In a recent blog post, UTS Emeritus Professor of Sociology Andrew Jakubowicz wrote:

“[A] dark hole sits at the heart of multicultural Australia – the data bypass on how the COVID-19 virus pandemic is affecting our culturally diverse communities.”

According to Jakubowicz, “one of the fundamental requirements of a multicultural society, that social facts as they affect social groups should be enumerated and recorded, has been consciously and systematically avoided [in this country]. In the USA and the UK ethnicity or race are clear indicators of vulnerability. In Australia, who knows?”

Jakubowicz reports being told that this absence of data is a virtue, as knowing would enable racial thinking, and potentially intensify racism against minorities.

Yet his comments raise important questions for how Australian society reckons with its growing diversity, in the context of power shifts in the region that surrounds it.

The onset of the pandemic has coincided with a change in how the Australian state perceives China’s power and motives, surfacing racist attitudes that circulate in Australian society anyway, even without this type of data. Further, without it, we cannot understand Australia’s “cultural political economy,” in Jakubowicz’s words, given that “ethnic groups are not distributed randomly across either the economy or the landscape, but are rather clumped into certain occupations, localities, and socio-economic classes.” Nor do we understand the behaviour and preferences of second- and later-generation migrants or how we/they navigate Australian society.

Yet simply rolling out schematic tools that track data against categories like “race,” “culture,” or “ethnicity” can be dangerous, carrying the risk that the state or other powerful institutions might simply adopt aggregate categories that group us up for their convenience. Worse, they might attach seemingly “old,” colonial race theories to those categories. Many Australians have experience living under such schematics in their countries of origin, across the former European colonies in Asia, for example. These categories can feel like a generational burden that we have to bear. Even if they are used benignly, they might be hiding processes of cultural differentiation over time, or obscuring other salient sociological realities like class and access to opportunity.

There are long-standing traditions of Asian history and historiography, anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology, that show how cultural identity groups are constructed through social and political processes. Debates about race and culture in Australia could learn from this scholarship, instead of always comparing Australia with other white-majority nations that practice “multiculturalism.”

Dr Amrita Malhi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change. Amrita is a historian of Southeast Asia, with a primary interest in shifting identities and identity conflict in colonial Malaya and contemporary Malaysia. Since 2015, Amrita has also been working on how to grapple with cultural difference in an increasingly diverse Australia and a changing region, including in a policy outreach project sponsored by the South Australian Government. This year, Amrita has been working on a project co-sponsored by the Department of Industry and social enterprise Cultural Infusion, aimed at stress-testing the ontologies and categories of difference embedded in its database, Diversity Atlas.

This event is part of the Learning from Asia andthe Pacific Symposium