On the deliberate ambiguity of defining race in service of the racial state.
The Lebanese-Australian journalist and founder of Media Diversity Australia, Antoinette Lattouf appeared in court on February 3 2025 on the first day of hearings in her unfair dismissal case against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
In sum, to cite The Guardian,
Lattouf lost her job after she shared a Human Rights Watch post about the Israel-Gaza war while employed in the casual role. Before the Fair Work Commission last year, the ABC said it was a breach of editorial policy. The ABC has denied she was sacked because she was paid for the full five days of her contract.
The affidavit of ABC Managing Director, David Anderson, clearly shows that before the posting of the HRW post that put the final nail in Antoinette Lattouf’s coffin, the broadcaster had been lobbied to drop her. The notorious WhatsApp group chat ‘J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics’ had sent countless emails of complaint to then ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose. Lattouf had been on a five-day temporary contract hosting a non-political morning radio show.
Needless to say the facts of the case are a parody of the Zionist tactics that are the modus operandi of the ‘war on antisemitism.’ They do not even have to sound coherent to be granted legitimacy under the terms established in the desperate attempt to assert the dominance of the racial state in a time of more overt fascism. It is clear that Jews have become an emptied out shell for whatever function we are being made to serve for global Zionism/white western supremacism when Lattouf’s sharing of facts can lead to her dismissal because her very presence on the ABC made some Zionist Jews ‘uncomfortable.’ The tooling of Jewish weakness – a racialised construction – for the justification of genocide certainty continues to astound in its audaciousness.
The use of race
However, what I wish to pay attention to is how race is being used in this case. In simple terms, the ABC is relying on the mass public confusion about how to define race; a lack of racial literacy which is – as it always is – by design.
The ABC contends that ‘Ms Lattouf’s case… insofar as it depends on “race” as an attribute, must fail.’ The reason for this is laid out in its opening submission:
Zooming in in the ABC’s argument, it makes the case that as there is no settled means to define race, Lattouf’s claim must fail because she “has not proven there is a Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern race”.
How does the ABC get to this argument? It is a fascinating microcosm of the poor state of racial literacy and the intentional confusion about the purpose of race as a technology of power that is contained within the very notion of race itself. The ABC refers to two ways of thinking about race: (1) What it calls its ‘ordinary meaning’ defined in dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary:
‘groupings or divisions of humankind, defined by distinct genetic characteristics and physical features, or shared ethnicity.’
This is race as discredited racial science; the wrongheaded idea that there is a way to distinguish between groups of human beings on the basis of shared genetic and/or biological attributes.
(2) It uses the 1983 Tasmanian Dam Case to introduce a second, much more vague and catch-all definition:
‘common or shared biological origins, physical characteristics, history, religion, spiritual beliefs, culture, belief, knowledge and tradition.’
What would a legal dispute about the passage of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 which stopped the construction of a dam in Tasmania have to do with the unfair dismissal of a radio presenter?
This account of the case explains how the Tasmanian government’s case in favour of building the dam ultimately failed. One of the reasons it did so was because parts of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 were ‘supported by the race power because they protected Aboriginal cultural heritage.’ The ‘race power’ refers to the subsection of Section 51 of the Constitution of Australia granting the Australian Commonwealth the power to make special laws for people of any race. This was altered following the 1967 referendum before which the government could make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.’
I am not a lawyer and it would be interesting to seek a lawyer’s opinion on why these two cases were used in the ABC’s submission in the case. But, from my perspective, it appears that the rationale was to introduce ambiguity on how race is defined. If there is no crystal clear way to define race, then – ta daa – Antoinette Lattouf cannot prove that she had been discriminated against on racial grounds. This is notwithstanding the fact that Anderson conceded that, while contentious, it is ‘factually accurate’ to say that ‘Australia is a racist country; it always has been.’ But of course, this comment, made by senior white journalist Laura Tingle, is permissible because she is white.
