Ten years ago, those interested in the future of what is sometimes anaemically called ‘race relations’ in the West had every reason to be optimistic. In the same year, an Australian Prime Minister delivered a long-overdue apology on behalf of the Australian Parliament to Aboriginal Australians for its shameful practice of child removal, and the United States elected its first Black president.

A decade on, the political situation in both Australia and the United States could hardly be more dire.

Racism, it would seem, is as intractable as ever. And yet the ugly persistence of racism is now frequently accompanied by a kind of ritualistic disavowal that one is in any way ‘racist’. Does this simply reflect a fundamental confusion about both the character of racism and the nature of moral complicity? Or does the moral register itself – bound up as it is with notions of intention and personal accountability – distort the problem and obscure the remedy?