping to shape and unpack some of the problems that we've seen in our health systems.

I think for me, one of the things that I can see now, still after this amount of time, is racism is much more deep seated, than we've really anticipated. And I think for the work that we do in the University and the work that myself and other colleagues are trying to champion, it's about a recognition of the fact that Australia was a country that was here before 1788.

Sovereignty's never been ceded, and really it's that recognition that the taking of Australia – the settlement of Australia, the colonial settlement of Australia – is all on the premise of land that was stolen and that's a deep part of our story as a country, I think. And that's one of the reasons why we can't expect to see racism dealt with in many other sectors when we haven't dealt with that.

Dr Susan Carland: Thank you, Jacinta. Div tell us, what does your work teach us about racism?

Div Pillay: Well, our work is really about behavioural change and it is about understanding and unpacking mindsets and attitudes towards race.

So we really find that, as you said Jacinta, it's much more deep-seated than we thought. And what we're finding is that there's an acknowledgement that racism occurs, but there isn't the capacity and capability to address the harm that racism causes, and also to educate people about pervasive harm that continues in workplaces.

So, that acknowledgement is not enough. It is about building capability to continuously address it, and also to acknowledge the historic trauma of racism as well. So we are not just seeing that capability.

And I can see the stark contrast because, for the audience I'm South African born, so 26 years of living under apartheid in segregation. So I was very, very comfortable talking about my own race, but then 19 years in Australia teaches me that this is not a dialogue of the day, such a difficult conversation. So, that's some of my experiences in the workplace, especially.

Dr Susan Carland: Thank you, Div. Alright, let's call on our panellists who are joining us digitally now. Nyadol, tell us about the work that you do and what it tells us about racism in Australia.

Nyadol Nyuon: I am a recent migrant to Australia. Well, maybe not too recent, since 2005. And quite recently there've been, I suppose, conversations about migrants being in themself different in the colonial project that established Australia, and what that means in terms of our relationship with First Nations people. So even in terms of racism, that is still a relevant conversation.

But for what I do, professionally I would like to think that I do something different – and I think that also that comments on the inescapable nature of racism – in that a lot of the work that I think has made me come to this panel today has been work that I've had to do or respond to because of political environments or conversations that felt personal because a defining aspect of those conversation was race. Obviously the African gang is one of them, but also often how issues of race come up in the Australian media.

So in terms of what I think my works teach about racism, I think I try to communicate the personal impact of racism and try to ground it more in both the health impacts of racism, but also the structural impacts of racism, and take the conversation away from just being framed in terms of free speech and in terms of the idea that it's only hurt feelings that are involved.

Dr Susan Carland: Thank you, Nyadol. And our last panellists tonight, Andrew Markus. Tell us about the work that you do, and what it teaches us about racism in Australia.

Andrew Markus: My background is in part a historian. A historian of say, 19th century colonialism, the white Australia policy, and most recently in surveys to try to understand Australian opinion.

I guess if I was going to just sort of make one point, it would be that it can be useful, in some respects, to have a nuanced conversation in this space rather than a blanket condemnation.

You know, I come from a couple of perspectives: contrasting the real and the ideal. And I think, having them really in mind, that is, what are societies capable of and what are they not capable of, I think that's part of a useful conversation.

And the other aspect is with regard to opinions. For me, if we blanketly condemn Australian society in terms of its racism, and of course there's a basis for doing that – I'm not contesting that – but if we do that, and if we say that things are getting worse, we need to, I think, examine the evidence on which that is based, which we do. And to realise that what we may be doing is actually giving a free kick to the racists.

Because we could actually be saying, “Hey, you people are winning. This country's getting worse. This country's becoming more intolerant.” And before we do that, I think it's important that we actually examine the evidence for that, and of course the evidence is not necessarily simple and clear-cut. It is in some respects, but in other respects it's clouded.

Dr Susan Carland: Sorry, go on Andrew.

Andrew Markus: No, I mean, I just wanted to sort of put that on the bottom, that in some respects we're dealing with a totality, but in other respects we're not. And if we don't also look to acknowledge where this country has come from and where it is today, we could be making a mistake.

I'll give you one example of a recent survey – not our survey, a survey conducted by the Lowy Institute. And they were looking at attitudes to people of Asian background, particularly people from China, and they found that say 31 percent of people have reported experience of discrimination. But 40 percent reported that people had actually come up to them and supported them. So, that's part of the balance conversation.

