A revised approach to racism in youth multiculture: the significance of schoolyard conversations about sex, dating and desire

ABSTRACT

Anxieties about social cohesion in multicultural societies have prompted scrutiny of how young people negotiate culturally diverse spaces. A key perspective of the literature at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture is that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a culturally diverse high school in Melbourne, Australia, I suggest that this binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within multicultural youth sociality. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between forms of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. To do this, I draw on young people’s conversations about sex, dating and desire as an entry point for new theorising about racism. Race and ethnicity were cornerstones of students’ frequent discussions about sexual ‘tastes’ and activity, discourses that have racist histories and effects. However, students did not understand their social world in such terms. These students’ social practices offer a situated illustration of how racism can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• conviviality
• racism
• youth
• ethnography
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

This is based on a paper presented at The ‘Muslim Question': Citizenship and Racism in Australia conference 14–15 December 2015, hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. I am particularly indebted to Dan Woodman, Farida Fozdar, Greg Noble, Jessica Walton, Mythily Meher and Tamara Kohn for rich discussion about and comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term ‘ethno-racial’ is intended to signal the shifting and conflated ways in which young people racialised their social world and peers. At Greendale High, ideas of ‘nash’ (nationality), ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ were used in fluid ways and these modes of social categorisation were ever-shifting.

2. In the broader Australian context, as the Australian Human Rights Commission website explains (as of 2015), ‘[c]ompared to other countries, Australia has a remarkable degree of social cohesion given its diversity. However, maintaining this cohesion can be a challenge’.

3. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/root, accessed 19 Oct 2015.

4. Ibid.

5. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term = rooted, accessed 19 Oct 2015.