Page 209 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

RACE

different jurisdictions struggled to place their populations into
categories that reflected their own circumstances, rather than squeeze
people into a universal standard. Hollinger (2000: 199) discusses how
in the US an ‘ethno-racial pentagon’, based on historically assigned
racial categories, is designed to allowthe enforcement of anti-
discrimination and affirmative action policies of the federal govern-
ment. Consisting of five categories – European, African, Hispanic,
Asian and Indigenous – the ‘pentagon’ has ‘come to replicate the
popular colour-consciousness of the past: black, white, red, yellow and
brown’ (Hollinger, 2000: 202). Certainly, despite its desire for
bureaucratic accuracy and neutrality, the categorisation of race in this
way is problematic, not least owing to internal differences within and
between each of the categories, and the difficulty of moving between
them, which has major implications for ‘mixed families’. Two of the
‘races’ – Hispanics and Europeans – would both be regarded as ‘white’
in other contexts.
The use of the ‘pentagon’ as an anti-discriminatory tool in US
federal policy clearly moves beyond the idea of race as a universal to
recognise histories of both culture and discrimination. Thus it
demonstrates that the category of race, for theoretical or governmental
purposes, cannot be separated from historical and cultural contexts (see
Hall, 1997; Hartley and McKee, 2000).
Because it is historical and therefore culturally specific rather than
universal, the ‘pentagon’ model would not make sense outside of the
US. In Africa, Europe, Asia or Australia, the demographic make-up of
the population is different. Australia for instance has no Hispanic
category. But it does make a distinction between ‘Anglo-Celtic’ and
‘multicultural’ Australians – the latter being those who migrated after
World War II, first from Southern Europe (Malta, Greece, former
Yugoslavia, Italy) and later from Asia (Vietnam and Cambodia in
particular). Australia thus has a racial ‘diamond’, not a pentagon:
Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, multicultural, Asian.
The current historical period is characterised by a re-proliferation
of the races, an attempt to arrive at non-discriminatory descriptive
categories for governmental purposes and different racial categories in
different jurisdictions. On the streets, there remains the working
through of quite different racial policies rooted in popular prejudice
and residual supremacist theories, and sometimes also inter-ethnic
competition, such as disputes between populations where both are
regarded as racial minorities, for example, Korean and Black or
Hispanic Americans. Howthe bureaucratisation of race in multi-
cultural policy may affect the outcome of these skirmishes remains to

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