The modern woke left has fallen into an intellectual abyss when it comes to race

The definition of racism has been radically reinterpreted to include criticisms that have nothing to do with race and nebulous notions such as ‘systemic racism’ that are invisible to the naked eye.

Civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King Jnr delivers his I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963.

Have you noticed how debased, ludicrous and incoherent public discourse about race and racism has become these days? For example, there is the recent accusation of racism levelled at Peter Dutton by MP for Warringah Zali Steggall in the debate on the Opposition Leader’s call for a temporary pause on issuing of visas to people from Gaza to allow effective security vetting.

Racism? How is Dutton’s proposal racist?

After first making the accusation in parliament, Steggall doubled down, accusing Dutton of making an “inference they are all terrorists, or they are all linked with Hamas. Now that is a racist inference.”

Of course, Dutton said no such thing and made no such inference. Steggall just asserted, without evidence, that he did. Moreover, as she said in her statement when Dutton’s proposal was debated in parliament, she was “offended by the rhetoric from the Leader of the Opposition”.

That was the key point. There are few more nefarious acts in today’s world than saying something political that someone finds offensive, personally or vicariously. Ergo, Dutton is a racist. Nothing more needs be said.

Interventions such as this make it hard to regard the teals and the Greens as serious contributors to public policy debates, especially where national security is on the line. In effect, they demand that the government set aside any consideration of national security implica­tions when it comes to decisions in circumstances such as this.

Zali Steggall doubled down, accusing Dutton of making an “inference they are all terrorists, or they are all linked with Hamas.

Unfortunately, similar sentiments can be heard, albeit in a more qualified form, from the Labor side, such as MP for Macnamara Josh Burns, a Jewish member and himself a victim of anti-Semitic abuse since the October 7 attacks.

In the same debate, he says: “I am in full support of having a sensible conversation about our national security and immigration policy, but collectively categorising people fleeing from a war is harmful. We do not have an immigration policy based on religion or race.”

No one, including Dutton, has suggested that everyone trying to get out of Gaza is a Hamas terrorist or even a Hamas supporter. However, Gaza immigrants would be drawn from a population in which, according to credible polls, a clear majority support the October 7 atrocity that precipitated the war, the nature of which they should be well aware of since the perpetrators exuberantly streamed their atrocities to family and friends.

This support for terrorism in the territory is, in large part, a product of decades of terrorist indoctrination in the Gazan school system run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, with course materials and instruction that exalts those dying in terrorist attacks as martyrs in a glorious cause. Bear in mind the median age in Gaza is only 18, so a high proportion of Gazans can be presumed to have passed through this pernicious system.

It takes only a small minority of immigrants to create a major security problem, including the possibility of actual terrorist attacks as well as less dramatic threats to Australia’s social cohesion.

That is the problem. It has nothing to do with race. Former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove told Sky News host Sharri Markson that were he in charge of Australia’s national security he would stop immigrants arriving from Gaza until much stronger vetting procedures were in place.

In a recent Commentary piece in The Australian, Russian-born British comedian and social commentator Konstantin Kisin, an active contributor to debates about immigration in Britain that are even more fraught than in this country, argues against a purely morality based framing for the immigration debate since such a framing implies “immigration is a good thing. Therefore, anyone who opposes immigration is a bad person.”

His preferred framing is to see immigration as a “slider”, one where moral considerations matter but need to be balanced against non-moral factors, such as national security, with the position of the slider moving depending on circumstances.

A better characterisation is to envisage the slider balancing different and competing moral considerations. Governments do have a moral obligation to contribute to alleviating humanitarian crises overseas. Most people also would accept they have a moral duty, some would say an overriding duty, to attend to the safety and cohesion of their own societies. People will differ as to where the moral slider should be set, but to disregard or minimise security concerns as the teals and Greens imply is untenable.

