Reconfiguring Racism: Youthful Dynamics of Conflict and Conviviality in a Culturally Diverse, Working-Class High School
Melinda Herron
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1772-9688
BA (Dean's Scholars Program), MA
This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Social and Political Sciences Faculty of Arts University of Melbourne Victoria, Australia
2017
Abstract
Youth, diversity and disadvantage are rendered a dangerous mix in contemporary Australia, with concern focused in particular on youth living in Australia’s most multicultural and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In this milieu, young people, and schools as ‘micropublics’, are often scrutinised as indicators of the health of multicultural societies with schools targeted as sites of intervention. Yet in the shadow of such moral panic, how does racialisation and racism actually feature in the lives of young people as they negotiate culturally diverse shared spaces? Do young people’s practices call for antiracist intervention or is there evidence of transformative ways of living with difference, which unsettles and advances current understandings of racism and conviviality in young lives? Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explores these questions in the context of peer sociality at Greendale High in Melbourne – a school located in the heartland of current social anxieties about youth, multiculturalism and divisive population growth.
While racism and conflict within a social cohesion rubric are positioned as anathema to successful multicultural living, research at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture increasingly shows that both conviviality and conflict can co-exist relatively easily within culturally diverse youth spaces. This literature further posits that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. In this thesis I argue that this racism-conviviality binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within a multicultural peer culture. Through tracing when, where and how racialisation emerged in schoolyard conversations, social spaces, friendship dynamics and classroom discussions, this thesis illuminates how expressions of everyday racism and conviviality can be enmeshed in complex, relational, sophisticated and uneven ways.
i Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between practices of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. Evolving from sustained ethnographic attention to Greendale student life, the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ compels engaged scrutiny of the concepts of – and relationships between – ‘racism’, ‘conviviality’ and ‘conflict’ for understanding youth sociality. In doing so, I call attention to the limitations of current youth multiculture research, which commonly assumes a racism-conviviality binary a priori. If we are to work against racism, scholars and educators require more flexible and expansive conceptual tools that engage seriously with youth perspectives and young people’s situated rules of play in high school sociality.
ii Declaration
This is to certify that:
I. this thesis comprises only my original work towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy except where indicated in the List of Publications (page vi),
II. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,
III. the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices as approved by the Research Higher Degrees Committee.
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Melinda Herron
June 2017
iii Acknowledgements
Undertaking this PhD has been a privilege and I have many people to thank.
I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Associate Professor Dan Woodman, Associate Professor Tamara Kohn and Dr Jessica Walton. My intellectual development over the last four years is thanks to their diverse and considerable expertise and their generosity in engaging with the process of my research and my academic writing. Dan Woodman has improved my scholarship with his expertise in youth studies and sociology and his critical, theoretical eye. Tamara Kohn has provided valuable guidance through our rich discussions about anthropological traditions, ethnographic writing and reflexivity. As a colleague and friend, Jessica Walton has been there with her unwavering support, along with her insights into fieldwork, issues of racism and navigating academic life.
During my candidacy I have also been fortunate to explore my ideas in conversation with other scholars in my field. Their active support of early career researchers is very much appreciated. I am deeply grateful to Farida Fozdar for being a generous and encouraging mentor. I would also like to thank Anita Harris, Anoop Nayak, Martin Forsey and Monica Minnegal for their guidance and collaborative ethos.
To my PhD friends, Cat Austin, Honor Coleman, Lucy Davidson and Mythily Meher, it has been pleasure to share in the joys and pains of the PhD experience with such intellectually curious, empathetic and hilarious women. Special thanks must go to Mythily, anthropologist extraordinaire, who is an encouraging and insightful critic, colleague, collaborator and friend. This PhD adventure was also made all the more enjoyable and sustainable by pursuing it alongside my fellow researcher in the family, Alison.
iv To my family, Syd and Alison, my boundless gratitude for your ever-present emotional and practical support; Andrew, thanks for your ongoing empathy. And to Gurleen – who features in this thesis as the boyfriend Greendale students were so intrigued by – whilst you never did finish reading that chapter I sent you, you made up for it a thousand fold with your patience and support during this PhD journey.
And most importantly, this thesis would not have been possible without the support of the school leadership team, teachers and the students I came to know. To be warmly welcomed into the lives of young people was an incredible experience for me. In this thesis I have attempted to do justice to the candid honesty, warmth and energy with which these students invited me into their social world.
v List of Publications
Some of the arguments to be presented in the coming chapters have been published or are in the process of being published. While I draw mainly on my sole-authored work, the ethnographic material and analysis I contributed to a co-authored publication are also reproduced at points in this thesis. Where I present ideas that I have developed with others, they are referenced accordingly.
The following journal articles were written during my PhD candidacy:
Harris, Anita, and Melinda Herron. 2017. “Young People and Intercultural Sociality after Cronulla.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 38(3):284-300. Parts of this article appear in Chapter 5.
Herron, Melinda. 2017. “A Revised Approach to Racism in Youth Multiculture: The Significance of Schoolyard Conversations about Dating and Desire.” Journal of Youth Studies. This article is the basis of Chapter 4.
Herron, Melinda. (Forthcoming). “Ethnographic Methods, Young People and a High School: a Recipe for Ethical Precarity.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly. Parts of this article appear in Chapter 2.
Herron, Melinda. 2013. “Fostering Antiracism: Applying Cosmopolitan Theory to Educational Settings.” Conference proceedings at TASA Conference 2013, Monash University, Melbourne.
vi Table of Contents
Abstract ...... i Declaration ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv List of Publications ...... vi List of Figures ...... x Student Roll Call ...... xi School Dictionary ...... xiii Prologue ...... xiv CHAPTER ONE Introduction ...... 1 Living with Difference: Scholarly Debates and Conceptual Tools ...... 8 Youth and Multiculture ...... 12 The Dynamics of Conviviality and Racism ...... 16 Racism: Definitions and Developments ...... 19 Racism in Young Lives ...... 22 Studying Racism Ethnographically ...... 24 Racialisation Unravelled: Thesis Overview ...... 26 A More Youthful Introduction ...... 29 CHAPTER TWO Going Back to High School: Research Methods ...... 32 Getting Ready for School: Finding a Fieldsite ...... 32 The New Kid on The Block: Learning to Fit In ...... 37 Typical School Days: ‘Doing Ethnography’ at High School ...... 40 Writing Fieldnotes ...... 42 Asking after Racism: My Fieldwork Sensitivities and Approach ...... 44 Subjectivity in the Schoolyard ...... 49 Making Friends and Keeping Them: Rapport, Positionality and Power ...... 51 Ethnography, Youth and High School: A Recipe for Ethical Precarity ...... 52 After School: Writing about Student Life ...... 58 Representing Race, Writing Multiculture ...... 59 The Complexities of Writing ‘Racism’ ...... 63 Producing Ethnographic Knowledge ...... 64 School of Thought: Ethnography as a Guiding Ethos ...... 67 Concluding Remarks ...... 68 Inevitable Limitations ...... 68 The School Year Begins ...... 69
vii CHAPTER THREE The Lay of the Land: The Racialising Foundations of Student Life ...... 70 My Introductions to Schoolyard Life ...... 72 The Shared Ethno-Racial Lexicon and Labelling System ...... 77 The Specificity and Significance of Ethno-Racial Classifications ...... 83 Mapping the Schoolyard: Race and Space ...... 85 Mapping it Out ...... 92 Friends or Enemies?: The Significance of Racialised Demarcations ...... 96 Blurred Boundaries: The Limitations of Social Categorisations and Divisions ...... 100 Conclusion ...... 102 CHAPTER FOUR Sex, Dating and Desire in the Schoolyard: Racism or Convivial Cosmopolitanism? ...... 104 Introduction ...... 104 Let’s Talk about Sex: Discourses of Dating and Desire in Youth Sociality ...... 106 ‘What nash are you into?’: Common Schoolyard Conversations ...... 107 The Racist Backdrop ...... 110 The Language of Preference and Taste ...... 110 Racial Rankings: Social Cachet and Stigma ...... 112 Sex, Sluts and Social Sanctions ...... 117 Returning to the Emic: Is it Racist? ...... 120 Perverse Cosmopolitanism: Theorising ‘Fucked’ Intercultural Engagement ...... 124 Age and Social Class: Dating Discourses in the Upper Courtyard ...... 129 Conclusion ...... 132 CHAPTER FIVE Meanings and Manifestations of ‘Racism’ ...... 135 Introduction ...... 135 PART ONE: Talk about Racism ...... 137 What is Racism?: Student Understandings ...... 137 Concluding Remarks ...... 146 PART TWO: Racism in Talk ...... 147 Gamze’s Friendship Group: ‘Just Joking’ about Racism ...... 148 Jase’s Friendship Group: Ironic, Subversive and ‘Post-Racial’ Racisms ...... 157 Reflections on Racism ...... 167 CHAPTER SIX Conflict and Context: An Intersectional Understanding of Racism and Racial Privilege ...... 174 Introduction ...... 174 Layer One: Bonding and Banter – The Place of Race ...... 177 Entertaining Social Differences: ‘Racism’ in Context ...... 179 Humour and Heteronormativity ...... 181 Layer 2: Conflict at Greendale High – Sluts, Fags and Fatties ...... 184 Friendship Fallouts: The Confines of Hegemonic Femininity ...... 186 Reconfiguring Racism as Conflict ...... 190 Layer 3: Personal Struggle and Suffering – The Weight of Racism ...... 192 Intersectional Life Struggles: Death by a Thousand Cuts ...... 194 Layer 4: Being White at Greendale High – Race and Class Manoeuvres ...... 196 The Bogan ...... 199 White Cringe vs. Multicultural Cool ...... 205 White Privilege and Power in a Culturally Diverse School ...... 209 Conclusion ...... 214
viii Interlude ...... 217 CHAPTER SEVEN The Exception to the Rule: Aboriginal Australians and The Limits of Perverse Cosmopolitanism ...... 221 Introduction ...... 221 Classroom Discourse about Aboriginal Australians ...... 224 Conventional Racist Discourses: A Checklist ...... 228 Courageous Counterpoints ...... 233 The Reflex of Racism ...... 235 Towards a Revised Approach to Racism in Youth Multiculture ...... 237 The Limits of Multicultural Inclusion ...... 239 The Invisibility of Aboriginal Peers: Contact Theory ...... 239 Multicultural vs. Indigenous Divisions: Who Belongs? ...... 242 ‘Racism doesn’t happen here’: But Elsewhere? ...... 249 Conclusion ...... 251 CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusion: Rethinking Racism ...... 254 Getting Schooled: My Own Education into Racism ...... 256 Breaking The Rules: New Forms of Racialisation ...... 258 The Continuing Problem of Racism(s) ...... 260 Setting Homework: Working against Racism ...... 263 School’s Out: Future Research ...... 266 References ...... 269 Appendix: Spoken Word Poem Transcript ...... 290
ix List of Figures
Figure 1: Freeze Frame from Spoken Word Video ...... 31 Figure 2: Select Research Participants in Greendale High Social Spaces ...... 42 Figure 3: Greendale High Layout ...... 72 Figure 4: Milena's School Mapping ...... 85 Figure 5: Gamze's School Mapping ...... 85 Figure 6: Jase's School Mapping ...... 86 Figure 7: Combined Mappings of School Social Spaces ...... 91
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Student Roll Call
The following students feature in this thesis. Students who appear in only one chapter have been omitted from this alphabetised list. These names and the name of the school are pseudonyms (as discussed in Chapter 2).
AISHA is a 19-year-old soccer fan who dreams of being a fire fighter. She’s in year 12, is a refugee from an Afghani background, and usually spends lunch in the lower courtyard of the schoolyard.
ALEKSANDRA is an Australian-born 16-year-old from Georgian-Turkish-Czech heritage who want to become a famous actress. She hangs out with her year 11 friends in the upper courtyard or the school canteen.
BEC is an Anglo-Australian year 12 student who cannot wait for her 18th birthday and to get her braces off. During lunch, she can be found in the lower courtyard.
DAXON is a 16-year-old Anglo-Australian who loves video games, sci-fi and football. He and his year 11 friends typically hang out in the upper courtyard.
DEE is a sporty year 12 student who identifies as Lebanese-Afghan and wishes her parents took more interest in her education. She is 18-years-old and can often be found in the lower courtyard between classes.
EMILY is a studious 18-year-old Anglo-Australian who is stressed about what to do after year 12 graduation. She tends to hang out in the library with her best friend at lunch.
ESTHER is an Australian-born year 12 student from Cook Islands heritage who works at the local McDonalds and sings in a Christian band with her friends. She can usually be found in the lower courtyard.
GAMZE is an Australian-born year 12 student with Turkish parents. She is 17-years-old, hangs out in the lower courtyard, and helps out after school at her parents’ corner shop when she’s not at Turkish dance class.
HAKIM is a 19-year-old Muslim student born in Afghanistan who tends to play soccer at the back of the school at lunchtime when he isn’t flirting with girls in the lower courtyard.
JAY is a year 12 student who can usually be found smoking on the oval or in detention because of his smoking.
JASE is a 16-year-old class clown and provocateur who writes spoken word poetry. He is in year 11, identifies as Jewish and white Australian, and can be found in the upper courtyard of the schoolyard.
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KANARINA is an 18-year old Romanian-born Australian citizen who frequently laments that her parents will not let her go out with friends on the weekend. She typically hangs out in the lower courtyard.
LACEY is a 16-year-old Anglo-Australian who paints and writes short stories. She can usually be found with her year 11 friends in the upper courtyard of the schoolyard.
LAURA is a demonstrative 16-year-old Anglo-Australian who tends to hang out in the upper courtyard with her year 11 peers.
MADUKA is an Australian-born 17-year-old from a Fijian-Indian background who plans to become a hairdresser. She socialises in the lower courtyard of the schoolyard with her year 12 friends.
MILENA is an 18-year-old Australian-born student who has a growing collection of tattoos. She speaks Maltese at home with her family, is in year 12, and always sits at the same bench with her best friend, Bec, in the lower courtyard at lunch.
MOHAMMED is an 18-year-old motorbike enthusiast in year 11. He’s an Australian citizen, was born in Pakistan, and usually hangs out in the upper courtyard.
NICOLE is an 18-years-old Anglo-Australian in year 12. When she’s not cutting school, she hangs out either in the canteen or with the smokers on the oval.
SAJRA is an 18-year-old year 12 student from a Bosnian Muslim background who wants to work in childcare and who can almost always be found with Gamze in the lower courtyard.
TESS is in year 11, identifies as Aboriginal and Welsh, and is proud of her fighting spirit. She tends to hang out in the library.
TOM is a year 12 student from Greek heritage who spends most lunch breaks smoking on the school oval or working in the art room.
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School Dictionary
Common terms at school as defined by their contextual usage by students:
AFL Australian Football League (also used as metonym for Australian Rules Football)
Bogan Social class label for white working-class peers considered uncultured and uncouth
EAL English as Another Language class. Otherwise known as ESL (English as a Second Language) or LOTE (Language Other Than English)
Fob Refers to peers from the Pacific Islands and Maori New Zealanders. Derived from ‘Fresh Off the Boat’
Nash Short for nationality but refers to the ethnic background of peers
Pov Poverty-stricken
Sudo Sudanese peers
Wog Peers from Eastern and Southern European backgrounds. Used by students descriptively rather than as an offensive label
xiii
Prologue
High school was just as intimidating, even 10 years on. A month after starting fieldwork at Greendale High1 – a disadvantaged school in the suburban fringe of Melbourne, Australia – I finally worked up the courage to talk to the circle of smokers who sat on the far reaches of the school oval everyday day at lunch. So as not to look like a teacher on yard duty, I looked at the ground and scuffed my Nike sneakers as I walked towards them. Laura, an extroverted Anglo- Australian I had met in English class, saw me and waved me over. Relieved at the welcome, I slid down next to her, striking a purposefully nonchalant lounging pose – arms out behind me, legs out straight. The students stopped talking and stared at me. “She’s not a teacher!” Laura stated, brightly, understanding the sudden silence, “she’s a researcher!” Another student, Tom, with his pale skin and crop of jet-black hair shaved on one side, looked up from tugging at patches of dry, brown grass and gave me a small wave. We had chatted briefly in maths class the day before.
