Race, rhetorical veneers and the virulence of colonial violence during COVID

Abstract

COVID has exposed how health and racial inequities are deeply entangled. This article seeks to examine how race is made present but also erased in words, bodies and institutions. It takes as its point of departure two Australian health campaigns and their use of the promotional rhetoric of ‘the race’ to urgently increase immunisations and organ donation registrations at the time of COVID. In a critical analysis of the public policy and political discourse that emerged in and around these promotions, I show how racialised oppression materialised and was obscured in linguistic veneers of inclusivity and diversity. The race to improve health outcomes articulated social imaginaries of the ‘level playing field’ in a projection to the future that omitted the historical production of uneven terrains. Reorienting this temporal direction, the article historicises the present, tracing back racial inequities from the frontline and dividing lines of coronavirus, to the frontiers and foundations of the Australian nation. In so doing, it argues for a more critical engagement with health discourse and promotions that target racialised groups and (re)present histories of violence.