Racial categories in three nations: Australia, South Africa and the United States

It is now widely accepted that race is a social construction, having different meanings in different parts of the world. Racial formation theory argues that race is a process of racial formation, where the meanings associated with race need to be viewed as changeable and situated in time and space. This paper compares racial categories in the United States, South Africa and Australia. I argue that current racial categories in all three nations have been strongly influenced by colonization and the ideology of white supremacy. These have led to racial hierarchies in each where whites are at the top and blacks at the bottom. However the people included by each country in their black and white racial categories differ, revealing important variations in racial formation processes.