Fragmented ideologies: Accounts of educational failure and positive discrimination (original) (raw)

‘The fine line between compensation and taking advantage’: Discourse analysis and race privilege

Psychology and Indigenous Australians: Effective teaching and practice, 2008

White Australians’ acknowledgments of race privilege or complicity with colonialism continue to come under scrutiny for their ‘confessional’ role in speaking of racism only to yet again ‘move on’ from it. In a similar way, discourse analytic studies of racism continue to be criticised for their failure to produce ‘real world’ outcomes, and for their inability to ‘shift’ rather than merely ‘describe’ the existence of racism. Nonetheless, we suggest, there is considerable utility to be gained from an approach to combating racism that takes as its starting place an examination of white race privilege. In this paper we discuss how an application of discourse analysis to the examination of race privilege in the everyday talk of white Australians holds great potential for identifying the commonplace, indeed banal, ways in which race privilege is played out. The identification of such speech patterns, we suggest, has considerable utility for developing interventions into the function of race privilege, and for maintaining an explicitly political psychological focus on the actions of white Australians (towards Indigenous people in particular). This stands in opposition to the aforementioned simplistic voicing of the existence of privilege that often does very little to examine the attendant implications of privilege in very real life and practical ways.

Came, H. (2012). "A fair go for all': A problematic contribution to anti-racism praxis in Aotearoa. [Working paper] In Sherman, R, Krageloh, C, Nayar, S. (Eds.), Walking the talk: The 2012 collection of oral presentations from AUT . Auckland, NZ: AUT.

In New Zealand, the Human Rights Commission is the lead agency in countering institutional racism. They have recently undertaken a major research project, A Fair Go For All (Human Rights Commission 2011), to inform the development of a national strategy/approach to countering structural discrimination. This paper, from an activist scholarship standpoint argues their chosen methodological approach has compromised the the research findings by ignoring the power relations inherent in researching racism and the minimising both the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1 and historic determinants of institutional racism against Māori in Aotearoa. Rather than focus on practitioner bias (personally-mediated racism) and prioritising addressing ethnic inequalities (the outcome of institutional racism) this paper advocates for a Tiriti based systems change approach to transforming institutional racism as it uniquely manifests in the neo-colonial context of Aotearoa.

Critical Whiteness Discourse Analysis

In this chapter from the third edition of Maggie Walter's edited book Social Research Methods, I outline my synthesis of critical whiteness studies and critical discourse analysis. The resulting method, critical whiteness discourse analysis, is applied to the Gillard Government's 2011 'Closing the Gap' speech.

‘Race’ talk: discourses on ‘race’ and racial difference

International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2003

The present article examines the responses to racism and ‘racial’ signifiers in the discourses of 33 black South Africans prior to, and after 1994, the year that marked the end of formal Apartheid and legislated racism in South Africa. More specifically, the article analyzes two corpuses of discourses, the first produced by a group of 26 black adults between 1992 and 1993, and the second by a group of seven high school students interviewed in 1999. One of the basic assumptions that informed the analyses of these discourses was that, since 1994, ‘racial’ signifiers, due to a range of factors, would have become increasingly valorized in the discourses of black South Africans. And indeed, it was found that in the discourses produced by the group of high school students in 1999, notions of ‘race’ and ‘racial’ difference were accepted and utilized in a much less critical manner than in the discourses produced by the group of black adults prior to 1994. The possible reasons for this trend are explored in the latter half of the article.

RACE, RACISM AND EVERYDAY COMMUNICATION in Aotearoa New Zealand

This essay is based on theories of ‘new racism’, which explain how race and racism continue to play an integral role in our lives, but in subtle and often hidden ways. This approach informs the discussion in this essay that focuses on some of the issues that emerged from a critical collaborative autoethnographic project that explored how race is manifested in everyday communication interactions in New Zealand. The discussion, more specifically, draws on what we call here ‘conversational tact’ and its three sub-themes of ‘everyday racialised ethnic terms’, ‘the everyday racialised use of ethnic stereotypes’, and ‘everyday censorship and silence around race in conversation’. These themes have been chosen as the focus of this essay because they sit together under a larger theme that looks at the way in which people communicate race through their everyday patterns of speech and vocabulary in New Zealand and help us unmask ‘racial micro aggressions’.

Do You Hear Me? A Critical Review of the Voice of Racism Anti-racism Education Campaign from Aotearoa New Zealand

New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2022

In July 2020 the New Zealand Human Rights Commission launched their Voice of Racism digital experience as part of their Give Nothing to Racism Campaign. On the website you can “experience” the racism felt by real New Zealanders as performed by internationally acclaimed New Zealand director Taika Waititi. The immersive campaign provides some insights into the lived experience of racism and the anti-racism action that follows in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This paper, using ethnographic and critical race methods, uses a critical and systematic review of the Voice of Racism digital experience to consider: What is the New Zealand experience of racism? How are experiences of racism curated for the general population through the NZ HRC Voice of Racism online education campaign? This article suggests the campaign employs a classic diversity logic by calling attention to racism, recentering whiteness, and completely ignoring the systemic and institutional foundations that create and sustain whit...

Making the ambiguities, absent presences and contradictions of racialisation analytically legible: reflections on a critical intellectual imperative

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019

are to be commended for coordinating and conceptually framing this special section, a most timely contribution to recent trends in the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Conversations on this important concern are being held in many parts of the world, not uncommonly within volatile climates and under embattled circumstances. I was introduced to the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (ARE) Network when I attended the European Association of Social Anthropologists' (EASA) 2016 biennial meeting in Milan, Italy. I appreciated the significance and indeed the urgency of establishing a supportive, publicly engaged space for anthropologists in Europe and their kindred thinking colleagues elsewhere who share with them interests in race and ethnicity, racialisation and racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and many related matters reflecting how race and ethnicity intermesh with each other and with other mutually constitutive axes of difference and inequality salient in various situations and contexts. The dynamic ebbs and flows along with the ambiguities and shifting terms of race-making-an assemblage of social relations, encounters and practices situated in and across time and space-make the tools, lenses and ethics of sociocultural anthropology's ethnographic inquiry particularly useful. About a year after Milan, I participated in a fairly prestigious interdisciplinary conference where I observed very different circumstances and commitments. I encountered a number of social scientists who insisted that the language of race was not appropriate for our work group's drafting of the conference's statement on the social and political challenges faced in many parts of the world today. An anthropologist from France was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the use of the race concept. The perspective he espoused in that discussion seemed to follow the colour-blind, race-evasive and post-racial line of thought that exists in parts of Europe as well as in the United States and Latin America. Contributors to this publication attest to this social fact as it is manifested in different national contexts. However, in all those settings, there are also countervailing forces, such as the socio-political confluences that have given rise to inclusive projects promoting 'Europeanisation from below', as Marleen de Witte points out in her contribution here.