A bird perched in the gumtree above shat on one of the girls and a flurry of movement broke the tension as friends tried to console her. Others, toying with cigarette packets in their laps, asked if they could smoke in front of me. Brows raised in astonishment when I said yes. “Yeah, I don’t care. I’m not a teacher.” “Yeah, she doesn’t tell them anything,” Laura confirmed. “Do you smoke?” one of the girls asked. “No, and don’t tempt me! I don’t want to start up again,” I responded. (This was a lie. I had never been a smoker, but it seemed an easier way of building rapport than taking up the habit). A stocky, brown-skinned student named Jay asked, as he lit a cigarette, what I was studying. I mentioned the words ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘racism’. He repeated the word ‘racism’ softly as if trying out the feel of the word in his mouth and
1 Greendale High is a pseudonym. Issues of naming and representation will be discussed in Chapter 2.
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said nothing more – the conversation moved on quickly to the announcement that morning at assembly of the new student leaders. Tom complained about the biased selection process; the teachers decide and they always choose Afghanis (because they work hard, he later admitted). He was a student leader last year and everyone aside from him was Afghani he explained for my benefit. “I’m not actually Aussie though,” he added. Before I could finish asking him what his background was, Laura teasingly quipped “his background is gay”. His sexual orientation apparently defined his ‘difference’ at that moment, not his Greek heritage.
The students spotted a teacher approaching, quickly stubbed out their cigarettes and jumped up to find a new hiding spot. I stayed seated. Jay beckoned me with his arm—“Coming?”—and so I followed them. They chatted amongst themselves about getting high. I asked them if weed was the only drug students at Greendale High were into. They nodded, explaining that other drugs were too expensive; only private school students could afford those. We finally found a spot to sit in the bushes, littered with discarded chip packets, near the student carpark. They talked about a dramatic friendship fallout that had happened at a party over the weekend. “Whose party?” I asked. “Milena’s”, Tom replied. “Who’s that?” one of the girls asked. “She’s the one who has parties even though she has a baby,” a fellow smoker replied in a disapproving drawl. Tom added that she’s a slut and only sleeps with black guys. “Is that a bad thing?” I asked. “I’m not being racist, but she only sleeps with Sudos [Sudanese] and Afghanis,” he explained.
The bell rang, interrupting the conversation. Tom asked me to come to his next class with him. Brushing the dirt and grass off our clothes, we started walking towards psychology class. I asked him what Jay’s background was. “Fob,” he said, “…Islander, Maori,” he clarified, aware that I might not understand the school lingo, but then checked with one of his friends. She thought he was from Mauritius or the Seychelles. They both shrugged. “So you’re, like, studying us?” he asked as we found seats together in the classroom. “I’m not studying you like
xv
hamsters. I’m interested to hear your opinions on life here,” I replied. “Well,” he declared, “I can tell you all about Greendale. It’s shit. It’s pov [poverty stricken].” For Tom, Greendale High was defined by its ‘pov’ stigma – not for the cultural diversity I had come to Greendale High to research.
This is a story about how young people operate in conditions of cultural diversity, in a school where, from what they told me, that is not a very interesting thing to study at all.
xvi CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE Introduction
In 2013, a 13-year-old girl called an Aboriginal football player, Adam Goodes, an “ape” at the ‘reconciliation’ round of the Australian Football League (AFL) in Melbourne, Australia. The strong message in the media coverage that followed called for schools to play a major role in tackling issues of racism in Australia. The then Victorian state Premier, Denis Napthine, pledged his support for increased education programs in schools “to make sure all young Victorians understand this sort of abuse based on racism, culture, is totally and utterly unacceptable in modern society” (Pierik and Gough 2013). Coincidentally, I had just set out to study young people’s attitudes towards cultural diversity. I was working on a mixed-methods research project as a research assistant evaluating the impact of a particular antiracist educational program on students across a number of participating high schools in Melbourne.2 In 2013, I arrived at Greendale High with a stack of surveys, a voice recorder and a list of questions about students’ opinions on the education intervention. The following school year, I returned to Greendale High to embark on my PhD fieldwork. This time I arrived with a notepad, a backpack and a lunchbox and set out to explore ethnographically how young people (16-19 years old) negotiate culturally diverse student life in enforced proximity.
How we can live in a ‘Land of Strangers’ continues to be a high stakes question (Amin 2013). As the state premier’s reaction attests, young people, and schools as ‘micropublics’ (Amin 2002), are often scrutinised as indicators of the health of multicultural societies with schools targeted as sites for intervention. Representations of young people leading the way on grassroots intercultural initiatives clash against images of youth at the frontline of racialised
2 This research project was ‘The role of museums in promoting acceptance of and respect for cultural diversity in secondary schools’, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP120100080).
1 CHAPTER ONE antagonisms on streets and in schools (Butcher and Harris 2010; Costello 2016). Enforced proximity in a culturally diverse school may offer young people “important possibilities for cultural experimentation” (Beck 2008, 31) or rouse tensions, conflict and divisions. Joining scholars who work at the intersections of youth studies and everyday multiculture (e.g. Harris 2013; Clayton 2009; Noble 2009b; Back 1996; Thomas 2011), I sought to better understand these contradictory possibilities and the ways in which young people negotiate complex social relations. How do young people get along (or not) and under what conditions? Do young people’s practices call for antiracist intervention, or is there evidence of transformative ways of living with difference, which unsettles and extends current understandings of racism and conviviality in young lives? This thesis explores these questions in the context of peer sociality at Greendale High, a school situated in a historically working-class outer suburb of Melbourne – a heartland of current social anxieties about youth, multiculturalism and divisive population growth.
Tourist brochures, government websites and cultural institutions laud Melbourne as a multicultural metropolis “home to one of the world's most harmonious and culturally diverse communities” (City of Melbourne 2017). Yet, these multicultural success stories harbour (presumptuous) concerns about social cohesion and the management of diversity. As one government website explains in the broader context of Australia, “compared to other countries, Australia has a remarkable degree of social cohesion given its diversity. However, maintaining this cohesion can be a challenge” (Australian Human Rights Commission 2015). Here, social cohesion is rendered an achievement easily undone by too much, the wrong kind or ill-managed cultural diversity. These fears gather in particular around the outer suburban fringes of Melbourne, home to some of the fastest growing, most culturally diverse and most disadvantaged municipalities. Recently (and episodically) young people in growth areas like Greendale have been subject to scrutiny over social cohesion along with media anxieties about ‘teenage terrorists’ and ‘ethnic’ youth gangs (Lillebuen 2014; Bolt 2016). My grounded ethnographic study of Greendale peer
2 CHAPTER ONE sociality sought to examine the extent to which concerns about racialised frictions were reflected in or challenged by how young people oriented to peers from diverse cultural backgrounds. What was the place of racism in these young lives?
My fieldwork hit an early stumbling block. I mistakenly assumed that, in this milieu, Greendale students would have much to say about negotiating culturally diverse school life. My fieldwork approach, at first, seemed promising. Frequent, enthusiastic remarks sprang forth in the staffroom when I introduced my research interests to the Greendale teachers.
“Oh, Greendale is the perfect place for your research!”
“It’s so multicultural here.” “Students call us racists all the time as an excuse to storm out of class.” “Have you heard about the fights between the Afghanis and the Islanders?”
Frustrated with students’ lack of interest in the topic of multiculturalism in class one day, a teacher animatedly emphasised to the students:
We are in Australia – multicultural… We are in Victoria – very multicultural…
We are in Melbourne – super multicultural… We are in Greendale for God’s sake – it’s like the dictionary definition of multicultural!
Yet responses from students regarding my research topic could not have been starker in contrast. Typically, I encountered only blank stares from students when I said ‘cultural diversity’ or ‘multiculturalism’. I took to also saying ‘racism’ to see if that garnered any more interest, but it did not. Across school classrooms, too, students generally remained silent whenever teachers prompted discussion about racism. Jase, a year 11 student from Jewish ancestry, told me matter-of-factly: “racism doesn’t happen here. Maybe 20 years ago. People don’t hang out by race…except the Afghanis.” A group of friends, hailing
3 CHAPTER ONE from Afghanistan, Morocco and Malta concurred: racism doesn’t exist anymore because “white girls want to have sex with black guys”. In fact, over the course of my 12 months of fieldwork, only a few students mentioned racism – always in passing, and rarely using the label ‘racism’. In almost all of these cases, students described racist incidents they had witnessed or experienced as external to Greendale High, or else inflicted by teachers not peers.
I was studying racism in a school where – from multiple students’ perspectives – it didn’t exist, and where cultural diversity was (often) not worth talking about. I was intrigued. Why did students show little interest in my research topic? Was it related to my (and teachers’) use of jargon terms like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘racism’? Did their lived experience not align with these concepts? Was it based on discomfort discussing painful or embarrassing experiences or performances of racism? Was it taboo to speak about these issues at school, or around adults, or me as a researcher – and an Anglo- Australian one at that? Or else, did it reveal that racism and the complexities of cultural diversity were, in fact, not deemed especially relevant in these students’ lives where cultural difference was normalised and accepted? These became some of the central questions of my fieldwork.
Accessing this understanding required a revised attentiveness to what students found relevant, significant and interesting about life at school. Following CJ Pascoe (2007), I simplified my research explanation to “I’m writing a book about life at Greendale High”. That got the conversation started; everybody had a ready opinion about this. The declarations were usually the same; Greendale High life was framed though a lens of disadvantage. They bemoaned the lack of strict uniform, the lack of new technology, the lack of resources and the lack of discipline, often comparing Greendale to their ideas about expensive private schools. Students readily offered up book title suggestions: ‘Greendale: A School for Dropouts’ and ‘Greendale is a Shithole’ were two popular titles echoed across the school (runner-up: ‘The Children Are Obsessed With
4 CHAPTER ONE
Drugs’). Jase told me my thesis should be about ‘The Truth in Youth’ – “that’s going to be way more interesting,” he declared.
These proposed titles, whilst humorous, were not without cause. Greendale High, like many government schools in Melbourne’s outer fringes, had low levels of academic achievement and low retention rates. “Do any of us look like we could do the VCE [Victorian Certificate of Education]?” a year 12 student laughed when I asked if she or anyone she knew had sat the exams.3 She gave it further thought and remembered that one girl had: “but I don’t know if she passed,” she added. In the first week of my fieldwork, a teacher warned me apologetically about the academic standard of some of the classes by saying “it’s not [name of private school], it’s Greendale. You can’t polish a turd.”4 It was an early introduction to the malaise and pragmatic acknowledgement of struggle that pervaded the school culture. Aspirational values about academic excellence and students’ enrichment through cultural diversity, common to other school mottos and promotional materials (e.g. Noble 2013; Bennett et al. 2016), were absent at Greendale. This is significant to understanding the context in which students’ attitudes and practices regarding their culturally diverse peer sociality emerged. In a school where ‘getting on with it’ was an overriding ethos, students’ perceptions of culturally diverse student life were unlikely to be strongly influenced by normative “saccharine diversity fantasies” (Back and Sinha 2016, 523).
When not lamenting Greendale High’s impoverished education, many students said that Greendale was much more friendly than other schools they had attended. Interestingly, they would inadvertently justify this because of its diversity. At Greendale, because “everybody is from everywhere so nobody really asks what your nash [nationality] is”, as Steph (a year 12 student from a Turkish background) explained, there was apparently less animosity and exclusion based on cultural difference. Bec, a year 12 Anglo-Australian student,
3 In Australia, Year 12 is the final year of high school. 4 ‘Turd’ is a slang dysphemism for excrement.
5 CHAPTER ONE said that Greendale was much more welcoming and sociable than her old school, which was much less diverse; multiculturalism was tacitly positioned as producing a convivial, inclusive atmosphere. After complaining about the quality of the Greendale education, Andy, a year 11 student with Hungarian parents, told me that Greendale was really great – there had never been any “punch-ons”, except once the previous year “between the fobs [Maori/Islanders] and the Afghans,” he recollected.5 When I asked if there was much racial tension at Greendale, he replied by way of explanation: “no, it’s really multicultural.” For Andy, Greendale’s friendliness was evinced by the absence of racialised violence rather than by openly amiable interactions. Some students, too, unhappily talked of people sticking together in ‘groups’ in the schoolyard, which were almost always described in ethno-racial terms. In this context, ‘getting along’ at Greendale was an expansive concept, encompassing, as Plage et al. (2016, 5) describe it, “cathartic and transformative engagement” with peers along with relations better characterised by “fragile tolerance” and a lack of conflict.
So cultural diversity, racialisation and racism were not insignificant and irrelevant to school social life after all. Whilst students did not mark these as central to their school experience when directly asked, the more I observed everyday school life, the more I witnessed how racialisation was infused in the ways Greendale students categorised each other, where people hung out in the schoolyard, how they gossiped about dating, sex and desire, and how friendships were enacted. The tenor of classroom discussions about Aboriginal Australians sounded particularly racist. Yet, moments when racialisation or racism materialised were one among many parts of social life at high school. For the smokers discussed in the Prologue, ethno-racial labelling, judgments and gossip surfaced in amongst the relevance of drugs, disadvantage, sexual orientation and the allure of smoking. The fact that Tom did not know the
5 In this thesis I use the ‘fobs’ rather than FOBs (‘Fresh Off the Boat’) because it existed as a word in its own right at Greendale High, disconnected from its acronym meaning – as will be discussed in Chapter 3.
6 CHAPTER ONE ethnic background of his (brown-skinned) friend, Jay, suggests that ‘diversity’ did not always matter and did not matter for everyone; race and ethnicity were not always the terms on which young people recognised and related to each other. These ‘differences’ were foregrounded and backgrounded depending on context.
Over the course of the coming chapters, this thesis traces where, when and how racialisation manifested in conversation and space at Greendale – its unmarked-ness, its irony, sophistication and playfulness, its performativity and uncomfortable viscerality, its specificity and essentialism and its fleetingness – in amongst other issues and forms of difference significant to young people’s everyday sociality at Greendale High. In face of the shifting centrality of ethnicity, race and religion to their everyday social interactions and spaces, why might so many students have downplayed or denied the significance of racism or cultural difference? How can we make sense of racialising practices in this context? This thesis attempts to unravel these questions, offering a situated understanding of racialisation and racism in a youthful social space.
Attending closely to the ways that Greendale students oriented to racialising exchanges at school raises alternative ways to think about how ‘racism’ operates in a multicultural space that complicate and advance current theorising about racism. As I will discuss shortly, much literature on youth multiculture positions ‘racism’ and ‘conviviality’ as dichotomous modes of relationality. On the basis of sustained ethnographic attention to Greendale student life, I suggest that this conceptualisation fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within a multicultural youth sociality. Unsettling scholarly assumptions that posit the existence of a racism-conviviality binary a priori, in the coming chapters, I reveal the variable dynamics between racism and conviviality at play at Greendale High that are much more sophisticated and complex than this binary allows. As we will discover, many Greendale students were refiguring the meaning of racism and the terms of inclusion, exclusion and peer conflict in a multicultural peer sociality. Furthermore, they were
7 CHAPTER ONE doing this in ways that account for their claims about the absence of racism among peers. Alternative conceptual tools and terms are required to capture their complex forms of peer sociality.
