Comment: Neoliberal Stories of Racial Redemption

Abstract

It is a long time since I have addressed issues of New World racism directly and even longer, if ever, since I have had much to say about this issue in the United States as opposed to the Caribbean. For the last 15 years my eyes have been trained mostly on Australia and the issues of racialization brought by European invasion of the continent. Nonetheless, Baca's topic struck me as familiar for the fact that the disconnect he identifies between advancement through civil rights (circa 1960s and the early 1970s), and a current and continuing deterioration of life chances among the poor and black, rings equally true for Australia. The Australian version of this has been dramatized recently in reports of remote indigenous communities that focus entirely on individual pathologies and suggest that the only right that indigenous Australians can or should have now is to be incorporated (by policy-forced migration) into an urban (unemployed) mainstream. Among Australian anthropologists, the response to this apparent disconnect between increased legal rights and diminishing life chances also parallels that in the United States as Baca describes them: the current period is seen as bad in relation to a previous good one, a 'neo-liberal' present contrasted with a recent past of land rights and 'self-determination' (roughly the 1960s through the 1980s). In Australia, this earlier period also saw the rise of a nationwide indigenous bureaucratic group, sometimes called the 'Indigenous Sector,' that seems to parallel the rise of an African American professional middle class in the United States. For Australia, the story of good period followed by bad comes undone when it is noted that the rise of Australia's Indigenous Sector coincided with the full incorporation of remote (and poorer) indigenous Australians into the welfare state and welfare dependency. In the 1990s, when federal government experimented with time limits on unemployment benefits, indigenous Australians received a 'remote area exemption' from such measures. However, this situation was hardly good.