Going Post-Racial: are we there yet?
This is a question I posed at the beginning of the project Race and the City. The temporal context was a determined Barack Obama in election mode in 2008, priming the hopeful and downtrodden into believing that ‘Yes we can’. This affirmative phrase was replete with possibilities, and here we are in 2010 with Obama as Commander – in – Chief, and while the world breathes a qualified sigh of relief, the possibilities seem somewhat less than they were.
In Australia, little has changed in terms of race and politics as I track the essays that have been randomly posted onto this site. Asylum seekers remain political footballs into the 2010 Federal election. Aboriginal activists and communities’ protest at the continuation of the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory is hardly registered in the halls of power, let alone mentioned as a token gesture in any mainstream news brief.
Most tellingly, in the last week of June 2010, no one was found culpable for the death of an elder who cooked in the back of a police wagon as law enforcement authorities ferried him across the continent like a caged animal. Where is the duty of care? Who is responsible? It is not like this is an isolated case. There are countless documented incidences of abuse, deaths in custody, and violence at the hands of authorities, yet no one is ever ‘culpable’. This is all about race and no one wants to face up to it. How can we in Australia even consider the idea of the post-race state, when this is our collective reality?
More to come….
‘The criminal in the Middle Eastern sense is more cowardice (sic) than the general criminal. They’ll hide in the dark and attack in numbers. They’d rather use a gun than stand in a fist-fight’.
– Ken McKay (Detective Chief Superintendent).
Screening the Arab other is a story about the violence of representation in contemporary Australian film and television narratives. The new urban gangster on the set is the Arab male – Lebanese to be more precise – brooding and bungling his way into celluloid stardom and narrative stasis. The Arab male body has achieved race capital status in a slew of feature films including The Combination (2009) and Cedar Boys (2009), and in the television drama series East West 101 (2008/2009) and ‘documentary’ Gangs of Oz (2009).
The successful reception of this most recent of cultural products depends entirely on how effective the links between male racialisation and Orientalism have been forged outside the culture of the screen. In tracking the emergence of this racialised character over the past decade in newspaper stories and on tabloid television, it seems this cinematic construction is precisely what the market wants. But just how ‘authentic’ is the Lebanese gangster?
More to come….
In November 2009, Swiss voters went to a referendum on the question of whether the construction of minarets on mosques should be banned. A campaign, spearheaded by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), elicited a backlash with 57.5% per cent of voters approving the ban.
According to news reports, ‘[a]fter the official results were known, far-right politicians celebrated, while the government sought to assure the Muslim minority that a ban on minarets was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture” (Al-Jazeera).
Not unlike the contemporary struggles taking place in Western Sydney and its outskirts, architecture and zoning laws have become the fields in which questions of culture, religion, race, place and visibility are being contested in the public space, with dominant groups organising at the local level to assert cultural supremacy over ‘their’ suburbs.
More to come…
[I feel most inspired] in some of my favourite delicious places: Paesanella, an Italian cheesemaker in Marrickville; in Middle Eastern spice shops – one breath and you want to start cooking; the fruit and herbs in Cabramatta. I thank God they all came and taught us so much about cooking and eating.
- Maeve O’Meara, food author and television presenter.
In the 1980s, graffito scrawled on an inner-city Sydney wall screamed: ‘God hates homos’. Underneath, a rather different hand had interposed: ‘But does he like tabouli?’ This graffito goes to the heart of how strategically useful food can be in the fight against homophobia and other forms of bigotry.
Inversely, what is hard to stomach is the way in which food continues to be mobilised as a metaphor for the success of multiculturalism in Australia. Celebrating ‘harmony’ and encouraging ‘tolerance’ and ‘integration’ have become the dominant frames for talking about racial and cultural interaction, effacing the possibility that the discourse might engage with the fundaments of power relations, privilege and racism in a multiracial / multicultural society. How did we get here?
More to come…