into white society. While some of the ‘light skinned’ or ‘half caste’ lived with ‘blacks’, the authors wrote, others lived with the whites and were more socially accepted. This hierarchicalization within race undertook what ‘Colorism’ scholars have observed as a caste system with roots in the 1600’s. The Eatock Versus Bolt case shows, as with many international cases in the context of race powers and colonisation, light skinned people have been the subjects of control and systemic abuse. An essential argument is not that light skinned people are not of a specific racial or ethnic origin, as Bolt (2009) argued, but rather a need to explore the impact skin colour in Indigenous Australia and how it reflects racial values of broader society, or as Holdschild puts it, creates a ‘double disadvantage’ for some. ‘Colorism’ transcends race and gender, normalises whiteness in race powers, and preferences light skin as reflective of normative. ‘Colorism’ also engages narratives and power relations related to tone as not just an inference of interracial relationships, but those with parents of the same ethnicity and leads to psychic conflict within the individual and more broadly the group (Hall 1990). It has a particularly insidious impact in relation to aestheticism in women of colour, allowing those with lighter skin to ‘marrying up’ on the socioeconomic scale, while leaving those with darker complexion notably unwedded and subjects of discard and dehumanisation. Noonuccal’s poem in 1989 ‘Dark Unmarried Mothers’, reflected on the value of whiteness in Australian court systems where white females are concerned, compared to those of black women when she wrote: ‘Is it a white girl, then court case and headline/ Stern talk of maintenance / Is it a dark girl? Then safe immunity/ He takes what he wants’
This passage comments on Colour, race, gender and sexual consent, and the manner through which the law protects whiteness and allows the exploitation of blackness. Whether similar agency is considered when light skinned women are raped is a question requiring interrogation. The case of the rape of Black Power Activist Roberta Sykes in the 1960’s in Townsville saw the conviction of one of several rapists. No such case from the same period has recorded the rape of darker skinned women nor the conviction of a white male, despite there being a rich literary premise for such occurrences. Research shows Indigenous Australians face a number of negative stereotypes which impact policy across a broad range of areas. However, like many populations of colour across the world, being dark skinned can intensify and activate negative associations, as research has shown with recent online experiments on the pigmentation of U.S President Barack Obama and the 2008 U.S election. *Colorism is an important field of study that, unlike critical race theory, moves beyond racial groups and relates to systemic privileges bestowed upon those with lighter skin tones. It has important implications across a number of fields including the media, the law, socioeconomics, politics, policy and education. This paper has argued the importance of introducing the concept of Colorism into Indigenous Australian research , and despite the fact that it has rarely been attempted, colour is already present in the way society perceives people, and has placed limitations of human interaction and human potential. In EATOCK v. BOLT [2011], for example, colour plays a particular role in how various Acts can be interpreted and applied. Recent social media activity has continued to highlight the problem of ‘Colorism’ in many parts of the world using the internet (ABC 2016), and while there is little research on Indigenous Australians and
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