Whiteness, Racism, and Power

Here’s a typical example of how white people exercise and maintain racism. TV personality, Kerri-Anne Kennerly, flies into a rage about Saturday’s Invasion Day protests, led by Aboriginal people, seeking to change the date of Australia Day and establish systemic reform that includes a Voice to Parliament and Makarrata (treaty). Kennerly taps the table angrily, ‘Has anyone of them been out to the Outback where children, babies, 5 year olds are being raped. Their mothers are being raped. Their sisters are being raped. They get no education. What have you done? Zippo.’

Here, Kennerly evokes the same strawman argument that politicises rape and child abuse that has been used since colonisation to deny Aboriginal people rights. She could be referring to the Northern Territory Intervention, where the army went into remote regions to justify removals of Aboriginal children. The Intervention was not based on evidence – that’s already been proven. It has been catastrophic for communities.

She could be taking about the same ill-founded arguments rehashed by another white woman on the TV program Sunrise in 2018 – which was found to have breached code of conduct.

Or it could be from 2015, when Western Australian white politician did similar.

In fact, Kennerly reproduces the same racism white women academics level at Aboriginal people, sensationalising remote communities (holding them up as ‘real’ Aboriginals on the one hand, and dismissing them as helpless on the other), using rape as a paternalistic tool to minimise Aboriginal women and their leadership. See Jackie Huggins AO’s fight against in the 1980s, as discussed by Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson in 2000.

Racism is maintained through institutional power, which includes the media. In this case, being a highly paid TV personality reproducing the racist machinery that dispossessed Aboriginal people and continues to remove kids from family. Dr Moreton-Robinson noted 19 years ago that white women constantly talk down to Aboriginal women, which is what’s happening here, where a white influential woman dismisses the leadership of Aboriginal women who have organised the Australia Day protests for years.

White women benefit from racism. To dismantle racism, white people need to give up their power, which includes the platform to talk down to Aboriginal women (especially on a show that talks about Aboriginal people without them in the room). Non-Indigenous people must recognise that the ideas Kennerly gives voice to are not ‘just’ an opinion. Racism is not a debate with two equally valid sides. To be anti-racist means undoing this logic, and following the leadership of Aboriginal people. This weekend it was a march. Soon it may be a referendum. Let’s be ready. We must stop excusing racism as ‘just’ anything but the reinforcement of whiteness.