The sheer weight of racist legacy and entrenched Islamophobic narratives was made clear to me all too often while researching Islamophobia, racism and multiculturalism in Australia.

As part of my research I interviewed predominantly Anglo-Australians across a range of generational, social and economic backgrounds. I found that the figure of “the Aboriginal”, “the Muslim”, “the asylum seeker”, “the brown-not-Australian-looking” person were all powerful signifiers for a constellation of myths, and ideological claims: inferior “values”, misogyny, irrationality, illiberalism, threat, otherness and so on. These signifiers were so pervasive and omnipresent, that even people I interviewed who had no association with racist organisations quite naturally invoked them.

What struck me was the common sense, vernacular quality to much of the rhetoric I encountered. It is in fact consistent with one of the more disturbing elements of Pauline Hanson’s success in this federal election; how the racist vitriol she peddles is legitimised by prominent commentators in the white left who encourage us to “listen” to Hanson and who privilege her racism with the status of “a battle of ideas”. Hate speech (calling for bans on Muslim immigration; comparing Muslims to dangerous dogs who are no longer allowed in Australia) is inaugurated into our everyday political vocabulary.

One particular “common sense” claim I repeatedly heard in my research is that racism is “part of human nature”. This was a mantra offered to me among people in far-right racist movements and among many on the white left. I recall mingling with guests at a writers’ event when another author – a white middle class male who enjoys a successful media career – proceeded to explain to me that racism was just about people “being afraid of what they don’t know”. “Racism,” he declared, “is just human nature.”

One of the problems with this oft-cited statement is that framing racism as primordial and intrinsic to the human condition empties racism of its politics and ignores Australia’s histories and continuing logics of racial exclusion, thinking and expression. One of the things that interests me is how these racial logics and hegemonic scripts infiltrate habits of thinking, speaking and power relations in everyday life.

If racism is not “human nature”, but learned behaviour and practices arising out of institutional, social, legal and historical power relations, political scripts, government policies and media framings, then don’t we need to spend more time understanding how such behaviour is learned and, even more importantly, what it takes to resist the sheer weight of racist ideology?

These are some of the questions I set out to explore in my latest young adult fiction novel When Michael Met Mina. The idea for the novel came to me while attending an anti-asylum seeker rally during my fieldwork. A character popped into my head. Well, two characters in fact. One was a young Afghan refugee. A “boat person” we see maligned and stigmatised by callous politicians and ruthless media. Bright, fierce, courageous, scarred, she wouldn’t budge from my head. I called her Mina. I thought about what it would mean for this young girl to have fled Afghanistan, be locked up in detention, grow up in western Sydney, only for me to then throw her into a private school in the lower north shore of Sydney.

The other person who popped into my head was a boy called Michael, whose middle-class, liberal and quite likeable parents have started an anti-immigration/Islam/asylum seeker/multiculturalism political organisation called “Aussie Values”.

As I interviewed people about their “fears of being swamped by boats”, the “Islamisation of Australia”, and the so-called “clash of civilisations”, I wondered how it would feel to be a teenager growing up in a family peddling such racism and paranoia. How do you “unlearn” racism? How do you find the courage to question your parents’ beliefs? How do you rise to the challenge of interrogating the sensationalised narratives that bombard us in tabloid media, talkback radio, current affairs and breakfast talk programs and public debates? That’s when I decided to write a story that took these two characters, Michael and Mina, and threw them at each other.

So much of Michael’s journey involves him confronting not only his privilege, and the power it offers him, but also how his privilege burdens him with the responsibility of challenging racism and exposing the myths and tropes that circulate so widely and easily in our society. Mina is blunt with Michael that she is not going to “rescue” him from his racism; “babysit” him through his “enlightenment”.

“The first step,” she tells him, “would be for you to realise that you need to figure it out on your own.”

The material, psychological and emotional impact of Michael’s family and their organisation’s racism on Mina’s family is something I was keen for my young readers to understand. How racist discourses and practices impact deeply on people’s lives.

But unlike much of the writing we see around race, I wanted to be clear that ultimately it is not up to racialised people to do all the hard work that is needed to dismantle the racial logics of our society. It is time we unsettle the common sense understanding that racism is human nature, behaviour and attitude. In doing so, we can start to see how those who benefit from racism bear the greatest responsibility for fighting it. It is my hope that Michael, a 17-year old boy, might offer some insights into the struggle and rewards of taking up that fight.

When Michael Met Mina is published by Pan McMillan Australia and is available now.