As a student going through high school in the 1990s in Sydney’s Western suburbs, I’d hear pretty much every day someone from a racial minority accuse another student of being a racist. Quite often the student making the accusation was half-joking, but even then children knew that the term was a powerful weapon, even if most of the time is was pretty clumsily used.

The clumsiest uses of the term are on occasions when criticism or ridicule of a culture or religion is confused with criticism or ridicule of a race.