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I close my eyes and think of a future world The Futures of Racism: The New World 'Other'
Conference paper   Open access   Peer reviewed

I close my eyes and think of a future world The Futures of Racism: The New World 'Other'

Marcus P Bussey
Proceedings of the International Conference on Racisms in the New World Order, pp.64-78
International Conference on Racisms in the New World Order: Realities of Culture, Colour and Identity Conference, 2005 (Coolum, Australia, 08-Dec-2005–09-Dec-2005)
University of the Sunshine Coast, Centre for Multicultural and Community Development
2006
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Abstract

Other Studies in Human Society racism
This paper builds on Roger Bastide's assertion that we construct 'race', and that colour in and of itself is without meaning. Deep futures of a causal and integral nature attempts to engage with the mythic and metaphoric roots that define reality, establish boundaries and maintain the structures of inequity that configure societies, shape civilisations and underpin the disempowerment of the vast majority of our planet. When developing policy, shaping educational language and community strategies to counter racism we need to understand the power of our myths to impose meaning and validity on these interventions. One component of futures work is to expose, through a range of strategies, the myths and metaphors that we live by in order to allow us to engage them and develop others. Futures also involve us in looking at our metaphors and being surprised. In seeing how we are complicit in much of the ugliness of the world, much of the Other that we deny yet which we find in our own metaphors. Thus Jacques Derrida reminds us that the Other of democracy can be found in our own enactment of the principle itself: "The great question of modern parliamentary and representative democracy, perhaps of all democracy, is this logic of the turn around, of the other turn around, of the other time and thus of the other, of the alter in general, is that the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternation." (Derrida, 2005, p.30-31). This alternation is not so much a binary function of our thinking as the shadow of our own selves - of our fears and hopes as we grapple with the fluid, morphic nature of the social. This shadow infiltrates the best we aspire to and uses our hopes to betray us. Thus democracy often ushers in a painful mediocrity, or anti-democratic forces that usurp the very form that underwrote its ascendancy. Similarly, as we grapple with questions of racism, the ugliness shifts and finds new languages, new tongues to play the political correctness game, to damn the 'prophets' and praise the 'whores'.

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