A FEW BAD APPLES, OR ROTTEN TO THE CORE? Seemingly, all of a sudden, Australia’s conservatives are more than a little stirred up by critical race theory — so what is it? Luke Pearson and Nat Cromb explain. hris Kenny, senior advisory group member to the government’s Indigenous Voice committee, linked critical race theory (CRT) to a “worldwide movement to view all white people as privileged and innately racist, and to see everything through the prism of identity politics”. CRT isn’t a worldwide movement to view all white people as privileged and innately racist, and to see everything through the prism of identity politics. Warren Mundine, former host of the Indigenous Advancement Strategyfunded Sky News show Mundine Means Business, has called CRT the “most racist theory” he has read “in the last 30 years”, (which is weird given critical race theory is more than 40 years old, but maybe he read something even
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more racist 30 years ago, in 1991. That was the year the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody report was handed down after all, so maybe he means that?). CRT isn’t the most racist theory of the past 30 years. Pauline Hanson, runner up on season one of Dancing with the Stars, who thinks she is Indigenous because she was born here implying that she also thinks cows and cane toads are native animals in Australia, recently tried to pass a motion in the Senate banning critical race theory from the national curriculum. CRT isn’t in the national curriculum. So what is CRT? Depending on who you listen to, CRT is an academic theory built around the assumption that racism is not just an issue of individual biases and prejudices but is something that has
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been embedded throughout society and its institutions, or it’s some sort of pagan witchcraft that will turn your children into gay communists if they get too close to it, unless they already are gay communists and then I assume it will turn them into some sort of . . . politically correct, halal-latte sipping, sharia law-loving vegan socialist — who is also a gay communist. So, what is it? Where does it come from? And why are Australian conservatives currently building a moat filled with Holy Water around the Legion of Sky News lair to protect themselves from it? There are any number of explainers of what CRT is, written by cleverer than us academic types, and you should definitely go and read those, but ultimately the current ‘debate’ in Australia boils down to this: is racism an individual or a team sport? Is racism an issue of racist individuals i.e. just a ‘few bad apples’? Or is racism
