Three in four Australians ‘biased against Aborigines’
THREE out of four Australians have negative bias towards Aboriginal people, according to research.
Academics at the Australian National University analysed the responses of more than 11,000 people surveyed from 2009 to 2020, and found “negative implicit or unconscious bias against indigenous Australians across the board”, adding it was “likely the cause of the racism that many First Australians experience”.
The research, published in the Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues and the first of its kind in Australia, comes as hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to protest police violence and other forms of racism.
Since a Royal Commission into aboriginal deaths in custody issued its findings in 1991, 432 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – who are indigenous to islands off Queensland and are ethnically distinct from mainland Aboriginal people – have died in custody.
The data, which showed ethnicity, education, religion, occupation and gender appeared to have little impact on people’s implicit bias, was collected online through a test created by Harvard, Yale and the University of Sydney. The test determined implicit bias by measuring how quickly participants matched positive words such as joy and love, and negative words such as nasty and hurt, with images of indigenous and Caucasian Australians.
The test found that, overwhelmingly, people held a racial bias against indigenous Australians.
Caucasian Australians showed the highest level of bias against indigenous people, as compared with the bias exhibited by respondents of East Asian, South-east Asian and South Asian backgrounds. Western Australia and Queensland participants were the most biased against indigenous people compared with other states and territories.
The report’s author, Siddharth Shirodkar, told the ABC’S Radio National that the “evidence shows implicit or unconscious bias toward our first Australians is not imagined. The reality is, 75 per cent of Australians who were tested in this … displayed an implicit bias towards Caucasian faces; so, associating positive terms with Caucasians,” he said.
He said the results were “shocking, but not surprising”.