Race Relations in Australia and the United States

Paper Summary:

This paper is an in-depth examination of the politics of race relations in the United States and Australia. The author examines the concepts of race including racial superiority and racial equality in order to give the reader a clear understanding of the issue. An overview of Native American history in the United States and Aboriginal history in Australia is given, and includes many of the government policies, and laws that were created to deal with the respective populations. The problems that resulted from these past policies, and their affect on the current environment is also discussed. The author draws some comparisons between the two countries and looks at how there are still many unresolved issues today surrounding the issue of race relations in both countries.

From the Paper:

"Racial distinctions are one of the on-going elements of human societies; like the poor, they may be always with one. However, an essential point to make for the arguments laid forth in this paper is the fact that "although 'race" is continually with us as an organizing concept, what the term refers to " that is, the origins and basis of 'racial" differences " has not remained constant" (Outlaw, in Goldberg, 1990, pp. 61-2). Race is a shifting category, changing over time, with different populations variously grouped together or divided into separate groups. This shifting quality of racial identity can be seen in recent re-conceptualizations of aboriginal identity in Australia, re-conceptualizations that came a generation before in the United States. Both American Indians and Aboriginal peoples have over the past half-century begun to redefine themselves and to be redefined by official forces in U.S. and Australian society. While most Americans are in general familiar with the general history of the first peoples of the New World, the story of the Aborigines is less familiar to us and so may perhaps be usefully summarized here."

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