Apparently, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese believes that all ‘black people’ are the same.

Albanese recently engaged in a publicity stunt in which he secured a celebrity endorsement for his proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Said celebrity endorsement came from Shaquille O’Neal – a famous African-American basketball player.

The wisdom of this move has been criticised multiple times and on many levels.

Appealing to a figure who was most popular during the 90s and the 2000s absolutely strikes many people as a ‘hello, fellow kids!’ move from Albanese, and one which also trivialises an important discussion about whether or not the proposed Indigenous Voice is going to represent ineffectual tokenism on one hand, or a genuine threat to equality before the law on another.

But one thing that must be emphasised about this publicity stunt is that, quite frankly, it is bigoted on perhaps the most appallingly superficial level possible – it treats people as interchangeable on the basis of their skin pigmentation.

It should go without saying that not all ‘black people’ are the same.

This holds true on both the individual and group levels – not all ‘black peoples’ are the same either. For example, African-Americans (a ‘black’ people) are not historically or culturally or even biologically interchangeable with Indigenous Australians (another ‘black’ people).

Yet, according to Anthony Albanese, because Mr O’Neal has sufficiently dark skin, Mr O’Neal somehow has credibility with respect to the affairs of a cultural group of which he is not a part, shares no common history with, has an entirely different culture, and is from entirely different ancestry. There is a word for attitudes like this, and it begins with ‘R’.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price quite correctly summarised the situation when she said, ‘It’s a bit insulting to call on a black American to help with black Australians as if this is all about the colour of one’s skin.’

Senator Price also correctly pointed out that it would be much more historically accurate to compare Indigenous Australians with Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Canadians. But Anthony Albanese seems to not be able to grasp what is a relatively obvious distinction – instead, he equates Australia’s ‘black people’ to America’s ‘black people’, as if Australia were the 51st State.

Indeed, Albo’s Shaq Attack (or is it Shaq Attaq?) really is a perfect microcosm of what the ‘benign tokenism’ version of the Indigenous Voice will actually be. It will be little more than a glorified Public Relations exercise with no actual connection to the suffering of Indigenous Australians living in traditional communities. It will be about getting media attention, about making woke white people feel less guilty, and about elevating performative ‘compassion’ above policy outcomes.

Dr. Andrew Russell and Lana Starkey