Master narratives as “colonial propaganda” and counternarratives as “refusal”: How African Australians reimagine racial dignity in Australia

Abstract

This paper utilizes the concept of “colonial master narratives” to examine how racial propaganda is mobilized in the Australian imaginary to “flatten” the stories of Blac/k people and how African Australians deploy counternarratives to reject these racialized projections. Specifically, we examine how master narratives, as a form of colonial propaganda, were challenged and subverted by participants' refusal to be spoken for and about through myths and falsehoods, presented as truisms about who black people are (or are not). In so doing, we analyse how African Australians encounter, negotiate, and actively refuse the colonial ‘master’ narratives that are institutionalized across Australian politics, policy settings, media representations, and everyday social hierarchies. Forty‐two African Australians were recruited across Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales to share their experiences of belonging, Africanness, and racial dignity. The findings demonstrate that, despite ongoing stereotyping, profiling, and racial labelling, African Australians deploy practices of refusal through dignity‐affirming counternarratives that actively seek to disrupt deficit‐oriented framings of Blackness and Africanness. We argue that such counternarratives are necessary resistances to racial harm and are generative political acts that reimagine life in Australia as something that can be experienced agentically, beyond the racial myths and falsehoods instrumentalized by colonial logics. Counternarratives are, therefore, a way of “refusing indignity” and making space for stories of love, beauty, and joy.

Highlights

• Colonial master narratives function to problematize Blac/k people in Australia.

• Counternarratives are used by Black African Australians to retain dignity and joy.

• Australia's meta‐narratives are linked to white supremacy and white nationalism.

INTRODUCTION

African Australians are a growing and diverse community within Australia (Udah, 2023). However, their presence here has elicited a range of responses and reactions, including racial moral panics and deployment of anti‐Black narratives that often cast African people and cultures as too foreign and therefore fundamentally incompatible with what it means to be a “real Aussie” (Hutchinson, 2021; Ndhlovu, 2013). The dominant settler master narrative of what constitutes Australianness is circulated and legitimised through political discourse and mass media, in a way that functions to police the boundaries of belonging (Gatwiri & Anderson, 2020). Non‐white Australians often straddle the ever‐incomplete puzzle of what it means to 'belong here', especially when strong anti‐immigrant sentiments are cited to signal the failures of multiculturalism. Anti‐African views, in particular, as Windle (2008, p. 563) explains, draw on the logics of antiblackness and “on wider colonial narratives about “primitive Africa,” on the perennial discourse of dangerous youth, and even on fears about American cultural imperialism (in the form of black “gang culture”)". A recent report by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (UN WGEPAD) found that Black Africans in Australia were often blamed for having “integration problems”, seen as “threats” to the Australian way of life, and live under a “siege of racism" (OHCHR, 2022). Afrodiasporic scholars in Australia (see, e.g., Gatwiri & Anderson, 2020, 2022; Majavu, 2020; Mapedzahama & Kwansah‐Aidoo, 2017; Ndhlovu, 2013, 2016; Udah & Singh, 2019; Uptin, 2021) have argued that their experiences are underpinned by an array of anti‐Black racism which forms the blueprint of Australian history.

In Australia, coloniality creates racial hierarchies that are organized through “strong pro‐white sub‐frame and a strong anti‐black sub‐frame” (Lane et al., 2020, 793). Despite being one of the most multilingual and multicultural countries in the world (Uptin, 2021), racial moral panics, fear‐mongering and anti‐immigration discourses police the nation in such a way that it is “not blank and open for anybody to occupy” (Puwar, 2004, p. 8). Ongoing settler‐colonial logics create (im)possible monoracial myths that utilise “border control” and “national security” rhetorics where the very terms of “successful integration” are defined by a highly controlled and surveilled assimilation process into the norms, aesthetics, and cultural practices of whiteness (Kim et al., 2025; Gatwiri & Moran, 2023). These logics are paradoxical in that, on the one hand, they demand that Black Africans sever their physical, emotional, cultural, political, and spiritual selves, or symbolically “peel off [their] Black skin” (Uptin, 2021, p. 85), as a way to approximate whiteness to achieve ‘true’ belonging. On the other hand, this demand is rendered structurally impossible, as Black Africans are rarely ever recognized as having succeeded in assimilating, regardless of the extent of compliance, adaptation, or self‐erasure they undertake. Thus, a central question that emerges here concerns itself with how Black Africans in Australia survive, navigate, and resist tropes that seek to diminish their personhood through the systematic poking, prodding and punishing of their blackness. Specifically, we ask how such resistance is enacted through counternarratives, and what practices of dignity‐making and re‐making to protect oneself become possible. Our analysis shows that, rather than internalizing deficit racialised constructions imposed upon them, participants enacted what we conceptualized as Afro‐Black counter‐storytelling, a process through which they generated alternative interpretive frameworks and forms of “counter‐institutional knowledge” that challenged and unsettled dominant racial logics (Ahmed, 2021, p. 22).

In this paper, we argue that colonial master‐narratives operate as forms of anti‐black propaganda that mobilise the dominant white ethno‐cultural majority to sustain colonial value systems where whiteness is valorised and imagined as the normative cultural and moral ideal. These narratives serve an ideological purpose, which is to preserve the 'natural‐ness' of whiteness by framing it as the default setting through which all other racialised populations are conferred social worth and political legitimacy (McPherson, 2010). In this sense, colonial propaganda operates as a mechanism to secure white dominance over racialised “Others” through the erosion of and the withholding of racial dignity, enacted through practices of:

“systematic economic marginalization; political disenfranchisement; ideological dehumanization; eugenic population control policies; family separation; structural, interpersonal, and state violence; or the denial of civil rights, civil liberties, and protections of law with regard to physical safety and bodily autonomy” (Rondini, 2018, p. 62).

