When was the last time you called someone racist to their face? As someone who can only remember using the phrase “that’s pretty racist” at someone, and even then only to immediate family (in all likelihood after a few drinks), I can safely assume that doing so is something of a faux pas.
Uttered aloud, "racist" sucks the air out of any room. Perhaps it always has. The word is in itself quite new, according to Ngrams only coming into relatively common use during the 1960s civil rights movement.
But the chart's most interesting detail is that around the year 2000, use of the word began to tail off. Basically, racists learned that the best response to accusations of racism is the political one: ostentatiously feigned outrage, making the accuser the accused.
In other words, people growing up in an era of media management have unthinkingly co-opted the same mentality into their own lives. They have internalised the PR manual and now instinctively know that claiming victimhood is a stone winner in any argument.
Accompanying this has been an elevation of "racism" into a hyperbolic attack on par with "Nazi" or "communist", something so absurd that it can be disabused on its face.
The word racism has become so powerful, so significant, that is has now been robbed of all its power and significance.
It is also a word that politicians can bandy about with scant regard for reality. Much like the government’s insistence that it accepts climate change, then dismisses it in practice, governments can shred legislation that the overwhelming majority of affected groups want retained, and then stand up and proclaim that "there is no place in society for racism".
That’s because racism is no longer actual racism. Racism is a boogey man - a cartoon character in a white hood with which we can scare our kids (and media networks), while spending our time complaining about swarthy Arab terrorists, awful Asian drivers and violent Sudanese youth.
Racism is for Nazis, slave owners and the French. We Australians just don’t do it.
It’s also a handy political weapon. NSW premier Barry O’Farrell, responding to George Brandis’s claim that people have a right to be bigoted, put out a statement saying that "racism is always wrong". Well of course it is, Barry, but when you say it like that, people are again thinking of pitchforks and death camps, not life expectancy and educational attainment.
Instead perhaps we can remember the underlying value that we’re on about when we talk about racism: fairness. Australians pride themselves on being fair. Indeed, much of the more nefarious racism tends to come in the form of "it’s unfair that Aborigines get extra welfare" and associated rubbish. Next time you’re confronted by such thoughts, rather than toss out an accusation of racism, perhaps ask the perpetrator about how fair it is that Indigenous Australians die younger and get sick more than the rest of us.
Ask them if it’s fair that your friend Muhammad is checked "randomly" at the airport for bomb-making residue every time he flies from Melbourne to Sydney for work. Ask them if it’s fair that minority groups are wildly over-represented among the unemployed, imprisoned and impoverished.
Then, if they still think it’s unfair that they don’t get treated as well as all these other people, ask if they’d like to trade places.
As it is, the word racism is freighted with negative meaning, so narrowly and extremely defined, that it's no wonder Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of breaching the racial discrimination act, was able to demand and receive an apology from the national broadcaster for being called a racist by a third party on air (after he had a big cry about how his feelings were hurt by such an accusation). So perhaps, seeing as to be racist has become so horrible, it's fair enough that poor Andrew felt slighted by being compared to something as awful as that.
Perhaps we could rethink how we talk about racism, call out racism, and stop racism. Perhaps we could start by establishing the fact that racism is not only putting on a white hood and burning crosses. It might be, say, assessing people's Aboriginality on a colour chart then accusing them of adopting an ethnic profile for personal gain.