Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality Responses to COVID-19

Abstract

Race is a pervasive system that categorises and stratifies people in ways that maintain institutional and systemic inequality. Race has impacted the evolving management of public health responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic around the world. In Australia, state governments imposed harsh policing of migrant and refugee working class people that were not applied to white middle class people. The Government failed to meaningfully engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in early public health planning, leaving communities who were at high risk from the virus to autonomously coordinate action without substantial state support. This chapter presents a case study of the webseries, Race in Society. The series featured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars and practitioners, and other people of colour researchers from Australia who examined public discourses of race and the pandemic. The chapter uses the concept of intersectionality to illustrate how the welfare state exercises multiple domains of power to maintain racial inequality, even during the public health crisis of COVID-19. This chapter provides guidance for educators and researchers on how to apply critical race perspectives into their own scholarship, teaching, and activism.

Introduction

Race is a way to categorise, stratify, and dominate people through social institutions (such as the law and economy) and social norms (such as taken-for-granted ideas about who is, and is not, white). In Australia, North America, the United Kingdom, idea that some groups are superior to others. This includes policies that create social hierarchies, with white European descendants at the top, Indigenous and other Black people at the bottom, and other people of colour and migrant groups in between.

While race is not based on any biological fact, the logic of race has material impact. As we will see, race is central to understanding how Australia responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. These patterns apply to other white-majority countries. This chapter explores intersectionality and the management of the virus to demonstrate how critical race concepts and methods can improve scholarship, teaching, and practice.

First, I give an overview of race in Australia. Second, I discuss intersectionality as an analytical framework. Finally, I present by a case study of ‘Race in Society’ (2020f), a webseries co-founded and co-presented with Professor Alana Lentin. Launched in 2020, it is freely available: https://www.YouTube.com/RaceinSociety. It consists of a series of online discussions with academics and practitioners working on race and COVID-19. I draw out key questions that researchers and students can use to rethink methodological assumptions. I show how intersectionality complements critical analysis of the welfare state.

Race in Australia

Australia was founded through genocide and violent dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their lands. Upon invasion in 1788, British colonists declared Australia to be terra nullius, ‘land belonging to no one.’ Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues that Western notions of ownership and power are central to the way colonial nations are organised. She shows how the ‘possessive logics’ of colonisation can be seen in the laws, institutions and discourses that affirm white control, and domination. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are both Indigenous and Black. Race was enshrined in legislation, such as the Aborigines Protection Amending Act, No. 2 of 1915 (NSW), which gave the state the power to take custody of Aboriginal children (Australian Human Rights Commission 1997, p. 34). Between 1910 and 1970, one-third of Aboriginal children were put into institutions (the ‘Stolen Generations’), with the aim to obliterate their connection to family, kinship, culture, spirituality, and land (Australian Human Rights Commission 1997, p. 31).

Race relations continue to impact the class and life outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In the most recent Census of 2021, there were 25.5 million people living in Australia. First Nations people make up 3.2% of Australia’s population (812,728 people) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022a). Due to the ongoing impact of colonisation, institutional racism and inadequate social welfare, the state continues to engineer unequal socio-economic outcomes for First Nations people. Despite their relatively small population size, First Nations people are twice as likely as non-Indigenous Australians to have a severe or profound disability (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2021b). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people earn 60% less than the median gross household income of non-Indigenous Australians (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2021c). Aboriginal people make up 20% of Australia’s homeless population (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2021a, p. 160). They are also more likely to be in overcrowded housing. The Australian Government has failed to meet two-thirds of its national welfare goals for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Collard 2022). This includes failing to reduce high rates of suicide, adult incarceration, and children in out-of-home care. In addition, Aboriginal children are not reaching key developmental milestones before preschool.

This racial inequality was exacerbated during COVID-19. In 2020, after the first year of the pandemic, half (53%) of Indigenous Australians aged 16 and over were receiving some form of income support. This is twice the proportion of non-Indigenous Australians receiving welfare support (27%) (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2021c).

One of the first Australian Federation laws passed in 1901 was the restriction of immigration. The ‘White Australia policy,’ as it is colloquially known, first targeted Pacific Islanders, and then more broadly all non British groups. Economic demands for cheap labour motivated an increase in foreign workers, but “ideologies of domination based on class, gender and ‘race’ prevailed” (Bottomley and de Lepervanche 1989, p. viii). Even after moving from assimilation to multiculturalism in the mid-1970s, Australia has maintained punitive measures to subjugate Indigenous people and other racial minorities.

Over half (51.5%) of Australians are either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas (Bahr 2022). Almost one-third (27.6%) of Australians were born overseas. The biggest migrant groups were born in England (3.8% of the national population), India (2.8%), China (2.3%), and New Zealand (2.2%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022b). Despite this ethnic diversity, racism is commonplace for people of colour, 43% of whom regularly experience racism at work (Aidone 2022). Additionally, 35% experience racism in public and 33% at school (Challenging Racism Project 2017).

These ongoing historical relations have fed into state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In July 2021, 12 local government areas in Southwestern Sydney were placed under strict restrictions. Locals could not travel outside of their local area. Residents had to keep within five kilometres from home. These are multicultural working-class suburbs with 44% to 69% migrant populations (Zevallos 2021b). These suburbs comprise the majority of ‘critical workers’ who maintained frontline services. Nevertheless, they were provided inadequate protections against infection.

A Victorian inquiry found people in low socioeconomic areas were twice as likely to be fined for COVID breaches (Taylor 2021). Youth and racial minorities were overwhelmingly targeted for COVID fines in the states of Victoria (Taylor 2020) and New South Wales (Fitzsimmons and Gladstone 2020; Rachwani and Evershed 2022). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were also more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested for COVID infringements (Sentas et al. 2021).

The intersectionality framework below is used to illustrate how government regulation of the pandemic maintains institutional racism embedded within the welfare state.