Before turning to the central debates to which this conceptual critique contributes, I first outline the broader field in which this research sits. The questions this thesis pursues build on research in what can be termed ‘lived multiculture’ or ‘everyday multiculturalism’ studies (see Wise and Velayutham 2009) which offer grounded insights into the possibilities and tensions of multicultural living in ‘super-diverse’ times (Vertovec 2007). In the following section I also canvass a set of analytical concepts and terms common to this field, many of which I apply, critique and revise in the chapters which follow.
Living with Difference: Scholarly Debates and Conceptual Tools
Transformed by the forces of globalisation (see Beck 2002, 2008), many multicultural societies are now characterised by what Vertovec (2007) terms ‘super-diversity’ in Britain and what Noble (2009b) calls ‘hyper-diversity’ in Australia. These concepts highlight that increased immigration has reconfigured the multicultural make-up of many places, bringing with it new, complex socio-economic, gendered and spatial diversities, positionalities and configurations of inequality. Inner-city Melbourne and many of its outer suburbs, like the Greendale area, characterise this hyper-diverse demography.
Such intensification of diversity has prompted questions about “how we think about human modes of togetherness” (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014, 342) amid rapid social change. Cultural and political projects like cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have received much scholarly attention as potential frameworks and ideologies for living in an interconnected, culturally diverse world (Appiah 2006; Beck 2002; Nussbaum 2002). Whilst cosmopolitanism has been conceived of in political, economic and cultural terms, the latter involves openness to and reflexive engagement with difference and the consumption and celebration of diversity (Hannerz 2006; Held 2010; Delanty 2006). These
8 CHAPTER ONE dispositions are commonly associated with the global, mobile elite and are highly normative, prescriptive and abstract.
Such ‘top-down’ ideologies and orientations are ideals for how people can live together well with others. Indeed, Beck describes cosmopolitanism as “a plea for cross-cultural and cross-national harmony” (2008, 26, my emphasis). These normative typologies do not necessarily align with or help to elucidate, how people navigate commonplace social encounters with difference and diversity (Semi et al. 2009; Noble 2013). Arguably, these normative frames particularly overlook the ways that multicultural and working-class communities, like the Greendale High School community, navigate ‘super-diversity’. Working-class populations are commonly rendered parochial, nationalistic and xenophobic when compared to archetypal cosmopolitans (Pardy 2005; Werbner 1999). Whilst Hage’s description of these cosmopolitans as the “White cosmopolite” (1998, 201) is helpful in critiquing the exploitative quality of much engagement with ‘ethnic’ culture that bolsters white privilege, different conceptual frames and analytical approaches are required to make sense of how people from more diverse and less elite backgrounds routinely engage with difference in their everyday lives.
Responding to this limitation, within the last decade scholarly attention has turned towards what social practices actually emerge when people live, work, shop and go to school with people from diverse backgrounds (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 2014). This analytical and methodological approach is variously termed ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (e.g. Harris 2013; Semi et al. 2009; Wise and Velayutham 2009; Stratton 1998), ‘ordinary’, ‘vernacular’, ‘working- class’ and ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ (e.g. Noble 2009b; Lamont and Aksartova 2002; Plage et al. 2016; Werbner 2006, 1999)6, ‘living multiculture’ (Neal et al. 2013), ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf 2013), ‘cosmopolitanisation’ (Beck 2008) and ‘conviviality’ (e.g. Gilroy 2004; Heil 2014; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). Described by Wise and Noble as “sensitising frames” (2016, 428), these
6 In Chapter 4, I discuss these distinctions in greater detail.
9 CHAPTER ONE analytical approaches and terms are unified in their focus on “an ethics of cohabitation in complex mileux [sic]” (Noble 2013, 166) to develop situated understandings of how people manage social change and confrontations with difference in multicultural places. Ethnographically oriented, place-based analysis across a diverse range of sites explores how co-existence in culturally diverse places may produce practices of “conviviality, of light-touch rubbing along, of competition for space, everyday racism and cross-cultural discomforts, of consumption, of inter-ethnic exchange and hybridity, encounter and hospitality” (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 2).
Sites under study include marketplaces in the USA and UK (Anderson 2011; Watson 2009), workplaces in Australia (Wise 2016) and neighbourhood relations in London (Wessendorf 2014), Singapore (Wise and Velayutham 2014), Senegal and Spain (Heil 2014). Youthful ways of managing change and diversity are largely explored in cities, towns and schools in the UK (Back 1996; Nayak 2004; Clayton 2012), Canada (de Finney 2010), America (Thomas 2011; Kromidas 2011a; Pollock 2004) and Australia (Harris 2009; Noble 2009b; Turner, Halse, and Sriprakash 2014). Multiethnic schools provide one valuable site through which to observe young people’s interactions in enforced proximity (Ho 2011).
In this thesis, I explore the diverse social practices and exchanges among students at Greendale High using this ‘everyday multiculturalism’ approach. The conceptual language I draw on to describe and critique how young people ‘get along’ is that of ‘conviviality’ and ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’. I employ conviviality as an expansive conceptual tool that emphasises “the capacity to live together” (Wise and Noble 2016, 423). Wise and Noble critique the use of ‘conviviality’ in academe as “shorthand for ‘happy togetherness’” instead of capturing the “practice, effort, negotiation and achievement” of living together (2016, 425; see also Noble 2009b). Akin to Plage et al.’s (2016) notion of ‘getting along’ discussed earlier, I employ ‘conviviality’ when referencing social relations with particularly positive affects as well as more precarious and pragmatic sociabilities. These varied possibilities were hinted at by Greendale students’
10 CHAPTER ONE definitions of ‘friendliness’ at school.7 By contrast, in this thesis I preference ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ – a form of conviviality – when I intend to specifically foreground students’ openness and willingness to engage with perceived differences (Plage et al. 2016; Noble 2009b), whether (inter)related to race, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, class or sexuality. In ‘everyday multiculturalism’ research, ‘racism’ and ‘conflict’ – typically positioned as oppositional to conviviality – are also key concepts used to analyse and describe everyday social exchanges. In a later section, I will explore scholarly understandings of racism and the guiding definition of racism I use in this thesis.
Having outlined the intellectual trajectory and scope of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ research, I now turn more specifically to studies of youth multiculture, otherwise termed ‘multicultural youth studies’. Scholars working at the overlapping intersections of youth studies and lived multiculture attend to the everyday dynamics of youth sociality to garner situated understandings of the complex and varied ways in which young people construct, destabilise and navigate difference – in ways that may unsettle normative, politically- endorsed modes of multicultural living. With its emphasis on youth perspectives where young people are positioned as agentic social actors (see Harris 2009), this body of research has contributed to the development of the questions now being asked about youth interculturality. In particular, questions are being raised about young people’s capacities to rework dynamics of power, inclusion and acceptable forms of racialisation as well as how to
7 As discussed elsewhere (Harris and Herron 2017), I also employ the term ‘sociality’ to complement an expansive framing of everyday multiculture (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016). Unlike the term ‘sociability’, sociality captures a broad range of habitual social interactions, not only social relations providing social support and pleasurable affects (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016; Neal et al. 2013). Furthermore, the concepts of conviviality, sociality and everyday cosmopolitanism are not only used to describe and analyse racialised interactions (see Padilla, Azevedo, and Olmos-Alcaraz 2014; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). Instead, they are able to capture the varying kinds of social differences that come to matter and are worked through in everyday social relations. The terms ‘mixing’ and ‘mixity’ are also commonly used in studies of lived multiculture to describe “the dynamics of associative ties and friendship formation across social and ethnic difference” (Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012, par. 3.6) in shared spaces of cultural diversity.
11 CHAPTER ONE account for the existence of both racist and more convivial, inclusive sociabilities in young lives.
Youth and Multiculture
Les Back’s (1996) ethnography of multicultural youth relations in 1990s London is a seminal text for situated understandings of how young people orient to one another in their local geographies. In the context of two multiethnic housing estates, Back (1996) explored how racism emerges among young people, including how they negotiate the rules of play for acceptable forms of racialisation. Racism among these young people was neither static nor uniform; targets of racism shifted as young people shared a space and “rework[ed] the terms of racial inclusion and exclusion” in varying ways (1996, 10). Whilst Vietnamese peers were subject to abuse and exclusion, white youth rendered local young black people ‘contingent insiders’ resulting in convivial affects and youthful expressions of cultural hybridity. As Back explains, “the uneven nature of common sense produces circumstances where the rejection of racism with regard to a particular racialised group can go hand in hand with the elaboration of hostility against other groups” (2004, 31). This ‘common sense’ for Back’s participants was informed by gendered, sexualised and racialised logics that structured youth sociabilities and hostilities.
These ethnographic insights highlight the contextual and ambivalent nature of youth relations and the need for sophisticated and situated approaches in theory and practice regarding racism, antiracism and social cohesion. Whilst Back (1996) empirically elaborates the complexities of lived multiculture for mainly black, white and Vietnamese peers in the context of 1990s London, what constitutes meaningful difference in shared spaces of cultural diversity and what boundaries are drawn regarding power and exclusion need continual interrogation across social and geographical contexts. According to Vertovec (2007), this is particularly pertinent in contemporary ‘super-diverse’ times. Decades on since Back’s detailed account of youth sociality, Vertovec suggests that ‘super-diversity’ may incite new configurations of prejudice as well as new
12 CHAPTER ONE cosmopolitan attitudes wrought by the “enlarged presence and everyday interaction of people from all over the world” (2007, 1046). Building on Back’s (1996) research, my ethnographic research provides a contemporary account of racialisation, racism and everyday cosmopolitanism and the dynamics of inclusion in an Australian context, with a focus on Greendale High peers from a diverse range of ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.
Whilst scholars in the UK and US have provided in-depth ethnographic analyses of race and racism among youth and in schools (e.g. Nayak 2004; Back 1996; Pollock 2004; Lewis 2003; Kromidas 2011b), in Australia there is a paucity of long-term ethnographic research about how secondary school aged youth navigate peer relations in multicultural places. To date, Australian researchers who focus on youth multiculture as well as youth conceptualisations of racism have employed interview and focus group methods (e.g. Grigg and Manderson 2015; McLeod and Yates 2003; Harris 2013).8 As noted earlier, in a place that sees itself as a successful multicultural city – the Australian capital of culture, cosmopolitanism, and ‘harmonious’ hyper-diversity (e.g. City of Melbourne 2017; Zable 2013) – Melbourne provides an interesting setting to consider young people’s engagements and experiments with multicultural living.
Both colonialism and sustained waves of migration from around the world have produced the high levels of multicultural mixity and associated complex social inequalities that characterise many of Melbourne’s inner and outer suburbs. As a result of growing gentrification and rising house prices in the inner city (see Wade 2015), the suburban fringes of Melbourne particularly bring together a diverse mix of people from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Anglo-Australians, migrant background Australians and newly arrived refugees. Consideration of these outer suburbs, like Greendale, raise particular questions about how young people manage “the local handling of rapid change” (Harris 2014, 573): what
8 There is, however, a small body of (largely short-term) ethnographic research in Australian primary schools (Noble 2009b, 2011; Rizvi 1993).
13 CHAPTER ONE social practices emerge among youth living on the periphery of a city that lauds multiculturalism and where an undercurrent of fear and concern attaches to working-class, ‘super-diverse’ communities? To date, there is insufficient in- depth understanding of how young people operate in and make sense of cultural diversity and racism in Australian localities where young people are closely involved in navigating complex constellations of and ideas about diversity. As we will discover in this thesis, attention to Greendale’s student world suggests new possibilities for understanding racism and the relationship between conviviality and racism that may have applicability in other national and international contexts.
Anita Harris’s (2013) interview and focus group based research provides a significant entry point to understanding how young people (re)configure and navigate convivial and conflictual social relations and modes of belonging in some of Australia’s most multicultural and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Canvassing a broad range of youth practices, relationships and social spaces, Harris (2013) illustrates how intercultural dating, political affiliations, music tastes, territorial and ethnicised loyalties and gendered pressures, to name a few, all constitute sites of either tension or more genial mixity in young lives. Providing a timely rejoinder to managerial approaches towards youth intercultural relations that champion ‘harmony’ and ‘cultural understanding’, her participants’ accounts reveal how both exclusionary behaviours and inclusive engagement with culturally diverse peers co-exist – and in ways that do not commonly cause long-lasting social rifts (2013; see also Harris and Herron 2017). For example, young people explained that territorialised fighting between racialised groups of young people could be “worked through and resolved over time within friendships and/or through an ethos of fellow- feeling” (Harris and Herron 2017, 296-97).
According to Harris, attention to youth practices through an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ approach is also able to “shed light on the processes by which white hegemony is contested in circumstances of super-diversity, and can offer
14 CHAPTER ONE glimpses of new national imaginaries” (2009, 203). Whilst her participants’ discussions allude to the decentring of whiteness in their orientations to diverse peers, how exactly young people’s social relations sustain and subvert the structures of power of white dominant Australian society has not been addressed in detail. Indeed, whilst Harris’s interview material illustrates the “messy work of negotiating diversity” from the viewpoints of young people living in multicultural communities (2013, 7), what is missing is a situated and elaborated account of the logics, relationships and contextual factors that inform and produce this ‘messiness’ in practice. To understand the place of racism in contemporary youth multiculture, Harris’s (2009, 2013) work points to important issues that require more detailed consideration. Do young people’s perspectives on peer relations match their practices? Who exactly is included and excluded in peer relations, and what contextual forces inform the emergence and nature of racism among peers? Under what conditions do young people reconfigure white hegemonic power relations – or what Hage (1998) calls the ‘White Nation fantasy’? What does this shift mean for ‘white’ students? And finally, how exactly do these transformative practices co-exist or reconcile with racist and conflictual exchanges?
Working towards an answer to these questions, my research offers in-depth ethnographic insights to enhance understanding of how young people negotiate multicultural peer sociality in situ within the confines of a school. In this chapter, I address two central debates and critiques pertinent to this research endeavour. Firstly, despite being decades and oceans apart, Back (1996) and Harris’s (2013) research both expose the co-presence of cosmopolitan attitudes and racist tensions in youthful social relations. Back (1996) terms these contrary compulsions of intercultural engagement and racism ‘the metropolitan paradox’. By way of example, Back explains that:
a city like London is both the stage for some of the most profound, and I would say beautiful, realisations of dialogue and radical multiculture; and yet, at the same time, it also provides an arena where brutal and enduring forms of racism take hold (2009, 205).
15 CHAPTER ONE
Whilst multiple studies, including Back’s and Harris’s work, bring to light these contradictory modes of relationality, in this thesis I ask whether these are necessarily conflicting forces in how young people orient to social life.
In doing so, I highlight the importance of attending closely to situated forms of racism. Thus, secondly, reviewing the literature on racism, I examine the ways in which youth mobilisations and understandings of ‘racism’ complicate scholarly approaches to racism. I call into question the utility of normative framings of ‘racism’ and ‘conflict’ for considering young people invested in a multicultural social space. As the following chapters will demonstrate, these framings fail to capture how ‘racism’ can operate precariously as part of convivial, inclusive and appropriate youth relations – within limits. Non- Indigenous students’ discussions about Aboriginal Australians when prompted by classroom curriculum proved a notable exception.
