Every writers’ festival seems to have a flashpoint of controversy, and in Sydney at the weekend it was all about race.

On the one hand, the hour-long discussion between the Booker prize-winning African-American author Paul Beatty and the white Radio National host Michael Cathcart was the most open and engaging of Beatty’s appearances, as the author – a fairly tricky interview subject, who tends to answer difficult questions with more provocations – opened up on storytelling, history and race in in the US.

But the session was also punctuated by audible groans: to many, me included, Cathcart’s line of questioning seemed tone deaf and occasionally offensive. The discomfort culminated 40 minutes in, when the Gamilaroi man Trent Shepherd stood up from his chair, shaking with anger: “Look at yourself!” he shouted at Cathcart. “I want white Australia to look at themselves!”

By this point, many in the mostly white audience had sunk low in their seats or taken to Twitter. The event became the talking point of the weekend, discussed between sessions and in bars afterwards – but what exactly went wrong?

I spoke with Cathcart the next day and found a sizeable gulf between how he came across and the person he is – which we’ll get to. I also emailed Shepherd to ask what he thought Cathcart could have done differently: “I hope he’s asking himself this very question,” he replied.

‘We all have to do the work’

The event was one of a number that brought race to the forefront at the festival.

The first year programmed by the director, Michaela McGuire, the list of headliners was dominated by writers of colour, including Beatty, Colson Whitehead, Brit Bennett, Ellen Van Neerven, Elaine Welteroth, Durga Chew-Bose and Roxane Gay – writers who have won all manner of prizes and acclaim for their illuminating work about race relations in Australia, the US and beyond.

A lot of ground was covered, of course, but one topic kept coming up: the onus that is placed on people of colour, not white people, to either fix racism or patiently explain how to avoid it.

During the Nasty Women gala event, the Indigenous writer Anita Heiss talked about the expectations that minorities and marginalised groups will “provide the answers”, and explain themselves to white people. “It can take up an enormous amount of times and it can be quite damaging to your mental health,” she said.

At a panel featuring only women writers of colour, Bennett made a similar point: “White people think there is some answer to be handed down from on high that will teach you, and it’s like, ‘No, we all have to do the work. I have to do that work. You have to do that work.’”

There were plenty of illuminating moments, but Beatty and Cathcart’s conversation was the most explosive. Beatty was there to promote his book The Sellout: a complex, contradictory, funny, eviscerating look at race and class relations in America. It is packed with potential landmines that a white Australian interviewer, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot be in the best position to navigate – and during the conversation on Saturday it felt as though Cathcart detonated them all.

just witnessed great example of why white baby boomers shouldn't host an interview w a black writer who mocks white liberal aggrandisement — patrick marlborough (@Cormac_McCafe) May 27, 2017

On Twitter his questions were described as “dumb”, “terrible” and “excruciating”. A visibly upset young woman in the crowd put it more colourfully: “fundamentally fucking moronic”.

As a moment of literary controversy, it was a blip compared with Lionel Shriver on cultural appropriation or a Milo Yiannopoulos book deal. For his part, Beatty seemed unoffended and mostly in good humour. But enough people in the room – people of colour as well as white Australians – were offended, upset or embarrassed for it to be clear that something went wrong.

When a person like Cathcart – a champion of the arts who identifies as progressive – can put his foot in it so unknowingly, it’s safe to say something big is missing from the way Australia understands, and talks about, race.

‘Ask yourself the question. Just think about it for a second’

Five minutes into the panel, Cathcart used the N-word twice, while quoting a phrase from Beatty’s book to ask a question. “Only in Australia has this question come up twice,” Beatty said. People near me in the audience bristled.

Later Cathcart described the “hypersensitivity around language in America” that seemed “paradoxical” in a country where “racial inequality … is massive” and “people are still being shot”.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking me, to be honest,” Beatty said. “I don’t see that as a paradox.”

Further in, Cathcart asked: “Do you think that people become black? Do they have to learn what it means to be black?”

Beatty was more bemused than frustrated as he cheerfully flipped the question back: “Ask yourself the fucking question, man … just think about it for a fucking second. Did you learn to be white?”

Cathcart initially resisted the question, but eventually said that he did not: “[Growing up] I didn’t know anyone who was anything other than white. But I believe that in my life I have learned to be white in different ways, and that I’ve become less interested in the notion of being white. So I think of myself just as a person. I think I have learned not to be white,” he said. This did not go over well with the crowd.

The highlight of #sydneywritersfestival was @CathcartMichael declaring he was post-white and the audience eye-rolling themselves to death. — Maria Metro (@MariaMoroder) May 27, 2017

Cathcart’s next comments, he told me later, were intended as a rallying cry for hope in a time of hopelessness, suffering and trauma. Missing vital context though, and delivered on the first day of Reconciliation Week at a festival that had been dominated by race issues, they came across as tone deaf.

“There is good will in the majority of Australians as they search for a way of being neither black nor white, but of sharing a common humanity,” he told the room. “I believe that we are an example to the world of what is possible.”