Accusations of racism are, as we all know, a regular feature of public discourse nowadays, almost always emanating from the left. This has been made easier by a loss of clarity about what people are talking about when it comes to race and racism, a problem greatly exacerbated by the work of what philosopher Roger Scruton aptly termed the “nonsense factories of academia”.

It is striking how the general understanding of what these terms mean has been transformed in recent decades, particularly with the emergence of the academic fields of critical race theory and its odious subdiscipline whiteness studies. The concepts developed in these fields have come to permeate the wider society to an astonishing degree throughout the Western world, including education at all levels, the media, government and the non-government organisation sector, the big corporations and even the military.

As to the meaning of race and racism, it used to be quite simple. Race referred to heritable surface features, such as skin colour and facial features, that tied a person’s distant ancestry to a region of the world. A racist was someone who attached great significance to such features, to the point of deprecating those deemed racially inferior, and an inclination to favour or discriminate against people on this basis.

The aspiration of progressives used to be to achieve a colourblind society, one where it was deemed illegitimate to treat people differentially because of race. The most famous expression of this view was Martin Luther King’s dream of a future where his children would be judged “by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”. By the early 1970s, this view of race had become generally accepted across the political spectrum, except for a residue of hard rightists.

It seemed that the battle to eliminate race-based discrimination throughout the Western world, at least at the legal and institutional level, had been essentially won. Indeed, most countries passed laws making discrimination on the ground of race illegal. To give credit where it is due, the old left led the way on this. But that was not the end of the story, as we started to see a transformation in the left’s view on race culminating in what we now term wokeism, the theoretical foundations for which were being laid in academia, first in the US, followed by the wider world, including Australia.

Here was their hook: the elimination of legal racial discrimination did not miraculously bring about an equalisation of outcomes across racial lines in employment, health, education and other indices of wellbeing.

How to account for this? According to the race theorists, it was entirely due to the continuation of race-based oppression, though in more subtle and occluded forms.

Terms such as systemic or institutional racism started to bubble out of academia. The activists started to argue that to truly eliminate racism a wholesale societal transformation was required. What became the DEI industry (diversity, equity and inclusion) emerged to combat unconscious bias and other mental pathologies.

This has become a highly lucrative field, despite evidence that some DEI courses actually worsen racial tensions in the workplace.

So, where is the evidence of this more sophisticated kind of racism? This is where the concept of disparate impact comes in, according to which any deviation in outcomes between different racial groups is presumed to be the result of continuing discrimination.

All other explanations must be excluded. Indeed, to suggest that, for example, cultural patterns might have something to do with disparities invites a charge of racism. This applies even if the person concerned is a member of the oppressed group, as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price discovered when she started to talk about the violence inherent in traditional Aboriginal culture in her brutally honest Homeland Truths speech in 2016.

For the race theorists who say persisting Aboriginal disadvantage was a result of intergenerational trauma inflicted by settler-colonialism, this was a shocking heresy. Far from the “lived experience” of Nampijinpa Price, who grew up in Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory, being respected, she and her mother, Bess Price, suffered denunciation, including death threats.

The one thing that is invariably lacking in the writings of the academic race theorists is credible solu­tions to continuing disadvantage. All we get is proposals for new symbolic gestures such as “truth telling”, calls for which persist despite the decisive defeat of the voice in last year’s referendum.

Truth telling? Surely that should be preceded by a process of truth ascertainment, an honest attempt to identify why the multitude of initiatives targeted at Aboriginal people across recent decades in health, employment, education, crime and abuse have failed so dismally.

Honest truth ascertainment – but that is the last thing the race ideologues want. Following the defeat of the voice referendum, Nampijinpa Price proposed as an alternative a rigorous audit of how the tens of billions of dollars spent on Aboriginal programs had been used, or abused, and why the results had been so disappointing, but all she got was ridicule.

And when Nampijinpa Price called for a royal commission into the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in remote communities, her proposal was peremptorily voted down by government and crossbench senators amid giggles and condescending smirks, a response Nampijinpa Price described as “unfathomable”.

