Iphones and “African gangs”: everyday racism and ethno-transnational media in Melbourne’s Chinese student world

ABSTRACT

Based on an ethnography of young women from China studying in Melbourne, this article explores participants’ experiences of living in a super-diverse city, and questions whether extant theoretical accounts of everyday multiculturalism are adequate to understand the experience of these residents. In 2016, Melbourne’s Chinese student community was rocked by a prolonged spate of mobile phone thefts that Chinese-language social media framed as ethnically targeted attacks on Chinese people by “African gangs.” This article considers participants’ responses to these incidents, alongside the racialized reportage of them on the WeChat public accounts that are participants’ main source of local news. The article mounts a critique of the media ethics inherent in this form of news delivery. It extends the everyday multiculturalism framework with an example that deals not with a strongly hybrid migrant youth culture, but rather with young migrants socialized into a monocultural society encountering everyday life in super-diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese students
• everyday multiculturalism
• everyday racism
• social media
• super-diversity
• international education

Acknowledgement

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in providing the funding for the study on which this paper is based. Thanks too to Can Qin, Yuxing Zhou and Juliet Zhou for their invaluable research assistance, and to all of the study participants for generously sharing their experiences with me. I am also grateful to the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers whose feedback was extremely valuable in helping me think through the complex phenomena this article addresses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Fran Martin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1265-9577

Notes

1 This conflation draws on a Chinese racialized imaginary of “the west” as the location of idealized whiteness, which is itself part of the same racialized global imaginary, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, that positions Africanness as “primitive”: see discussion above and Dikötter 1992.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Fellowship number ARC FT140100222].