The Dynamics of Conviviality and Racism
How the seemingly “paradoxical impulses” (Back and Sinha 2016, 521) of racism/conflict and conviviality/cosmopolitanism operate in everyday life is receiving renewed attention (e.g. Back and Sinha 2016; Tyler 2016; Wessendorf 2016). Understanding these dynamics in multicultural places has taken on particular significance in the current global socio-political climate where discourse centres on diversity as a danger to social harmony and cohesion (Glick Schiller and Schmidt 2015). Other narratives preference celebratory diversity discourses, erasing issues of racism and power (Back and Sinha 2016; Ahmed 2012). Responding to these socio-political debates, research with adult and youth populations has revealed how conflict and racism are able to co-exist with acceptance of and openness towards others within a range of communities and social spaces (Wise 2005; Wessendorf 2014; Harris 2013; Clayton 2009). These findings unsettle foundational principles of the social cohesion agenda, providing evidence that conflict can exist in young lives without fracturing school communities and producing sensationalist, panicked and exclusionary
16 CHAPTER ONE outcomes (Noble 2009b; Harris 2013; Harris and Herron 2017; Clayton 2009). Valuably, research has further shown that young people ricochet between performances of both everyday cosmopolitanism and racism (Clayton 2009; Harris 2013). Scholars suggest these young people’s shifting performances are not simply contradictions, but are better explained in terms of competing dispositions, discourses and repertoires that are strategic and positional (Nayak 1999; Harris 2009, 2016a; see also Wise 2005). By positing that young people move back-and-forth between forms of everyday racism and more convivial relations, this body of research has been particularly significant in providing analysis that reckons with both openness and exclusion, moving beyond single framings that (inadvertently) represent young people in either a positive, progressive light or negative, racist light. Despite these theoretical advancements, current framings continue to draw on dichotomous concepts. Namely, racism – framed as a form of conflict – is diametrically opposed to conviviality.
Even the most recent attention to this ‘paradoxical’ relationship within (sub)urban multiculture reproduces this binary. Tyler, for instance, writes about “the close proximity of racist and convivial relations” in suburban Britain (2016, 6, my emphasis), while for Wessendorf modes of racism “exist in parallel” to more positive sociabilities in Hackney, London (2016, 460). Nayak writes of “conviviality and conflict com[ing] to form the major and minor chords of citizenship and national belonging” (2017, 291). Do these musical, geometric or pendulum-like metaphors adequately represent how young people make sense of and operate in a complex peer sociality? As the coming chapters develop, I suggest that expressions of racism and cosmopolitanism can, in fact, be entangled and co-produced in interactive ways that are more complex, productive and sophisticated than these binary constructions allow.
Whilst scholars reviewing these debates have noted the possibility of more ‘intertwined’ (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014) or ‘enmeshed’ (Wise and Noble 2016) articulations of conviviality and racism, according to Back and Sinha
17 CHAPTER ONE
(2016), these have not been elaborated empirically or with theoretical depth. This thesis explores and extends this conceptual terrain by illuminating the relationship between racism and conviviality within Greendale students’ social relations. By attending closely to these dynamics, the chapters of this thesis offer new conceptual access points to understanding the significance of cultural difference and ‘racism’ in youth sociality.
As Wise and Noble argue “what we need, perhaps, is a more nuanced account and terminology for the ways that issues of cultural (religious, racial) difference plays out in social settings” (2016, 427). Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between forms of conflict and openness, in this thesis I develop an alternative frame through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations; many of Greendale students’ social practices offer a situated illustration of how racism can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ in Chapter 4. In proposing a new conceptual tool for analysing youthful intercultural relations, I call attention to the risks involved in youth multiculture research which commonly assumes a racism- conviviality binary a priori. As I will show, to do so conceals the variable ways that racism and conviviality cross orbits, merge and split apart in peer relations and the logics that inform these divergent practices.
This conceptual critique compels engaged scrutiny of the conceptual terminology ‘racism’ and ‘conflict’ for understanding youth multiculture. ‘Racism’, as Greendale students’ disavowals signal, is a challenging concept to define. Much scholarly discussion of lived multiculture tends to inadequately address this issue. What constitutes ‘racism’ is largely not clarified, including whether this interpretative label is one imposed by the researcher or is used by research participants themselves (Bonilla-Silva 1997). McLeod and Yates (2003) identified this problem in their interview-based research with Australian high school students. They explain that neither researcher nor participant explained what they meant by being ‘racist’ yet both parties operated “as if there were a
18 CHAPTER ONE taken-for-granted criteria for determining racism” (2003, 34). Intriguingly, they note that whilst the term itself was presumed to have a shared meaning, students’ discourses revealed attempts to work out what were appropriate discourses, attitudes and practices regarding race and racism (McLeod and Yates 2003).
A lack of detailed articulation of racism in empirical research creates the impression of a common consensus between scholarly interpretations of racism with that of young people in their everyday social encounters. Yet, normative definitions on racism may not align with young people’s understandings and mobilisations of the concept. To comprehend youthful ways of living with difference, it is critical to closely attend to youth perspectives and their situated practices in order to, as Connolly argues (1998, 195), “more fully understand the nature of racism in their lives and develop and adopt more informed and appropriate strategies in order to counter it.” In the following section, I outline scholarly definitions of racism and the guiding characterisation of ‘normative’ racism used in this thesis. I then turn to considering the ways these normative frames are challenged by young people’s everyday practices and understandings of racism and ‘appropriate’ racialising exchanges.
Racism: Definitions and Developments
According to Omi and Winant, “there can be no timeless and absolute standard for what constitutes racism, for social structures change and discourses are subject to rearticulation” (2002, 135). This is most broadly exemplified by a shift from a belief in racial hierarchies of biological superiority (‘old racism’) to notions that there exist cultural differences that are fundamentally incompatible (‘new racism’). ‘New racism’ has various iterations including ‘cultural’, ‘modern’ and ‘neoliberal’ racism that centre on “justifications for keeping ourselves separate” which use coded language to avoid accusations of racism (Barker 2002, 81-2). As Wierviorka (1997) argues, this historical move from inferiorisation to exclusion is partial; contemporary expressions of racism
19 CHAPTER ONE may include both forms. Beyond these broad strokes characterisations of racism, scholars vary in their analytical and definitional emphases and criteria for what constitutes racism.
Reviewing the literature on racism, Berman and Paradies assert that racism variously comprises “stereotypes (racist beliefs), prejudice (racist emotions/affect) or discrimination (racist behaviours and practices)” (2010, 217). In another review, Grigg and Manderson propose that racism is broadly defined as “any cognition, affective state, or behaviour that advances the differential treatment of individuals or groups due to their racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious backgrounds” (2015, 196). Contemporary forms of racism are, thus, not restricted to solely phenotypic, biological ideas about ‘race’. Various individuals and groups may be subject to racism depending on social, political and ideological climates and contexts, with “language, religion, clothing or any other cultural project…used as racist signifiers” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005, 110). Scholarly definitions of racism also couple racism with social power, typically attributing expressions of racism to members of the dominant culture (see Berman and Paradies 2010). Anthias and Yuval-Davis moderate this position, clarifying that whilst it is possible for people from ethnic minority backgrounds to hold and act upon racist beliefs, racism is “about the ability to impose those beliefs or world-views as hegemonic, and as a basis for a denial of rights or equality” (2005, 11). Notwithstanding such variations, what these conceptualisations share is a particular concern with the outcome of racist discourses and practices rather than just the intentions of social actors.
Racism is further understood to manifest in a variety of forms, including interpersonal racism, institutional racism and everyday racism (Wieviorka 1997; Grigg and Manderson 2015; Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b). Whilst interpersonal racism refers to how individuals directly perpetuate racialised inequality through social interactions, institutional racism denotes the “cultural biases and forms of majority dominance which have become part of
20 CHAPTER ONE institutional structures, so that the apparently impartial application of general rules can in fact lead to discrimination of minorities” (Vasta 1996, 49). On the basis of interview research with black women in the Netherlands and USA, Essed (1991) developed the concept of ‘everyday racism’ to capture the daily, routine and covert experiences of incivility, marginalisation and discrimination these women described. Rather than concerning exceptional incidents, everyday racism refers to routine, ambiguous, and embedded forms of racialised treatment that can include joking and stereotyping (Essed 1991; Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b). According to Essed, these “systematic, recurrent, familiar practices” have “racist implications” and cumulative effects that fortify ethnic and racial boundaries, normalise and embed racist ideas and produce racialised inequalities (1991, 3 & 52). In the context of youth multiculture, ‘everyday racism’ is a particularly useful concept to prompt attention to the subtle and prosaic ways that racism might emerge in the daily flow of students’ social life (see Harris 2009).
With the objective of gaining a situated understanding of racialising ideas and practices among Greendale peers and of shedding light on why they made little mention of racism, this thesis requires a broad conceptual and analytical approach to ‘racism’. Encompassing prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination, the overarching scholarly definitions of racism canvassed here provide the breadth and flexibility required for the lines of inquiry I develop in this thesis. In the coming chapters I explore the extent to which these ‘top down’ characterisations of racist actions, discourses and effects align with how students understood, operationalised and experienced racialisation and racism in their day-to-day school life. As will emerge, the interpretative frictions and harmonies that arise through this analysis point towards new avenues for theorising racism, conviviality, inclusion and exclusion in multicultural youth culture.
A central limitation of scholarly theorisations of racism is that they mask the ways in which people may reformulate the meaning of racism within local
21 CHAPTER ONE geographies and social relationships. Judging young people’s social relations as ‘racist’ according to normative criteria may not align with youthful interpretations and logics in a given social world. Attention to empirical research on youth racism highlights some key areas in which young people’s ideas and social exchanges complicate conceptualisations of racism and approaches to studying racism in young lives.
Racism in Young Lives
Contrary to normative classifications of racism, in interviews and focus groups conducted by Grigg and Manderson (2015) with Australian high school students, students from diverse backgrounds downplayed the significance of racist humour. Students suggested there were ‘appropriate’ ways to make racist jokes. This was also the case among students from a range of different backgrounds in Bennett et al.’s (2016) and Winkler-Reid’s (2015) UK based research. In Winkler-Reid’s ethnographic study in a London high school, ironic and subversive racist joking between students could produce a “convivial sociality” (2015, 37). For young people in Back’s research, young people were sometimes able to negotiate ways to invoke racist jokes, taunts and stereotypes that countered “the widely held view that it was ‘out of order’ to use racism or bring colour into multi-racial peer interactions” (2004, 35). In contrast to ‘top- down’ concepts of racism, across these research studies young people commonly rendered intent as more significant than effect when working out whether or not something was racist (see also Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b).
This body of research not only illustrates young people’s capacity to transfigure the meaning and weight of racism, but also that this involves people from both majority and minority backgrounds. The latter finding unsettles academic definitions that tie racism to white power and privilege. Whilst racism and power cannot be divorced, multicultural youth studies scholars are concerned with how young people mobilise concepts of cultural difference and power in ways that that make sense in and of their social world. According to Nayak
22 CHAPTER ONE
(2004, 152), “the exercise of power is subject to context and situation, and can come to mean different things at different moments” (see also Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005). As Nayak (2004) discusses in the context of 1990s North- East England, notions of white power are complicated in working-class, post- industrial areas where white youth may feel a distinct lack of, or loss of, power. Building on Nayak’s work, in this thesis, I explore the dynamics of social class, whiteness, power and privilege in the Australian context, and in a much more culturally diverse locale, to gain a deeper understanding of how systems of power shaped the emergence of racialising social practices and students negotiations of peer sociality. Attention to the (de)valuation of (classed) whiteness in a multicultural peer culture highlights how hegemonic power structures might be complicated or transfigured in certain contexts that extend current accounts of youth interculturality and racism. Gender, sexuality and other social forces further impact and inflect how power, racism and conflict are mobilised and experienced as will be explored in the coming chapters (see Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005 on intersectionality). Indeed, as discussed earlier, in Back’s (1996) research the performance and experience of racism was vastly uneven, informed by a constellation of ideas about masculinity, sexuality and race.
Together, this body of research on youth practices and understandings of racism demonstrates that there is no singular form, experience or perspective about racism; youth engage with and are involved in a whole range of racialised ideas and practices. As such, ‘top down’ framings of ‘racism’ may not capture the nuances of racialisation within a given youth multiculture. They may also have little purchase in young lives when social relations are perceived very differently from prescriptive notions of the ‘appropriate’. Attention to these varied patterns of sociability provides a richer understanding of how racialisation and racism can function in young lives and why it might be disavowed. Importantly, these varied contextual meanings of ‘racism’ emphasise the need for flexible framings to capture the emergence and import
23 CHAPTER ONE of racism in young lives that the formal and managerial language of ‘racism’ might obscure or flatten.
Studying Racism Ethnographically
To ask young people directly about racialised practices in formal and informal interviews has significant limitations. My early fieldwork experiences quickly alerted me to the obstacle of language. According to Harris (2009), researching young people’s attitudes towards concepts like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘racism’ is problematic as young people seldom describe life using these formal, adult terms. In Winkler-Reid’s (2015) ethnographic research in a multiethnic London high school, students rarely used the term ‘racism’ outside of a joking frame. Nayak (1999) suggests this avoidance may, in part, be motivated by that fact that the language of racism may be highly stigmatised as it has entered teen lives through educational interventions with moral absolutes. Van Dijk (1987), researching race talk in the Netherlands, suggests a further possibility. He contends that people avoid the word ‘racism’ because they “have a different conceptual representation associated with words such as racism” (1987, 103, emphasis in original). In the Dutch context, he suggests that ‘racism’ narrowly denotes extremist, supremacist beliefs and activities. De Finney (2010) echoes this argument in the context of Canadian youth, asserting that narrow framings of racism as blatant and extreme hinder young women’s ability to label more complex and subtle racialising behaviours as racism.
In a complex peer sociality that does not match with common understandings of racism, and without a language to describe this complexity, young people may avoid using the word ‘racism’ (Harris 2009; Back 1996; Hewitt 1986). Indeed, a young migrant in Noble’s interview research described experiences of racism using “the language of discomfort” rather than ‘racism’ (2005, 110), whilst young migrant women in de Finney’s focus group research drew on “metaphors of visceral peripherality” to describe racist treatment (2010, 479). An expansive exploratory approach is, therefore, useful to understanding the place of racism in multicultural youth sociality. To a greater extent than
24 CHAPTER ONE interviews, ethnographic participant observation is able to “push beyond explicit use of relevant terms…to identify patterns of activities that reflect the relevance of gender, ethnicity, or class” (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995, 136) and their complex intersections. Ethnographic observation can be attentive to complex, creative and uneven racialising practices, logics and experiences that are embedded and “come alive in repetitive acts, embodied and corporeal activities” (Nayak 2007, 743) within everyday sociality. In the case of young people, according to Harris, this means paying attention to “how they dress, hold their bodies, speak, take up space, flirt, fight and fantasise in intercultural contexts” (2009, 194). Whilst Harris’s research touches on this through interviews and focus groups, my research addresses this through sustained multisensorial and immersive ethnographic methods. Building on the ethnographic work of Nayak (2004) and Back (1996), I apply ethnographic methods and pursue similar questions about lived multiculture in much more diverse locales than their fieldsites to contribute conceptual critiques and tools for understanding young multiculture in contemporary, ‘super-diverse’ times.
