(Not) doing race : ‘casual racism’, ‘bystander antiracism’ and ‘ordinariness’ in Australian racism studies

Many Australian studies of racism avoid a head-on analysis of its systemic nature and do not apply a ‘black analytics’ (Hesse 2014) to their interpretation of either the meaning of racism or its manifestations and effects. There is an overriding drive within this work (which eschews a more race critical or decolonial commitment) to couch racism in terms of questions such as the success or failure of multiculturalism, the quantification of levels of integration and social cohesion, the tolerance of diversity, and the unfortunate persistence of discrimination. Racism may be admitted to have roots in colonisation and the White Australia Policy. However, it is often presented as best tackled as a social pathology that manifests in specific incidents borne of outdated attitudes that jar with the proposed acceptance, dominantly, of multiculturalism as a civic value. The centrality of race, rather than individualised expressions of racism, as undergirding contemporary relations of power in Australia, determining access to resources, public participation, health and life expectancy, freedom of movement and expression, and individual or community safety and autonomy is rarely placed under scrutiny. Rather the tendency in the studies I examine here on ‘casual racism’, ‘bystander antiracism’ and ‘ordinariness’ is to foreclose race by failing to theorise its persistence in contemporary racism which are presented as excessive rather than integral to a liberal multicultural Australia whose continuing coloniality is rarely identified (Lentin 2016). My thinking of Australian racism studies has been developing over recent years, during which I moved from Europe to Australia. I consider my position privileged, working within the most culturally, ethno-racially and religiously diverse area of the country, Western Sydney. My students come from a vast range of backgrounds and their lived experience as embodied critics of the systems and structures of White Australia are an invaluable starting point for radical pedagogy. With some of my students, and with other members of the small but vibrant community of race critical scholars in Australia (many of whom are actively demined a permanent place within the academy), I have organised events, debates and publications that seek to discomfit the sureties of Australian ‘racism studies’. This chapter is both a contribution to and an outcome of these ongoing discussions which sit alongside my developing knowledge of the legacies of Australian colonialism, and the particularities of its own mythologies about multiculturalism (Hage 2002), its place as the worldwide instigator of indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers (Mitrpoulos and Kiem 2015), and the specific ways in which contemporary Islamophobia play out (Morsi 2015)