Unmasking the Racial Contract

'Taking as her example that icon of meritocracy, the Australian Public Service, Debbie Bargallie's Indigenist critique of Australia's racial contract illuminates how race figures in the daily experiences of First Nations employees. As long as First Nations are recognised by Australia as a race, Australians will fiercely dispute when it is fair (recognition) and when it is unfair (racism) to distinguish persons by race. Drawing on yarning with twenty-one public servants, Bargallie conveys their forthright account of what it feels like to be racialised. Her sociology of the racial contract adds nuance to our understanding of recognition.' --Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse, Western Sydney University and the Australian National University 'Despite a history of conquest, genocide, and expropriation, to say nothing of a multi-decade official ""White Australia"" immigration policy, mainstream Australian discourse and scholarship still prefers to conceal the central reality of white racial domination with the evasive and obfuscatory categories of ""diversity"" and ""culture."" This courageous and hard-hitting text by Indigenous scholar Debbie Bargallie reveals the ugly truth of systemic racial exclusion behind the liberal façade--a lesson not merely in the workings of the Australian Public Service specifically but for the country far more broadly.' --Professor Charles Mills, Author of The Racial Contract, City University of New York 'In Unmasking the Racial Contract, Debbie Bargallie has achieved something that Australian scholarship on the ongoing impact of colonization deeply needs: a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which race continues to frame the everyday experiences of First Nations people under colonialism. Bargallie's analysis of how an unspoken racial contract sits beneath the workings of an ostensibly neutral and tolerant institution--the Australian Public Service--will ring true to many racialised people whose interactions with institutions are a daily litany of microaggressions, so often met with denial. As such, Bargallie's book sits alongside other vital pieces of scholarship in the international critical race canon and should be widely read, in both Australia and far beyond.' --Alana Lentin, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University 'This book addresses the critically important, but under-researched, field of racism in the everyday. Using a strong Indigenous methodology the research on which the book is based examines how the Australian non-Indigenous/Indigenous racial contract is enacted in everyday interactions, racial microaggressions and everyday performances. The socio-cultural space the book examines is the Australian Public Service but its theoretical frame, its key findings and its disturbing conclusions can be applied more broadly across Australian society. A key strength of the book was its historical linking, drawing on threads of earlier times, such as the experiences of Charlie Perkins, to show that this is not a new phenomenon, but rather an expected continuation of the older power dynamics of the racial contract, relatively unchanged in either their practice or their outcomes, despite changing rhetoric around race and Indigeneity.' --Distinguished Professor Maggie Walter (PhD, FASSA), University of Tasmania