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Tag: colonialism

Not Racism™, the Voice Referendum and white progressive anxiety

The lead-up to the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to parliament is replete with text-book case after text-book case of what I have called ‘Not Racism™’. Not Racism is something anyone who has faced racism knows about. In an article I published in 2017 on the subject, the title the editors…

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Week 1: Race & Power

Interactive presentation Tutorial activity: Conversations about race bingo I updated my introductory lecture to The Racial State. I welcome you to share the slides and notes below and to watch the recording where, as you can see, I grossly underestimated the time I had (when will I ever learn!) I…

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La guerre contre la Critical Race Theory en Australie passe à côté de l’essentiel

I was invited by the Revue Movements to contribute a reflection on the so-called war in critical race theory and how it plays out in Australia [in French] « La race imprègne de façon immuable la politique d’accaparement inhérente à la souveraineté blanche patriarcale, qui est souvent invisible et passée sous…

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Challenging Antisemitism as Part of the Wider Struggle for Racial Justice

I was invited by Donna Nevel to participate in a panel organised by Jewish Voice for Peace, South Florida among some really great speakers, Barry Trachtenberg, Jamil Dakwar, Mark Tseng-Putterman, Meena Jagganath moderated by Martha Schoolman. The video of the event is below and the text of my contribution further…

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A Process, not an ontology; a structure, not an event: Race, coloniality and property

‘Race, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is a process, not an ontology, its varying modalities so many dialectical symptoms of the ever-shifting hegemonic balance between those with a will to colonize and those with a will to be free, severally racialised in relation to each other. Race registers the…

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Race & Culture

The link between race and culture, or rather the racialization of culture, and the political manipulation of this situation is central to our understanding of how race works. In our in-class discussions, we have already noticed that we have difficulty speaking about race without speaking about culture and our sense…

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By Rejecting the Uluru Statement, Australia Recommits to Colonial Rule

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…

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With our narrow interpretation of racism it’s too easy to deny that we are racist

I teach undergraduates at Western Sydney University, several hundreds of whom have, over the last five years, studied my unit, “The Racial State”. I chose this title to echo the seminal book of the same name by race critical scholar, David Theo Goldberg. My students have no problem identifying racism;…

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On relationality in race research

This is the third contribution to the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series. In it I look at the argument advanced  by David Theo Goldberg (2009) that a relational approach to the study of race and racism reveals more than a comparativist approach does. I propose, however, that before being able to discuss the relative adequacy of either approach, we must have a good understanding of what is being researched when we centre race in accounts of historical or contemporary social, political and economic processes.

In 2014 I published an article, Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe, in a book I co-edited with Hamburg sociologist Wulf D. Hund, Racism and Sociology.

I examined work by mainstream ‘migration, ethnicities and minorities’ (MEM) scholars in Europe. Through institutes and departments often aligned with policy-making, these scholars often receive the lion’s share of the funding to research issues which, from a race critical perspective, are wholly about race. Yet their work mainly tends to neglect, elide or even deny the salience of race. In my view there are three main reasons for this:

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Alana Lentin