Wednesday, April 17, 2019
In this essay I discuss structural racism in laws and legal systems. I argue that powerful trends and discourses are enlisted to serve the interests of colonialism, and innervate Australian contemporary colonialism.
The essay is a response to an initial provocation that global trends in neoliberalism (that were reaching Australia in the late 20th century and hit with full force in the mid-2000s) can account for the contemporary retraction of Indigenous rights in Australia. I discuss how colonialism better explains this, not neoliberalism alone, but argue that neoliberalism and other discourses – including those which ought to help indigenous peoples – are enlisted to innervate contemporary Australian colonialism and set back Indigenous interests. Colonialism has never desisted for Indigenous people in Australia.
I use the example of two legislative provisions to explore these ideas. Each provision purported to address claims of judicial tolerance of violence against Aboriginal women and children, specifically judicial misperceptions of Aboriginal law regarding this. But the provisions reflect polarised policies regarding recognition of Aboriginal law: one was introduced by a territory government that explicitly pursued a policy of respectful engagement with indigenous knowledges and the advancement of Indigenous self-determination; the other was introduced by a federal government as part of a larger imposition in that territory of a policy of overt intervention and control into the lives of Aboriginal peoples.
The former provision failed to have its desired effect of better educating judicial officers and legal actors, because it was inserted into court processes that have never been decolonised. The latter provision was justified in part by the failures of that provision and other Indigenous policies of the territory government.
The latter provision was consistent with neoliberal practices and ideology of the federal government, but it also (ab)used feminist and international human rights discourses about gender violence. After more than ten years of the use of this provision it cannot be said that it has had any positive impact on the violence against Indigenous women and children, and there is evidence that Indigenous experiences of the criminal justice system are worse - for example, there is no demonstrable increase in violence reduction and more and more Indigenous women and children are being incarcerated.
Australia has never engaged in any real attempt to be post-colonial with respect to Indigenous peoples here. Having never addressed this at any fundamental level, it is suggested it is impossible to achieve real change social justice for Indigenous people without decolonisation.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/2019/04/williams-on-structural-racism.html
Williams on Structural Racism curated from CrimProf Blog
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