CRITICAL RACE PERSPECTIVES ON NARRATIVE PRODUCTION: WHAT CAN BE SAID, REMEMBERED, OR IMAGINED?

To ground our theoretical position, we draw on Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine how racism is embedded within law, language, culture, and institutional arrangements, and how it is structurally reproduced through the routine operations of social, political, and legal systems (Bell, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2000; Ladson‐Billings & Tate, 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1995). In the Australian context, CRT extends understandings of how white colonial settler formations continue to organise racial scripts, shape social relations, and consolidate white power through what Moreton‐Robinson (2015, p. xii) theorises as “possessive logics” of whiteness.

Considering Stratton's (2011, p. 5) argument that race is the “foundational form of discrimination,” CRT draws attention to how possessive logics in Australia produce narratives of nationhood and boundary‐making where the cost of belonging is acquiescing to demands of hyper‐surveillance, over‐policing, and racialized governance in ways that disproportionately affect Blac/k communities (Watego, 2017). As argued elsewhere, narratives of nationhood shape the interpretive frames through which Black bodies are read, managed, and regulated, “to determine their subjective relation to the white construct and imagination of Australianness” (Gatwiri & James, 2024, p. 3). In this way, CRT strengthens analysis of how anti‐Blackness, settler colonialism, and national identity are mutually constituted through narratives that Haggis (2004, p. 45) argues are “never quite post‐colonial.”

CRT provides a framework for understanding how colonial master‐narratives activate racial tropes that constrain the recognition of Blac/k people's right to life, personhood, and dignity. Such narratives are historically anchored in, and continue to be sustained through, the oppression of First Nations peoples, who remain in the Australian context, the primary targets of settler‐colonial governance and violence (Gatwiri & Townsend‐Cross, 2025). From the onset, the racist terra nullius master narrative falsely constructed Australia as a land belonging to “no people” (Watego, 2017). This juridical fiction facilitated the dispossession, genocide and an institutionalised racial order in which Indigenous peoples were and continue to be essentialised through colonial categories of deficiency and deviance (Ghattas, 2023, p. 3).

Colonial propaganda continues to obscure the material and political realities of Australian colonialism by mobilising state‐sanctioned narratives of “peaceful settlement” to sanitise history while side‐stepping the truth‐telling about the violence of invasion, dispossession, and genocide (Carlson, 2024). Such revisionist accounts have been central to the colonial project and have been systematically maintained since the nineteenth century through mass media and other powerful social and cultural institutions, including school curricula, governmental rhetoric, and national myth‐making (Rappaport, 2000, p. 4). In sustaining these propagandist narratives, language itself has become a site of struggle, where terms such as “invasion” and “genocide” are policed, contested, or politicised in ways that minimise the impact of settler‐colonial violence (Grewcock, 2018, p. 222). Through these linguistic and symbolic practices, coloniality is able to regulate what can be said, remembered, and imagined about Australia's past and present.

Master‐narratives that seek to rewrite Australia's colonial history often mobilise colour‐blind discourses and assertions “that racism does not really exist” or that "we live in a post racial world" (kamaloni, 2019) yet it is race that has been foundational to the construction of a white Anglo‐Australian national identity. As the work of Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton‐Robinson (2015, 2021) demonstrates, race domination thinking was key to the legitimisation of British invasion and occupation, and to the subsequent consolidation of settler empire‐making. The ongoing denial of this racist history works to sustain contemporary white possessive logics and their attendant claims to rightful ownership, authority, and belonging on Blak lands and territories. Through the dispossession of Blak Indigenous peoples and their positioning as “conceptual primitives,” British colonial actors were able to naturalise their own occupation as civil, lawful, and inevitable through,

classification, order, value and hierarchy; differentiation and identity, discrimination and identification; exclusion, domination, subjection and subjugation…entitlement and restriction, as well as possession (Moreton‐Robinson, 2021, p. 4).

Colonial master‐narratives that privilege a British‐derived social order within the nation continue to shape ideals of “Australian‐ness” (Hage, 2002). Australian historians have described these settler narratives as the “myths of nation‐building,” through which the British federal colony sought to secure a “white cultural destiny” by "making real" national narratives that legitimised the emergence of a white “native” culture aligned with British ideals of empire and governance (Hearn, 2007, p. 104). Over time, these narratives have become embedded within the Australian cultural and social imaginary through language, visual iconography, cinematography, literary texts, folklore, moral codes, symbolisms and ritual practices, ultimately crystallizing into what is now understood as “Australian‑ness” (Stratton, 2011, p. 1). As Hutchinson (2021) observes, “Australian values” continue to circulate within contemporary political and cultural debates, particularly in far‐right nationalist discourse, where they are mobilised to legitimise exclusionary claims to belonging and racial boundaries. Put differently, certain “Australian values” have been weaponized to advocate for a white nationalist, mono‐cultural state. Alongside mainstream media, social media is utilised to manufacture viral stories and “fake news” (Qureshi, 2022, p. 216) that spread misinformation and disinformation about the 'problem' with migrants in Australia while also presenting white nationalists as "people who say it like it is", “heroes” or “saviours” of the “lucky country”. All the while, people who are not white are re‐cast as “perpetual outsiders,” “enemies,” or potential security threats to the Australian way of life (Majavu, 2020). Delgado (1993, p. 666) similarly argues that this is how majoritarian groups exercise narrative power by deploying stories that reflect their privilege simply as “how things are,” or as “the truth.” Majoritarian groups purposefully circulate distorted, fictitious, or selectively curated representations of racialized groups in ways that amplify fear, as a way to appeal to individuals' racist beliefs that legitimize narratives of white superiority (See also, Smith & Iner, 2021; DiAngelo, 2021).