It is through taking seriously the ways young people orient to their social world at school that we can come to understand the contextual meaning and mobilisation of racism and conviviality in a multicultural place and how racialisation with racist connotations might exist within a social setting where racism is denied or downplayed. Ethnographic attention to the intricate relationship between racism and conviviality, the ways in which young people defined racism, configured power and cultural cachet, and how they made cultural difference matter (or not) in their everyday social world offers new insights into these disavowals or silences. Capturing such complexity and diversity of student voices and experiences does not lend itself to revised ‘prescriptive’ definitions of racism or evaluative normative criteria for assessing racism. This thesis does not conclusively identify what is and is not racist or appropriate for how young people navigate multicultural school life; indeed it underscores the difficulties of such interpretations. Instead, I illuminate the need to expand the range of conceptual resources and terms available in
25 CHAPTER ONE multicultural youth studies to capture the sophisticated, diverse practices and logics of culturally diverse youth sociality. Namely, in the chapters to come, I develop the notion of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’. This concept makes visible and aids interrogation of the complex, uneven forms of racialisation that were often intricately linked with a cosmopolitan ethos, intimate knowledge of culturally diverse peers and investments in intercultural mixity. ‘Perverse cosmopolitanism’ facilitates analysis of how these racialising logics and behaviours operate within and are shaped by an environment structured by youth codes and hierarchies regarding ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality.
Racialisation Unravelled: Thesis Overview
In the following chapter, Chapter 2, I discuss my research methods and the methodological issues that arose in studying a culturally diverse peer sociality. That chapter canvasses my experiences of returning to high school, what the fieldwork involved and the impact of my subjectivities and positionalities on the data I collected. Building on from the discussions of ethnographic methods in this current chapter, I further illuminate the value of immersive ethnographic methods from an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ perspective in uncovering patterns of sociality in all their complexity. In a social world where the term ‘racism’ was elusive and the import of racism and cultural difference downplayed, long-term ethnographic observation and participation enabled the flexibility and extensive attentiveness necessary to tease out, critique and represent the complex and ambivalent social relations I encountered and cacophony of diverse student voices I heard explain this social world. I also discuss the methodological challenges and limitations involved in collecting data on racism, how I responded when racist (and other problematic behaviour) occurred and other ethical issues raised by immersive ethnography in a high school. Issues of representation during the writing process and the production of ethnographic knowledge are also detailed.
26 CHAPTER ONE
Having outlined the ethnographer’s perspective on fieldwork and the process of data analysis and writing, in Chapter 3 I turn to outlining the students’ own ‘lay of the land’ – how they described student life to me. Chapter 3 provides an important overview of many of the patterns of sociality I discuss throughout this thesis, including the ethno-racial labels ascribed to peers and peer groups and the spatialisation and racialisation of the schoolyard. I show how ethnicity and race was a key organising force in schoolyard life, which mirrored racial divisions in wider society. Comparing students’ diverse perspectives about schoolyard life, I explore the qualities of socio-spatial configurations, questioning whether they reveal racialised frictions and systemic structural cleavages or are crosscut and attenuated by investments in intercultural mixity. As I will illustrate, ethno-racial categorisation practices existed without overt conflict as part of an overriding ‘ethos of mixing’ (Wessendorf 2013) or ‘indifference to difference’ (see van Leeuwen 2010). This exposition spotlights important foundational principles of student social life that subsequent chapters develop in greater detail.
Chapter 4 considers how racialisation emerged within talk about sex, one of the most common conversation topics in the schoolyard. Race and ethnicity were cornerstones of students’ regular discussions about sex, dating and desire. In the first half of this chapter, I critically examine the racial logics that appeared to inform students’ sexualised discussions. Initial analysis reveals pervasive ideas about race, sexuality and gender that have engrained racist histories. Yet, this does not accord with how the students I encountered understood their social world; as we will encounter, these students rejected the idea that racism was an issue at their school and, in fact, claimed that sexual intimacy across racialised borders marked the end of racism. By taking Greendale students’ perspectives seriously, in the second half of this chapter I question whether standard readings of students’ behaviour as racist capture the complexity of young people’s racialised practices and logics, which were based on inclusive orientations to and intimate investments in cultural diversity. I propose ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’, as an alternative frame to capture the capacity for
27 CHAPTER ONE racism to be enmeshed within convivial social relations and to emphasise how ‘top-down’ concepts of racism may, thus, have little purchase in how these students orient to their social world.
Chapter 5 deepens this exploration of how ‘racism’ functions among students, including as a form of perverse cosmopolitanism. By tracing the use of the word ‘racism’ among peers, I review students’ typical definitions of racism. A diverse range of ethnographic vignettes illustrate how students’ understandings of racism, corresponding with those endorsed by the teachers, were narrow in scope and contrast strongly with the complex ways in which peers performed and experienced racialisation among friends in the schoolyard. Spotlighting the dynamics between two friendship groups, this chapter explores the capacity for racialisation with racist tenors to be precariously inclusive, motivated by a cosmopolitan ethos, and intended to subvert popular racism and colour-blind censorship. This discussion highlights how students’ practices and experiences of racism challenge and extend current theorisations of racism, and elucidates why young people might, in this social context, deny or understate the existence or impact of racism.
Together Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 evince how racism and conviviality can be intricately linked in sophisticated, subversive and inclusive ways. Developing this argument further, Chapter 6 critically examines what conflict entails at Greendale High. Through a broader consideration of student sociality beyond moments of racialisation, this chapter offers a more complex understanding of the significance of cultural difference and racism in students’ lives. Rather than conflict centring on cultural difference, pressures of gender and heterosexual politics were key to understanding the lines along which students reckoned with and fought amongst each other. Through an analysis of ethnographic vignettes relating to gender, sexuality, social class and students’ other life struggles, this chapter illustrates the ways in which performances, experiences and reactions to racism were deeply influenced by intersectional social forces. The chapter further considers how whiteness and racial privilege functions
28 CHAPTER ONE within this multicultural, working-class school space. As we will see, shared meanings of whiteness as boring, unclassy, uncool and racist among the diverse student body trouble standard understandings of white power. This helps shed light on what drives some white students’ modes of relationality at Greendale and their rejections of any implications in racist behaviour or wider systems of power.
Chapters 3 to 6 together illuminate a youth sociality that deals creatively and subversively with the possibilities and tensions of living with cultural difference, inflected by class stigma and restrictive sexual and gender hegemonic codes. Chapter 7 is a point of departure from this empirical argumentation. At times during the year when classroom discussion turned to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, this complexity often disappeared and hostile racist attitudes emerged that closely resembled theorisations of conflict and racism of the literature. I explore the potential reasons why the binary of conviviality and racism surfaced in this context, and the possible significance of this for understanding youth codes of inclusion and exclusion in a culturally diverse space. The ability for convivial relations to be scaled up to unknown peers and racialised Others beyond the school gates is explored. In Chapter 8, I reflect on the relationship between all these chapters and highlight the implications of these complex dynamics of sociality for racism and antiracism in theory and practice, and point to avenues for future research.
A More Youthful Introduction
This thesis is not quite, perhaps, the story these students envisioned me telling. These young people wanted me to tell a story about something much more interesting than cultural diversity and racism. They wanted an exposé on ‘the truth in youth’, about what it’s like to be young and grappling with drugs, sex and homework stress, of burgeoning or impinged freedoms, and intense friendships and friendship fallouts, vulnerability, gossip and boredom, of money making schemes, of family and Facebook dramas, and dating
29 CHAPTER ONE
(mis)adventures, and sometimes of the stigma of going to a ‘shithole’ school and living in a ‘shithole’ place. Yet, by talking about racism we must inevitably talk about these wider experiences and contexts to understand how, why and when performances and experiences of racialisation become salient, contextualised and inflected with “counter-balancing or cross-cutting effects” (Winkler-Reid 2015, 29). By tracing how young people navigate and negotiate race and everyday racism in the daily flow of school life, these all come to bear.
The students who grace the pages of this thesis shared stories with me multiple times a week over 12 months of fieldwork, in the form of peer group conversations in the schoolyard, in the back of classrooms, in creative poems, in heartfelt letters, in Facebook messages and in impromptu heart-to-hearts in the school corridors. Privy to their creative avenues of expression and immersed in their fast-paced conversational world, I was inspired to write a spoken word poem as an alternative introduction to this thesis – one that Greendale students would appreciate. I have reproduced the poem for this thesis in video format. On the following page, Figure 1 shows a freeze frame from the video and includes a hyperlink to take the reader to the two-minute video.9 My spoken word poem sprang from a desire to succinctly capture the quick-paced dynamism, emotional timbre and breadth of entangled social issues and practices I observed, listened to and viscerally experienced during my fieldwork at Greendale High. It sprang from my desire to represent young people beyond the reifying terms of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘racism’ where cultural difference is always foregrounded. It also sprang from my desire to represent young people in a way that they recognised, drawing on the lexicon and social issues of peer sociality in a peer culture that eschewed discussion of cultural diversity or racism as remarkable or problematic parts of their social world. This is the result:
9 The written transcript of this poem and a brief explanation of ‘spoken word’ poetry are included in the Appendix (pp. 290-291).
30 CHAPTER ONE
Figure 1: Freeze Frame from Spoken Word Video
HYPERLINK TO PRIVATE VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/223278578
Password: TTIY280617
Interspersed with Greendale students’ experiences and ways of talking about school life, this spoken word poem gives voice to my own experiences, curiosities and motivations as a researcher. It alludes to my struggles as an ethnographer learning how to immerse myself in an Australian high school – an experience I hadn’t faced since my own high school years a decade earlier. The following chapter, Chapter 2, attends to these and other weighty issues that shaped my ethnographic practice in the field and during the writing process.
31 CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO Going Back to High School: Research Methods
The spoken word poem in Chapter 1 evoked the affects, intensities and rhythms characteristic of my fieldwork experience at Greendale High. This chapter deepens and extends this introduction to fieldwork with young people in a school environment. It elaborates chronologically on what specifically was involved in conducting the research and the making of this thesis. Firstly, I detail how I came to embark on fieldwork at Greendale High and the value that ethnographic methods offer in studying a culturally diverse high school sociality. Secondly, I consider the ‘doing’ of ethnography at a high school. From the moment I entered the school gates, I faced challenges related to rapport building with students and navigating moral and ethical issues raised by immersive participant observation with young people and about issues of racism. I also critically reflect on how my particular fieldwork approach and sensitivities developed as I continued to learn about Greendale student life and how my experiences were informed by my positionality. Thirdly, I discuss the analytical and writing process of this study; upon leaving the field, representing Greendale’s social world through writing raised another set of challenges and choices.
Getting Ready for School: Finding a Fieldsite
To study young people’s routine social relations with peers from different backgrounds necessitated selecting a school with a multicultural student populace. Not all schools are, as Amin might describe them, “natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Amin 2002, 967, as quoted in Ho 2011, 604). Having visited a number of secondary schools whilst working as a research assistant on a Melbourne-based ARC project (see Chapter 1) I was familiar with a range of schools that may have been interested in hosting me in the following year as a PhD researcher. Of these schools, only a small number had a student body from a wide range of ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds.
32 CHAPTER TWO
According to Ho’s (2011) analysis of statistics on secondary schools in Sydney, Australia, the level of cultural diversity varies greatly between government- funded, religious and private schools. Whilst government-funded schools (often called ‘public schools’ in Australia) were found to have the highest levels of diversity across the sector, gentrification and ‘white flight’10 have also divided public schools by both affluence and ethnicity (Ho 2011; Ho, Vincent, and Butler 2015).
Greendale High was one of a few schools participating in the ARC research project that was government-funded and where, additionally, the student body represented the richly diverse profile of the surrounding suburbs. Greendale High, a large, co-educational school, was attended by a mix of Aboriginal and Anglo-Australians, first- and second generation Australians, along with recently arrived migrants and refugees. Approximately half the students had a language background other than English, with over 40 language groups represented, including English, Spanish, Russian, Bosnian, Dari, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Khmer, Mandarin, Somali, Maori and Tongan. The senior college – comprising year 10 to 12 students (approximately 16-19 years old) – had its own campus (which became the focus of my fieldwork).
Greendale High had a large catchment zone, encompassing many historically working-class neighbourhoods. Despite pockets of affluence in the region, this public school drew only students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. As noted in the previous chapter, the Greendale area was in one of Melbourne’s ‘growth corridors’, so called due to the rapidly increasing number of residents, many arriving from other parts of the world. Greendale High School and its catchment area may thus be described, in the words of Gilroy, as a place where the “processes of cohabitation and interaction…have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life” (2004, xi).
10 ‘White flight’ describes the exodus of white families from multicultural schools and suburbs.
33 CHAPTER TWO
Suburban growth areas, like Greendale, are more regularly scrutinised regarding concerns about cultural diversity, population growth and social cohesion. By situating my research at Greendale High, I hoped to be able to inform socio-political debates about social cohesion and racism for young people at the coalface of contemporary multicultural living. Did students’ practices called for antiracist intervention, as the media might suggest (see Chapter 1), or were students working out ways to deal with difference more productively – in ways that unsettled current understandings of racism and conviviality?
When I approached the school leadership team to gauge their interest in having me return to conduct participant observation at Greendale for my PhD, the school principal initially did not seem overly enthused by the topic of my research. Sitting around an overly large laminate table for just the two of us, the principal’s voice remained flat and administrative when I discussed cultural diversity in terms of classroom practices. When I mentioned my interest in also observing students in the schoolyard, however, the atmosphere changed with a sharp inhale and animated exhale. The principal launched into animated stories of how fascinating the schoolyard was, how it is divided up into ethnic groups and how students have all sorts of racialised names for each other. ‘Fobs’ and ‘wogs’ I was told, and ‘Sudos’ as well. This was a foreign language for me too, aside from ‘wog’ which is well-known Australian insult-cum- reappropriated slang for Southern European migrants. The principal recounted feeling aghast during a recent school talent show when the student MC announced by way of introduction: “next up is two Arabs and a Turk.” After an initial reaction of “you can’t say that!” – and then a moment of wondering: “which one is the Turk?” – the principal realised that the students were far better at telling each other apart. Equally surprising for the principal was when a young woman, born in Slovenia, related that she would turn up to class if there were more ‘fob’ boys to look at, describing their shapely lips and thick, muscular legs. These were not the qualities the principal expected to hear listed.
34 CHAPTER TWO
Buoyed by these stories, I embarked on my fieldwork journey at Greendale High in early 2014. I did not it know then, but the racialised, gendered and sexualising practices the principal was so intrigued by were reiterated daily in the schoolyard and were central to understanding racism and conviviality in a culturally diverse space, as the chapters in this thesis will explore. This early interaction reinforced the proto-questions I had for fieldwork at Greendale High. Namely, how and when does cultural difference come to matter in everyday peer relations in a shared space, and what is its significance for getting along? The principal was the first of many staff members over the course of my fieldwork to express curiosity about the complex and contradictory racialised patterns of sociality in the schoolyard they observed everyday. With long-term, immersive ethnography, I hoped to shed light on some of these professedly mystifying practices.
Ethnographic methods with an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ lens facilitate the openness and flexibility required to capture the varied dynamics and habitual patterns of lived multiculture. As Semi and colleagues explain:
everyday multiculturalism puts forward a specific methodological approach: a preference for listening and direct observation, devoting attention to the meaning attributed by the actors to their practices and situations, a preference for intensive analysis of specific cases and attention to the dynamics of relations (2009, 73).
