People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying.
Andrew Bolt was found guilty of contravening the Racial Discrimination Act on this basis, since he questioned why light-skinned Aboriginal activists would identify with the minor part of their ancestry.
But who else would also have to be found guilty? The thought crossed my mind that all those academics involved in "whiteness studies" courses contravene the law, given that the whole point of these courses is to associate whiteness negatively with oppression and to deny that a white racial identity is legitimate.
So I did a quick google search and within a minute had come up with sufficient evidence to run a case. In the very first section of the first document I looked at I found this:
“[t]he critique of whiteness…attempts to displace the normativity of the white position by seeing it as a strategy of authority rather than an authentic or essential ‘identity’”
Here we have a clear denial that a white person might have an authentic race identity.
In the same document we find the following:
the central overarching theme in scholarship on whiteness is the argument that white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property
Isn't that an insulting claim? The allegation is that whites only identify as whites in order to get power and money.
Then there's this admission about whiteness studies:
This literature sits within a long history of observations of whiteness as a problem
So whiteness is looked on in the literature as a "problem". Not a tad offensive to white people?
There's also this:
Allen, as is central to the critical study of whiteness ... [describes] the invention of the white race as political rather than biological or evolutionary.
Umm, how can I be free to fully identify with my race, if the very existence of my race is denied?
It gets worse:
Again, Roediger was also responsible for editing a collection of essays concerned with whiteness. Entitled Towards the abolition of whiteness, this text contributes to the movement, above attributed to Ignatiev, of those seeking to combat white race privilege by abolishing the white race.
Now, surely anyone selling this book in Australia is contravening section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Then there's the following less than charming passage:
‘New Abolitionism’ “refers to the abolishment of the white race so that whites may gain their freedom from the enslavement of their cooperation in racism” ... It requires challenging all of the institutions that reproduce race and whiteness, and the supporters of ‘new abolitionism’ call on all ‘so-called whites’ (to borrow the language of Race Traitor) to become race traitors, telling us that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”
I'm not feeling fully free to identify with my own race after reading that particular rant. I'm feeling offended. Definitely a case for Section 18C.
And there's this this from Olivia Khoo:
In the Australian context Olivia Khoo uses Asian-Australian and indigenous literature to discuss the possibilities for destabilising whiteness in Australia. She suggests a strategy of ‘visibilising’ whiteness as an ‘ornamental detail’, arguing that “[s]howing up the ornamentation of whiteness enables it to be dislodged from its position of power and associated privileges”
Oddly, Olivia Khoo's own suffering at the hands of white privilege was to be catapulted into a job as an English lecturer at Monash University. Must have been a hard path to tread.
All of the above quotes are from just one paper written by a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland - the first paper I happened to look at. Just imagine, then, if Section 18C were to be applied consistently throughout academia. You would probably have to close down the English departments at most universities and at many high schools - and some of the history and politics departments as well.
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