Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which is marked each year by the United Nations (UN) on the day the police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against apartheid laws designed to enforce segregation in 1960.
It is held in solidarity with people struggling with racial discrimination – but you’re not to blame if this is the first you’re hearing of it.
In 1998, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship had the first national survey on Australian attitudes about race.
Then in 1999, after a report from the survey recommended building the belief that Australian society was fundamentally harmonious, and that this harmony should be a cause for celebration, Australia rebranded the day to ‘Harmony Day’.
This change not only pushes aside racial discrimination, but any mention of racism at all. It’s largely reflective of Australia’s attitudes toward racism, denying its very existence.
This is actually only one of two examples of this we get each March.
International Women’s Day, celebrated on 8 March, comes with two themes every year.
The official theme from the UN, which this year was Count Her In: Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress, and the theme from internationalwomensday.com, #InspireInclusion.
This happens every year, one proposes a specific theme aimed at moving toward gender equality, and the other is broad and requires no real action (except maybe the distribution of cupcakes).
A vaguely ‘empowering’ hashtag doesn’t ask for anything but, much like Harmony Day, it sounds good. Never mind that ‘inclusion’ is much harder to measure than investment in women’s education and employment.
The non-UN theme has been such an effective distraction over the years that the fact that there are always two goes relatively unnoticed. The UN theme consistently gets less reach both across social media and International Women’s Day celebrations.
While of course it’s all well and good to celebrate progress, the words we use have the power to dilute action.
Language is paramount in how we understand anything – and if we aren’t asking for real change, we might just be suggesting that none is needed.
And maybe – just maybe – we can distract ourselves from these issues so much we forget to call them out altogether.
