Unmasking the Racial Contract : Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service - Dr. Debbie Bargallie

Unmasking the Racial Contract

Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service

By: Dr. Debbie Bargallie

Paperback | 1 June 2020

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In an era of reconciliation and cultural diversity, Indigenous peoples in Australia still experience everyday and structural racisms in the workplace. Unmasking the Racial Contract is a study of one such workplace: the Australian Public Service. Bargallie shows that despite claims of fairness, inclusion, opportunity, respect and racial equality for all, Indigenous employees continue to languish on the lower rungs of the Australian Public Service employment ladder. By showing how racism is normalised in white institutions, Bargallie aims to help us see and understand and ultimately challenge racism. This original and innovative book, written from an Indigenous standpoint, is the first to use race as a key framework to critically examine the discrimination faced by Indigenous employees in an Australian institution. Bargallie provides an insider''s perspective and privileges the voices of other Indigenous employees, and she applies critical race theory to unmask the racial contract that underpins the ''absent presence'' of racism in the Australian Public Service. Bargallie provides an important counter-narrative to the pervasive myth of meritocracy, and encourages readers to consider the effects of the racial contract in colonial-colonised relations in Australia more broadly.
Industry Reviews
'Despite a history of conquest, genocide, and expropriation, to say nothing of a multi-decade official "White Australia" immigration policy, mainstream Australian discourse and scholarship still prefers to conceal the central reality of white racial domination with the evasive and obfuscatory categories of "diversity" and "culture." This courageous and hard-hitting text by Indigenous scholar Debbie Bargallie reveals the ugly truth of systemic racial exclusion behind the liberal facade--a lesson not merely in the workings of the Australian Public Service specifically but for the country far more broadly.' --Professor Charles Mills, Author of The Racial Contract, City University of New York

'In Unmasking the Racial Contract, Debbie Bargallie has achieved something that Australian scholarship on the ongoing impact of colonization deeply needs: a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which race continues to frame the everyday experiences of First Nations people under colonialism. Bargallie's analysis of how an unspoken racial contract sits beneath the workings of an ostensibly neutral and tolerant institution--the Australian Public Service--will ring true to many racialised people whose interactions with institutions are a daily litany of microaggressions, so often met with denial. As such, Bargallie's book sits alongside other vital pieces of scholarship in the international critical race canon and should be widely read, in both Australia and far beyond.' --Alana Lentin, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University

'This book addresses the critically important, but under-researched, field of racism in the everyday. Using a strong Indigenous methodology the research on which the book is based examines how the Australian non-Indigenous/Indigenous racial contract is enacted in everyday interactions, racial microaggressions and everyday performances. The socio-cultural space the book examines is the Australian Public Service but its theoretical frame, its key findings and its disturbing conclusions can be applied more broadly across Australian society. A key strength of the book was its historical linking, drawing on threads of earlier times, such as the experiences of Charlie Perkins, to show that this is not a new phenomenon, but rather an expected continuation of the older power dynamics of the racial contract, relatively unchanged in either their practice or their outcomes, despite changing rhetoric around race and Indigeneity.' --Distinguished Professor Maggie Walter (PhD, FASSA), University of Tasmania

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