Screen vs Life

There are 2 very big problems that are becoming glaringly obvious at Australia’s multicultural public broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). First, is it’s clearly partisan reporting on political news. Second, its political partisanship is explicitly racist and bigoted. Take for example SBS's representation, or lack thereof, of Candice Owens. Owens is a black female political activist in the US who rose to fame on social media when her satirical video on coming out as conservative went viral. She has since teamed up with conservative heavy weights such as Turning Point USA and PragerU to launch a career as a political activist and pundit. Most notably, Owens the brainchild of Blexit , a movement that aims to educate black Americans about how politicians exploit black American concerns to gain their vote, and encourages them to ‘exit’ the democratic party.  Even if you disagree with her politics, Owens is indisputably an independent, strong, articulate, black woman, w...

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the ...

What is it about Nazism that people find so abhorrent? What are those elements of Nazism that we recognize in the words and actions of the politically empowered that make us rise up and say “no more”? Is it the harsh lesson of how quickly the forked tongue of a charismatic leader can whip up support to condemn a whole race of people to extermination? Is it the uncanny ability to identify the next despot, paving his or her road to political victory by spinning tales of unearned wealth and privilege accruing to an elite minority? Both sides of the contemporary political spectrum increasingly invoke Hitler to raise the alarm about the imminent danger of the next fascistic regime. It is however, towards the left that I pitch this question, because the Hitler-Nazi-Fascist triad has largely been invoked by the left to foreground the re-emergent politicization of race, and valorization of racism. And while I certainly do not condone racism I believe that this focus is detriment...

Yesterday, by way of anecdote, I proposed that academia is at least in part, responsible for the mainstream media acceptance and rationalisation of violent anti-white racism . See here if you missed it. Admittedly the points made were largely anecdotal and provided little in the way of evidence. What I offer today is more substantial in terms of evidence, and is provided in the form of a critique of what is a largely unchallenged field of study within the humanities, known as critical race and whiteness theory (CRW). My knowledge of CRW stems from my PhD research where I leaned the claims of the theory to discuss the representation of national identity in Australian film and television. If you are interested my dissertation is linked here . I am no longer a proponent of CRW theory and here’s why…  Critical race and whiteness (CRW) really began to coalesce as a theory within the humanities from the late 1990s. The interdisciplinary field CRW has deep roots within pos...

The media and police response to the recent abduction and torture of a white mentally disabled man by four black men and women in Chicago exposes a sickness within Western culture, and as humanities scholars we are all absolutely responsible for the spawning of this sickness. Despite the fact that the perpetrators live streamed the torture on Facebook, clearly articulating their racial and political motivation (the assailants can clearly be heard chanting Fuck Trump! and Fuck white people!, as well as forcing their victim to proclaim is love of black people), some mainstream media in the US refused to label this attack as racist or racially motivated. As many astute critics have asked, would journalists be so generous if the scenario were reversed with whites torturing a black victim, disabled or otherwise?  What this question foregrounds is a recent revision of the term racism such that it has come to be re-defined as a product of prejudice plus power. In othe...