Dr Susan Carland: Andrew, what is your research? You do a lot of research on discrimination. What do Australians think of the quote-unquote ‘other’? What does your research tell us about how racism in Australia is tracking? Is it changing over time? What is your data telling us about social cohesion and racism?

Andrew Markus: Yeah, so we've got a – the most-recent survey will be launched at the end of November – but the story’s fairly clear. Contrary to what I would've expected, I know what you and the audience would've expected, in July 2020, so well into the pandemic, we actually got a more cohesive... evidence of a more cohesive society. Our index of social cohesion went up considerably, and we were not the only ones to do that. The Australian Wellbeing survey conducted at Deakin University found the same result.

So, there's a paradox here, and the paradox is, many people report terrible experiences, both on an institutional level and at an individual level. When we look at surveys – not only our survey, but a number of surveys – we're getting very positive indicators relative to what they might have been. In Australia, there's no question about it, there’s a hierarchy of racial preference. And if you are in certain categories, you are treated differently. And our surveys track that and show that, but when we look for evidence things are getting worse, more... the evidence points to stability, rather than things getting worse – and in some respects, getting better.

Dr Susan Carland: Nyadol, I'm going to come to you next with the big question. Why do you think we do still struggle with racism so much as a society?

Nyadol Nyuon: It's a good question. I'm still reflecting on the comments of the Professor about nuance. And I think there is room for nuance in these conversations, but I'm not sure to what extent that replies to some of the real problems that seems to suggest that it's gotten worse in some cases.

And I think that goes into why we still have a problem with racism. I think part of the problem is how do we define racism? What constitutes racist conduct?

And I think, and I'm not certain the professor's work says this, but I think part of the issue that I've experienced in the public space is that we tend to recognise racism if it presents itself in a rude, aggressive, violent way, almost an expectation that it has to come with the Ku Klux Klan burning a flag before we can name it racist. And I think that makes it very difficult for the people that experience racism to not look like what snowflakes are, when they complain about the experiences in their life.

But there is definitely a difficult nuance, not just in terms of how other makes us experience what it is to be in Australia, but how we also experience Australia. For example, I have had an education in Australia. I have had a job in Australia. I've been relatively, if I could use the term, successful and done well in Australia. Clearly, all those things would be hard to achieve in a country that was completely racist.

But at the same time, I've also had my mother called a black dog. I've been called the N word, walking on the street. There's been a whole political campaign run in the media on the backs of people of African descent. There were numerous racist articles written about them. Those were not just anecdotal experiences, those were state conversations defining how people like me should experience what it is in Australia.

And that is difficult to explain to somebody else, because if a white… Maybe for the audience here, if you are a person who is white, I don't think you sit on a television watching it and praying that a random white person committing an offence is going to reflect on you. But, every time a Sudanese black kid, sometimes even a Muslim kid, does something wrong, we are praying that next day that it doesn't cast a doubt on all of us from those communities and whether we should be in Australia or not.

And that's not just a small group of people. Those are politicians with power and with voice, and can implement policies that affect, disproportionately affect, people like us. So during the first or one of the first incidents of African gang narrative, the then-Minister of Immigration introduced a policy that reduced the number of people from Africa by about 70 percent. That hasn't changed until today.

So, I think in some ways it is not the distinction between reality and aspiration. It is the distinction between different realities and different aspirations, because I think, to live as a white person in this country is a very different experience to living as a black person in this country.

So I think that reality definitely isn't as nuanced as one would like it, but at the same time, I'm conflicted because I do know that there are amazing aspects about this country and that there are things that all of us as a citizen should work towards and that not every Australian is racist. But I also know that the occasions for me and my children, and my mother, and my community to experience racism at a personal, and also at a media level, and also at a political level, and also even at the federal level – those are no longer conversations about my personal experience. Those are institutional responses to... that shape the very existence of myself and people who look like me, and of course I haven't mentioned Indigenous people because there are capable hands to cover that.

Dr Susan Carland: Div, the big question, why do you think we do still struggle with racism in Australia?

Div Pillay: I think because there is ultimately fear. There's absolute fear from white people, people who have migrated here a long, long time ago, who are from European descents, to really talk about race. And I think it's almost like a mental block about that fear.

