Antiracism and Australian universities
A School of Education seminar presented on October 23, 2019 by Dr Kelvin McQueen
In 1998, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission defined racism, in part, as an ideology, with regard to racial and ethnic groups, ‘that devalues and renders inferior those groups, that reflects and is perpetuated by deeply rooted historical, social, cultural and power inequalities in society.’
Yet a difficult to challenge form of racism is institutional racism. It has been defined as being ‘structured into political and social institutions. It occurs when organisations, institutions or governments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against certain groups of people to limit their rights’ (NSW Department of Education and Training 2000, p. 5).
Universities, of course, are very important cultural institutions, especially with the advent of mass higher education, As such, they occupy a crucial point for fostering either institutional racism or antiracism education – or perhaps even both!
There has been recent criticism that in universities ‘Racism is silenced through…“epistemologies of ignorance”.’ This criticism goes on to suggest that such ignorance may be compounded by inertia and deflected conceptualisations adding to the challenges facing antiracism education: ‘We continue to struggle to name racism and to act against it within the university sector because of “equality and diversity” as the preferred approach to racial inequity and institutional transformation’ (Tate & Bagguley 2017, pp. 295 & 296).
Following from this, for some academic commentators, effective antiracism education, unlike other forms of education in universities about diversity, empathy, perspectives, racism, and so on, ‘focuses on social power asymmetries’. According to these same commentators, universities can facilitate antiracism education – and antiracism itself – not least through actions like the following:
‘Seek to eliminate false beliefs by providing accurate information; Avoid “one-way” communication…; …Have the support of clear unambiguous political leadership; …using both “top-down” strategies (e.g., community or institutionally instigated action…) and “bottom-up” strategies (e.g., addressing specific racist behaviours)’ (Pedersen, Walker, Rapley & Wise 2003, pp. 4-5)
In light of University of New England’s recently appointed Vice Chancellor’s, Professor Brigid Heywood (2019), repudiation of racist behaviour and quoting to this effect the words of United States writer Toni Morrison that oppressive language is, amongst other things, ‘language designed for the estrangement of minorities’, then this presentation provides a case study of institutional racism and offers some institutional solutions.
