Women of Colour

By Zuleyka Zevallos

“No one can take away who we are. No one can take away our identity”. Prominent Australian writer and intellectual Anita Heiss recently made this comment on the program Living Black. She was speaking about her lawsuit win over Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of racial vilification. In 2004, Bolt engaged in a series of racist comments attacking high-profile Indigenous Australians, essentially arguing they weren’t “black enough”, as Heiss puts it in her latest book. The Living Black video (below), recounts some of Bolt’s insidious comments, such as “Meet the white face of a new black race. The Political Aborigine… I certainly don’t accuse them of opportunism, even if full-blood Aborigines may wonder how such fair people can claim to be one of them and in some cases take black jobs”.

Bolt is a conservative commentator and notorious bigot who tries his hardest to single-handedly dismantle multicultural harmony via his newspaper column and TV appearances. Bolt glowers over Indigenous Australian leaders, patronising his readership about how he images Indigenous Australians might feel about “light-skinned” Aboriginals, without awareness of his white male privilege and the ongoing history of racist paternalism which dominate Indigenous affairs at the national level. Bolt casually makes reference to “full-blood Aborigines”, which is a socially constructed colonial concept used to institutionalise racist practices. The categorisation of “half-caste”, “full-blood” and other variations, has been used since European settlement to deny Indigenous Australians access to their human rights, social welfare and land ownership. As Heiss’ book argues, her court case win over Bolt was a symbolic triumph. The court rule in favour of racial vilification took away the power of identity labelling from white Westerners who impose racial categories upon Indigenous Australians. While this is only one case involving one infamous media personality, Heiss says that the future implications of this court case are likely to be profound: Continue reading Reframing “Black” Identity Politics in Australia