Travelling Racism: Global Forces and Their Impact on Racism

This chapter explores how international forces influence race relations in the contemporary Australian nation state. It examines the role of an evolving global security environment on local racial discourse, analysing how episodes of racial strife abroad can have a snowball effect on local racial politics. Racism may be produced locally, but it can travel across national borders, may impact and shape race relations trans-locally. Racism in post-WW II Western societies has largely been localised, usually reflecting internal national structures of racial and ethnic inequalities. Country-specific socioeconomic, cultural and political factors have largely determined prevailing intergroup dynamics. In Australia, racism was as much a colonial legacy as it was an outcome of the country’s institutional structures, which systematically excluded and disenfranchised Indigenous and minority ethnic groups. International race relations can have direct influence on Australian race relations. For example, the recent Black Lives Matter movement has similarly affected race discourse in Australia and beyond. Despite race relations in every country remaining somewhat inward looking and locally specific within broader colonial configurations, this changed with the advent of the Internet over the last three decades, with cyberspace becoming an ever-growing domain of intercultural encounter. Racism has now intensified as a global phenomenon, with racially conscious groups gaining access to global audience. Racism today is no longer perpetrated by mere physical proximity; the culprit is not necessarily one sharing the same jurisdiction with the target. In addition, racism is not necessarily an immediate outcome of local episodes or circumstances that have allegedly disenfranchised the perpetrators. Thus, the book discusses how racist ideologies travelling across borders are vicariously imported, thereby influencing racist hatred and targeting local minorities.