Every year on 21 March, schools hold assemblies, children share food, workplaces post orange graphics and talk about belonging.
It is called Harmony Day.
Globally, it is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; established by the United Nations to mark what happened on this date in 1960, when police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire on thousands of Black South Africans peacefully protesting laws that controlled where they could live, work, and move. Sixty-nine people were killed. Many were shot in the back while running away. The UN named the day after that day to confront racism.
In Australia, a choice was made to rename and rebrand this day to something else.
In 1998, the Howard Government commissioned research (The Eureka report) to conduct an anti-racism study with a stated purpose to "explore and understand the subtleties and nature of racism in the Australia of the late 1990s, with a view to mounting an effective mass media and/or education anti-racism campaign" (All Together Now, 2014). The research was unambiguous. Around 85% of respondents recognised that racism was widespread within Australia. The findings documented deep levels of racial intolerance across the community. They recommended an explicit anti-racism campaign.
The Eureka report recommended the government build the belief that harmony in the community already existed, that it was worth protecting, and that this harmony should be a call for celebration (All Together Now, 2014). Harmony Day was born. As Professor Andrew Jakubowicz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at UTS, who later obtained the suppressed report through Freedom of Information, has documented: the government suppressed the report so that its evidence base for the "Living in Harmony" policy "could not be examined, tested, or challenged. Since the suppression of the report there has been no government research into the extent or intensity of racism in Australia, nor was there any attempt to use the research to provide a benchmark against which changes in attitudes as a result of 'Living in Harmony' could be assessed" (Jakubowicz, 2011).
The report stayed hidden for thirteen years, released only in 2011 under Freedom of Information. In the intervening period, Howard commented on the racially motivated 2005 Cronulla riots: "I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country" (Australian Government, PM Transcripts, 2005)
Sadly, this is not a uniquely Australian story.
American historian and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi has argued that the foundation of racism has never been ignorance or hate, it has always been personal self-interest. In his book How to Be an Antiracist, he writes: "My research kept pointing me to the same answer: The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest." (Kendi, 2019).
He tells us that self-interest produces policies that embed racial inequity. When those policies are challenged, racist ideas emerge to justify them. Denial follows. As Kendi puts it elsewhere: "Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations."
Is the decision to bury a report, rename a day, and insist there is no underlying racism a form of denial? Or a pattern that still shapes what is permissible to say out loud in Australian institutions today?
The 2024 Australian Reconciliation Barometer found that 54% of First Nations peoples reported experiencing racism in the past six months — up from 39% a decade ago (Reconciliation Australia, 2024). Around two in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experienced everyday discrimination between 2018 and 2021 (ABS, 2024). First Nations peoples make up around three per cent of the national population and more than twenty per cent of the prison population.
This is the shape of the system, and yet many of the institutions that produce those outcomes will, this week, post about belonging.
Most people inside institutions are not consciously choosing harm, but what we've come to understand is that the language we reach for, shapes what we are able to see. When we frame the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination with harmony, the question becomes: how do we celebrate what we have? When the framing is the elimination of racial discrimination, the question becomes: what needs to change, who holds the power to change it, and what are we actually going to do about it?
Those are very different conversations. and institutions need to choose which one they're going to have.
At Tank, we work alongside communities, government, and institutions trying to answer the more difficult question. That work has shown us something consistent: the distance between an organisation's stated values and the lived experience of the people it serves is almost never a values problem. It is a problem of power, language and listening.
Institutions that will not name racism, will also remain blind to it within their workplaces.
Andrew Jakubowicz has argued that rebranding this day cost Australia a generation: "We've lost a generation of capacity to engage with racism and do something about it in a systematic and serious way" (NSW Teacher's Federation, 2023) We've also avoided the uncomfortable conversations about racism choosing comfort instead of truth-telling.
A day built on a massacre was never designed to make people comfortable. The work it calls us to do, is more difficult than morning teas and orange ribbons. It asks institutions to look honestly at what they produce, who wears the cost of the work they do and what their intentions are for communities, and future generations.
So this 21 March, consider what would it means to use the full name of today, and then ask honestly whether the systems you run, fund, or influence are producing racially equitable outcomes.
It was never meant to be a comfortable question.