In the case of youth multiculture, such a flexible approach does not presume the significance of cultural difference in young lives and it need not prescribe the language used to describe young people’s experiences. Instead, it cultivates ethnographic sensitivity to everyday encounters and contexts “where difference becomes a resource in defining the situation, regulating relations and defining social hierarchies, with the awareness that it is something unstable, in constant evolution, and always open to question” (Semi et al. 2009, 68-9). Ethnographic fieldwork and analysis with this kind of attentiveness would allow me to
35 CHAPTER TWO critically investigate the extent to which racism inflected and disrupted young people’s social relations and in ways that engaged with youth perspectives.
Place-based ethnography over an extended period of time is further valuable for understanding the contextual structures and factors that encourage, constrain and inflect students’ social relations. As Valentine and Sporton (2009) highlight, whilst young people might theoretically be able to perform multiple and fluid identities, the places where they live, work and go to school are embedded with power relations, spatial and social orders and hegemonic cultures which restrict how they can act. My research focuses on school-based and school-related peer relations. As with many other urban ethnographers (e.g. Anderson 2011; Duneier 1992; see also Duneier, Kasinitz, and Murphy 2014), particularly those studying race relations, my ethnographic inquiry centres on particular places where people gather together; it does not attempt to capture participants’ entire social worlds.
With a focus on high school sociality, this thesis is only able to comment in- depth on students’ interactions and experiences within the school boundaries, at school events and at two cafes in walking distance to the school – KFC and the local shisha cafe.11 Students also talked about events in my presence that happened outside of these spheres and outside of my purview that contribute with necessary caution to my analysis in the coming chapters. The content of these second-hand stories also raises some additional questions for future research. On a few occasions, I draw on the interactions I had with some students over Facebook. The limitations of my research scope and the implications of this for my analysis will be elaborated later in this chapter. In the following section, I explore the process of conducting ethnographic fieldwork at Greendale High.
Before doing so, it is important to briefly outline what I mean by ‘ethnography’. ‘Ethnography’ can signify multiple methods (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995)
11 Shisha refers to a waterpipe filled with flavoured tobacco.
36 CHAPTER TWO and may be operationalised in varying ways, informed by different disciplinary traditions and theoretical concerns. This may increasingly be the case as disciplines like sociology take greater interest in what has been a long-standing anthropological enterprise (Duneier, Kasinitz, and Murphy 2014; Pink 2009; Delamont and Atkinson 1980). For the purposes of this thesis, I refer to ethnography as a text that emerges from extensive field-based research and the generation of fieldnotes based on immersive participant observation. Ethnography is a text that presents an intersubjective account and analysis of this fieldwork material and experience.
The New Kid on The Block: Learning to Fit In
By week three of my fieldwork – term 1, 2014 – I was losing heart. I had not yet had a conversation with any students outside of the classroom. Even my classroom interactions were infrequent and always brief; students seemed to act indifferently to my presence. Lingering self-consciously at the side of the schoolyard multiple lunchtimes on end, I asked myself: ‘why did I think this was a good idea? These students are never going to let me into their social circles.’ My own memories flooded back as I watched the cliques of 16 to 19 year-olds across the schoolyard; vivid memories were brought alive again by the rapid beating of my heart; of the courage needed to face up to a group of students and of attempts to impress, of desires to fit in and gain acceptance. At least ten years their senior, fitting in seemed a formidable task. I tried to channel the advice I had been given from fellow school ethnographers – be warm and enthusiastic, but don’t try too hard. The teachers were easy to build rapport with, often expressing enthusiasm for having what they thought of as an ally in the classroom and around the school. The students proved much more difficult. “Who here thinks Mel is a student teacher? Hands up!” asked a teacher by way of introducing me in class one day. The classroom was awash with dangling arms. Wandering around the schoolyard without a school uniform but a nervous and youthful face, my only possible role could be that of a student teacher.
37 CHAPTER TWO
Complying with ethics requirements also made it difficult to escape the persona of an authoritative, professional adult. My PhD study received ethics approval from The University of Melbourne Ethics Committee (#1339536 & 1443150) and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (#2013_001878). In order to inform staff and students of my researcher role, in the first weeks of the school year I introduced myself and my project interests at assemblies and staff meetings, in classrooms and around the school grounds. I also distributed printed flyers about my research and the school publicised my research on electronic billboards around the school. Students whose classrooms I attended regularly signed consent forms (as did their parents for students under 18 years old). As I developed networks with peer groups outside of the classroom, I again distributed Plain Language Statements and consent forms for students to take home to read and decide whether to participate. Over the course of the year, I also got to know some of the parents of students with whom I had become most friendly. A few families invited me to their homes for dinner and I gained parental permission to socialise with their children on occasions outside of the school, like at the shisha café.
For my first forays into introducing myself, the research project and ethics procedures across school classrooms, I dressed and spoke in ways that I thought teachers – my gatekeepers – would expect of me; I was sensitive to maintaining an image of professional integrity. This extended to how I behaved on an everyday basis during class. I sat in class upright in my chair listening dutifully to the teacher. The stiff and nervous way I held my body further exposed my ‘outsider’ status in a youthful social world. I also tried to engage with students ‘on their level’ by making pop-culture references, which I quickly learnt did not match with 17-year old pop-culture. I asked students questions about what they were studying, cringing inside as I realised I probably sounded like a parent. I exuded vulnerability emanating from “the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it” (Behar 1996, 3). Something had to change. As Madden has said of ethnographic fieldwork, “the
38 CHAPTER TWO early days of acquiring bodily competence can be humiliating and/or humorous, but are always steeped in learning” (2010, 83).
Building on Mandell’s (1998) concept of ‘least-adult’, Pascoe describes her strategy of minimising social distance from high school students by acting as “an adult but not too much older than them, more of a mediator between the adult world and their world” (2007, 178). The way she dressed and moved her body was central to creating a ‘least-gendered’ identity in the context of her research on masculinity (Pascoe 2007). To move towards a ‘least-adult’ identity in the Greendale High context, I purposefully started to slouch and fidget more in class, and swore more outside of class. I wore more comfortable clothes; jeans, a t-shirt (or hoodie) and Converse or Nike high-top sneakers became my uniform. I stopped trying to impress and started to make fun of myself and others in humorous repartee. My ability to roll with students testing me, and in fact ‘one up’ them awarded me the label of “cool” and “funny” in some of these interactions (cf. Pascoe 2007). During the school day, I also made sure to side myself with the students more than with the teachers. Simple acts of whispering during class, hanging out with the smokers, or being told off by a substitute teacher mistaking me as a student helped secure my acceptance amongst the students.12 It was a steep and exhausting learning curve. I return to the complexities involved in navigating research relationships with students (and teachers) following a detailed discussion of the overall fieldwork process.
12 Aside from substitute teachers, the permanent teaching staff was aware of my research focus and seemed supportive of my approach to immersing myself in the student world. Only one classroom teacher expressed sentiments that indicated discomfort with my burgeoning relationships with students, telling me on a number of occasions: “they only like you because you’re novel.” I often visited the staffroom and lingered after class to discuss my research with teachers and to regularly check that they were happy to have me in their classes. Some teachers sought me out to tell me about incidents in their classrooms or to give me their perspectives on wider issues they saw as relevant to my research. Due to my focus on peer sociality in this thesis, teachers’ viewpoints and practices form only a peripheral aspect of my ethnographic analysis.
39 CHAPTER TWO
Typical School Days: ‘Doing Ethnography’ at High School
Field research and participant observation are defining features of ethnography (Geertz 1998; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). As Emerson, Fretz and Shaw describe it, “ethnographers are committed to going out and getting close to the activities and everyday experiences of other people” and in doing so they seek “a deeper immersion in others’ worlds in order to grasp what they experience as meaningful and important” (1995, 1-2, emphasis in original). Over 12 months during school terms in 2014, I spent approximately four days per week at Greendale High. Every morning I would make the thirty to forty-five minute drive from the inner suburbs of Melbourne, where I lived, to Greendale High. I usually arrived at school just before the school bell rang at 8.30am in the morning and left school 8 hours later, after milling around with students at the bus stop after the final bell and chatting with teachers as they worked overtime in their offices preparing for the next day’s classes. I also visited Greendale on an ad hoc basis in Term 1 and 2 in 2015 to maintain my rapport with students, the school leadership team and to attend important annual school events.
During the school day, I was constantly interacting. If I wasn’t chatting with students in the schoolyard, I was sitting up the back of classrooms (and usually called on to participate), sitting cross-legged on the gym floor with students at assemblies or talking to the teaching and administration staff. My school day typically involved attending classes, hanging out with students skipping class and in different parts of the schoolyard during recess and lunch breaks. As I noted earlier, I sometimes tagged along to KFC at lunchtime and I regularly hung out with a few of the students at a shisha café after school. I also went to school events like dances, award nights, and parent-teacher interviews.
In the first school term of my fieldwork I dedicated a significant proportion of my time to regularly attending particular humanities classes. I hoped those classrooms would provide a place for me to build research relationships with
40 CHAPTER TWO students as well as to observe how they interacted with each other and spoke about issues of identity, belonging and racism when prompted by class curriculum. Over time I found that classrooms almost always provided the least fruitful place for ethnographic observation of student’s orientations towards cultural diversity at Greendale (an exception to this is discussed in Chapter 7). Due to the class sizes, multiple learning difficulties, and the demands of the curriculum, there was little time for student discussion. Teachers spent their time teaching the class content and then rushing around the room trying to answer individual students’ questions. Subsequently, I shifted from dedicating my time to regularly attending English, history and sociology classes to focusing more on a number of students and following them to whichever class they were going to next. Alternatively, when they went to class I found people who were enjoying spare periods (or ditching class) and spent time with them.
I did not get to know every student or peer group at Greendale. This thesis provides a ‘snapshot’ of social practices, experiences and patterns of sociability at school amongst a number of young people willing to let me into their lives (cf. Harris 2013, 13). With a focus on understanding how racialised cultural differences came to matter in student life, students who I spent time with but did not participate much in racialising discourses and practices do not feature in this thesis. The following diagram (Figure 2) illustrates the students who take centre stage in this thesis and indicates where they socialised during school breaks. The diagram depicts the main social spaces of the school and does not include students mentioned in only one chapter in this thesis.13 The significance of where students hang out in the schoolyard will be made clear in the following chapter. As Chapter 3 also illustrates, year level was one salient category students invoked to identify and organise themselves and each other. Whilst I refer to students’ year levels in this thesis, I do so as a means to
13 In Figure 2 ‘& Co.’ denotes ‘and company’ to indicate that other peers not listed in the diagram were part of their friendship group. The ‘Student Roll Call’ (pages xi-xii) provides a list of these students with brief character descriptions, including noting their cultural heritage. I also note students’ ethnicities when I first introduce them in ethnographic discussion and I reiterate them on a few occasions throughout the thesis when students’ cultural backgrounds are particularly relevant to my analysis.
41 CHAPTER TWO distinguish students and give a sense of their distinct friendship circles, not as a factor to analyse their attitudes, practices and experiences in regards to age and maturity.
Figure 2: Select Research Participants in Greendale High Social Spaces
Writing Fieldnotes
Along with participant observation, writing fieldnotes is another key aspect of ethnographic research (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Sanjek 1990; Madden 2010). Madden (2010) distinguishes between two types of interrelated fieldnotes: the jottings taken in the midst of participating in the field and the elaborated accounts written later, typically at day’s end. These handwritten and typed fieldnotes, combined with other audio, photographic or archival materials, encompass the primary data that ethnographers then code, analyse and use to produce a rich textual account of a particular group of people or social world (Madden 2010). This process involves
42 CHAPTER TWO reflexive awareness of how researchers’ positionality and their selection of what to write about a given phenomena influences the fieldnotes they write, the interpretations they draw and the texts they produce (Kouritzin 2002).
The data in my thesis comprises detailed fieldnotes that I scribbled during school hours and ‘wrote up’ at night. Engrossed as a participant in school life, I rarely had a chance to write notes in the heat of the moment, but regularly stole a chance to sneak away to the toilets, the staffroom or an empty corner of the yard to write down the day’s events. Scrawled onto a notepad that I kept on me during the school day, my fieldnotes attempted to be as faithful as possible to students’ conversations as they were the nexus of everyday sociability. I became skilful at memorising quotes in my head and regurgitating long streams of dialogue onto the page as soon as I had a chance. Thus, whilst the ethnographic vignettes in this thesis are largely reconstructed from memory, I am confident that they closely reflect students’ exchanges and have captured the essence of the dialogue, body language and atmosphere that I witnessed in these interactions.
Whispering in class, gossiping at lunchtime, chatting at the bus stop, silence was a rarity. After those first few weeks of learning to fit in, my attempts to sit back quietly and observe students interactions, the landscape and the ways bodies moved through space were usually cut short. Moments of solitude were quickly noted by students who interrogated me about what I was doing, or used this opportunity to sit next to me and slowly open up about difficulties they were facing. Classrooms provided some of the only spaces where I was able to take notes without (as much) interruption. Confused by my constant scribbling during class one day, a couple of students asked me what I wrote down. “Everything,” I said. “Really?” one boy asked, highly doubtful, “did you write about the girl who just stormed out of class?” I pushed my notepad along the table so he and his classmates could check. “Yep,” his friend declared, “it’s all right there. It says ‘girl walks out of class’.”
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Each afternoon after school I drove back to the city to sit down at my desk and write up my field jottings from the day. In addition to expanding on events of the day, later in my fieldwork my evenings were often spent responding to Facebook and text messages from students. After a student told me “you look 20 but you’re actually 100” when he found out I didn’t use a particular social media platform, and after constant requests by students to add them on Facebook, I set up a new account (see Baker 2013 for discussion of social media ethnography; Postill and Pink 2012).14 As the following chapters illustrate, students at school often talked about conversations that had taken place on Facebook Messenger, which is similar to private email correspondence. In Chapter 6 I discuss a conversation I was involved in with a few students on Facebook Messenger. By staying in contact with students on Facebook and via text message after school, on the weekends and during the school holidays, I emphasised my social proximity to these students despite my physical distance.
With a broad understanding of the fieldwork process and particular scope of this ethnography, I now turn to considering my fieldwork practice related more specifically to the study of the significance of cultural diversity and racism to peer relations.
Asking after Racism: My Fieldwork Sensitivities and Approach
As noted in Chapter 1, I quickly learnt to stop using the words ‘cultural diversity’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘racism’ when talking to young people. Whilst students were aware this was my research focus, direct conversation about these topics did not spark much response. Instead, I began to frame my research more broadly, expressing curiosity about “life at Greendale High”. So as not to impose my own terminology on Greendale students, or dictate what was salient and meaningful in student life, I also made a purposeful decision to allow the students to drive the conversation. This mirrors strategies employed
14 I did not simply add students to my personal Facebook account as I often use Facebook to post and discuss feminist and antiracist articles with my friends, and I wanted to minimise how this might influence my burgeoning research relationships.
44 CHAPTER TWO by other scholars studying race in schools (Pollock 2004; Bucholtz 2011a). As Harris points out, “to enquire into the [intercultural] mix is to make their routine social experience of diversity exotic, potentially problematic and an object of surveillance and management” (2013, 42). I resolved to only ask about cultural diversity and racism if students explicitly brought them up. This strategy allowed to me gain insight into what was most relevant to young people at any given time, what language they themselves used to describe their social world, and was respectful of what they wished to share.
