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….
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