Sisonke Msimang (2022) | Precious White Lives

Festival of Dangerous Ideas

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.