BEYOND COLONIAL PROPAGANDA: REFUSAL & DIGNITY‐MAKING COUNTERNARRATIVES

The racial dignity theory builds on CRT's critique of structural racial hierarchies by foregrounding the everyday manifestations of worthiness, humanity, relational agency, and self‐sovereignty towards Blac/k people and people of colour. Rather than centring analysis solely on Black pain, the suffering black body, or what Gatwiri and Mapedzahama (2022) refer to as "trauma porn," the framing of racial dignity reorients the analytic focus toward the ways in which Black people affirm the truism that they have immutable, “inherent, [and] incalculable worth” (Lloyd, 2018, p. 74). One way in which dignity is reaffirmed is through the use of counternarratives, which are utilised by many marginalised groups to resist the distortions, erasures, and dehumanising scripts produced by oppressive structures under which they live. Counternarratives are epistemic interventions that refuse deficit framings and negative social formations used to routinely misrecognise and strip people of their dignity. As Rodríguez (2019, p. 6) suggests, “refusal is a way of unmasking seemingly benevolent relations” and, in this sense, counternarratives are acts of dissent through which African‐Australians contest the psychic, affective, and structural wounds of racism through the creation and circulation of alternative stories that centre Afrodiasporic experiences of expertise, creativity, love, worthiness and joy.

Counter‐narratives are situated here as critical sites of analysis because, despite a robust body of work on the structural and normalized dimensions of racism, less attention has been devoted to how African Australians engage in processes of contestation and refusal within a social landscape dominated by colonial legacies of racial violence. The political and cultural work involved in these acts of self‐definition and resistance is often overlooked due to the over‐focus on racial suffering and racism. In particular, the processes through which Afro‐Black agency, resistance, and self‐definition are articulated, negotiated, and sustained remain comparatively under‐theorised. In this paper, we seek to shift the focus away from the suffering body alone to the structural, institutional, and policy arrangements that underpin what Cahill and Pain (2019, p. 1061) theorise as slow violence.

We argue that one of the major possibilities of racial dignity‐making counternarratives is its deployment as a naming practice. As Hardy (2013) explains;

“One of the most debilitating aspects of racial oppression is that this is a nameless condition, difficult to describe, quantify, or codify. Lacking a common language to convey what is happening deepens the self‐doubt/self‐denigration cycle” (p. 28).

Dignity‐making counternarratives offer the ability to name some of the unnameable, multiple, overlapping and “shapeshifting” (Okello et al., 2020, p. 422) movements, logics, myths, experiences, realities and wounds of anti‐Blackness which are experienced as dehumanization, devaluation, humiliation, disrespect, misrecognition, racial gaslighting/invalidation, minority burden, hyper(in)visibility and choicelessness (Gatwiri, 2025). Positioned against the persistent micro‐ and macro‐level racisms embedded within media representations and everyday social interactions, the counternarratives employed by Black African Australians in this study demonstrated how they “refused, did not consent to, and still refused to be folded into a larger encompassing colonizing and settler colonial narratives” (Simpson, 2017, p. 18). Through acts of refusal and re‐humanisation, these counternarratives became a way of resisting compliance with what Rodríguez (2019, p. 6) describes as the “imposed scripts of being and belonging.” For example, social movements and campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter, #AboriginalLivesMatter, #StopDeathsInCustody, #AfricanNotGang, and #HandsOffAfricanYouth made visible counternarratives led by Blak Indigenous and Black African Australians who actively pushed back against dehumanising representations of Bla/k people as “out‐of‐control criminals” (Puot, 2025, p. 1105).

As Mignolo (2009, p. 161) argues, counternarratives are forms of “epistemic disobedience” that interrupt the authority of Western universalism. Such interuptions are central to the broader decolonial project of delinking from Eurocentric demands for assimilation and compliance. In this sense, racially dignifying counternarratives align with what Tuck and Yang (2018, p. 8) describe as the refusal to participate in “projects which require us to prove humanity or worth” or “appeal to the people who abuse us.” In refusing to “die, to lose the truth and to roll over” (Simpson, 2017, p. 25), counter‑storytelling is activated as a form of dignified disobedience that exposes the underlying white supremacist systems and ideologies that work to criminalize, problematize, and intensify anti‑Black African sentiment in Australia (Moran, 2024). From an Afrocentric perspective, counternarratives also compel us to interrogate fundamental power questions about “who gets to speak and whose stories are told” (Uptin, 2021, p. 76), and in answering those questions, perharps there is a restoring of narrative authority and voice to those most wounded by the guttural punches of racial trauma.

METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH PROCESS

This paper is part of a larger study funded by the Australian Research Council under the DECRA scheme and was approved by the Australian University Human Research Ethics Committee (project code 2023/063). The project utilized the principles of Afrocentric storytelling to investigate the experiences of racial dignity and belonging among Black Africans in Australia from an Afrodiasporic perspective. The stories shared by African Australians are explored through a framework of racial dignity, where principles of agency and freedom to self‐determine and self‐express create exemplary webs of counternarratives that foster refusal to dehumanization.

Storytelling

For a long time, the stories of African people have been told by others. Their narratives, essence, cultures, and ways of life have been shaped by those who had the structural power to tell those stories, clearly exemplifying what Achebe (1994) wrote: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (n.p). Gatwiri and James (2024) have argued that this African proverb demonstrates “how power functions through story and invites us to rethink and re‐imagine who tells the story and who the passive object of the story is” (p. 139). Storytelling approaches in Afrocentric research align with African ontological and epistemological ways of knowing and engaging with the world (Tuwe, 2016). As a methodology, it sits in contrast to approaches of interviewing, where the researcher is seen to be an “information gatherer,” never a “sharer,” careful not to reveal aspects of themselves that might “give away” any signs of connection and identification, which could be interpreted as lack of "objectivity".

As an approach, storytelling helped us to decenter and resist Eurocentric and Western approaches to meaning‐making, and instead tapped into the intricate tapestry of culturally informed knowledge‐sharing practices woven within the way Africans share stories. As such, stories were not seen as “separate from theory… [but as] real and legitimate sources of data and ways of being” (Brayboy, 2005, p. 430). Stories were an embodiment of living expertise and an opportunity for Africans in Australia to share “their stories, their way.” By doing so, participants who reported feeling likely to be targeted by racist and colonial narratives were involved in the re/de/construction of these narratives and were able to utilize “storytelling and counter storytelling” as analytic tools for claiming and reclaiming racial dignity.

Positionality

A positionality statement carries inherent contradictions for us. While it offers a means to name the standpoint from which we speak and write, emerging scholarship now highlights how the practice itself can be problematic, especially for minoritized scholars who may “refuse to conform to Eurocentric epistemic traditions that render difference as deficiency” (Opare, 2025, p. 1). For us and other minoritized scholars, the expectation of personal disclosure and exposure can produce additional forms of vulnerability, including heightened susceptibility to reviewer scrutiny and bias, concerns which “might be misunderstood or even dismissed by critical scholars” (Gani & Khan, 2024, p. 2). As Savolainen et al. (2023, p.1331) contend, “by asking scholars to disclose information about themselves, positionality statements undermine the very norms and practices that safeguard the impartiality of research.” Likewise, Gani and Khan (2024, p. 2) argue that positionality statements “(even if well‐intentioned), can be an extractive methodology with colonial epistemic origins,” reinscribing the very logics they purport to unsettle. These critiques highlight the tensions we struggle with, that is, the importance of articulating our standpoint and challenging claims to neutrality, while also resisting institutionalized practices that may inadvertently reproduce the epistemic harms and asymmetries that we already encounter in academia.

In saying that, we understand the importance of locating ourselves. We are Afro‐Black and Pan‐Asian scholars working within the Australian academy. The Australian academic landscape is one that is largely white and is underpinned by colonial‑settler logics, thus influencing whose and which knowledge is legitimized, whose and which voices are marginalized, and whose and which lived experiences are rendered marginal to knowledge production. Our scholarly practice is anchored in a critical race praxis that interrogates and disrupts dominant accounts of race, whiteness, and the mechanisms through which racial hierarchy is reproduced, including everyday practices of racial misrecognition, epistemic erasure, and affective bordering (see, e.g., Gatwiri & Kim, 2026). Our racial standpoints are fundamental to how we engage in research, and our lived experiences of racialization have sharpened our awareness of the structural and interpersonal dynamics of race, and they inform the methodological, ethical, and political commitments embedded in our work. We draw mostly from Black, Indigenous, and global majority epistemologies and ontologies as our own “refusal practice” and to legitimize knowledge traditions that contest the colonial architecture of the academy. We also refuse the expectation of objectivity and neutrality that are often praised in Eurocentric frameworks as the hallmarks of good research. Instead, we affirm that knowledge is produced from particular locations, social and historical positions, and that our own scholarship is intentionally aligned with broader struggles for racial justice, dignity, and humanization in Australia and globally.

Data collection

Forty‐two African storytellers were recruited to share their stories of belonging, Africanness, and racial dignity across five Australian states: Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales. The recruitment was primarily through advertisements on social media platforms, notably LinkedIn and Instagram. Additionally, digital posters were disseminated within African communities via messaging applications such as WhatsApp. The advertisements were met with considerable enthusiasm, leading to a diverse pool of participants. The selection was conducted to encapsulate a broad spectrum of experiences, considering various demographic factors such as age, gender, geographical location, and migration status. Storytelling sessions (interviews) were designed to be flexible, catering to the participants' preferences for in‐person meetings or virtual interactions via Zoom or Teams. The interviews were conducted by author 1, who invited participants to share their stories of both racial dignity and indignity. Each interview spanned a duration of roughly 90–120 min. Storytelling sessions were done alongside relation‐ and trust‐building activities such as having a coffee break or a meal together, either in person or virtually, to foster a sense of connection. All of the interviews were transcribed using a professional transcription service, which de‐identified the participant data. Pseudonyms were also applied to protect the identities of all the participants.