It was then that Shepherd, an Indigenous lawyer, stood up from the crowd shouting. It had been 20 years to the day since the Bringing Them Home report, he reminded us, and Indigenous children were still being taken from their families. “I want white Australia to look at themselves!” he yelled.

Shepherd sent me an email the next day. He had spent the morning before the event at Redfern Community Centre, on Sorry Day, listening to “brave people sharing their stories of being removed from their families … stripped of their language and name”. These stories were fresh in his mind as he listened to Cathcart call Australia “an example to the world”.

“I was waiting for someone to say something,” he wrote. “I was thinking that in this room of middle-class people surely there must be someone who was willing to challenge him … What hope do we have when a white male presenter from Radio National presents this narrative?”

Cathcart told me these ideas are not new to him; a historian, he has written books about settlement and its legacy. “These things are in my gut, and swirling around there on the shore of Sydney Cove, I can feel them, I can feel what was lost,” he said. “When that guy stood up I thought, ‘Fuck, mate. I know why you’re doing this.’”

Nor was he unprepared when it came to Beatty.

“I have read everything this man has written, I have never prepared for an interview in my life like this,” he said. “This is a novel which I think sets out to offend and unsettle and amuse us all at once, and talking about it in a candid and probing way was never going to be plain sailing.”

The question of language

Cathcart hosts Books and Arts on Radio National, where the conversation was broadcast in full on Tuesday, including his use of the N-word.

He defends the decision: he wanted to confront the audience with the violence of the language, the same way he was confronted by it in Beatty’s book. “It would have been coy, in these circumstances, to avoid what was being said … To me, arts journalism is not about euphemism.”

Is that a good enough reason to quote the word, in this context? The question is up for debate; Beatty himself demonstrates in the book and in interviews that he is sceptical of euphemism. But it’s one thing for Beatty to use the word to confront his audience, and another to hear it from Cathcart’s mouth.

At the event, Beatty chose to tactfully dodge using language that was offensive to another group: while talking about a controversial joke later in their conversation, he sidestepped around the “Asian slur” within it. “You’ve got a right [to say what you want],” he said at another point, “but you’ve got to think about are you willing to hurt that person. And if you are, then that’s your choice.”



Which is quite funny when you realise the 'offensive language' is Cathcart, a white guy, using the N-word. — Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) May 30, 2017

Which brings us to that clunky question about learning to be black, which was roundly mocked on Twitter. Cathcart said that one was simply an unsuccessful journalistic prompt. Beatty has spoken in past interviews about the psychologist William Cross, whose work on the development of black identity is parodied in The Sellout. “Paul has indicated that this problematic work has been a major influence on him, and I was hoping that he would talk about that,” Cathcart said.

“As a journalist you’re then thinking, how can I give him the opportunity to talk? … I was trying to open doors into difficult places so that we could talk there.”

Cathcart told me the question “misfired”, that it was “obviously a miscalculation”. “You might say I didn’t ask it in an appropriate way,” he said. But if there was tension and discomfort in the room, he said, there should have been: “The tension was inevitably going to be in the room because this is a book that creates a tense and unsettling conversation ... It is not a comfortable book.”

Radio National’s broadcast includes a back announce in which Cathcart explains the background to that question right before he asks it. In front of the live audience, though, the context was missing.

‘A great wall of uncomfortable silence’

I spoke to a friend, a person of colour, on Monday who said the event “reflected the general level of white person ignorance that’s out there” – but he suggested the biggest mistake was one of programming.

“I don’t think Cathcart is racist, or malicious or even particularly ignorant,” he said. “Rather, I think something like this is almost inevitable when you get someone as whitebread as Cathcart in a one-on-one with Beatty … You’re either going to get a really boring conversation that tiptoes around the key themes Beatty explores, or you’ll get this situation, where a guy thinks he’s doing the right thing but genuinely has no idea how bizarre it is to drop the N-word on stage.”

To Shepherd, the event pointed to a broader problem in Australia: “Conversations about race in Australia are denied – we don’t seem to talk about it, it’s a great wall of uncomfortable silence … Is it easier to point the finger at other countries than look in the mirror? Cathcart did the finger pointing so well. But he did not speak our truth.”

Intense gold star vibes to ANY diverse panelist whose had to answer a q that included 'as a white person' this SWF. MY SINCEREST APOLOGIES! — Maggie Thompson (@mobythompson) May 27, 2017

Another friend described the festival in brutal terms: “Sydney writers’ festival: where blackness is explained to white people.” It was one of the most challenging, thought-provoking literary events I have been to but she was right: while writers of colour were drawing the biggest crowds, the audiences gathered were almost entirely white.

There is nothing wrong with us wanting to learn, of course – particularly if those teaching us are being paid for their labour, which is most often not the case.

But when a group of women writers in hijabs are being brazenly ogled as they walk along the pier; when well-meaning white people interrupt people of colour to take a diversity photo (“You just look so glorious underneath this light, I couldn’t resist,” I heard one man say to Yassmin Abdel-Magied before asking her to pose for him); and when an Indigenous man is left shaking with rage after he hears the truth of our country’s history denied on a weekend of remembrance, it becomes clear that white Australia needs to be listening harder, and doing the work.