Andrew Brooks | What is Anti-Racism?
Ideas of race change and adapt, taking on different meanings at different points in history.
Did you know that the White Australia Policy originally considered immigrants from countries like Greece and Italy as non-white?
Ideas of race have changed, taking on different meanings at different points in history – creating hierarchies of difference between groups, and providing a self-reinforcing rational for racist aggression.
Andrew Brooks takes a close look and what race and racism actually are –and explains some of the technologies that have enabled the creation and reinforcement of racism in settler-colonial, capitalist societies.
By better understanding how embedded racism is, we can better recognise and acknowledge that it’s not simply a case of couple of bad apples, but threaded through the systems that govern our everyday lives.
Andrew Brooks
Dr Andrew Brooks is a Lecturer in Media Cultures in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW Sydney. His work investigates infrastructural and inequalities, policing and abolition, technology and aesthetics, race and anti-racism. He is a co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub, a researcher in the UNSW Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice, a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press, and an affiliate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. With Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. Their book of essays on art and politics, Homework, was published by Discipline in 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection, Inferno, published by Rosa Press in 2021.