Data analysis

The Afrocentric perspective utilized in the study promoted a more integrated and holistic comprehension of the context, recognizing the intrinsic value and impact of societal constructs in shaping personal narratives, which aided grounded constructivist analysis that visualized the themes and categories. To do this, two researchers coded the extensive data collected through the array of stories over a period of 6 months. The coding process involved “recognizing (seeing) an important moment and encoding it (seeing it as something) prior to a process of interpretation” (Fereday & Muir‐Cochrane, 2006, p. 83).

The researchers interpreted the data through a critical racial dignity lens, which theorized how the participants' sense of worth was eroded or affirmed using the principles of the Racial Dignity Framework namely: humanization, care, choice, agency, respect, recognition, and autonomy. Their accounts illustrate how colonial master narratives embedded in politics, policy, media, and social hierarchies were identified, refused, and countered in efforts to protect and affirm racial dignity. In this context, and amid the pressures of white assimilationist narratives, these counternarratives were interpreted as acts of reclaiming racial dignity.

FINDINGS AND THEME PRESENTATION

Grounding this study in racial dignity allowed us to analyze the everyday practices through which Black Africans in Australia assert agency through refusal as a reclamation of dignity. A clear pattern emerged in which participants first encountered and, at times, internalized dominant colonial narratives. This was followed by a process of refusal and the construction of counternarratives, often triggered by the psychological exhaustion that accompanies prolonged exposure to these racialized ideologies. The counternarratives presented in the following section make visible the everyday experiences of Black African Australians across four interconnected practices: (i) noticing colonial master narratives and propaganda, (ii) refusing these narratives, (iii) countering them through alternative meaning‐making, and (iv) reimagining more liberating and dignifying narratives.

THEME 1: NOTICING COLONIAL MASTER NARRATIVES AND PROPAGANDA

This theme explores the spatial and contextual conditions through which participants identified the overt and covert operations of colonial propaganda, and the subtle discursive encounters that seemed to delegitimise and inferiorize Black African identity. These encounters were experienced as eroding safety, security, peace, and respect, as well as diminishing personal, cultural, and professional recognition. Participants identified media institutions as key sites where “white propaganda” was produced‐particularly in news reports that normalised racial profiling and legitimised police violence. As Maya said,

Racism is everywhere… Deaths in custody, a white policemen brutalising a Black man to death. There's just this feeling that they can do anything to us (Maya)

Participants described anti‐Black violence in the media as central to the operationalisation of colonial propaganda. Many reflected how Blackness and Africanness were constantly associated with danger, violence, insecurity or threat (Majavu, 2020). This master narrative frames Black Africans as an unruly people that need to be "controlled" through aggressive policing, surveillance, scrutiny, securitization, punitive incarceration, and, in some cases, lethal force. Many described how racialized dog‐whistles were used to invoke fear among white people by 'warning' them that they were in imminent danger of “African gangs.” Intensified fear‐mongering, therefore, became the pretext through which the state could authorize the systematic curtailing of rights, freedoms and dignity of Blac/k people and communities. In this way, media reports about violence and, at the same time, participates in the racial ordering that legitimizes it. As one participant, Zane, noted, challenging deeply entrenched propagandist ideologies is often difficult because they are not grounded in evidence but in “people's deep‐seated fears”;

It's not us, but the narrative easily makes people feel like there's a bigger threat than there is… [because] of their fears of what's foreign and Black (Zane)

For Izzy, the desire to challenge stereotypes that cast Black people as “criminals,” “terrorists,” or “gang members” (Kwansah‐Aidoo & Mapedzahama, 2018) is what initially motivated her to share her refugee story publicly. She later recognised, however, that her experience was being weaponized by the mainstream media in ways that began “squeezing the life out of [her]”

I remember I was so excited [but] they keep pushing me into these stories… I always had to think about myself through the lens of the suffering and how grateful I am to be in Australia. The story got exhausted at that point. I wanted to tell a different story but there were no opportunities for me to do so (Izzy)

Even ostensibly “positive” opportunities to share one's story can be harmful when they are mobilised to reproduce and amplify Western benevolence, superiority, and saviourism. As Izzy reflected, the extraction of the "make‐us‐feel‐good for rescuing you" stories from people with refugee backgrounds can be a commodification of their trauma for consumption (Gatwiri & Mapedzahama, 2022). As hooks (1990, p. 343) observes, the trope of “no need to hear your voice, only tell me about your pain” aligns with what Essed (2020) calls entitlement racism, that is, the belief that white people or institutions are entitled to stories they want and need to hear from Black people. Participants also described adopting strict control over which stories they could share publicly due to fear of racial vilification. Some stated that stories by and from African migrants were mostly tolerated only insofar as they affirmed the moral, cultural, or political superiority of white people, or reinforced expectations of the “exceptional” model minority who works, endures, and assimilates quietly (Kim et al., 2025). Speaking of the burden of minoritization, Rasha adds,

Your mind never switches off. You're just constantly paying attention to what's going on around you. You've gotta make sure that you're smarter, more articulate, and more intelligent. You're more well‐behaved than everybody. You can't leave room for mistakes (Rasha)

However, for Zane, professional exceptionalism offered no protection from racism. Despite being an excellent doctor, his supervisors and colleagues could not look past the fact that “he was from Africa.” Zane recalled a supervisor suggesting that he might have “brought a disease from Africa and given it to the patient.” Such remarks reproduce what, one of the participants, Sherry described as a harmful caricature “that denies the humanness of the person sitting in front of you.”

