What we lost when we imported America's race conversation

The dominant antiracism conversation in 2026 has accepted the central premise of racism: that race is the unit through which everything must be read. It treats race as the irreducible category. It hardens the very lines it claims to want to dissolve. The intent is honourable. The frame is the problem.

This is not a new mistake. Two and a half thousand years ago, Isocrates wrote that “Greek” no longer marked a race but a cast of mind. Anyone formed by the shared culture was Greek. Anyone not, whatever their blood, was βάρβαρος. Belonging was paideia, not blood. Built, not inherited.

The argument over whether a people is defined by descent or by formation is older than almost anything else we still argue about. We are losing it now, badly, and the people losing it hardest are often the people who think they are getting it right.

Nations Are Political Projects, Not Racial Facts

Nations are constructions. The United States invented itself out of an idea and spent two centuries fighting over who counted. Australia federated in 1901 and immediately legislated whiteness as a condition of belonging, then spent the second half of the twentieth century engineering a different answer, and is still arguing about it. Modern Turkey was built by Atatürk on the deliberate manufacture of a national identity that submerged Ottoman pluralism. None of these nations are racial facts. All of them are political projects dressed, when convenient, as natural ones.

Locking people into racial categories is fighting yesterday’s war on yesterday’s terms.

The Strategic Flaw

The version of antiracism that dominates the conversation is strategically flawed. It says race must be foregrounded, named, made central. The intent is honourable. The outcome is that race becomes the dominant frame through which every political question is read. Belonging gets sorted by descent. Identity gets fixed. The Isocratean move, the move that says belonging is formed rather than inherited, becomes nearly impossible to make.

It accepts, in its operating logic, the central premise of the racism it opposes: that race is the thing that matters most about a person.

The signs show up in what stops being sayable. A workplace conversation about whether a particular DEI initiative is working becomes a conversation about whether the speaker is racist. A migrant who questions why they are being sorted into “people of colour” alongside groups they have nothing in common with gets told they are speaking against their own interests. A teacher who suggests that class is doing more work than race in a particular outcome is treated as a problem to be managed. The frame stops looking like a frame and starts looking like reality.

The Obvious Objection

The obvious objection is that race produces material outcomes. Indigenous Australians die younger. Migrant workers face hiring discrimination. Surnames affect callbacks. Postcodes track ancestry. None of this is invented and none of it goes away by talking about it differently.

That is correct. It is also not what is at issue. “Race produces material outcomes” and “race should be the organising principle of our politics” are different claims, and the second does not follow from the first. Outcomes are racially patterned because of historical and ongoing structural arrangements that built and police the categories. The categories are the inheritance to be dismantled, not the natural unit of political life. Treating them as the unit accepts them as fixed.

The structural work of changing racially patterned outcomes does not require race to be the dominant frame. It requires honest accounting of who pays and who gains, where, and why. Class, place, citizenship, history of dispossession: these are all part of the picture. Race is one variable, not the variable. Elevating one variable above all others distorts the problem it claims to solve. Treating race as the variable produces predictable outcomes: solidarity within sorted groups, fragmentation across them, and politics better at sorting than at building.

The Argument We Should Be Having

None of this means there is no real argument to have about what Australia is and who it is for. There is, and it is the argument that matters most. What kind of country we want, what we owe each other, who is included in the “we,” what we do about the dispossession the country was built on: these are urgent and contested questions, and they deserve a serious national conversation.

We are not having one. We are having a media-shaped proxy fight in which the categories do the thinking for us. The Voice referendum was the clearest recent example. Whatever you thought of the outcome, the conversation Australia had in 2023 was not the conversation Australia needed. It collapsed into tribal sorting almost immediately. The substantive question, what changes constitutionally and practically when First Nations people get a permanent advisory voice to government, was displaced by who was on whose team.

What Was Imported

What was imported from American politics into Australian discourse over the last decade was specific: the binary side-framing of every issue, the personality-over-policy fixation, the treatment of political questions as identity tests. American racial taxonomy got mapped onto an Australian population that does not fit it, lumping Greek and Vietnamese and Sudanese and First Nations Australians into a single category called “people of colour” as if they shared anything other than not being Anglo. The vocabulary did not survive the trip intact, but the conflict logic did.

Hardened categories are better content. Nuance does not trend.

Who benefits? Media outlets that need engagement and political operators who find tribal sorting easier than coalition-building. Who pays? The people whose actual problems do not map onto American culture-war categories. Which, in this country, is most of us.

Elections turn on this now. Not on argument, on frame. Whoever sets the categories wins before the debate begins. And the categories can flip astonishingly fast, which is the tell that they were never natural to begin with. A decade is enough to recode who counts as what. The speed of the change is the proof of the construction.

Paideia, Not Blood

I write this as a queer, autistic, multicultural Australian who has spent a career working on inclusion. The project is right. The frame it is being conducted in is failing in real time. A decade of dominant antiracism politics has produced more racial sorting in workplaces, more identity-based gatekeeping in institutions, more fatigue in the people doing the work. The structural questions, housing, education access, the social determinants of health, have moved far more slowly than the rhetoric implied they would.

If belonging is paideia rather than blood, built rather than inherited, the work is cultural, civic, educational. It requires us to talk to each other across the lines, not fortify them.

If belonging is blood, in any of its modern coded forms, then we have already conceded the argument to the people we think we are fighting.

The Greeks left us a question, not an answer. Whether a people is what it inherits or what it makes of itself. Australia keeps having to answer it. We will keep answering it worse for as long as the categories do our thinking for us.

And the people who pay the highest price for that are the people most affected by racism in the first place. They get politics that performs solidarity and produces stalemate. They get DEI training that does not change hiring outcomes. They get land acknowledgments instead of land. They get a country that is louder about racism and no closer to ending it.

First published on Substack, 26 April 2026.