Or what I hear from people in business is the... When I talk about South Africa and affirmative action, and the fact that we, for example, needed to have a black quota met, and we had two-year transitions plans for senior white South African executives to exit their roles and have black South Africans take those roles, and there was a very steady, pragmatic plan towards achieving that, I've heard some very fearful responses of that because white leaders feel, “Oh, I've got to give up something. I've got to give up something to put this in place to re-address that imbalance and that inequity.”

So I hear a lot of fear, and I think we struggle with it because, absolutely with Jacinta's point, I agree. I found that really perplexing, that we could not acknowledge First People, and what chance did I have as a migrant to actually get the dialogue on my own race and identity acknowledged when First People aren’t acknowledged?

So my first question in a corporate setting is to ask clients, “Do you have a reconciliation action plan that's meaningful?” That, for me, is really key, and then comes the next dialogue on race.

As a small company, we kind of punch above our weight in that we don't accept a client who doesn't have a meaningful reconciliation action plan, because I'm not going to do racism work without that in place.

But I do see the fear and the struggle around it and I see a lot of initiatives trying to understand the language on race, but still I feel the investment is very much disproportionate to white, Anglo-Saxon leaders and them coming to terms with racism, as opposed to tackling racism systemically in society and in business. So I do feel that there's this fear and protectionism around it, not acknowledging First Nations people, and there we are, stuck in this holding bay.

And I feel that it is something that will hold us back continuously. Because when I compare the South African experience of transformational effort, and everyone had to just get behind it because there was legislation around it, and I don't feel that we have a legislative environment that actually protects people from experiencing racism and actually legislates for a transformation effort on racial equity.

And until that happens, we're going to be still stuck and waiting for good people to do something positive with it. So, it's not a very easy conversation and answer, I'm sure.

Dr Susan Carland: Andrew, you mentioned about how your research shows that some things are getting better, but there are some things... it sounds like what you're saying is some things are kind of baked in. What is your understanding of these areas of racism that Australia still struggles with certain groups or whatever? Why are we still struggling with this, Andrew?

Andrew Markus: So, you are surprised by that. I don't think I'm surprised.

Dr Susan Carland: Okay. [Laughter]

Andrew Markus: I'm not surprised because I understand – I think I do – how societies function and how hierarchies function. We could be having a conversation about class. We would say, “Why do we have this class system, et cetera, et cetera?” and understand that it's not an easy thing to expect that class prejudice and so on will disappear next week.

Like the example of South Africa. You see, what happened in South Africa was a transference of power. And in the context of the transference of power, legislation was passed and the society made great strides. We haven't had that in Australia, nor are we likely to have that in Australia. So I mean, the issue that we have in Australia is this embedded hierarchy that informs people’s understanding. And we have colour prejudice. And we have a whole range of issues such as that. And they're extremely difficult to deal with.

And I don't want to be understood as minimising that in any way whatsoever. What I'm saying is that a conversation that says, “Listen, you've actually come 10 percent of the way. We want you to come the next 10 percent of the way.”

Now I could be wrong, but for me, that is a more productive conversation. It's not the only conversation we need to have, because we need to call out systemic racism. We need to call out colour prejudice and all of that. But at the same time, for me, it's important that we acknowledge where this society was and where it is today and where we would like it to be five, 10 years down the track.

Dr Susan Carland: Alright, let's get into the details. Div, I want to start with you. You are an expert in diversity, racism, inclusion in the workplace. Often workplaces have diversity training workshops that we have to do.

[Laughter]

Dr Susan Carland: What do you think about them? Are they a good idea? If they're not, what should we be doing instead in the workplace?

Div Pillay: Look, in the workplace, I think there's absolutely a place for education on racism, for sure. But I really have an issue with the kind of education that's provided, and the education itself.

When I think about it, I've seen some really poor examples of education where it almost racially profiles and stereotypes a person, so lots of online modules. So when we look at, analyse, and audit diversity and inclusion spend, and you'll see very repeatable patterns in the spend – that there's actually a small amount of money allocated to dealing with racism, and it's normally online compliance, kind of hygiene modules, completed normally at induction, and that's it. So everybody gets a broad brush understanding of it.

What is the behavioural response then? So I know now what racism is. What do I do when I see it in the workplace? What do I do when I'm actually, potentially, the perpetrator of that racism? What if I'm the victim of it, what do I do then? There isn't enough of that infrastructure after the training and education.

I've also seen... I've got to call out the fact that I've seen large corporate and public businesses spend money on white diversity and inclusion practitioners who are delivering the racism training. And I go, “You don't have any lived experience of this. How are you going to train and share what it actually feels like to experience racism?” And that for me is just absolutely a no-no. I'm happy to co-facilitate something with someone from a white background.

