Anti-racism ‘from below’: exploring repertoires of everyday anti-racism

ABSTRACT

While a focus on institutional anti-racism challenges structural formations of racialized inequality, the inattention to quotidian resistance misses the complex manner in which racism is negotiated in everyday life. Examining ‘everyday anti-racism’ can better identify the cultural repertoires that frame how individuals deal with racism across different contexts. This paper shares findings from ethnographic research with Filipino migrants living in Sydney. Specifically, it focuses on middle-class Filipino migrants and their use of social mobility to manage routine racism. The experience of middle-class racial minorities presents distinct perspectives as their strategies do not sit comfortably with anti-racism ideals of ‘equality for all’. I advance the concept of everyday anti-racism to argue for a broader anti-racism politics that captures situated approaches to combating racism. Furthermore, I propose that the identity repair in middle-class contexts offer a chance to build anti-racism praxis that cuts across traditional solidarities.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• anti-racism
• middle class
• Filipino migrants
• Australia
• everyday life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lamont's extensive empirical study is focused on the experience of African American workers in the USA and North African immigrants in France (Lamont, Morning, and Mooney 2002; Lamont and Fleming 2005; Lamont and Askartova 2002; Fleming, Lamont, and Welburn 2012). Her recent collaborations illuminate cross-cultural comparisons of migrant and minority responses to racism in the context of Israel, Brazil, Sweden, and Canada. For the latter see ‘Special Issue: Responses to stigmatisation in comparative perspectives: Brazil, Canada, France, South Africa, Sweden and the United States’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(3), 2012.

2. In the broader research project, the strategies are wide ranging depending on the complex intersections of race, class, and gender. The resources deployed by Filipino migrants range from socioeconomic capital like money and consumption practices, education, intergenerational, and transnational mobility, to more social forms like language and claiming citizenship rights or those classified as modes of popular culture like dress, body tattooing, sport, and discourses of love.

3. When Colic-Peisker (2011) describes the ‘Asian’ middle class in Australia, she refers to individuals from China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and India who are either newly arrived through the skilled migration stream or have achieved middle-class status through socioeconomic mobility of its second generation.

4. According to the 2011 Census, twenty-one per cent of Filipinos in Sydney work in the professional sector and a further seven per cent are employed in managerial professional occupations. Twenty-nine per cent of the population indicated earning an individual weekly income between AUD $1,000 and AUD $1,999 (considered in the top three percentile bands), and a further five per cent earning in the highest income bracket (AUD $2,000 or more a week). The majority of the population have also successfully completed a secondary school education (73.8%) with a significant number having some form of tertiary qualification – sixty-one per cent being a Bachelor Degree. The socioeconomic mobility promised by the second generation – high rates of educational attainment and proficiency in English – is taken as an even stronger indication of the continuing middle-class stability of many Filipino-Australians. The Filipino-American context is the most comparable to the Filipino-Australian experience because of its equally sizeable middle class (Espiritu 2003).

5. I acknowledge that the middle class is an ever diverse group in neoliberal states. ‘Middle class’ can be used either to describe the middle sector located in suburban Australia with average household incomes and relative socioeconomic stability or it can refer to the more affluent and cosmopolitan upper-middle class who occupy professional managerial jobs and who have access to high living standards. In some cases, the term ‘middle class’ has also been applied to the lower-middle sector who share more characteristics with those considered Australia's working class ‘battlers’. For a more detailed discussion of class categories, see Colic-Peisker (2011).

6. The term ‘Asian’ is a complex term (Lo 2006). It can encompass a range of groups depending on the application of geographical, cultural, historical, and linguistic definitions in different societies. In official classifications in Australia, this generally includes North-East Asia, South-East Asia, and South Asia. However, in everyday racializations in Australian society, ‘Asian’ is defined as North-East Asia and South-East Asia. South-Asia is generally excluded in everyday understandings of ‘Asian’. When respondents refer to ‘Asian', they generally refer to the latter classification.

7. See Dunn (1998) and Mellor (2004) for the Indo-Chinese experience in Australia and Markus (1979) for a historical analysis of anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia.

8. Pseudonyms are used for participants’ names throughout the paper to avoid identification. Only one interviewee named here as Catherine permitted her identity to be revealed and aspects of her narrative may be identifiable. But her name is nevertheless changed in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by a Macquarie Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES) between 2007 to 2012 at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. It was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee in 2008.