‘Mainstreaming’ Indigenous Inequality as Disadvantage and the Silencing of ‘Race’ in Australian Social, Educational and Vocational Training

Published in the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association e-journal (2008) Traditional constructs of inequality and discrimination to explain the life chances of indigenous Australians have been supplanted by the discourse of disadvantage. The boundaries of exclusion are made less clear by the emergence of inclusive discourse related to increased access and participation (outcomes) [...]

Invoking an Ivory Tower: Journalistic Misrepresentation of me as a Critic of Race and the Content of my Criticisms

Published in G. Tsolidis (Ed.) Migration, Diaspora and Identity: Cross National Experiences (2014) She saw what she wanted to see. But the world does not divide as neatly on the ground as it does when gazed upon from an ivory tower (Baum 2008). Hylton (2005) writes that “where race has been ignored, include it, where [...]

Encountering Disregard in Australian Academe: The Subjective Perspective of a Disaffiliated Racial ‘Other’

Published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education (2009)  This article proposes that progressive frameworks underpinned by diversity are contradictory to the inclusion of the ‘other’ in Australian higher education. I integrate the critical race theory constructs of disregard and convergence with white privilege and indigenous lacking to claim that objective processes underpinned by merit [...]

Critical Race Theory and the Orthodoxy of Race Neutrality: Examining the Denigration of Adam Goodes

A co-authored article with Chris Hallinan published in the journal of Australian Aboriginal Studies (2017) This study draws on critical race theory to examine common sense assumptions of race and racism so as to identify the distortions in logic in the justification that the booing of Indigenous athlete Adam Goodes was not ‘racist’. It is [...]

An ‘Alchemy’ of Rights and Racism: A Critical Reading of the ‘Booing’ of Adam Goodes from an Expat in Papua New Guinea 

Published in the Journal of Australian Aboriginal Studies (2016) Williams (1992) draws on alchemy to describe how racism is ‘infused’ with rights. The booing of Indigenous athlete Adam Goodes in the Australian Football League (AFL) in 2015 was dissolved into fictitious right of moral equivalence. Booing could not be ‘racist’ because non-Indigenous athletes are also [...]

The Paradox of Fairness and the Racial Vilification of the Indigenous ‘Other’ in Australian Sport

Published in the Journal of Australian Indigenous Studies (2013) This study examines the dismissal of race and by implication racism within judicial interpretation of fairness in the context of racial discrimination in Australian sport. It is claimed that this hinges on an evaluation of fairness that is paradoxical. McNamara’s (1998) construct of evaluative racism is [...]

Race Formations (Evolutionary Hegemony) and the ‘Aping’ of the Australian Indigenous Athlete

Published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2007)  In the article ‘The Fire Within’, Anthony Mundine, the Australian indigenous boxer and world bantam weight title holder, is the subject of discussion around his inability to be his own man. Martin Flanagan (2006: 6) writes that ‘Mundine is commonly accused of aping Muhammad [...]

The Real and the Unreal (second edition, 2015) 

The second edition of The Real and Unreal reflects on the objective in the first, which was to claim the changing significance of race in the context of Australian sport. Race is celebrated in terms of indigenous athletic dominance yet the persistence of racial inequality on and off field is denied. The approach, underlined by [...]

The Real and the Unreal (first edition, 2007) 

Race is said to be irrelevant conceptually. Drawing on the notion of race formations (evolutionary hegemony), this study engages with the changing significance of race through an examination of contemporary narratives depicting indigenous efficacy for sport in popular print content. The centrality of the black athletic body to narratives of indigenous dominance in Australian football [...]