Youth Marginality and Marginalization: A conversation on the Crisis facing South Sudanese youth in Australia

Kuir  ë Garang (Editor)

 

Photo: Refugeeresearchonline.org

September 20, 2025

The following quotes are from my conversation with Dr. William Abur and Dr. Santino A. Deng. 

"You know, there's no any child that can be born as a bad child, for example. No, a child can be a difficult child...based on where the child is raised, based on the environment, based on the family situation, based on the school, based on the community, what the children do. So now with this current climate of the technology, some of the parents don't even know what the kids are doing as Dr. Santino mentioned it before. They can be in a room and the parents are happy. saying, well, my children are inside, they are not out. But they don't know what they are doing, who are the people that they are engaged with. And that is a bigger issue within a number of families. The conversations also don't break through. You know, the relationship between the young person and the parent, when that relationship is broken, it is hard for the parent to be able to play their role.

 The other burden that the parent are facing, most of the parent are struggling with work and the life generally. So they don't have enough time where they can be able to engage with their kid and especially with a teenager to be able to find out how they are going, you know, what is happening. Because it is important, we human being, need check-in. We need check-in to be...

 For example, children, those teenagers or younger children, they need check-in, you know, someone to come and have a conversation with them and say, hey, how did you go at school? How was the day? How did you go at work? How was your day? Those kind of check-in are very important. Psychologically, they are very useful. And this is where you find out that, okay, the person may be open up to talk about, you know, there was incident that happened at school.

 Or there was this that happened that made me upset. That is lacking that conversation. The basic check in. I would say the parent need to step up to be able to do just a simple check in a simple evaluation to check in your kit. Even though they are inside, you need to be able to knock knock at the door and come in and say hey, how is your day? How are you going?"  ~ Dr. William Abur.

 

~ Dr. William Abur.

"I think when we talk of parents, there are a lot that they can do and I am mindful and I understand that some parents might be struggling with other things, language barriers among others and the web, juggling web and so on. And sometimes being maybe some single mothers is really struggling with, you know, with the primary parenting support and trying to put the put on the table as well. But there are a lot that they can do. I have done some work a few years ago, maybe about seven years ago here in one of the school. And I was asked to do some work with a kind of the children that go to school, young people themselves and teachers in school so that I can get their perspective.

 It was one of the schools that was getting overwhelmed and have never been exposed into diversity before. And what came out of that report that I did was a lot of young people were saying, some of the things that I was mentioning earlier, saying that most of the time when they have issues at a school, they report to the teachers, most of the time they're getting ignored, even sometimes.

they get blamed for being the victim. so what happens sometimes they may end up fighting, taking law into their own hand because nobody is actually responding to their complaint and they become more victim and get expelled. Sometimes they get discouraged and told, you can't do this subject. Actually, William know very well that they work in some school here, maybe told that, this is too hard for you, you can't do it.

 Some parents proved some of their teachers wrong and said, I have to do it or go into another school and actually succeed. Some young people, may give in, but support become very crucial. I came across some example where young people were supported by their parents and some relatives and they actually succeed in so many ways. So what they told me was young people in particular."  ~ Dr. Santino A. Deng

                                                          ~ Dr. Santino A. Deng

 

Most immigrant communities face a host of challenges when they settle in a new countries. This is a historical problem. Meaning South Sudanese in Australia are not the only immigrant and refugee group to be in such a situation. South Sudanese in Canada have faced, and continue to experience,  similar problems among the youth. 

These problems, which Dr. William and Dr. Santino have addressed, include the following: 

1. Being neglected by teachers and school administrators
2. Being faulted when they are not at fault
3. Stereotypes and prejudgments
4. Racist treatment by the police
5. Overrepresentation in the criminal justice system
6. Cultural disconnect between home culture and host culture
7. Lack of appropriate, community role models
8. Lack of parental attention due to pressure from work and life
9. Misconstrual of what it means to be an Australia, Canadian or American
10. Incentivization from gangs and criminal to run criminal errands

Youth workers and scholars who study youth issues are familiar with these issues. They are characterized by overt and subtle issues of social marginalization and institutional neglect. 

On Sunday, I had a conversation with two South Sudanese Australian researchers as the beginning of what I think will be a protracted conversation. 