THEME 2: REFUSING COLONIAL MASTER NARRATIVES/PROPAGANDA

Participants described a shift in their knowledge and understanding of colonial propaganda when they started to “know too much to continue to pretend otherwise” (Izzy). This realization is what Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 811) describe as recognising “the code beneath the code.” Incidents participants once perceived as isolated or innocuous were re‐interpreted through a critical racial lens. For example, several participants reflected on subtle forms of indoctrination that rewarded internalisation of anti‐Black sentiment, the emulation of white norms, or compliance with institutional practices that reproduced racialized master narratives. While many participants stated that they had an underlying sense that “something wasn't right,” they also gaslit themselves about the reality of racism in Australia. A participant explained that seeing the subtext or what's hidden under colonial narratives started to “eat away at [me] slowly until [I] lost myself and [my] identity” (Aisha). Ashanti also shared;

As an African, you start to feel like the corn spread out for the roosters of the world to feed on… and although there are changes, the struggle, is still there (Ashanti)

For Jill, Rasha, and Layla, challenging colonial master narratives and propaganda involved a refusal to “tolerate racism” anymore (Rasha). This refusal was essential to prevent what Hardy (2013) identifies as the devaluation of Blackness and the erosion of personal identity. Layla emphasised that while she had internalised some anti‐black rhetoric growing up in Australia, she was now healing herself because her racial “dignity cannot be erased” or taken away. Jill added that accepting anti‐black narratives about oneself is dangerous and could “kill your spirit.” For all three, refusing to absorb these messages was necessary for sustaining a healthy sense of racial self.

For Elimisha, Briony, and Hani, refusal took the form of strategic withdrawal. Initially, they were all ‘fully committed’ and engaged in their workplaces, including by way of adopting 'white' behaviours aimed at minimising exposure to racialised assumptions and stereotypes. Over time, however, they reached a threshold where withdrawal became the only viable option for self‐preservation. As Elimisha explained, “If I can't change it, I'm walking away. I don't have to take it.” Walking away was a refusal to remain complicit in environments where racist narratives continued to devalue their personhood and dignity.

It brought me joy and fulfilment because I gave myself permission to not accept it. walking away was probably one of the most empowering things (Elimisha)

For Aneni, walking away meant refusing to patrionage her local café where she experienced multiple slights including delayed and rude service anytime she took her Black friends to the cafe.

We were invisible. We would have to approach them and say, hey, I'd like to order a coffee. Then they'd be huffing and puffing. At one point, I ended up saying out loud, I am done rewarding your bad behaviour with my money (Aneni)

For Nadia and Fatima, refusal took the form of decentring whiteness and recentering Black narratives and ways of knowing, being, and doing in everyday life. For example, Nadia started learning igbo language which for her, was a way of “pushing back,” and re‐engaging in cultural continuity and self‑definition

I read a lot of books about Pan‐Africanism and also books about people from where I'm from so I could see our writers or storytellers. That's what fulfills me when I feel like I am lacking, maybe because Western society has sucked so much out of me. I always go back to where I've come from, my culture, to just recharge. (Nadia)

For Maya, refusal was more public and involved “calling out” people who were being racist;

I just call them out on their shit. I do not allow them to disrespect me and my ancestors and all the pain we've been through because of colonization. Also, I'm making sure that they never say such things around me again, then I feel like I am standing tall as a Black person (Maya)

Participants' refusal experiences highlight what Chazan and Baldwin (2021), explain is a deliberate practice of self‐care enacted through withdrawal (abstention) and direct opposition (pushback) in settings where indignity is prevalent.

THEME 3: BACKLASH AND “DOUBLE‐ DOWN” COUNTER‐PROPAGANDA

A key finding was that participants who resisted or rejected colonial master narratives often encountered backlash. The self‐loving and community‑affirming counternarratives they articulated were frequently met with counterpropaganda strategies intended to “counter the counter story” (Lindemann, 2020). These strategies often mobilized promises offering conditional access to status, protection, or institutional power through assimilation or proximity to whiteness (Bireda, 2022). Such appeals were used to destabilize refusal counternarratives by recasting resistance as irrational and socially, culturally, and politically costly.

Some participants stated that their white colleagues and friends attempted to convince them that they were “better” than other migrants. Danai, for instance, described being told she was “different to the others,” a framing that (Lindemann, 2020) calls the “make language pretty” tactic that relies on backhanded euphemisms, including “I never think of you as Black” or “you are one of the good ones,” to mask the violence and indignities levelled against “other” Black people. Danai reflected that being rewarded by whiteness for not being like “other Black people” was a form of recruitment into whiteness, where conditional inclusion was offered in exchange for complicity or “throwing other black people under the bus.” She shared;

Even if they elevate, celebrate and give me dignity whilst they can't do that for people from here [First Nations Australians], how am I supposed to reconcile that? (Danai)

Ameni, too, remarked that her first experience of Blackness in Australia was “very jarring” because of how she observed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples being treated;

People basically acted as though Aboriginal people weren't even part of society. I found it really hard… yes, I'm Black, but I'm not your Black. How is it that they get subhuman treatment and I am supposed to be okay? (Aneni)

Many participants reported the concerted efforts to recruit them into adopting anti‐Indigenous ideologies. These efforts commonly took the form of cautionary narratives circulated by colleagues and friends, including warnings about Indigenous people and unsolicited advice on avoiding particular suburbs, where there were big populations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Here, racial propaganda is utilized to undermine other Blak (Indigenous) peoples by recruiting Black Africans into the hierarchies of racial “otherness” (Udah & Singh, 2019). This form of propaganda works in several interconnected ways: first, by entrenching distinctions between supposedly “good” and “bad” forms of Blackness; second, by enabling settler colonialism to “cover its tracks” through the deflection of racial antagonism away from white supremacy (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 813) and third, by enticing Black migrants with the conditional promise of becoming “honorary whites” (Bonilla‐Silva & Embrick, 2006) when they do the “dirty work” of devaluing blackness on behalf of white supremacy.