And I take Andrew's nuance comment on board, because I do think that you need to bring people on a journey, and if you make them more fearful and hesitant of racism, you're likely not to get the change that you need. So that's an important point, but I do think you need to face up to the lived experience of racism, where someone can account for how they experience it in the community, how they experience it at work, how they experience it at their children's school and pick-up, how their children also experience racism.

When I think about my own life, I think, we've got three children all born in Australia, all Australian, but yet they still have to justify their identity. They still get labelled as a migrant, and they still do get the stereotypical racial comments that we've lived with. And I think, “Oh my gosh my son is in University and he's still getting that kind of backlash. When will that stop?”

And the conversations that we have at our dinner table is to prepare our children to face that every day, wherever they are, and that's wrong.

So when I think about it, that lived experience needs to be shared with leaders who have power and privilege in the workplace to be able to see it for what it is, and also for people of colour in the workplace to have that visible, direct conversation with their leaders. Because it's actually... a lot of people of colour that we interview, from a qualitative interview perspective, say they are just tired of talking about their own racial identity. It's a hard conversation to have, and it's hard not to be seen only for your racial identity in the workplace.

So I do think that training and development programmes have a long way to go, and if anyone's listening now and actually is in charge of a diversity-inclusion budget, or is a leader in an organisation, I would absolutely urge you to interrogate the spend. One, whether it's disproportionate; to actually assess the value of the application of any learning; and actually to measure it from a change perspective – is it actually doing any good to people of colour in the business? If it's not doing any of those things, probably time to stop the spend, and re-audit and reevaluate what you do next.

Dr Susan Carland: Jacinta, you are an expert in so many areas, but you are... One of the many things you do is, you are a Pro Vice-Chancellor at University. So you have good insights into education and one thing I hear people say a lot is that, “What we need to have is better education about racism and race and inclusion in schools. That's where we need to start focusing.” Do you think that is a good idea? Is that where we need to really... Often what people are saying is, “Look, we can't be helped, it's our generation, forget them. Start with the kids.” Is that what you are seeing?

Jacinta Elston: Look, I think there is a lot of tendency for us to say that the schools need to do more in these spaces, but I think we also have to acknowledge the hard work that teachers and educators do do out there. I mean, I hear this as well about climate change, for example, that, oh, we need to put climate change education in. Actually the schools are talking about it all the time. The classrooms are talking about it all the time. And I think teachers are genuinely trying to bring in these conversations into their classroom and they're trying to look for it.

Do I think that we've done enough to equip them to be able to do it? That's another piece. So actually, you can't educate people about these sort of things and have a robust experience of it, if you yourself aren't prepared to do that.

And so I've seen many a situation where students have walked out of a – even at the university level – walked out of a tutorial and said, “I'm never going back into that tutorial”. A well-meaning tutor has tried to have a conversation about something that has led to a rather large racism debate. And then in the end the person of colour – not necessarily an Indigenous person, but a person of colour who's felt like they've needed to defend a situation or a circumstance – has walked out feeling very injured, and it's polarised groups.

So I think we do need to do some work to support teachers, educators, people in systems, to be able to actually enter into this work. It's not work that you can do without a set of skills, I don't think. So I do think we need to put some focus into that.

The other challenge that I think we have, and again from an Indigenous perspective, is that we are often seeing that Indigenous First Nations people here in Australia and around the world are included in a diversity and inclusion agenda. We're not a diversity and inclusion agenda. We are the First Nations people of this land. And so when you hide an Indigenous program, project, commitment inside of a diversity and inclusion agenda, you actually hide your commitment to the agenda.

And so I know myself, many of my colleagues call for Aboriginal-Torres Strait Islander programs and efforts to be brought out outside of a diversity and inclusion agenda, to not have that sit under that banner. And I mean, even if you went to North America, you'd often see First Nations people being thrown in under the banner of minorities.

When we think back to the Black Lives Matters issues last year in the US, all of that focus was on African-American people and rightly so – that's where that issue happened, that's where other issues happened. There's very little talk about the fact that Native Americans, native Hawaiians, native Alaskans experience the same type of mistreatment, and yet they're the First Peoples of that country.

So I think we've got to do a little bit more work. Again, it comes back to that nuanced argument and conversation of separating out the issues. You can't talk diversity and inclusion and just banner people together. Disabilities, gender inequities, they all have their own sort of aspects to this, and I think that's one of the challenges.

Also, the other problem is you can't send kids home from school more equipped to have these conversations if the households that they're going into are not going to be supportive of them. So we've got to do this work as a society, across society. We can't just expect teachers to do it with our schools.

Dr Susan Carland: Yeah and like people say, “just give up on the older generation”, that's – it can't be the way to do that.

Jacinta Elston: We can't do that, yeah. I think that a lot of these opinions... I mean, who would vote on the Uluru Statement from the Heart tomorrow? It's not going to be the under-18s. So we can't just start with the kids in school. We've got to make this a society-wide, multi-generational focus, I think, to think about these issues.

Dr Susan Carland: Nyadol, you've mentioned tonight about the role of politicians, the media... And people often do say that the media and politics, they need to do a better job in leading our conversations and the way we talk about racism and deal with it. But also, just who is in politics and who is in our media? What do you think does need to happen in these big arenas that are such culture-shapers for our country?

Nyadol Nyuon: Yeah, I think the term ‘culture-shaper’s is so important and also ‘conscious-shapers’. They kind of define what becomes important and urgent in our society, and they shape the priorities of the nation and the society as a whole. So they're two extremely important institutions. And their representations in terms of racial representation is very, very small in both cases, which I think plays a big part in the way national stories are told.

I think in the media – I'm going to make a very bold accusation. I think that in the shrinking space of traditional media and with the competition with social media, that race has… now has economic currency. It's useful as a tool of clickbait. So I think besides the inherent assumptions that some people might have about races, there is the fact that it… garners attention. Articles about race garner attention. There's been research by showing that social media, like Facebook and even Twitter, have a kind of a default setting that generate more attention for content that is enraging or causes big emotions, I suppose, and race is one of them.

And politically, I think race still has political currency. I think some of it is blatant. Like we saw with... I've forgotten his name, I think he gave a speech about the final solution, attended a rally by neo-Nazis, and he was a Member of Parliament. There have been some really controversial members of the far right in the United States that have had welcome and attendance with federal Members of Parliament. There are in fact members of the far right that have moved to Australia because somehow they think, kind of, it’s more safe and welcoming, and some who have said those comments.

So I think until racism or race politics doesn't get the vote, I don't think that things are going to change. I think when it comes to changes in the media and changes in the political scenes, I don't have a lot of hope in them. I think that things are going to remain difficult and that the minorities without the political power or the media influence will definitely continue to bear the brunt of it. So I know that's a very pessimistic view, but I think it's more... closer to the truth.

Now it doesn't necessarily say that, the general society would behave in the same way. But I think some media organisations definitely now don't really care about the influence of putting racist or racially charged articles out there. In fact, I think sometimes they do it because of it and then there is a continual reaction after it. So you put out an article, there is outrage or another article about the outrage and how it's pushing other people to decide, too. It's become like a very typical experience that plays over and over again.

And the most difficult part is that, I don't think the media authority is equipped to be able to deal with the issue of racism. Because there is a question generally that I think is posed for articles or opinion pieces that are deemed, of people of diverse background, deemed to be racist, which is: Is it in the public interest?

And I think to determine what's in the public interest, you have to have an image of what that public is. And if the public is, in your conception, predominantly, say, people who don't experience that particular racist issue, then it becomes purely a matter of free speech and therefore it seems arguably in the public interest to do so.

But it doesn't really go on deeper and ask whose interest? Because if you see what is the public, if you see the constant divergence of views about whether something is racist or not, you could almost see a clear-cut reaction where, in my experience, people of colour are saying “this is certainly racist”.

And then most of the commentators, some in the media, some in politics, who happen to be white, saying, “This is just freedom of speech. This is people being snowflakes. This is how Australia works.”

But of course the very kind of people that have this very broad notion of free speech will hound you out of the country if you happen to be a Muslim young girl who said something inappropriate about anything. And so what we culturally prioritise and protect doesn't include, most of the time, the interest of all – the sensitivity or sensibilities of minorities.

Dr Susan Carland: That concludes part one of our panel discussion, ‘Racism: it Stops With...?’.

Join us next week for part two, as our panellists share some positive initiatives that tackle systemic racism and prejudice in society. They also share some tips on what we as individuals can do to make a difference. I'll catch you next time on What Happens Next?.