The study ““It’s Trauma on a Deadline”: Change, Continuity and Harm After the “Racial Reckoning.”” by Archie Thomas from University of Sydney and David Nolan from University of Canberra argues that the increased demands for racial and media justice that have led Australian media institutions to employ Indigenous journalists may place these journalists at risk.
The “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd has also impacted media institutions, as institutional reproduction of racial inequality and violence have been publicly criticized. Racism in newsrooms and the inability to highlight Indigenous voices have fallen under scrutiny.
In Australia, the case of Floyd drew parallels between it and 2015 killing of Dungatti man David Dungay Jr from First Nations people, also restrained and under custody, and commenting “I can’t breathe”.
A common response to these criticisms and issues has been to publicly hire Indigenous journalists to the newsrooms. However, the authors argue that this practice, rather than solving issues, may be reproducing and exacerbating the problems of diversity they seek to address.
The study consisted of 11 in-depth interviews with Indigenous journalists on the East Coast of Australia between 2022 and 2023. The authors apply a non-traditional approach here and position the interviewees as theorists and knowledge holders, hence making the methodology Indigenous. The authors themselves identified as settlers, not Indigenous.
The interviewees discussed their role as “native informants” who were expected to continuously provide cultural advice to ignorant co-workers, and further, they were devalued by the assumption that such a task would be an easy ride. Further, they had encountered various microaggressions and microdevaluations.
On the other hand, the non-native employees were often anxious to do the right thing, but in this, they often placed a cultural load on the Indigenous workers to constantly educate them or check their work, but such a task was not always compensated for and was simply expected of the Indigenous workers as sort of an extra.
The Indigenous journalists felt the burden of intergenerational trauma, and one interviewee expressed the encountering of potentially traumatizing subjects at work as “trauma on a deadline”. Not only that, they frequently became targets of racial abuse online by simply being visible in their roles as journalists.
The interviewees also expressed frustration of what they perceived as the privileging of white perspectives – such as when they were not deemed credible as commentators on Indigenous issues because they were ‘tied up with it’. The Indigenous journalists often faced defensiveness when trying to bring up racism in news work.
In conclusion, the authors state that mere hiring of Indigenous workers is not enough to address racial inequalities but may instead represent ‘mere tokenism’ and reproduce racialised microaggressions and the devaluation of Indigenous expertise.
However, they also pointed out that they do not entirely discount the potential of diversity initiatives to make positive contributions, but suggest that the hired Indigenous journalists should not be tasked with the making of change without others also showing initiative and the institution focusing on the problem of racism.
The article ““It’s Trauma on a Deadline”: Change, Continuity and Harm After the “Racial Reckoning.”” by Archie Thomas and David Nolan is in Digital Journalism. (open access).
Picture: Untitled by Priscilla Du Preez.
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