Anti-racism means more than just responding to racism once it has happened. It involves actively identifying where racism has contributed to the exclusion and unfair treatment of First Peoples, multicultural and multifaith communities. It is challenging our beliefs and biases and transforming the structures, institutions and practices that allow discrimination and inequality to persist.
Anti-racism is a continuous practice and everyone’s ongoing responsibility.
At the personal level anti-racism means we …
- Reflect on how personal beliefs and attitudes towards each other may be based on stereotypes or unconscious biases.
- Do not make assumptions about people based on their skin colour, the language they speak, their cultural practices or their religion.
- Challenge or disagree with other people when they make racist jokes or comments.
- Listen to and learn from each other’s perspectives, educating ourselves about each other’s cultures and experiences, and how they may differ from our own.
- Report racist comments or behaviour when we witness it, and help the people targeted.
At the institutional level anti-racism means we …
- Identify and remove an organisation’s racist policies, practices and procedures.
- Make policies and change processes to proactively promote racial equity.
- Include First Peoples, multicultural and multifaith people in the design of policies and processes that affect them.
- Improve environments and services to make them culturally safe.
- Guarantee equal access to professional pathways and to career and leadership development.
- Make sure leaders and people in power in an organisation have the tools to identify and overcome biases when making decisions.
- Develop measures to respond to and address racist actions by people in an organisation.
At the structural level anti-racism means we …
- Support First Peoples' right to self-determination, Truth and Treaty.
- Protect and promote human rights, including the right to freedom from racism and discrimination.
- Acknowledge and teach the history and ongoing effects of colonisation in schools.
- Acknowledge that cultural and social norms benefit some and marginalise others.
- Improve access to resources and economic and social participation for First Peoples, multicultural and multifaith groups.
Using intersectionality to understand and respond to racism
‘Intersectionality’ refers to the ways in which different aspects of a person’s identity can expose them to overlapping forms of discrimination and disadvantage, making the impacts worse. These include, for example, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism or ageism.
Aspects of a person’s identity can include characteristics like:
- Aboriginality
- ethnicity
- age
- disability
- gender
- sexual orientation
- class
- language
- migration status
- religion.
An intersectional approach to anti-racism helps us to:
- understand and identify how systems and structures of inequality can overlap and worsen discrimination and marginalisation for racialised groups
- create more targeted and effective policies and services to address racism and consider overlapping forms of inequality, disadvantage and discrimination.
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