There is a constellation of issues here which must be disentangled. Doing so will hopefully support Antoinette Lattouf in her case against the ABC, which there is no discussion, is a clear case of racism. It is also a specific case of anti-Palestinian racism which the Palestinian sociologist Muhannad Ayyash connects to what he calls the ‘toxicity’ of Palestinian critique. This does not only affect Palestinians who expose ‘the foundations and institutions of Israeli state and society as primarily racialized and settler colonial,’ but extends to anyone else who does so. The specific form of racism suffered by Antoinette Lattouf, like countless others in the ‘war on antisemitism’ derives from the fact that she raises awareness about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
This is exacerbated by the fact that she is herself a Lebanese, Arab woman. In an obvious example of epistemic racism she is seen as a less reliable narrator of politics because of the racist, Orientalist, colonising maxim that Arab people, and women in particular, are driven by emotion, not fact, and thus lack rational thinking. In matters pertaining to Palestine specifically, Arab people have been portrayed as uniquely antisemitic – opposition to Israel being confused with racism against Jews – in a wilful neglect of the actual history of antisemitism as a European phenomenon with no comparable history in the non-European world. What is perceived as the widespread antisemitism of Arabs is in fact anger at the nefarious impact of what Zionist founder Theodor Herzl referred toas ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’ in the middle of an Arab region. This can be seen today in Israel’s incursions into Lebanon and Syria, and its designs for a ‘greater Israel’.
The insertion of this ambiguity about how to define race into the Lattouf vs. the ABC case thus sheds light on the relationship between race and racism. ABC Managing Director Anderson appears to wish to disentangle the fact that Australia – like Israel, as another settler colony – is racist from the question of whether Lattouf was subject to racial discrimination by questioning whether she emanates from ‘a race’. However, the fact that the Tasmania Dam case was mobilised to do so is not the flex the ABC’s lawyers think it is, because the description of of race in that case reveals that race is fundamentally an amorphous and flexible category and always has been.
I have described race as
‘a technology for the management of human difference the main goal of which is the production, reproduction and maintenance of white supremacy on both a local and planetary scale’
What has been definable as race changes over time and circumstance. On the one hand, the ABC points to this by introducing two definitions, which they want to create the impression compete with each other. On the hand, by using the Tasmanian Dam case definition and contrasting it with what they call the ‘ordinary definition,’ they wish to imply that the biological idea of race supersedes any other more culturally-based one. The use of the race power in the Australian constitution to legislate against the building of the Tasmanian Dam reveals how race has never been about biology, let alone genetics; rather the racial state and its institutions mobilise all discourses, histories, and constructs at its disposal to build a picture of what race could mean, and use it accordingly in different ways depending on circumstance. This has always been the case historically.
Specifically in relation to the so-called ‘race power’, like all people subjected to racial-colonial domination, Aboriginal people did not define themselves as ‘a race’. However, as colonised people, they have been and continue to be subjected to racism because the overriding feature of race is the assertion of white, western supremacy over Indigenous peoples who are diversely presented in racial discourse as less-than-human or non-human, lacking culture, history, knowledge and art, child-like and unable to self-govern, uniquely criminally violent, savage and in need of taming, and usually a combination of all of these things.
The race power allows the Australian state to make laws with respect to all people, including Aboriginal people. Before 1967, the state reserved the right to make special laws with respect to Aboriginal people. However, the salient point is that the inclusion of Aboriginal people within the constitution does not change the reality of the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous lands in the continent and the fact that Indigenous people remain subjected to some of the worst forms of state violence in the world.
The purpose of race as a technology of rule has always been to exert power, to enact exploitation, domination and harm, and to enable colonisation, expropriation, and the enrichment of those who cast themselves as racially superior: white Europeans.
The attempt to dismiss Antoinette Lattouf’s claim against the ABC by invoking the ambiguity of race itself is a prime example of how racial categorisation became such a key weapon for the achievement of western dominance. As Stuart Hall most expertly reminds us, it is a floating signifier that can be made to mean what it needs to mean for the purposes of ensuring the maintenance of white supremacy. The paradox of introducing the antiracist argument that race ≠ biology is that institutions like the ABC can latch on to it to deny that racism exists.
In the end, Antoinette Lattouf’s defence comes down to the clear point made by Amani Haydar that Australia has been ‘more than happy to racialise Lebanese people’ when they are being criminalised, profiled, ‘deradicalised’, etc. She hits on the vital point that the racial state conjures peoples as races for the purposes of control and punishment and deracialises them with equal speed when those subjected to that control and punishment fight back as ‘a race.’
Antoinette Lattouf is fighting back. She deserves our wholehearted support!