For Cate, attempts to undermine her counternarratives emerged when she expressed her intention to participate in the #BlackLivesMatter protests. In response, her “progressive white friends” cautioned that anti‐Black violence was not a “big issue” in Australia and warned that attending a public protest could jeopardise her visa status. This counterpropaganda tactic was to neutralise political engagement by shifting the focus away from anti‐Black violence and toward fear and personal risk, exemplifying what Lindemann (2020, p. 292) refers to as “playing devil's advocate,” where threats, doubt, and imagined negative consequences are invoked to shut down dissent.

All of my white friends were saying, “Oh, you shouldn't go [to Black lives Matter protests] You're jeopardizing yourself. Your visa” (Cate)

By redirecting the discussion toward the risk of visa loss, Cate's attention was shifted away from the moral and civic engagement with the global struggle against anti‐Black violence and directed towards fear, punishment, and implications for migration status. Several participants described how such warnings generated apprehension about speaking on race, with the fear of facing white backlashor "getting yassmined" (Anderson & Gatwiri, 2020) being noted. As Ella states,

We are afraid to have this conversation. You are afraid of how are you going to be treated or be able to thrive in this society (Ella)

Lindemann (2020, p. 294) calls this the “what about me?” tactic, where expressions of concern are used to deflect attention from structural racism onto white affect, redirecting the interaction toward self‑blame, shame, fear and guilt rather than the problem in focus.

THEME 4: SUBVERTING PROPAGANDA THROUGH COUNTERNARRATIVES OF SOLIDARITY

Participants emphasised that challenging colonial propagandist narratives required solidarities with other marginalised groups, particularly Indigenous peoples. Many asserted that racial dignity in Australia is unattainable without the prioritisation of First Nations sovereignty and dignity. This counter‐narrative suggests that Indigenous people's struggles for sovereignty and self‐determination are inseparable from global liberation movements, including those across Africa and other African diasporas. Several participants understood these struggles as mutually reinforcing, positioning Indigenous justice as foundational to the protection of Black African dignity and rights within the Australian context.

Until First Nations people of Australia have full control of their land, I do not have the moral right to call Australia home. Fighting for independence for Africa is inextricably entwined with recognition for First Nations people here and the respect for their own dignity (Ashanti)

Danai described seeking dialogue with Indigenous leaders, alongside other Africans, to collectively share and make sense of their experiences of colonialism. She understood these exchanges as a bridge to collaborative action, underpinned by recognition of shared yet distinct histories of dispossession and resistance. Other participants emphasised the importance of generating new and more dignifying Afrodiasporic narratives and experiences through story, language, philosophy, and culture to counter the deficit‐oriented Eurocentric representations of Africa and Africans.

We need holistic stories beyond that deficit story about Africa. The story beyond poverty, charity, donations… Stories that teach about the philosophies that are really holding Africans together… This is how we can change the indignity that Africans are experiencing (Sherry).

Many participants highlighted the role of language reclamation, the necessity of re‐engaging with and teaching African children their mother tongues, arguing that this enabled them to learn their culture independent of the white gaze.

This is why I'm teaching my children the language, my culture, to teach them the background they come from so that they understand that it's not only the bad things that you're being told (Aneni)

Some strongly emphasised the importance of sustaining change by “not giving up because it's not about us anymore” (Trevor). For these participants, counternarratives were a necessary “resource for sensemaking in the absence of other available narratives” (Lundholt et al., 2018, p. 3). In this sense, counternarratives were both protective and generative, offering future generations a resource and an “armour” to guard themselves against colonial propaganda that may attempt to “diminish” (Ava) or “inferiorise” them. As Ava explained, “Let's put ourselves out there. Not just for ourselves… but so [the next generation] will be able to develop their armour quite early.” Another key finding was the emergence of a collective counternarrative that was used alongside individual acts of resistance. Participants described how, especially since the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, they have been able to mobilize their resistance across everyday, institutional, and political contexts as they now had solidarity with other Black people. What initially appeared as isolated acts of refusal gradually unfolded as a chorus of collective “stories” and a way of “making our voices heard” (Sarai).

DISCUSSION: RACIAL DIGNITY AS A COUNTERNARRATIVE

Racial dignity, like racism, is produced, negotiated, and contested within the routines of everyday life (Essed, 2020). Stories from Black African Australians in this study illustrate how colonial settler myths, assumptions, and racialized narratives operate as routinized mechanisms that intrude upon, erode and deny racial dignity. At the same time, participants' accounts show that dignity can be enacted and continually reclaimed through counternarratives that expose the dominant ideologies underpinning the seemingly benign yet highly racially charged social, cultural, and political exchanges (Ndhlovu, 2016).

