Race, racism, and the far right: critical reflections for the field

As critical scholars of race implore us to consider the structural and systemic nature of racism and to move beyond individualistic and attitudinal understandings, the proliferation of the global far right has reinforced a ‘bad apple’ view of racism within the scholarship. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a reflexive account of conducting a PhD thesis on Australia’s most prominent far-right politician, Pauline Hanson. For many, the return of Pauline Hanson to the Australian parliament in 2016 signalled the return of the ugly politics of race that characterised Hanson’s first stint in politics in the 1990s. The collective agreement that Hanson’s return represented the resurgence of racism in Australia corresponded with Ghassan’s Hage’s point that “white Australians have an interest in someone else perceived as ‘irrational and/immature’ … by distinguishing themselves from the ‘extremists’” (2000: 246). This chapter suggests that in the absence of a risk critical analysis, scholars of populism and the far right risk (re)producing individualistic understandings of racism through our narrow focus on far-right actors. Drawing on the Australian case study, this chapter aims to produce a set of critical provocations for scholars researching the far right within colonial and settler colonial contexts where racism is woven into the very fabric of society at a structural level. The chapter concludes by arguing that anything less than conceptualising the far right within a broader system of race, colonialism, and white supremacy risks the field becoming an obstacle to the project of dismantling them.