New racism, meritocracy and individualism: constraining affirmative action in education

Abstract

This article presents a discursive analysis of student talk on disadvantage and affirmative action from two focus group discussions on ‘race’ relations in Australia. Our analysis builds upon previous research in the discursive tradition on affirmative action and demonstrates how participants draw on resources, which construct affirmative action as largely problematic. Liberal principles such as individualism, merit, and egalitarianism were recurrently drawn upon to justify, argue and legitimate opposition to affirmative action. Speakers managed their opposition to affirmative action while presenting as fair, principled and lacking in prejudice. One argument, which was commonly deployed, constructed affirmative action as undermining meritocratic principles and ideals. This meritocratic discourse has a self-sufficient, taken-for-granted quality which participants assumed to be a moral and normative standard that needed to be protected and upheld. This argument was also associated with a closely related one that ‘everyone should be treated equally or the same’, regardless of social background. Although our analysis emphasizes the deployment of discursive resources that function primarily to uphold the ideals of meritocracy, individualism and equality, participants did produce talk that on occasion challenged the ideology of individual achievement and acknowledged the existence of Aboriginal disadvantage. We discuss how these contradictions are reflective of the competing values of egalitarianism and individualism in western liberal democracies like Australia and how the language of the ‘new racism’ is framed by such ideological dilemmas and ambivalence.

A Multicultural Education Praxis: Integrating Past and Present, Living Theories, and Practice

“…In one example, I asked the students to write about something they achieved through hard work. We then analyzed these narratives in relation to the American Dream, or how people can succeed if they put in hard work, and neoliberalism, or the systemic emphasis on objectivity, meritocracy, and individualism (Augoustinos, Tuffin, & Every, 2005;Tuck, 2013). We talked about how these discourses centered on the individual, luck, and meritocracy, and thereby erased structural access to privilege, the importance of family, and the impact of others' help.…”

Discursive Approaches to Race and Racism

“…Research based on focus group data has thus been able to add a more strongly interactional focus to the examination of themes similar to those discussed above, including new racisms and the denial of racism (see, e.g., Augoustinos, Tuffin, & Every, 2005;Goodman & Burke, 2010). Particularly noteworthy in this regard are Condor's (2006) analysis of how participants interactionally collaborate in the production of subtly racist talk, and the extension of previous analyses of denials of racism to consider not just how denials can be produced by a speaker on his/her own behalf, but also how other speakers may deny racism on behalf of others, and may collaboratively suppress potentially racist utterances (Condor, Figgou, Abell, Gibson, & Stevenson, 2006).…”

“…Even when focus group discussions are structured in such a way as to minimize the involvement of the researcher and facilitate the production of talk that is as naturalistic as possible, and although in some cases the participants rather than the researcher "spontaneously" introduce race or ethnicity as topics of discussion (Verkuyten, De Jong, & Masson, 1995, p. 256), the abovementioned practices for sampling and recruitment of participants, the role of the researcher in (even minimally) facilitating the discussion, and the participants' overall awareness that their interactions are being produced for the researcher's benefit mean that the data cannot strictly be considered "naturalistic" (Augoustinos, et al, 2005).…”

Helping the Marginalised or Supporting the Elite? Affirmative Action as a Tool for Increasing Access to Higher Education for Ethnic Roma

“…The claims of the first type argue that affirmative action is inherently unjust because it goes against fundamental liberal principles, such as individualism, meritocracy, 'colour blindness', and equality, as it violates the notion of open and fair individual competition. The critics claim that affirmative action undermines these principles because by establishing privileges based on group membership, it explicitly favours group rights to individual rights, and is therefore inherently immoral (Augoustinos et al, 2005;Sterba, 2009, p. 57). The critics also claim that affirmative action discourages individual motivation, as knowing that there would be a preferential treatment for a particular group harms motivation of both members of that group and of the non-members; hence, affirmative action may lead to lower standards of performance and eventually to institutional inefficiency (Loury, 1997;Sowell, 2004, p. 189).…”