COMMENT | "Chinese virus" and "Chinese tea". "Chinaman" and "fine China". Some words do sound, and feel, more racial. It depends on who said those words to whom, for what purpose and how they affect the target community.

Racial adjectives essentially associate certain actions and features with a group of people. Some positive. Others less so, uttered to dominate (ketuanan Melayu/Malay supremacy) and segregate (bumiputra and non-bumiputra status).

Language expresses the workings of our mind. Racist thoughts and adjectives are used intentionally to devalue and denigrate the Other as lesser people of inherently inferior culture. And, in its extreme, to exterminate through ethnic cleansing in Africa, genocides in Europe, pogroms in the Middle East.

Biological differentiation of race codified in, for instance, the Chinese Exclusion Act in the US (repealed in 1943), the White Australia policy (abolished in 1973), and apartheid in South Africa (ended in 1994), has long placed other racial groups lower in the social evolution ladder, born into servitude.

Hence, the slave trade from Africa, indentured labour in the colonies, prohibition of interracial marriage - including in Australia - up until the mid-1960s. (And, in many of today’s households, the enslavement and abuse of foreign maids).

Western media narratives of the non-European non-white "Third World" have perpetuated this racialised history - even today in the...