Last weeks's QUT Symposium met in the staunch tradition of the Brisbane Blacks, who have fought for sovereignty, land rights, liberation and an end to racial violence for decades. It was a gathering of Elders, academics, organisers and frontline community workers who speak, theorise and embody the truth about race and racism in this place. It refused to clothe itself in multicultural platitudes about tolerance, or to speak about racism only in terms of individual prejudice.

In segmenting off Jews, and Muslims, these Special Envoys function as a technique of racism, pitting groups against each other. But we can only fight against racism by working together, collectively and in coalitions. This is not just rhetoric, but a material and political reality.

The Australian anti-halal campaign, like the French one, aims at criminalising and further excluding the already marginalised Muslim minority. While racists pretend to act in the name of national unity, their words and deeds show us how food becomes a means to distinguish a superior ‘us’ from an inferior ‘them’ – the unwanted and unwelcome Arab and Muslim Other.

Asians can – and must – also engage in more radical forms of anti-racism. Otherwise, they risk signaling that they are happy to remain a model minority, complicit and silent in the face of continuing racial injustice so long as it’s not directed toward us.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen the beginnings of an anti-racist reckoning in Australia’s media, arts and entertainment sector, nourished by the Bla(c)k Lives Matter movement. I am sceptical that it will lead to any real change in Australia. Diversity and inclusion initiatives are usually a way for a company’s management to abdicate responsibility to a junior colleague who doesn’t have authority to challenge structural racism. Maybe there’ll be a couple more of us in the room. But what happens when we get there?

We shouldn't need to prove to the colonial state that we’re ‘civilised’ or that Wuhan is a beautiful, vibrant, cultured city. Instead, we should become stauncher allies to First Nations people and other people of colour who face damaging stereotypes and harassment every day. When the Coronavirus outbreak is over, racism won’t go away. It will seek a different target and will always be ready to rear its head unless if we dismantle the structures that perpetuate it.

The PRC interference debate has resulted in a form of collective madness amongst segments of the political class with inflammatory language and an unwillingness to hear out the concerns of Chinese Australians. I know I am not the only one deeply uneasy about the direction of a PRC influence debate that often has Sinophobic undertones that invoke a fear of anything ‘Chinese’, suggesting risk without explanation or context.

Dan Tehan’s ‘university foreign interference taskforce’ has gone relatively unnoticed in the mainstream press, yet it’s imperative that progressives on campus oppose such moves to impose more government scrutiny on academics and their conduct – particularly one that so deliberately fans the flames of anti-Chinese racism.

Racism in Australia has long rested on not only vicious establishment slander, but on silence, or attempts to obfuscate, the agency, humanity and courage of the oppressed.

Open letter from NTEU members regarding the Four Corners episode ‘Cash Cows’.

I have no reason to doubt Corbyn’s sincerity in rejecting antisemitism. The problem is that the rhetorical framing of his critique in moral terms of the defence of the economic wellbeing of the nation against ravaging international capital tends, unwittingly, to resonate with noxious forms of ideology and ressentiment.

The ideological ground occupied by Quadrant, Fox News, Quillette, The Australian, Sky News, Infowars et al. is founded on the same essential creed: under the banner of identity politics, the Left is undertaking a deliberate campaign to police speech and behaviour in order to create a society in which conservative dissent is erased

The Christchurch mosque attacks have conjured waves of support and solidarity and shame. These are important and heartwarming, but they are not enough. Every attack of this kind opens floodgates of racialised violence. It legitimises and emboldens.

Many of us immigrants have heard in the last few days that ‘this is not New Zealand.’ It’s meant to be a comforting sentiment. It’s understandable where it’s coming from. What can you possibly say about unspeakable horror, without needing to disavow it?

‘It all starts with learning how to read, to write, to count and to think in the national language. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an important role for culture in remote schools but nevertheless people need a decent education in the national language.’

Catalysed most recently by the tragic death of Eurydice Dixon in June, much has been written and debated about sexism, misogyny and gendered violence in our society. For many, intervention into this discussion has stemmed from a kind of melancholic identification with the victim – a young, cis, straight, able-bodied, white woman with an aspiring career – that sense that ‘it could have been me’.