Why I Write About Race, Not Politics

I write about race because race enters a person’s life long before it appears in a speech, a policy document or an election campaign. It can shape where a child feels safe, which history is taught at school, how a family is described by strangers and whether a neighbour is treated as belonging. Politics matters, but it often arrives after the damage, the fear or the quiet exclusion has already become part of ordinary life.

My novels, memoir and reflections have therefore been concerned with human beings before institutions. In Gideon’s Children, and in the journeys and recollections gathered in An Irish Experience, I look for the private choices that reveal a public truth. A character’s hesitation, a family’s silence or a moment of courage may explain racial injustice more powerfully than a list of policies. Stories give readers room to recognise one another without reducing anyone to a position on a ballot paper.

The Human Story Beneath Public Debate

Political language tends to sort people into camps. It asks whether a government was right, whether a movement succeeded or whether a law should be supported. Those questions have their place, yet they can turn living people into evidence for an argument. When I write about race, I want to restore the individual who disappears behind the headline.

A child who is followed in a shop, a worker whose name is repeatedly mispronounced or a family that is told to be grateful for limited opportunity does not experience these moments as an abstract debate. The incidents accumulate. They influence confidence, relationships and expectations. Fiction can follow that accumulation closely, allowing readers to feel how prejudice operates through habits as much as through openly hostile declarations.

This matters in Australia, where public conversations about race can move quickly from the history of Aboriginal dispossession to current arguments about recognition, migration and national identity. The language of a “fair go” is deeply familiar, yet fairness is not experienced equally by everyone. A story can hold that contradiction without rushing to a slogan.

Race Is Lived Before It Is Legislated

Race is often discussed as though it exists only in official categories. In daily life, it can be heard in a joke at work, seen in a police stop or felt when a person enters a room and senses that others have already made assumptions. These experiences may never reach Parliament, but they influence how people understand themselves and one another.

That is why I am interested in character, memory and moral choice. A political programme may describe discrimination in broad terms, while a novel can show a mother deciding what to tell her son before he leaves home. It can show a friendship strained by an unexamined belief, or a bystander weighing the cost of speaking up. Such scenes make racial prejudice recognisable in its ordinary forms.

Australian readers know how much meaning can sit inside everyday speech. “Good on you” may signal genuine warmth, while “mate” can express solidarity or conceal condescension depending on who says it and how. A person may be told to relax, stop being sensitive or “go back where you came from”, even when their family has lived in Melbourne, Perth or Darwin for generations. Race is present in these small encounters, long before a political party claims the subject.

What Fiction Can Hold

Fiction allows contradiction to remain visible. A character may love a country and still condemn its injustice. Someone may benefit from a system while trying to change it. A person who has suffered discrimination may still carry prejudices of their own. Political argument often rewards certainty, but human experience is full of divided feelings and unfinished understanding.

This is one reason I write about race rather than politics. I am less interested in proving that one side is pure than in showing how people become capable of harm, denial or compassion. A story can examine the private excuses that sustain public inequality. It can also show how a single decision—a refusal to join a cruel joke, an act of welcome, a willingness to listen—may interrupt a pattern that has lasted for years.

The form of the novel is especially useful because it creates time. Readers remain with a character through consequences, not merely through an announcement. They see what happens after the speech, after the apology and after the law has changed. That extended attention encourages empathy without demanding sentimental agreement.

Memory, Place, And Moral Attention

Race is inseparable from place. Ireland, the United States and Australia carry distinct histories, yet each has had to confront the stories it preferred to leave untold. A landscape can preserve memory even when public language tries to smooth it away. Roads, schools, monuments and family homes may carry traces of conflict that official histories neglect.

In Australia, the presence of Aboriginal history is not confined to museums or commemorative days. It is part of the ground beneath cities and rural towns, including places such as Sydney, Alice Springs and the communities surrounding Uluru. The legacy of the Stolen Generations, the consequences of the Mabo decision and continuing debates about sovereignty all shape the moral landscape. Writing about race requires attention to who was here first, whose testimony was dismissed and who has been asked to carry the burden of reconciliation.

Travel and memoir make this attention physical. To move through a place is to encounter distances, borders and silences that cannot be understood from a newspaper editorial alone. In An Irish Experience, travel becomes a way of considering history through people and settings rather than treating a country as a collection of picturesque images. The same principle applies when reading Australia: the landscape is beautiful, but beauty must not be used to erase dispossession.

Why Politics Alone Can Narrow Vision

Political parties need clear positions. Writers need a different kind of clarity: the clarity to notice what a position leaves out. A policy may promise equality while failing to address humiliation. A campaign may invoke inclusion while treating minority communities as useful symbols. A government may condemn racism in public and permit its everyday forms to continue through indifference.

The distinction between race and politics is not a claim that politics is irrelevant. Laws, institutions and elections determine material conditions. Rather, I write about race because it is possible to oppose a policy without examining the assumptions that made the policy acceptable. When the conversation remains at the level of party competition, readers may debate who is winning while missing who is being wounded.

Writers have a responsibility to investigate that gap. The civil rights lessons that remain valuable today concern courage, persistence and the discipline of seeing others as fully human. They are not instructions for copying an earlier era. They are reminders that legal progress does not automatically produce social trust, and that silence can support injustice even when it appears polite.

Writing Across National Borders

Race does not mean exactly the same thing in every country. The language of civil rights developed through particular American struggles, while Ireland has its own religious, national and colonial histories. Australia’s racial history includes the invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, the White Australia policy, migration after the Second World War and continuing debates about belonging. A responsible writer must respect these differences rather than importing a ready-made explanation.

At the same time, stories travel because readers recognise emotional patterns across borders. A person made into an outsider, a family protecting its children or a community deciding whether to remember can be understood in many settings. The Australian publishing market reflects this mixture of local experience and international reading. Readers buy through independent bookshops, library networks and online retailers, while festivals in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane bring writers from different traditions into conversation.

For an author, this creates both an opportunity and a duty. The work should speak clearly about its own setting while resisting the temptation to make one nation the measure of all others. An Australian reader may approach an American civil rights story through knowledge of the Freedom Rides, the 1967 referendum or the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Those connections can deepen understanding, provided they do not flatten distinct histories into a single narrative of progress.

A Reader’s Responsibility

Writing about race asks readers to practise attention. Attention is more demanding than agreement because it requires time with people whose motives, histories or conclusions may be uncomfortable. A reader can reject a character’s decision and still try to understand how that decision became possible. This effort is the beginning of moral imagination.

I do not expect a novel to settle public disputes. Its task is more intimate and, in some ways, more durable. It can unsettle a comfortable assumption, recover a neglected voice or make a familiar injustice difficult to ignore. It can remind readers that racism is sustained through choices made by ordinary people, which means ordinary people also possess the power to resist it.

That resistance does not always look dramatic. It may involve correcting a false story, learning the history of the place where one lives or refusing to laugh when another person is diminished. In Australia, it may mean listening carefully to Aboriginal voices rather than treating reconciliation as a ceremonial phrase. It may mean recognising the difference between welcoming diversity as an idea and sharing power in practice.

Race remains a subject worth writing about because it reaches into the private and public parts of life at once. Politics can change laws, governments and institutions; stories can change the quality of attention with which people encounter one another. I write to protect that human scale, where history is carried by bodies, families, memories and choices.

Explore Howard G. Franklin’s books, excerpts and reflections on race, civil rights, Ireland and personal experience through this website. Read Gideon’s Children and An Irish Experience, follow the continuing conversation in the blog, and share these works with readers who value literature that looks beyond political labels to the lives those labels affect.