Aboriginal Role Models
So-called black role models prop up the myth of equality
A critical examination of the way Aboriginal role models are presented in the media indicates that the aim is not inspiration, but assimilation.
When Cathy Freeman enchanted the world at the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, she became an uber-role model for young Indigenous people. Like so many before her, Cathy’s image was appropriated as a readily digestible Aboriginal image for Anglo Australia, an ideal of Aboriginality that was palatable as a template for colonial constructs of new millennium Indigenousness.
I wonder how many people noticed that 95% of her body had been smothered in white lycra? I wonder how many people have noticed that these “black role models” are always defined in terms of their mainstream success as individuals, and never in terms of success in their own communities and cultural domains?
This has the effect of shifting the aspirations of young Indigenous people away from their communities and into the mainstream, away from family/community success and towards personal power. Ongoing Aboriginal social fragmentation is the name of the game here. “Aspirations” has become something of a buzzword in government with regard to Indigenous affairs and especially education. But it’s hard to sell aspiration and inspiration to people struggling with day-to-day respiration.
A select group of Aboriginal role models is used in posters and TV advertisements, mostly selling messages from government about unemployment, domestic violence, drug abuse, etc. The victim-blaming message here is that these “successes” were able to make individual choices to escape these social plagues – so why can’t the rest of us? The target audience here is Anglo Australia as well - the message being, "Relax! It's not your fault!"
Stan Grant, the Wiradjuri newsreader, is a rare Aboriginal role model - rare in that he has been publicly open and honest about the assimilatory agenda behind his Indigenous icon status. In his book “The Tears Of Strangers”, he candidly states,
“I made the rounds of Aboriginal organisations, schools and prisons as living proof that we can make it in the white world. My example, though, was in the futility of community life and the salvation of selfish individualism. I could have been a poster boy for assimilation, and that other blacks lauded me for it only revealed their barely-hidden aspirations. The price of success for somebody who likes to call himself an Aborigine is conformity.”