I wanted to unpack these problems from the perspective of researchers and from the Australian context. These researchers are Dr. William Abur, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and Dr. Santino A. Deng, a researcher working for the government of Victoria, Australia. 

I asked them to lay out the issues within the Australian context, and to propose possible expert solutions. 

The following is our conversation.

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Kuir  ë Garang (PhD) is the editor of TPR. Follow me on X: @kuirthiy Instagram: @Kuirthiy

Are we just savages driving escalades and BMWs in our so-called real world?

Destruction in Gaza, Palestine. Photo: Euromedmonitor.org

 

"For Sowell, therefore, you must take cues from history. If you cannot find a historical precedent, then stop looking for that kind of a world."

The west's fervent and uncritical support of Israel even when Israel commits a genocide makes me think about human equality.

Is equality a mirage?

Given the persecution of the Jewish people in Europe in the last 2000 years, I feel saddened by the fact that those who know what means to be hated and persecuted by simply being who they are, now premise peace and co-existence on bombs.

I teach young people. I do research on young people. In these activities, my aim is to work toward a better world, a world in which everyone would feel respected, a world in which what fails you is your inability.

That is the world I want to leave behind for my children and the youth I teach. This world is yet to be realized.

But there are conservative thinkers like Thomas Sowell (see: Social Justice Fallacies, Intellectuals and Society, Intellectuals and Race), John McWhorter (Woke Racism) and Coleman Hughes (End of Race Politics) who think differently.

They either say such a world is already here, or they believe it is an impossible world. A utopia of Saint Thomas More variety. Meaning a search for a just and equal world is fantastical, a childish wish. They want us to live according to what the world throws at us. In other words, we must live in the real world and accept things as they are.

Violence. Military brutality. Military invasion. Genocides. Murders of civilians. Wars. Economic equality.

Photo: Palestinian Return Centre

Within this framework, Israel is said to be adapting to a world it cannot change. Israeli genocidal destruction of Gaza is, by this account, a response to a real world Israel did not create.

This is a world in which equality is a pipe dream.

For instance, equality is a natural impossibility for Thomas Sowell. We shouldn't dream of a world that is not and has never been. Pssst: Sowell uses history to make his point. He makes this point in Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Conquest and Culture.

For Sowell, therefore, you must take cues from history. If you cannot find a historical precedent, then stop looking for that kind of a world.

As such, for the Sowells, the Hughes, and the McWhorters of the world, racism is, largely, a passé.

To be realistic, they are right or wrong based on one's ideological camp. You will find their supporters and haters in boat loads. Sowell puts this well in Intellectuals and Society:

“The coincidence of real world challenge and intellectual challenge, which [H. G] Wells and others have tended to treat as almost axiomatic, depends on the initial assumptions of one’s social vision.”

To Sowell, the left forces their vision (as the anointed – McWhorter would call them “The Elect” and Hughes would call them “Neo-racist”) on the rest of us. Conservative intellectuals, according to Sowells, remain faithful to the facts of the real world.

But here is where they seem naive. They think their assessments are simply objective. That they write about facts, common sense, and the real world.

Here is Sowell again:

Donald Trump is the west looking at itself in the mirror

Kuir ë Garang, PhD*

When the South Sudanese embassy officials in Washington, D.C. made an honest mistake in April and accepted a Congolese national, who was deported with South Sudanese deportees to Juba, officials in Juba corrected the mistake. They refused the Congolese entry to South Sudan after doing more background checks than was possible in Washington. 

The Trump administration responded with threats. Bullying. Infantilization.  Their argument was that Juba did not accept the deportees in a "timely manner." 

The Trump administration, through Marco Rubio, did not care that South Sudanese officials were not rejecting South Sudanese deportees. They were only rejecting a Congolese who was masquerading as South Sudanese. 

Even when South Sudan accepted its citizens, the Trump administration revoked visas and threatened to withhold pending visa applications for South Sudanese nationals. 

It was bullying! No room for negotiations and reason.

Accept what we say we, the mighty US say, or we punish you. South Sudan had to cave in. What else could South Sudan do? Nothing! They accepted the Congolese, a non-national. 

The Congolese is a fellow African so the issue was not really about rejecting a fellow African. It was about protocols, diplomatic protocols and respect, and the fact that Congo (Democratic Republic) exists.

