In the last while I have participated in two events that have given me the chance to speak about the fourth chapter of my book, Why Race Still Matters, ‘GoodJew/Bad Jew’. On November 24th, I spoke at the opening panel of the German Rat für Migration’s annual conference, ‘Body and…
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One of my many jobs is supervising maths homework. At the top of each exercise sheet is the command to ‘Show all working out’. I was thinking about this when reflecting about the common failure within academia to show the traces of our work, the lines that connect us to…
Comments closed‘As a Jew’ is a phrase I wish I never had to hear again in relation to Palestine. I don’t want to read anymore justifications that the Jewish tradition opposes violent settler colonialism. What is this Jewish tradition? There is no essence of Jewishness outside of its practice and today,…
Comments closedA comparative political sociology of anti-racism in Europe, showing the various discourses within this movement
Paperback ISBN: 9780745322209
eBook ISBN: 9781783718641
Published by Pluto Press in Jun 2004
Comments closedI was touched to have been awarded the School of Humanities and Communication Arts Researcher of the Year award 2020 at my institution, Western Sydney University. The prize was awarded for the paper, ‘Looking As White: anti-racism apps, appearance and racialized embodiment’, published in the journal Identities, and soon in…
Comments closedLast year, the course I run at Western Sydney University as part of the Masters of Research degree, ‘Understanding Race’, was well received among a wide range of people because I posted the readings and the blogposts I wrote weekly online. This year, I am running it again starting tomorrow, Thursday 25…
Comments closedSlam, the latest movie by my partner, writer-director Partho Sen-Gupta, is playing at the Sydney Film Festival on June 15 & 16 2019. Described by Rough Cut as, ‘upend[ing] the anodyne images that dominate Australian cinema’ and named in Dirty Movies top ten films of 2018, Slam is an unapologetically…
Comments closedI gave this talk a year ago, just after so-called ‘Harmony Day’. Thinking about white supremacy and white crisis’today so I thought I’d post it here in case of it’s of any use. My 8-year old daughter was getting ready for ‘Harmony Day’ the other day, laying out her Indian…
Comments closedLast week Jeff Sparrow was doing the rounds promoting his new book, Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right. I used it as an example in the seminar I gave at the University of Amsterdam, on ‘Misplaced Identity’, organized by Sarah Bracke and Paul Mepschen to make my basic point that talking about identity politics as a distraction from antiracism is a distraction from antiracism. Then I came across this post I had in my drafts folder about Sparrow’s writings from 2016 which I never published. I guess his book is a culmination of those articles, so maybe this is a useful time to actually publish the post. But maybe one of the reasons I didn’t post it is because of how boring these ‘critiques’ are.
At the end of my last post I ended by saying that I had something to say about the ways in which liberal and ‘left’ journalists miss the point about not patronising, tokenising, and otherwise coopting migrants and refugees to other agendas and in fact reinforce it. I was thinking mainly of the articles churned out with relative frequency these days by Jeff Sparrow, either for Overland or for The Guardian that all turn around the same tired point, summed up by the following quotes:

Supplemented by:

You can see that I’ve handily archived them in my Scribl library:
In addition to the polls cited by Sparrow, the academic research he may be referring to is that conducted yearly by Andrew Markus for the Scanlon Foundation (which by the way @attentive has nicely diagrammed the murky ‘detention, logistics, urban development, political parties’ links of). These annual reports underplay societal racism by arguing that the issue of asylum is not close to the top of respondents’ agendas and that most of those surveyed are positive about ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’. The argument plays perfectly into Sparrow’s mantra that popular racism in Australia is not that bad.
I was invited to comment on the Australian government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement of the Heart by the ABC Religion and Ethics website. This is my conclusion. Until we all start to work actively to decolonize Australia – that is, to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by…
Comments closedYou are enough
When your throat closes
And even breath is
A trapped spider
Running back and forth
From glass wall to glass wall.
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