The storytellers (participants) described two dominant metanarratives through which racial indignity is distributed. Story after story emerged on experiences of anti‐Black racism across all spheres of life, including at work, home, in school, and in everyday public spaces (Gatwiri & Moran, 2022). We heard how colonial master narratives, underpinned by anti‐Black propaganda created fear that weaponised non‐Black people against Black Africans by casting them as “criminals,” “terrorists,” or “gang members” (Kwansah‐Aidoo & Mapedzahama, 2018). We also heard how surveillance and public scrutiny rewarded and even craved for the figure of the “good African” or “ the model minority” who works, endures, and assimilates quietly in exchange for limited access to rights, opportunities, and recognition.

Participants shared multiple perspectives and strategies of how they resisted these anti‐black propaganda and narratives. They described that it was first essential to “see the code beneath the code”, recognizing the hidden racial meanings embedded in everyday interactions, dialogues, and social scripts. By noticing what lies behind these narratives, participants explained that they could begin refusing to absorb harmful messages and racial scripts that reproduce anti‐Blackness. This clarity also enabled them to identify, name, and reject narratives that attempted to diminish their Afro‐Black identity. For some, refusal involved minimizing exposure to racist environments as a form of self‐protection. For others, naming and calling out racist discourse explicitly was an expression of their self‐dignity. Many participants proudly immersed themselves in dignified Afro‐Black narratives by recentering affirming Afro‐diasporic and non‐Western ways of knowing, being, and doing into their lives. Some did this by learning or re‐learning their cultural languages, which was seen as a way to connect with themselves. Others were committed to teaching their children their mother tongues, so they could ground them in cultural knowledges that contradicted white or Western misrepresentations of Africanness. 

Participants also revealed that colonial propaganda can be entrenched through “backlash.” White backlash follows what Charles Blow (2021, n.p.) warns is the “new era of oppression.” It can be understood as a punitive response that is triggered when Blac/k people refuse or resist negative racialized constructs of themselves. Many described navigating this backlash by locating themselves within a broader collective counternarrative and grounding themselves in the global Black struggle for rights and dignity (Browdy & Milu, 2022), as well as connecting with and learning from Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self‐determination in Australia. For several participants, this solidarity was inseparable from their own histories of colonization and displacement in continental Africa.

In Australia, where the settler‑colonial project has been sustained through narratives of white national identity and a hegemonic “Australian way of life,” counternarratives play a vital role as a liberatory practice, creating space for Black humanity and personhood to be named, centred, and celebrated. For Black Africans and other negatively racialized communities, acts of counter‑storytelling and truth‑telling confront dominant tropes of “Australian values” and white fantasies of how “good” migrants should think, feel, and behave. As Lloyd shared in their seminal work on “Black Dignity” (2018, p. 5), “we cannot offer a comprehensive list of exemplars [of what dignity is]. We cannot simply rely on knowing it when we see it. What we can do is two‐fold. First, we can clearly and forcefully name what dignity is not. Second, we can point to examples of what dignity could be.”

What this research sought to do was to name what dignity is and what hinders it. Dignity is not produced through colonial propagandist narratives nor through broader global metanarratives of Western developmentalism that continue to frame Blackness and Africanness through deficit logics of poverty, charity, corruption, or violence, that legitimize dehumanization, labour exploitation, and extractivist practices across the African continent. Rather, dignity is affirmed and reclaimed through practices of humanization, self‑agency, and counternarrative production.

Counternarratives are practices of dignity because they resist the “danger of a single story” and its limitations and biases (Adichie, 2009). When a metanarrative becomes the only story told, it reduces complexity, flattens difference, reproduces stereotypes, and erases the humanity of individuals, communities, cultures, and even entire continents. Participants in this study demonstrated that colonial propaganda is but a constellation of intricate falsehoods and monoracial myths often hidden and covertly reproduced through everyday interactions. As Lindemann (2020) argues, such narratives operate as propaganda when they “reinforce unjust distributions of social power by … depicting certain groups of people‐ ‘them’‐ as inferior to ‘us’ … [through] epistemically rigged stories that masquerade as an explanation” (p. 288).

CONCLUSION

Despite sustained calls for the protection of Black people's rights and dignity through the #BlackLivesMatterAustralia and #AboriginalLivesMatter counternarrative movements, Blac/k people in Australia continue to live their lives “policed and patrolled” under ever‐present and evolving methods of white supremacy (Anderson & Gatwiri, 2020, p. 6). One such method is through the operationalization of colonial master narratives, which are dynamic formations of myths and falsehoods that continually change, adapt and shift form in response to challenges to their authority.

This paper examined how African Australians utilise counternarratives to defend their racial dignity. Specifically, we examined how colonial master narratives, as a form of propaganda, were challenged and subverted by participants' refusal to be spoken for and about through myths and falsehoods, presented as truisms about who black people are (or are not). In particular, the counternarratives refuted the labelling of the Black African migrant as dangerous and undesirable, which contributes to racial moral panics that exacerbate the likelihood of racially motivated discrimination (Majavu, 2018).

The paper highlights how participants' counternarratives centred on celebrating their knowledge, expertise, and joy against the constant barrage of racialized micro and macro assaults in everyday life. Recognizing the tactics of colonial master narratives allowed participants to have a more nuanced examination of how racism was "hidden" in plain sight. As Lindemann (2020, p. 297) suggests, we can see hope on the contemporary world stage from other forms of counternarratives, such as #metoo and #BLM, that have created a cultural shift and challenged master narratives about colonial power. In other words, “If you shoot enough counterstories at any master narrative, you will find that it is not so invincible after all.”