Explicating race privilege: examining symbolic barriers to Aboriginal and non-indigenous partnership

Abstract

Processes of racialisation and patterns of privilege continue to structure relations between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australia. This study explored the everyday ways race is reinscribed and unequal relations of power expressed, constituted and legitimised in a context marked by a history of oppressive colonisation. Conceptualising barriers to partnership as ideologically reproduced through discourse, critical discourse analysis was utilised to examine non-Indigenous and Aboriginal participants' understandings of the history of poor relations between groups. Participants were four male and three female non-Indigenous local government representatives and five female and four male Aboriginal community members, recruited for semi-structured interviews or a focus group. We focus the first part of our analysis on the discourse of ‘abstract liberalism’, which was identified in local government representatives' talk. Arguably, this hegemonic discourse, which reflects a monological conception of the world, is indicative of the circuits and consequences of dispossession within this particular local context. The discourse of ‘disregard’, mobilised by Aboriginal participants, demonstrates the continuity of coloniality and offers a counter story to the dominant ideological narrative. Explicating the reproduction of race privilege, while engaging with Indigenous knowledge as a space of critique and resistance is discussed as central to decolonisation and anti-racism praxis.

Keywords:

• colonialism
• racism
• Aboriginal
• whiteness
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback provided on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. CAN WA has found that local people generally express a preference to be described as ‘Aboriginal’ over ‘Indigenous’. Aboriginal or ‘Noongar’ as the overarching language and cultural grouping is therefore used throughout this paper.

2. Rejecting the idea that Australia is post-colonial, Moreton-Robinson (2003) has argued that:

Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are situated in relation to (post) colonisation in radically different ways, ways that cannot be made into sameness. There may well be spaces in Australia that could be described as post-colonial but these are not spaces inhabited by Indigenous people. It may be more useful, therefore, to conceptualise the current condition not as post-colonial but as post-colonising with the association of ongoing process, which that implies. (p. 30)

3. To protect the anonymity of the participants involved in this research, the rural communities involved in this research will not be named. Four shires in a specific geographic location of Western Australia were involved in the research.