The Human Rights Commission has handed down a report on racism at Australian universities. Here’s why it fails
- Written by Chelsea Watego, Professor of Indigenous Health, Executive Director, Carumba Institute, Queensland University of Technology
Just before universities closed for the year in 2024, the Australian Human Rights Commission released its Interim Report on Racism at Australian Universities.
The timing of the report’s release resulted in little news coverage.
That’s in contrast to the release of other racism investigations in recent years from the ABC and the AFL and its clubs Hawthorn and Collingwood. These all received considerable and sustained media attention.
Yet, in this instance, more media scrutiny was centred around Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah’s call for an end to the genocide against Palestinian people.
Questions were raised around her worth as a scholar and recipient of a prestigious research fellowship. Her research was represented through racist stereotypes as a threat to the safety of students at her university.
A structural understanding of racism demands an analysis of power and a willingness to stand up to it. It’s here that the commission’s report falls short and ends up reinforcing the problem it’s trying to solve.
Dangerous conflations
In May, the government tasked the Human Rights Commission with investigating antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and the experiences of First Nations people at Australian universities.
It came as the Liberal–National Coalition (which is not usually at the forefront of anti-racist activism) expressed outrage about antisemitism on campus.
Antisemitism is real, yet initiatives such as the Coalition’s Private Members Bill seeking to establish a Commission of Inquiry into antisemitism in universities, conflate antisemitism with political criticism of Israel.
As a result, the language of anti-racism is being used to shut down those opposing the most horrific expression of racism that exists – genocide.
The Australian Human Rights Commission report could have explored these contradictions. However, they refused to name genocide, instead referring to “world events” since October 7 2023 involving Israel and Hamas.
This is despite a United Nations Special Committee finding last year that Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza were “consistent with genocide”.
The 132-page report from the Australian Human Rights Commission expresses vague concerns for “Muslim, Arab and Palestinian staff and students”. But it too fails to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism.
The commission cannot have it both ways. It cannot express concern for Palestinian safety while glossing over a crucial factor that makes Palestinians unsafe.
Racism is structural
The commission acknowledges feedback from academics who are negatively affected by racism. These academics say “conversations about racism are shut down” and that there’s “reluctance to discuss institutional and structural racism”.
Unfortunately, the study reproduces the problem that it briefly recognises.
For instance, a survey quantifying experiences of racism does not explain the role structures play.
As we have noted elsewhere, this type of research is designed to document what First Nations, Black and Brown people already know: they experience racism.
Studies like these do not explore how and why universities and other institutions generate these racist hierarchies.
A structural understanding of racism moves beyond racism as isolated incidents located within an organisation. It connects them to the deeper systems of racial dominance embedded in social, legal and political systems of society.
Understanding racism as a collection of quantifiable experiences rather than a deeply embedded set of practices, values and knowledge reduces racism to an isolated behaviour.
It’s then seen as an anomaly to be treated on the individual level through education or awareness-raising.
This approach makes racism a problem of those negatively affected by it, rather than those perpetrating it. The proposed solutions tend to involve tinkering with complaints processes, promoting counselling services and installing diversity targets.
This approach treats the symptoms, rather than tackle the root cause of the problem.
The dilemma of diversity and “racial literacy”
The commission uses the language of “diversity” of lived experience to avoid both naming racial violence and providing conceptual clarity for its study. The commission says it is “not rushing to settle on definitions” of racism.
Yet they did invent their own racial categories to organise experiences of racism into one of five groups. The diverse Australian population is defined as “First Nations”, “Jewish”, “Muslim, Arab and Palestinian”, “African” and “International”. Significantly, these categories are allocated very different word counts.
What results is a collapsing of the diverse experiences of racism into crude race categories that exclude and erase any number of negatively racialised staff and students in Australian universities.
For instance, it excludes the racism experienced by anti-Zionist Jewish scholars and students.
There is no category for the racism experienced by staff and students of south Asian descent or even our Polynesian, Melanesian and Māori neighbours.
The catch-all category of “international” refers only to the international students.
Read more: Is Australia a racist country? We asked 5 experts
In its “initial insights”, the commission draws on the supposed problem of “racial literacy”. It defines this as the “ability to name, understand and confront racism”. It also suggests that those experiencing racism might not recognise it as such.
This is odd. Typically, people who experience racism have an clear understanding of it. What prevents effective anti-racist action is a society that denies the reality of racism.
The idea of racial literacy can frame racialised people as incapable of understanding their experience without expert assistance. It also affords an innocence to those who benefit from racism.
A flawed attempt
The Racism at Universities study should have been based on a robust structural understanding of race and racism. This would have been possible had it drawn on, rather than ignored, the intellectual work of scholars at the forefront of anti-racist research and practice.
It is ironic that a study of racism in Australian universities is not informed by the scholarship produced within them.
But this reveals the clear political position of this research. The performance of neutrality is a political position – one for which the Australian Human Rights Commission has been criticised in relation to Palestine.
In trying to appear objective, the commission is unable or unwilling to address the racism experienced by racialised scholars undertaking anti-racist research, such as Abdel-Fattah.
An analysis of racism divorced from the socio-political environment entrenches rather than eliminates racism. All claims to racial harm might appear equal until power is examined.
To properly understand how racism is working, reports like this must go beyond collating individual feelings and experiences as though all perspectives are equal, and examine the institutions and political systems that distribute racial violence and racist harm.
We must ask who is being displaced and structurally excluded? Who’s being incarcerated, dehumanised and overpoliced? Who commands sympathies, whilst others do not? Who’s being pushed out of employment, framed as violent and denied sovereignty? Who’s being killed?
Who has access to state militaries, land, weapons, media, political influence, government support, international recognition and money?
In avoiding an understanding of racism in a structural sense, anti-racism efforts wherever they are situated become useless, or worse - violent.
Read more: Vietnam, brutalist architecture, fees and Gaza: how student protests shaped Australian universities
Queensland University of Technology’s Carumba Institute is convening The Greatest Race Debate on Wednesday 22 January 2025 at Garden’s Point Theatre in Brisbane.
Authors: Chelsea Watego, Professor of Indigenous Health, Executive Director, Carumba Institute, Queensland University of Technology
