Foreword by Parlo Singh

Summary

My name is Parlo Singh. I am a diasporic Punjabi Australian, a professor in education (sociology). I live and work on the unceded lands of the Yugarabul, Yuggera, Jagera and Turrbal peoples, a place now called Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

My grandfather worked in Australia as an Indian subject of the British colonial empire. Despite the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and its various amendments, designed to keep Australia white (the ‘White Australia’ policy), Black or coloured subjects of the Empire were allowed into ‘Australia’ as they were crucial to clearing bushland and helping to ‘settle’ the country. My family migrated here in the 1960s. Themselves colonized subjects and the victims of colonial racisms, they became entangled in the formation of the Australian white, colonial settler state, which violently wrested unceded lands from Indigenous Australians.

I have written about my standpoint elsewhere (Singh, 1994 , 1997a, 1997b). One of the few women of colour in Australia awarded a PhD in education 30 years ago, my academic writing focuses on how discourses and practices of patriarchy and racisms work to construct my body as ‘other’, as not belonging in this country. However, in all my writing about institutional racisms and my embodied racialized experiences, I never wrote about my own entangled history in the formation of white settler colonialisms. It is through a true project of solidarity with my colleague, Debbie Bargallie, an Indigenous Australian critical race scholar, that I have been given the opportunity to engage, discuss, think and act with critical Indigenous scholarship.

Taunts as a primary school student, ‘Go home curry- muncher’, constructed a sense of non- belonging, making me feel like an outsider in the only place I had known as home. As a primary school teacher, taunts such as, ‘Ooh Ms Blackie, we have a Black teacher’ from ‘innocent’ school children positioned me as other, less than. After gaining employment in the supposedly progressive higher education sector, I shared the stage as other, as a woman of colour, alongside white women speaking out about patriarchy and its numerous oppressions. White women first positioned me as a racialized subject and then silenced me when I spoke out about their racialized practices (Singh, 1997a), othering both my body and my speech.