MDA | Race Reporting Handbook
How to Approach This Guide
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be
changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin, American Writer and Civil Rights Activist.
This Reporting on Race Handbook is
designed to be inclusive and mindful,
through an anti-racism lens, for the
media industry.
We understand that race intersects
with other dimensions of a person’s
experience, including class and
organisational hierarchy, which influences
decision-making power and experiences.
This intersectionality means that your
ability to enact change varies based on
your position within an organisation.
If you’re in a leadership role, you have a
different set of responsibilities compared
to those in more junior positions. However,
everyone has a role in fostering an antiracist environment.
UNDERSTANDING RACE
AND RACIALISATION
The definitions used in this
handbook have been adapted
from Key Concepts and
Definitions for Building Racial
Literacy (2024) written by Alana
Lentin and Debbie Bargallie and
The Australian Human Rights
Commission Resources.
Race
Race is a mechanism of power based
on the idea that people have shared
heritable physiological and/or cultural
characteristics. These are assumed to
be fixed and unchangeable. Groups,
conceived of as races, are located closer
to or further away from an ideal vision of
humanity constructed by Europeans.
Race should be understood as an active,
dynamic force (Sivanandan, 1990). It
weaves together ideas from biology,
culture, nationalism, and religion to make
inferences about whole populations. It
is, first and foremost, a technique for
the management of human differences
for the purpose of exploitation and
domination.
It is used by states, governments, and
institutions, such as the police, education,
healthcare and welfare, to organise and
demarcate between people. Race is
mobile and ever changing. But ultimately,
it serves to maintain white supremacy, at
both a local and global level (Lentin, 2018).
Systemic Racism
Systemic racism is the way that cultural
norms, laws, ideologies, policies, and
practices of a particular society,
10