Race at Work Within Social Policy

My chapter ‘Race at Work Within Social Policy,’ has been published in the book, Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence, edited by Dr Debbie Bargallie and Dr Nilmini Fernando. Read an excerpt below.

Until end of December 2024, you can purchase the book at 50% discount when ordering via NewSouth Books. Alternatively, you can purchase the eBook from Bristol University Press with 50% discount using code CNF24. It is also available on Kindle.

The book is being launched on Gadigal land, Sydney, Friday 20 September, from 10am-11.30am. The event is free. There are future events for the book planned in Naarm (Melbourne) and Meanjin (Brisbane).

Introduction

Race is the foundation of invasion and colonial rule in Australia, and is enshrined in laws and social policy. The edict of terra nullius (land belonging to no one) legitimized state violence and a British legal framework to take possession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands. In the Australian settler-colonial context, racial literacy in social policy requires an understanding of patriarchal white sovereignty, which is, ‘a regime of power that derives from the illegal act of possession and is most acutelymanifested in the form of the Crown and the judiciary, but it is also evident in everyday cultural practices and spaces’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 35). Patriarchal white sovereignty grants white people a sense of social belonging through ownership of property and resources, cultural power and socioeconomic authority. The logic of ownership is established by enforcing racial differences, even while social policies and laws promote individual equality, as conferred through citizenship (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 52).

Policy makers and academics rarely give critical attention to the processes and politics of the production of policy documents, instead focusing on what the document says. This is one way to maintain racial silence, since each step of policy creation – particularly the production of documents – presents an opportunity to address, or ignore, race. This chapter raises the question of which agents and actors conduct each step of the process and how. How do race relations impact how and when policies are negotiated? I present an analysis of the ways poor racial literacy across the policy cycle weakens the potential for social transformation, particularly in drafting strategies that seek to implement anti-racism.

Racial literacy exposes how race is used to structure ‘social, economic and political relations’ so groups in power retain their dominance (Guinier, 2004: 114). Race is used to normalize white supremacy by taking attention away from the unequal distribution of power and resources and creating division. Racial literacy can be defined as a way to learn about race, and act on racial inequality (Guinier, 2004: 115). This requires an understanding of how social context shapes how we think, talk and act on race; the role of social forces that impact our ability to make change (agency), such as institutional and environmental factors; and the interplay between race and other forms of social stratification, such as class, geography and gender (Guinier, 2004: 115).

Given its institutional authority, an examination of racial literacy in public policy processes presents a potent opportunity to examine how patriarchal white sovereignty is enacted through institutions, chiefly policy negotiation and documentation.

This chapter presents three case studies of policies I have advised on in one agency within the New South Wales (NSW) state government, on data sovereignty, service delivery and disability-inclusion strategies. While the policies and workforce data discussed in these case studies are public, the sources and the organization are anonymized; the point is not to make an example of the agency and teams involved, but instead to study these to exemplify how the public service as an institution learns about, and uses, anti-racism knowledge. Rather than focus on individuals (who said what and how it made me feel), I use racial literacy to illustrate how policies are created and negotiated, and what happens to anti-racist expertise along the way. I argue that a racial literacy approach helps us to understand institutional racism in four ways:

1. making race relations explicit;
2. targeting structural, rather than individual, inequity;
3. redressing the ongoing impact of colonialism; and
4. eliminating institutional racism.

I will show how state policies have adopted a white supremacist reframing of First Nations scholarship and anti-racism, to fit in with what I term ‘hegemonic diversity’, and thus maintain patriarchal white sovereignty. I conclude with a discussion of why we need to move away from individualistic approaches to policy and practice using critical racial literacy. Existing understandings of race, diversity and inclusion are inadequate for the task of dismantling institutional racism; analysis of policy documentation exposes how white interests are reproduced through institutional processes, even as organizations seek to address racism, because institutions are not fully committed to radical transformation – which is at the heart of seeing, responding to and redressing racial inequity.

Read the rest of my chapter in hardback or online: Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence,