Comparative measures of educational achievement (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, NAPLAN) demonstrate that although Australia is broadly understood to offer quality education, this masks stark and persistent inequalities. Wider disparities are evident between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds than in many other OECD countries. These inequities start before children enter schools. Children experiencing economic and social adversity are underrepresented in preschool and overrepresented in population level measures of ‘developmental vulnerability’ prior to school commencement. Young people from Indigenous backgrounds, rural/remote areas, and lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer significant achievement gaps across all measures, and the gap widens as they progress through their education. Some young people are being left behind as their more advantaged peers outpace them, with life-long consequences. Although public discourse encourages us to see educational failure as the fault of individuals, there is wide agreement that these inequities result from policy failures in Australian education.

This chapter examines the predicament outlined in the previous chapter, of the non-white body showing up in white spaces. Whilst a staunch objective of postwar black cultural politics, and of this book itself, is to portray the heterogeneity of the cultural identity of non-white ethnic minorities, in reality what happens in the lived experience is that the individual is interpreted through their racial characteristics, chiefly skin colour, which skews a holistic understanding of the person. The ‘historico-racial schema’ devised by Fanon that defines the restrictions faced by the non-white body in space, is explored in more widely and is theorised in Sara Ahmed’s insights in her study of the phenomenology of whiteness where she conveys the precarious situation of non-white bodies inhabiting white spaces. When they fit in, they are rendered invisible, and when they don’t and ‘stand out’ and ‘stand apart’, they are ‘hypervisible’ (2007, 159). Either way, visibility is not permitted in their own terms. In the interviews that followed the psychiatrists did not enjoy white privilege and there were times when they were made to feel different, a theme that was explored within the context of acculturation and other factors.

Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Both areas involve both avoiding racial wrongs (stereotyping, antipathy, demeaning the other) and promoting positive racial goods (respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial difference). Institutional racism requires civic education, to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities and to asymmetries between the way white and nonwhite identities function morally and civically. It must teach positive racial ideals of racial justice, understanding, and harmony.

Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.

Aging and Memory in the African American Community. Pregnant women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have children who are premature, underweight, or stillborn, and the effects hurt African American mothers and babies most. The population of those over 80 will increase 80% in the next ten years. Many older Americans who live with disabilities will not be able to pay for adequate housing, food, medicine and personal care. Many families of color are unable to pay for healthcare.

The Roberts Courts post-racial conception of affirmative action means that diversity is simply an aspirational myth, not substantive equality for the historically excluded.

Shows how the Museum of the Bible produces a bible resistant to moral critique, particularly when it comes to racism, slavery, and civil rights in US history. Argues that the museum’s exhibits engage in selective history-telling and other techniques to protect the Bible from complicity in societal harms and to frame the Christian Bible as in indispensable ally for progress. The museum’s bible participates in the constructions of Christian cultural heritage narratives and Christian nationalism in the United States.

An intense public debate over the deaths of unarmed black persons has emerged at a time when the thesis of a postracial, colorblind America had inserted itself into mainstream thinking as evidence of the growing sentiment to move beyond race and erase its explicit, violent history. Among the findings arising from these killings is the split in the public reaction along distinctly racial lines. Othello’s dying speech raises related concerns insofar as he is anxiously aware of the possible outcome of having a white narrator tell his story. Such a narrator is a prototype for the modern scholar in a majority white field like Shakespeare studies who must confront new empirical data on whites’ diminished capacity to perform cross-racial reading and identification. Hazlitt and other critics appear to have little difficulty affirming that, “It is we who are Hamlet,” but the same has not been true of black Othello. By contrast, the chapter’s appeal, “We are Othello,” is meant to disrupt the silence around whiteness, to make visible and productively politicize the subject identities of critical practitioners in the field, and issue a call for a transformative, antiracist scholarship.

Government policy made specifically for and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as distinct from other Australians, evolved from the time of white settlement in 1788. A range of social policy decisions arguably contributed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experiencing multilevel disadvantage, including lower life expectancy and education levels, poorer physical and mental health and higher rates of infant mortality, unemployment, family violence, incarceration and homelessness than other Australians. This chapter focuses on the assumptions about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that have underpinned past and present social policy, the impact of explicit and implicit racism in past and present policy focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, instances of Indigenous policy formulation flaws and delivery implementation gaps, and concepts of equity, citizenship and human rights to measures like compulsory income management. It encourages the reader to reflect on their own value base and practice in light of claims regarding white privilege and the control of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.