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Friday, 27 July 2018

Go ahead, white Australia, eat your kebabs while you remind us of your 'values' | Randa Abdel-Fattah

When I think about white fragility and its moral pretensions I marvel at the great hoax of it all

• Being a good, quiet and assimilated ‘model minority’ is making me angry - Masako Fukui

I know who I am. Most racialised people do. History matters to us. We know that the answers to who we are as a nation lie in a story that did not start with the last election or 9/11 or Tampa or deaths in custody or the stolen generations. We know that if we were to approach the question of who we are as a nation the way we would a jigsaw puzzle then the most logical and coherent approach is to first assemble the pieces that make up the frame to see its shape and how the border determines the shape and fit of all the pieces inside.

We know that the frame of Australia is race. As a white-settler colonial outpost of the British empire, it could only ever be race. The dispossession, genocide and exploitation on which this country was founded; the legacy of its status as a British settler colony; past efforts to build a racially exclusionary nation via the White Australia policy; its evolution from “racial” to “cultural” dominance through the vehicle of a highly politicised policy of multicultural­ism; and, above all, the denial of Indigenous sovereignty – racialised people know that this is where any discussion of this nation’s identity must start.

Related: Being a good, quiet and assimilated 'model minority' is making me angry | Masako Fukui

Related: If language tells us who we are, then who am I? | Stan Grant

Whiteness is fascinating in the lies it tells itself and the moral contortions it insists upon

Related: Australia's immigration policy is meant to be blind to race, but is it?

Related: What are they so afraid of? I’m just a young brown Muslim woman speaking my mind | Yassmin Abdel-Magied

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from Islam | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2vjGnZF

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