But why negotiate with people you can easily bully into submission? As American lawyer, Leon Fresco, told Aljazeera on April 6, the Trump administration was using South Sudan as an example to send a message to the rest of the world. It is a colonial attitude. 

Now, South Sudan seems to have become a dumping ground for American deportees for the Trump administration. 

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Many western leaders seem horrified by what Trump is doing to United States institutions and society and to the global order. Trump's actions are not really unprecedented. Yes, they are devious, self-serving, at times immoral, and more so, destabilizing. 

But should we be surprised. No. Not really! The rest, non-westerners, or those who know a bit of the history of the west, know that Trump is a western man (with a capital 'M') through and through. He is treating the west and his own fellow citizens in the same way the west has been treating the rest of the world for the last five centuries.

We are not surprised. Westerners have been feeling superior and entitled as, somehow, super-humans, whether overtly or covertly. 

Before the collapse of the racist and eugenicist regime in the 1960s, westerners' opinion of the rest of the world was overt. It was taught openly and proudly in university lecture halls and auditoriums, preached at the pulpits, acted out on theatre stages, joked about at dinner tables...etc.

After the above regimes collapsed, the attitude did not disappear. It morphed into new forms through which it manifested without betraying the fact that these regimes only collapsed in forms only but not function. 

Meaning western colonial bullying went underground. It became formal in monetary policies, fiscal policies, international trade laws, terms of borrowing through International Monetary Funds and the World Bank...etc. It was a clever obfuscation.  I

In these new social forms, Africans were still considered inferior. But African inferiority was not spoken out loudly by the sane majority. It was whispered or joked about in racially exclusive country clubs or book clubs. 

When Trump called African countries 'shitholes' and supported policies that appeared callous or behaving as if Africa is inhabited by beings no one should care about, he was not inventing a social consciousness. He was joining an established tradition. 

To westerners, Africa is always that place where resources are exploited and the people forced to remain painfully silent.

What is different now in Trumpism is that Trump has become explicit and overt in his denigration regime. Denigration is now shamelessly aimed openly', not through inadvertent 'hot mics' moments or in recordings not meant for public consumption. 

Meaning President Trump was joining the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who have insulted African.

Post-World War Two changes were forced on the west by geopolitical conditions. Westerners resented those changes. 'The good old days!' we hear regularly from the social and political right are part of that resentment.

But westerners seem surprised by Trump's actions? Why are westerners surprised? 

We shouldn't be surprised that the west is surprised. The attitude Trump has turned against the west has never been historically aimed at the west in the way Trump is doing. 

Hitler was considered an outlier when his gleefully genocidal attitude toward Jews was first considered a socio-political fad. It turned out Hitler meant business. The Hitler we now know was not considered a possibility for a westerner, a German. Yet there was World War One from which the west could learn. No learning. 

So there was Hitler and World War Two from which the west could learn.

By the 1970s, the west had already forgotten the war and Hitler. (Laws against Neo-Nazis are either weak or Neo-Nazi hate is trivialized or moralized as free speech).

Franco Spain was local. Fascist Italy was also local. So Trump seems like a tragic novelty. But history shows he is not.

While some people in the west see Trumpism as something new, those who have borne the brunt of similar attitudes and actions over the years would tell the west, 'Welcome to feeling human!' 

Europeans on the continent and in the diaspora have always ignored how the rest the world feel. They didn't feel inferiorized, infantilized, belittled or bullied. They considered genuine experiences moral panic, moral pedestal or a needless cry for attention when all we should do is to toughen it up in the real world.  

Trump belittling of Americans and westerners, his dictatorial actions, and his solipsistic projections, are westerners looking themselves in the mirror. Trump is a western product. He is an embodiment of the western Man, the Nietzschean Übermensch, the westerns 'supermanism' the western male has considered himself to be or becoming.

It's time for Europeans, continental or diasporic, to be humble and ask those of us the question renown African-American sociologist and historian, W.E.B Du Bois, encountered in Jim Crow America as he related it in The Souls of Black Folk: 'How does it feel to be a problem?'

Today, Trump is asking everyone the same question: 'How does it feel to be a problem?' Europe now knows what it feels to be considered a ‘problem’ when one is not; how to feel belittled unnecessarily.

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*Kuir ë Garang is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee.