There is, in the global north, a "care crisis," a shortfall in the capacity to provide care for an aging population. Migrant care workers have been positioned as a solution to this crisis, but this positioning sits in tension with research highlighting the widespread racism that questions or denies the skills and commitment of migrant care workers. This study draws on the experiences of 30 migrant African women working in the Australian aged care sector to interrogate the implications of this tension. The authors describe how everyday racism perpetrated by clients and colleagues denied the possibility that migrant African women carers were able or welcome to undertake "good caring." Applying Tronto's conceptualization of caring as relational, the authors argue that everyday racism symbolically denies African migrant women's participation in key phases of the caring process: "caring about," "caregiving," and "care-receiving." Everyday racism thus rejects migrant African women's care work at the individual level and reinforces care as a set of practices and dispositions that are unavailable to them.

Existing commentary rarely systematically acknowledges racism in the Australian aged care field. This article begins to address this gap through a detailed focus on the experiences of 30 African migrant women workers, one of the fastest growing groups employed in aged care across Australia. Drawing on data generated through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, we argue that racist micro-aggressions, specifically micro-insults and micro-assaults, were a commonplace experience for this group of workers. Micro-insults and micro-assaults were perpetrated interpersonally, and also drew upon and reinforced colonial discourses about backwardness, inferiority and Otherness. We conclude that for these carers, micro-aggressions have a two-fold effect: they express everyday racism in interaction, and they position African migrant carers as unwelcome and unable to care for and care about clients.