Inclusion Without Dignity: How African Australians Resist Assimilationist Narratives as Conditions of Belonging

Multiculturalism in Australia is predominantly framed as a benevolent process of “inclusion and diversification”. It promises equity, participation, and belonging for racialized minorities, as well as a pathway to ‘social cohesion’. Inclusion, as it is widely understood, implies equitable access to systems, spaces, and institutions. These enable social and economic mobility while safeguarding belonging and safety. However, for African Australians, “inclusion projects” often fail to protect against racial harm and can instead reproduce assimilationist expectations that demand compliance and a collapse into whiteness as the condition of acceptance. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, this article interrogates the limitations of inclusion as a framework for addressing the “challenges” of belonging. It proposes racial dignity as a more expansive concept that has remained largely unaddressed in Australian political and social dialogues on integration, social cohesion, and belonging. Against this backdrop, we read participants’ resistance as politics of refusal. Here, refusing indignity and insisting on “living with dignity” directly challenge the hierarchical distribution of belonging. Refusal signals that belonging is not a reward to be “granted” by those in power, but a practice that can be cultivated, defended, and expanded by those who are marginalized, excluded or cast as unworthy of belonging. By reframing belonging as an outcome of dignity rather than inclusion, this article redirects the debate toward how dignity is re/claimed in sites where belonging is produced through indignifying processes.