For someone like me who spent decades in the left, the most striking feature of the new woke ideology of race is just how right-wing, indeed positively reactionary, it is.

Consider: not only has the old progressive aspiration for a colourblind society been abandoned, but it also has become a grave ideological heresy.

If you Google “colourblindness and race”, dozens of scholarly articles appear with titles such as Colorblindness: The New Racism? or Color-Blindness Perpetuates Structural Racism. The nonsense factories seem to have been put on overtime.

And who is it nowadays that thinks it acceptable, indeed mandatory, to denounce a class of people based on skin colour? That would be the woke ideologues in academia, who have designated whiteness as a kind of racial pathology, indeed akin to original sin.

In an article last year in these pages, I drew attention to an extraordinary statement on the ABC’s The Minefield program by Scott Stephens, who runs the ABC’s religion and ethics website.

It bears repeating, since in my view it is the perfect example, the Platonic form, of expressions of the new woke racism: “The great moral debility about being white is that people have wilfully chosen the trinkets and accoutrements of the accretions of power and privilege over a much more fundamental bondedness with other human beings … I mean that is, if we were speaking in a theological register, we would call that a tremendous and even radical sin.”

This statement inverts the old racist notion used to justify slavery that black skin was the mark of Cain. For some time, notions of racial guilt have been inserted into education at all levels, including primary school, exemplified by a program described in an ABC documentary titled The School That Tried to End Racism that requires the children to focus on their racial identity, and their racial privilege or victim status, producing obvious distress in some of the children.

The definitions of race and racism have been radically reinterpreted, with their scope both narrowed and broadened by the race ideologues. Narrowed, in that according to woke ideology whites can never be the victims of racism. At most, whites can be subject to prejudicial abuse but not racism, since only white people possess the requisite power to impose oppression. All white people? Do no non-white people have power? Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey? Far more power than the vast majority of whites? It is manifestly absurd.

On the other hand, the understanding of racism has been broadened to include criticism on grounds that have nothing to do with race. In Britain, for example, an all-party parliamentary group adopted the following definition: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

An article lauding this development in The Conversation acknowledges that Muslims do not constitute a race but that the definition highlights “similarities between the functions and processes of Islamophobia” and racism.

In a similar vein, the Australian Human Rights Commission advocates a definition of racism that “reflects a nuanced and intersectional understanding of racism” and that “understanding racism only through the category of race does not address its breadth and complexity”.

Got that? Non-racial racism, according to the scholars, can include anything that has been “racialised”. No circular reasoning there. In effect, it is Humpty Dumpty’s definition, the latter famous for saying: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Suddenly, Steggall’s intervention makes perfect sense.

Since October 7, things have taken a more sinister turn with the re-emergence in a “progressive” guise of that oldest and most malignant form of racism, anti-Semitism. This week, The Wall Street Journal ran an article by liberal columnist William A. Galston titled Can College Campuses Get a Grip on Anti-Semitism? Citing the work of taskforces investigating anti-Semitism at Columbia and Stanford universities, Galston reports: “What they uncovered is deeply disturbing. Large numbers of Jewish students report harassment, intimidation and even physical assault. Students wearing yarmulkes have been spat on, humiliated, and shoved up against walls. Necklaces with Jewish symbols have been ripped from their necks. Jewish students have been chased off campus by groups threatening violence, and many avoid walking alone on campus. Some have been excluded from public spaces.”

For some time, there have been allegations that anti-Zionist agitation, especially on campuses, has been degenerating into outright anti-Semitism. It looks like the mask is falling.

In an article late last year, historian Niall Ferguson drew parallels between what is happening at universities today with 1930s Germany, noting that “hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into anti-Semitism is now impossible to deny”.

It seems that, where matters of race and racism are concerned, the left in its modern woke incarnation has fallen into a moral and intellectual abyss.

Peter Baldwin was the federal Labor MP for the seat of Sydney, 1983-98. He was a Labor member of the NSW Legislative Council, 1976-82. He posts articles weekly at polciv.substack.com