Sisonke Msimang (2022) | Precious White Lives

Australia is professed to be the most successful multicultural
society in the world. However, with our treatment of
multicultural communities throughout the pandemic, a selective
immigration progress and fraught ongoing Indigenous relations –
Australia continues to deliver some sharp lessons about race. Why
is it that some lives are remembered, commemorated and valued
more than others? 
 
Delivered in the wake of the Queen’s passing, author and activist
Sisonke Msimang explores the preciousness of white life in the
precarious face of Black Lives.


Sisonke Msimang is an award-winning writer whose long-form
writing on money, power and sex has appeared in the New York
Times, Foreign Affairs the Washington
Post, Lapham’s Quarterly and a range of other
publications. She is also a columnist for The Guardian
Australia. Currently a fellow at the Wits Institute for Social
and Economic Research (WISER), she has fellowships at Yale
University and the Aspen Institute, where her work has focussed
on the form and content of women’s stories.  She served as
the Executive Director of a human rights organisation that
provided grant funding and advocacy support to amplify the voices
of activists living and working across Southern Africa. Much of
that work involved gender justice in conflict and crisis-affected
countries, most notably Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo
and Zimbabwe.