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The whole history of progress of human liberty

Shows that all concessions

Yet made to her august claims

Have been born of earnest struggle.

If there is no struggle

There is no progress.

Frederick Douglass, 1857



Introduction;

To rationalise or “make sense” of the Australian states attempts to control Aboriginal socialisation and identity we must first look into the foundation of the racist ideology and the archaic scientific theories held by the governing body at that time.

It could be argued that racism is a virulent and hateful form of collectivism, it is mass exclusion that creates mass poverty and despair. Racial discrimination is in reality ethnic conflict and is characterised by territorial protectionism basing its ideology on the subconscious philosophical residue of European-style racial theories.

Hollinsworth argues that with the expansionism of the European nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ideology and rationalisation of racist theory shifted from that of a class structure to one based on the nessessity to maintain a capitalistic doctrone and support the nationalistic ideals through the labour of non-European cultures. He further contends that most Europeans felt that because of their economic and military domination they were superior in both culture and racial origin. (Hollinsworth 1998)

A few years later in the nineteenth century the scientific community adopted Darwinism. Darwin’s theories were based upon the synopsis that there were no permanent forms of nature and that each species adapted to its environment by natural selection. (Darwin 1859) When Professor Ernst Haeckel developed these theories to incorporate a general theory of human and social development, the notion was used by racists to justify their, 'conceptions of superior and inferior peoples...