White Free Speech: The Fraser Event and its Enlightenment Legacies

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Goldie Osuri

Abstract

This essay discusses the 2005 Australia-wide controversy about the white supremacist comments made by Macquarie University academic Associate Professor Andrew Fraser. It locates the means by which this white supremacism manifested itself not only through Fraser comments, but also through arguments surrounding free speech/academic freedom. Using whiteness theory and its examination of whiteness as an Enlightenment legacy, Osuri argues that the collusion between Fraser’s white supremacism and the free speech/academic freedom argument is based on a disavowal of how whiteness operates, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson describes it, as an epistemological and ontological a priori, an embodied form of knowledge-production, and collective white hegemony.

Article Details

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Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Goldie Osuri, Macquarie University

Goldie Osuri lectures in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. Her research interests include visuality and newsmedia technologies; terrorism and the New World Order; nationalisms and transnational cultures, Australia and the United States, and conversion and nationalism in India.