This approach was particularly important given the critiques by scholars discussed in Chapter 1 that the language of ‘racism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is formal language not necessarily used by young people to describe their everyday experiences (e.g. Harris 2009). Moving beyond assumptions of shared meaning about ‘racism’ and what is appropriate, ethnography is able to illuminate the local contextual production of racialised practices and discourses. Unlike formal interview methods, long-term ethnography also enables understandings of an individual's utterances or actions in one context to be situated in understandings of their conduct in a broader set of contexts from their lives (Zaharlick 1992). According the Bucholtz, the sensitivity afforded by ethnographic methods is particularly valuable for interrogating labels like ‘racist’ as it does not simply “dismiss[s] speakers as ‘racists’ without seeking to make sense of their viewpoints” (2011a, 400).
Whilst this is a key strength offered by ethnography for studying youth multiculture, following such an open approach had some drawbacks. I was limited in my ability to directly explore students’ views about whether or not something was racist, and I was not able to explore in great detail the impact of racialising comments on students’ wellbeing; as we will encounter, students almost never talked about experiences of racism or marked their friends’ comments as ‘racist’. Despite these interpretive dilemmas, I chose not to seek clarification about racism among students. The reasons for this decision
45 CHAPTER TWO illuminate some of the difficulties of conducting ethnographic research about a culturally diverse youth sociality.
When written down and crafted into a coherent narrative for the purposes of scholarly inquiry, incidents of everyday racialisation or racism between students appear deceptively easy to recognise and scrutinise. In the field, however, these incidents were fleeting in amongst other quick-paced conversations. As I have described, during the school day I was preoccupied with frantically capturing a lot of fast-paced, wildly tangential conversations in my notebook. It was often only when I got home each night and began to untangle the day’s events through the process of elaborating on my fieldwork jottings that racialising encounters between peers – that may constitute ‘racism’ – became more evident and prompted reflection on the meaning of students’ ambiguous retorts, the quickness of the rebuffs, the little laughs, averted eyes and pregnant pauses, and my own discomfort in certain conversations (exemplified in Chapter 5).15 In this context, it felt strange to follow up with students the following day, or a few days later, to ask about a brief comment that occurred between them and their friends.
To ask students about why they engaged in racialising practices with racist overtones also risked judging their behaviour as inappropriate. In a similar vein, to follow-up with students who had experienced racialising treatment at the hands of their peers was fraught. During social interactions, students usually chose to quickly brush off the idea that that they were hurt by friends’ racialising remarks. Given these responses, one could argue that to question students about their experiences would be disrespectful. McLeod and Yates (2003) experienced similar dilemmas when interviewing young people about experiences of racism. They were wary about how their questions attempted to elicit responses from ethnic minority students that would “satisfy [the
15 As Pelias writes, “the body becomes a location of knowledge, a place where the researcher speaks from felt experience, from an awareness of what the body endured” (2011, 663). Madden describes the ethnographer’s entire body as a multisensory “organic recording device” (2010, 19; see also Pink 2009).
46 CHAPTER TWO researchers’] curiosity about the experience of racism” (2003, 44). Such a desire, and ensuing scrutiny, may have the effect of reiterating a common experience for those students regularly positioned as culturally different outsiders (McLeod and Yates 2003) or “pathologised” others (Melamed 2006).
I learnt this lesson the hard way when I asked a student called Mohammed about his ethnic background (the context of this interaction is described in Chapter 3). “You’re Pakistani-Australian, right?” I checked with Mohammed, as I scribbled it on the back of the school map. I had heard him described that way by teachers. “That’s offensive,” he replied, bluntly. “Oh sorry! How would you describe yourself?” I asked, mortified, trying to repair the situation. “I’m just Mohammed,” he answered. “Does anything else make you you?...make you unique?” I asked. “No,” he said firmly.
With this incident etched painfully in my memory, for me to ask Mohammed how he felt each time he was on the receiving end of potentially racist treatment would necessarily make his ethnic background meaningful. I certainty did not want to add insult to injury. To pursue this line of inquiry, I would run the risk of subjecting Mohammed to further unwanted racialising treatment (discussed further in Chapter 6).
This is complex terrain that other scholars studying race grapple with (e.g. Duneier 2004) along with researchers engaging with how to study and represent ‘the Other’ whether that be related to race, ethnicity, gender, class, (dis)ability or sexuality (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1996; see also Said 1978). Whilst I was attempting to avoid objectifying my participants, it is possible that I was contributing to an erasure of racism and my own white privilege and had inadvertently closed the space for airing these weighty issues. Yet directly asking about issues of racism would not necessarily have solved this dilemma;
47 CHAPTER TWO students may not necessarily have felt comfortable speaking openly and honestly about how they were feeling.16 As Duneier writes from his position as a white ethnographer working with African American street vendors: “participant observers like myself who do cross-race fieldwork must, I think, be aware that there are many things members of the different races will not say in one another’s presence…as a survival mechanism, many blacks still feel that they cannot afford to speak honestly to whites” (2004, 99, emphasis in original).
During my fieldwork, the students I got to know often responded to the racialising quips their friends directed at them with silence or apparent nonchalance. These reactions could be read in various ways. It is possible that these students had not felt their racialising treatment to be hurtful, offensive or inappropriate. It is also possible that they did not wish to discuss these experiences in my presence as a white, adult researcher, or at school, or at all. These possibilities were all equally important to respectfully and reflexively take into account during fieldwork and in later analysis. To add to this complexity, as will emerge at times throughout the chapters to come, students’ voicing of ‘racism’ may have been provoked by my presence; sensitised by my research interests, students may have shown more awareness about racism than they usually would in peer exchanges. This sensitivity may help explain some of the provocative performances of ‘racism’ and expressions of confusion about or defence of racism when I was around. Furthermore, as I touch upon in Chapter 6, a few students from Muslim, Afghani backgrounds opened up to me unbidden about racist experiences inflicted by teachers and members of the wider community. This openness may have been due to my research focus, but these students told me they appreciated my empathetic nature and respectful orientation to their religious beliefs.
16 This also raises the question about at what stage researchers can access ‘accurate’ insights into students’ feelings about racism. A response elicited five minutes after the fact, a day or after high school graduation may produce very different responses about the impact of these comments in their life. Research that traces this would prove useful.
48 CHAPTER TWO
Thus, my ethnographic approach to allow students to lead conversations invoked both limitations and opportunities that are difficult to definitively take into account. Another methodological challenge I faced regarded how to understand the influence of my positionality and subjectivities in the field. In the next section, I attempt to sketch the ways in which my multiple identities came to bear on the access and insights I gained with regards to Greendale student life.
Subjectivity in the Schoolyard
My ability to build relationships with students, and the qualities of these relationships, was influenced by my positionality and subjectivities. At any given moment, different insights were afforded to me or restricted on the basis of a myriad of entangled racialised, gendered, classed and other social factors (cf. Duneier 2004; see also Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983 ). As Cunliffe and Karunanayake argue,
positioning oneself as a particular type of researcher is not a one-off activity, or a linear progression as one gains and negotiates access, but a continuous interplay of multiple relationships, identities, and expectations situated in specific conversations and moments in time (2013, 374).
My gender and patterns of sociability outside of the field facilitated easier connection with many of the female students and gay male students. My gendered discomfort of hanging out in all male spaces restricted my ability to connect with male students who socialised in all male groups playing sport or working out in the gym. Aligning with heteronormative youth codes enabled my participation in multiple conversations like those on dating. My gender may have informed my inclusion in young women’s personal conversations about gendered insecurities regarding sex and dating. At other moments, my contravention of teenage femininity codes underscored my otherness. My hair, for instance, was “too fluffy” and “like you’ve come out of a horror movie” as one student remarked, counter to the straightened, sleek hair popular to young women at the school.
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As the following chapters unveil, social class was an important undercurrent in Greendale students’ lives. How my middle-class background affected my relationality with working-class students is difficult to fully grasp, although a few students hinted at its significance. Jase, a charismatic 16 year-old white student with whom I had developed a strong bond, alluded to the import of social class when he made comments like: “Mel! This is Greendale, you can’t use such big words!” In other moments, as will be discussed in Chapter 6, he seemed to refigure the stigma of ‘disadvantage’ by acting as if I was not as tough and savvy as he was – useful traits for navigating a neighbourhood many students described in terms of high crime rates, violence and drug use. As Chapter 6 also explores, other class assumptions were activated by my Anglo- Australian ethnicity. Gamze, a student Turkish background, associated me with ‘bogans’ – a term which commonly refers to white, working-class Australians. More often, my ethno-racial background was not marked as directly salient; it was how I oriented to racialised others that mattered. As Chapter 4 explores, I was often included in commonplace discussions about which ethno-racial groups were sexually attractive. How students oriented to my disclosure of my boyfriend’s cultural background also facilitated interesting insights in my research (Chapter 4).
Clearly, my regular inclusion in many students’ social conversations and interactions did not mean that I had become a neutral part of their school lives. High school ethnographer, Pamela Perry, describes her ability to become part of students’ everyday lives, right in amidst the “secret hideouts, food fights, fist fights, tongue lashings, and over-the-top fits of goofiness” (2001, 63-4). She argues that her presence had little influence on how students behaved. This is a controversial claim. In the case of my research, just as I was performing a cooler, more youthful version of myself, the students, too, were performing – for me and for their peers.
Small disrupting moments in the field constantly reminded me students were likely often moderating their behaviour in my presence and not just in regard
50 CHAPTER TWO to racism. Jase often brought this to my attention. One lunchtime, for example, when his friends were talking about girlfriend and boyfriend related problems, Jase turned to me and quietly remarked, “this is so high school” with a wry smile. Our bond was made stronger by his apparent alignment with my adult position. Another student called me a “colourful paint splatter in [her] greyscale cesspit” existence; I was certainly not invisible. “You seem out of place, not in a bad way – this place is a shithole,” she added. Whilst it is very difficult to disentangle the ways that my various identities and ascriptions by others shaped my fieldwork and the ensuring production of a critical ethnographic text, my own experiences immersed within a racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed peer sociality are included within the forthcoming chapters as a point of reflexive discussion and theorisation in keeping with ethnographic conventions (see Hastrup and Hervik 1994). In addition to these issues of positionality and subjectivity, I also faced many ethical challenges involved in conducting fieldwork and maintaining rapport with young people in a high school institution.
Making Friends and Keeping Them: Rapport, Positionality and Power
Throughout my fieldwork, working out how to position myself in students’ conversations was a particularly thorny exercise when seemingly racist, sexist, homophobic or other hurtful or illicit sentiments were expressed. Contending with what do when people in the field behave in ways counter to one’s own moral code is common for ethnographers (e.g. Bourgois 2003). At high school I could not be a ‘wallflower ethnographer’, trying to shelter my data from contamination (see Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). My acceptance by Greendale students was based on getting involved, expressing sympathy or advice and being a diversion from boredom.
In lunchtime conversations, students would look to me for a response as they called someone a slut, discussed the latest friendship fallout or the drugs they wanted to try. I had to reply in some shape or form based on my moral compass
51 CHAPTER TWO and contextual factors which raised multiple ethical and methodological questions. How could I study what racism means to young people, whilst also judging them according to my own ideas of appropriateness? Similar to a dilemma I raised earlier, would my silence render me complicit in normalising and authorising racism (along with sexism, homophobia and other problematic practices)? Grappling with these questions, my decision-making about how to respond in these moments was guided by the relationships I developed with students, the norms of sociability I observed and my own moral sensibilities. My strategies to navigate these complexities shifted depending on the context as illustrated throughout this thesis. One useful approach I adopted was acting confused (see for example Chapter 7). Discussing James Spradley’s (1979) seminal text ‘The Ethnographic Interview’, Madden describes this technique as “expressing cultural ignorance” whereby you “get the interviewee to ‘educate’ the interviewer” (2010, 73). This enabled greater insight, whilst avoiding as much as possible complicity or judgment.
It was hard work to balance students’ ways of socialising with my own ethical and methodological sensitivities. This was made even more challenging in face of the ways ethnographic roles and sensibilities conflict with the norms and expectations of school and university institutions. In the following section, I offer a reflection on the ethical implications of studying young people in a high school and the ways it shaped my ethnographic practice.
Ethnography, Youth and High School: A Recipe for Ethical Precarity
As an adult ethnographer spending large amounts of time with young people in their social worlds, I unsettled the relational norms of the school. Ethnographic methods are flexible; in the field, research directions along with interpersonal relationships commonly develop, shift and deepen over time. Writing about her relationships with high school students, Kehily, for example, explains: “I was called upon at different moments as group member, invited audience, moral arbiter and source of knowledge about the adult world. In one-to-one discussions I was invariably a confidant” (2004, 368). This echoes my
52 CHAPTER TWO experience and that of other ethnographers working with young people (e.g. Bucerius 2013; Williams 1989). In striking contrast, in a school, roles, responsibilities and relational boundaries between teachers and students are clearly defined and litigiously regulated. Hauled into the vice principal’s office one day late in my fieldwork, this became all too clear. The vice principal, recently returned from extended leave, was concerned that a student had shared a personal and potentially troubling story with me – one which had compelled me to talk to the student welfare team. My relationship with this student and others was deemed ‘too close’ – I was not trained to support these students. The vice principal asked to see my ethics approval.
My heart was in my throat. The school principal and many of the other staff members valued my interactions with the students, but the vice principal did not know this yet and was unaware of the trust I had built with the school leadership through my regular discussions with them about how I engaged with students and about how I could voice my concern for students’ welfare whilst protecting their confidentiality. Nevertheless, listening to myself trying to explain my research and my interactions with the students, my ambiguous ethnographer role did indeed sound fraught with risk. Whilst this incident was quickly resolved, the feeling of precariousness had shaped my ethnographic practice from day one. How could I align with the relational norms of ethnography and youth sociabilities whilst also adhering to the strict boundaries, expectations and risk management ethos of the school and university ethics? The problem of institutional ethics not aligning with field ethics is a critical issue facing ethnographers as Kohn and Shore (2017) have appraised in the context of university ethics. At Greendale High, a contradictory, precarious and anxiety-provoking balancing act was required.
Ethics clearance provided little comfort in a social environment that proved unpredictable and unstable. Interacting closely with high school students, everyday presented new moral and ethical challenges and triggered uncertainty: how close was too close to students? And how much power did I
53 CHAPTER TWO have as the researcher over these interpersonal, intersubjective relationships? Turning to ethnographic methods and standards for guidance only yielded further contradictions. Anthropological narratives recount tales of how informants become friends for life (see Cotterill 1992 for informant-to-friend critique). In fact, this ideal seems so engrained that Cotterill cautions researchers not to feel like they have “failed” if they do not achieve friendship with their participants (1992, 595). In feminist research methods there has been significant in-depth consideration and implementation of approaches to “produce non-hierarchical, non-manipulative research relationships which have the potential to overcome the separation between the researcher and the researched” (Cotterill 1992, 594; see also Tillmann-Healy 2003; Bloom 1997; Ross 2015). Working with under-aged youth in a school setting, this approach to reducing power differentials clashed decidedly against ideas about young people as vulnerable and in need of protection. In the context of my relationships with students, knowing that young people are seen as inherently vulnerable placed me in a considerably emotionally fraught and anxious position.
