“This is not how we talk about race anymore”: approaching mixed race in Australia

Abstract

Discussions about how to talk about race are ubiquitous among academics seeking to balance the recognition that race is a social construct with the very real effects of racial stratification. Naming race is seen as potentially reifying it, but ignoring it invisiblises its effects. Pathologising, celebratory and critical approaches to talking about mixed race can all be found in how mixedness is talked about in Australia (among the public and in scholarly work), and there are differences depending on whether mixedness is Indigenous or migrant. Using my experience of being challenged for speaking too positively about the experience of being mixed in Australia, and a Facebook discussion about Census categories, this paper explores the ways in which mixed race is talked about (and not talked about) in Australia. It argues that we can’t move ‘beyond race’ before actually acknowledging it, something Australia has been very reticent to do, due to its race-based history of colonisation, immigration, and Indigenous child removals. Acknowledging race would enable diversity, and mixedness, to be counted, and therefore to ‘count’, in a context where multiculturalism provides a socio-political environment somewhat supportive of diversity, but where actual measurement is limited. It is argued that acknowledging race may be a necessary intermediate step on the road beyond race, and, for that matter, nation.