Shrink-Wrapped Racial Identity

On QandA the other night it was alleged that one of the women referred to by Andrew Bolt in his 2008 article was driven out of public life because of the psychological trauma of having her identity as an Indigenous woman questioned. I have no knowledge of the specifics of this matter, but it does raise the complex issue of psychological trauma intersecting with personal vulnerability,  cultural context and politics.

In a nutshell, the nub of this issue is our right to question ‘personal meaning’. It is about the legitimacy and legality of scrutinizing racial identification (in the Bolt case) or, more broadly, the issue of personal psychological salience. That is, how much should your sense of personal meaning impact on my right to question its authenticity and interrogate its psychological and factual truthfulness? Sometimes fact and meaning intersect in all sorts of ways that are more important than a lesson in post-modernism at the local polytechnic.  Section 18C of the…