The idea of the vulnerable participant runs throughout much of the methods literature and underpins procedural ethics (Halse and Honey 2007). Young people are viewed by ethics boards and in legislation as inherently vulnerable as a result of their age (Parsons et al. 2015; Huisman 2008; Heath et al. 2007). Yet, this is being increasingly challenged in childhood and youth studies literature. New approaches to studying youth focus on young people’s agency and “reject notions of children’s essential vulnerability and/or incompetence” (Heath et al. 2007, 407). The ‘fixed-age’ rule in procedural ethics has been challenged for determining young people’s competency on the basis of chronological age (Bessant 2006; David, Edwards, and Alldred 2001). In light of this reconceptualisation of youth, the category of ‘adult’ also requires reconsideration, which includes treatment of the adult-researcher as not inherently powerful (Punch 2012; Meloni, Vanthuyne, and Rousseau 2015). As Meloni and colleagues question:
54 CHAPTER TWO
When we talk about power differentials between adults and youth, what kinds of adults and youth do we have in mind? And, most importantly, how do youth perceive us? These very questions are crucial to understanding ethics as a dialogical encounter, rather than an opposition between two alterities (2015, 115).
It was difficult during my fieldwork not to challenge social and cultural constructs of youth when everyday I met young people who faced challenges and held responsibilities beyond my own. How do we classify young people who are carers for their parents or siblings, have babies of their own, are emancipated, are employed and self-sufficient and are participating (mostly) safely in so-called ‘adult’ practices of sex, casual drug use, drinking and getting engaged? It seems patronising to treat them as inherently vulnerable and of in need of protection. Generally, too, the students viewed me as a fellow student (albeit at university), older but not too old – not as an authoritarian adult but as a potential friend, older sister figure or social oddity. This blurred boundaries of young participants and adult researcher and diminished power differentials.
Unfortunately, whilst debates about young people’s inherent vulnerability may be flourishing in childhood and youth studies, this is yet to impact research standards in the litigious environment of schools, and university ethics boards which still see young people as needing protection from the data-driven exploits of adult researchers (Parsons et al. 2015; Huisman 2008). In the context of my relationships with students, knowing that young people are seen as inherently vulnerable placed me in a considerably emotionally fraught and anxious position. As experienced in the vice principal’s office, developing close interpersonal fieldwork friendships with students was not necessarily accepted or understood.
Unsettling the powerful/powerless dichotomy of researcher/researched also further challenges the notion that the researcher has complete power to dictate the terms of the research relationship. As with any relationship, fieldwork
55 CHAPTER TWO relationships are intersubjective; the ethnographer and research participants make sense of and help shape the unusual relationship developing. All parties bring with them assumptions, expectations and relational ways of being and can interpret their rapport in vastly different ways (see Bloom 1997). Despite the constancy of my ethnographic interactional style, relationships with students took on unpredictable and varied shapes and qualities.
Ethnographers create the space for a relationship of sorts, for communication (or not), and in the case of my research it was largely the participants that choose what to do with that space. Many of my participants used me as a good listener, some used me as on-tap entertainment, others used me as an audience, and others used me for company when their friends were away. I employ the word ‘used’ here to mean potentially strategic but not necessarily manipulative. However, I was in control of when I turned up to school, the fact that I could leave school at any given moment and that I could not or would not fit into the normal ‘friendship’ model of school friends. Thus, I cannot take full credit for the ‘successes’ with informant-friend relationships, but as such I cannot take full blame for what the vice principal, for example, may have construed as ‘failures’. In an interpersonal relationship, both parties have responsibility and influence over boundary and role management (see Hart 2016 for discussion of boundary negotiation in a youth work setting). However, in litigious environments of schools and universities mired in risk management thinking, this may mean very little.17 Until institutional codes of conduct come to terms with the agency and power of young people in relationships with adult researchers, ethnographic terrain remains precarious.18
17 As Kohn and Shore (2017) note, the litigious regulation of research ethics in Australia is much more austere than in other countries like the UK and US. 18 My forthcoming journal article in Anthropology and Education Quarterly (see page vi) provides an expanded discussion of these dilemmas and explores how can we develop an ethical infrastructure that reduces the vulnerability and risk ethnographers and their host schools face, particularly in a milieu of increasing bureaucratic accountability.
56 CHAPTER TWO
Despite – or even because of – the difficulties of being ‘betwixt and between’, I was able to gain intimate insight into many of the complex, entangled and weighty concerns that many Greendale students were navigating. Indeed, another member of the school leadership team expressed the wish that they had the funding to permanently employ someone like me who could work the intersections between teachers and students to garner more personal understandings of and ways to support youth. For my research, ethnographic immersion enabled me to gain nuanced understandings of how cultural difference and racism came to matter and were inflected by a broad range of experiences and practices that shaped Greendale student life.
It is important to emphasise that whilst I developed research relationships with multiple students, some of whom I got to know particularly well, our relationships were always partial, temporal and unstable. The school terrain was constantly shifting; the students’ moods and attendance, schoolyard atmospheres, friendships and loyalties, staff morale, school politics and my own mood changed incessantly. Strong connections made with some students would fade out over the school holidays, and new connections with others from other social groups and parts of the school blossomed. As such, I do not claim complete acceptance and authorial credentials as “an omnipresent, knowledgeable exegete and spokesperson” (Clifford 1983, 132) about Greendale students and their social lives. The ethnographic material in this thesis and the interpretations I draw are offered with the knowledge that, as Clifford asserts, “ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial—committed and incomplete” (Clifford 1986, 7). The students that I came to know and the patterns of sociality I observed raise questions about youth multiculture and suggest new ways of theorising racism that may be pertinent in other national and international contexts.
Having reviewed the emotional, ethical, relational and methodological complexities involved in ‘doing fieldwork’, I now turn to ‘writing ethnography’. Upon leaving the field, I faced a further set of complex decisions relating to
57 CHAPTER TWO how to represent Greendale High sociality and write about issues of racialisation and cultural diversity. The following section explores the analytical, intellectual and methodological issues involved in writing an ethnographic text and producing ethnographic knowledge.
After School: Writing about Student Life
Writing also involves ethical decision-making. One of my first considerations was how to protect the identities of my research participants. As per ethics requirements, the names of students’ in this thesis are pseudonyms. Generally, students chose aliases for themselves. For those who did not, I have assigned one to them. Certain identifying details about their lives have also been changed which do not affect the arguments made in this thesis. Teachers have been randomly assigned names and genders like Ms T and Mr D. Without the space to critique their teaching practices in their wider context, I feel it to be inappropriate and disrespectful to provide any personalising information.
Greendale High and ‘Greendale’ as a suburb are also pseudonyms; I made the decision to withhold the name, geographic location and identifying demographic information about Greendale High. My descriptions of Greendale’s school layout and organisational structures have also been somewhat altered. These decisions were based on the need to protect the school, students, teachers and neighbourhood from the risk of stigmatisation. When I told friends, acquaintances, scholarly peers and members of the community about my research, the first question practically bursting from their lips was “which school?” When I explained I could not reveal its name, the next question was “which suburb?” It was as if this information would automatically provide answers about multicultural living and issues of racism. This keen fascination likely derived from people’s own schooling experiences but also of attempts to pigeonhole Greendale High into a highly politicised terrain of school choice and stereotypes attached to particular Melbourne suburbs.
58 CHAPTER TWO
The next consideration was how to write about these students in non-othering and non-essentialising ways. Building on awareness in anthropology of its fraught history of ethnocentric othering and exoticising (see for example Said 1978), Kitzinger and Wilkinson open their edited volume ‘Representing the Other’ with a key ethical question for feminist (and I would add antiracist) researchers: “whether, and how, we should represent members of groups to which we do not ourselves belong – in particular members of groups oppressed in ways that we are not” (1996, 1).
These complexities were reflected in the uncomfortable encounter with Mohammed I described earlier, where I tried to write down his ethnic background as Pakistani-Australian, which I found out was not how he self- identified. Emerson, Fretz and Shaw explain that “in general, fieldworkers concerned with members’ meanings are leery of any classifications which do not refer to the categories that the people recognize and actually use among themselves” (1995, 109). However, this invoked a significant challenge, one voiced by other multicultural youth scholars (Harris 2013; Back, Räthzel, and Hieronymus 2008); how could I avoid essentialising students and reifying ethno-racial ascriptions and other social constructs in my representational writing practice, whilst at the same time recognising that students regularly defined their social world and positioned their peers in these terms?
Representing Race, Writing Multiculture
As Chapter 3 will detail, loaded descriptors like ‘fob’, ‘wog’, ‘white’ and ‘Afghani’ were regularly used by students to differentiate and categorise their peers. Brubaker defines “groupism” as the “tendency to represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial or cultural blocs” (2002, 164). Whilst he is critical of analyses in the social sciences that rely on groupist thinking, at Greendale High homogenised, monolithic ethno-racial groups were some of the fundamental building ‘blocs’ of school life. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, one Greendale student acknowledged that to eliminate this kind of categorisation of peers, “you’d have to get to know
59 CHAPTER TWO everybody individually.” This indicates that one of the major functions of categorising of peers into ethno-racial groups was to be able to conceptualise social life in accessible, manageable ways. This was a seductive simplification for the ethnographer too; how was I to represent to the reader a highly complex social word in intelligible ways? It meant struggling with, and compromising on, awareness that race is a fiction and a social construction (Brah 1991, 53; Frankenberg 2001). Racialised appearances and ascriptions have a “social reality” (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 9, emphasis in original) that are meaningful to social life – for how Greendale High students as well as how I see the world.
In light of these complexities, in this thesis I attempt to make clear what informs my description and categorisation of students – whether it is their self- identification, labelling by peers or my own assumptions. Where possible, I describe students using their own descriptors regardless of their accuracy in the eyes of others. I only discuss these contradictions when they become relevant. My use of single quotation marks when discussing racialised peer groups, for example ‘Afghanis’, indicates that my analysis is based on students’ viewpoints, not my own. As Chapter 3 explores, the peer group labels like ‘Afghani’ are used to describe students from a range of different backgrounds and include different people at any given time.
How to represent students who were ‘white’ was another challenge. ‘White’ was a particularly complex category at Greendale as is the case in the broader Australian context (see Stratton 1998). At Greendale, students with white skin rarely described themselves in ethno-racial terms (this sense of white ‘culturelessness’ or ‘normality’ will be discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 6). When they did, they and other peers used a mix of labels like ‘Australian’, ‘Aussie’, ‘white Australian’ and ‘white’ that had different and overlapping meanings. This practice accords with Frankenberg’s assertion that “whiteness is a site of elaboration of a range of cultural practices and identities, often unmarked and unnamed, or named as national or ‘normative’ rather than specifiably racial” (Frankenberg 2004, 113). For clarity in this thesis, it is not practical to represent
60 CHAPTER TWO white identities by drawing on students’ own diverse lexicon. Whilst ‘Anglo- Australian’ is not a term I heard students use, I employ this label in the following chapters to describe students who often considered themselves to have no ethnic background or culture (see Chapter 6) and whose families have lived in Australia for generations. These students would likely have had Anglo- Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The term ‘white’ alone was a more inclusive term at Greendale, and could include pale-skinned students and those with substantial cultural capital, but with parents or grandparents born overseas (see Chapter 3).
Writing about multiculture also required deciding which scholarly terminology to use more broadly when discussing racialised cultural difference. As Barot and Bird highlight, there exists an “enormous conceptual armamentarium in sociology to write and talk about issues of race and ethnicity: race, racism, raciation, racialism, racialization, ‘race’, ethnicity, ethnicism and so on” (2001, 616). ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are deeply contested terms with extensive literatures. While they are defined, critiqued and operationalised in different ways across the social sciences (Eriksen 2002; Hutchinson and Smith 1996; Barth 1969; Jenkins 1996), in social anthropology, according to Erikson, ‘ethnicity’ generally “refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive” (2002, 4). In contrast, Erikson argues that ‘race’ derives from out-dated (social) science that “divide[d] humanity into four main races” on a phenotypic, biological basis with “the same inborn abilities” (2002, 5). On this basis, ‘race’, as I noted earlier, has increasingly been debunked as a ‘fiction’ in the social sciences, albeit a ‘fiction’ that “produces real effects” (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 9).
My decision to use ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’, or similar descriptive and analytical concepts, was made further complex when taking into account Australian norms as well as Greendale students’ local lexicon. Whilst ‘race’ is a common term in American scholarship and public sphere, this is not the case in Australia (Fozdar and Perkins 2014). Arguably, ‘race’ is eschewed because of its
61 CHAPTER TWO associations with Australia’s colonial history of Aboriginal dispossession and the ‘White Australia policy’, a series of laws introduced in the early 1900s to effectively prohibit non-white immigration (see Fozdar and Perkins 2014 for further discussion).19 Ethnicity, more closely associated with migration and multiculturalism (2014), is a predominant term in Australia to describe people’s ancestry and cultural identity. Indeed, this was reflected in Greendale High’s school curriculum: ‘ethnicity’ was a key unit of study, with some teachers discouraging use of the word ‘race’.
Yet, among young people and in popular culture, terms like race, ethnicity, nationality, culture and religion are often conflated, used interchangeably or omitted altogether (Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b; Winkler-Reid 2015; Thomas 2011; Hall 2000). In Thomas’s (2011) interviews with American high school students, for example, the word ‘race’ was used to talk about a range of national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. In the case of Greendale High in Australia, students only used the terms ethnicity and race in the classroom. Outside of this teacher-controlled space, students used the word ‘nash’ (short for nationality) in fluid ways to discuss each other’s cultural backgrounds (detailed further in Chapter 3). As we will also encounter, Greendale students commonly shifted between racialising their social world into black and white and delineating the student body into numerous ethnic groups. With this complexity in mind, in this thesis I typically use the terms ‘ethno-racial’ and ‘cultural difference’ to signal the varied, shifting and conflated ways in which young people racialised their social world and peers on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, language and religion.20 It is also important to note that the use of the word ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiculture’ in this thesis
19 According to Moreton-Robinson (2004) a similar form of erasure operates in American scholarship. Namely, ‘race’ is used to refer to identities and dynamics emerging from American’s history of slavery and immigration, whilst Native Americans are obscured as part of erasing America’s colonial roots (2004, viii). 20 In keeping with a focus on local knowledge, logics and practices, I do not directly engage with the extensive literature on ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ that I have briefly canvassed as they “set forth a priori assumptions and definitions” (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995, 133) that do not aid the lines of inquiry I develop in the coming chapters.
62 CHAPTER TWO refers only to the existence of people from diverse backgrounds living together as a normal part of life; it does not refer to the socio-political policies and normative ideologies of multiculturalism (see Bennett et al. 2016).
The Complexities of Writing ‘Racism’
Lexical decisions became particularly problematic for analysing racism in school life. To research racism in a school where cultural diversity was unremarkable and many students acted as if racism was not an issue was an intriguing intellectual challenge. Two questions needed to be addressed: how can racism as a concept be critiqued and the possibilities of its intent and effect left open whilst also invoking racism as an analytical frame? How can conceptual clarity be achieved when using a word that has multiple meanings across scholarly literature and across the student body at school?
Hage (1998) offers one particular route through these challenges. In ‘White Nation’, Hage purposefully avoids the term racism which he argues “belong[s] to a political register” (1998, 21); instead he opts to frame his analysis through questioning “how do humans struggle to make their lives viable” and how they might “impinge too much on other people’s struggles to make their lives viable” (21, emphasis in original). This has merit in leaving open the impact of racialising behaviour as necessarily harmful, and to understand people’s motives to act in racialising ways. However, avoiding the word racism entirely produces difficulties in proposing reconceptualisations of racism and of engaging with a lexicon and concept that is widely used among young people and educators.
In this thesis, I use both ‘racism’ and ‘racialisation’ but to different effect. I use the former as an analytical concept under scrutiny. As I noted in Chapter 1, the guiding definition of racism in this thesis is everyday talk and practices that have “the effect of establishing, sustaining and reinforcing oppressive power relations” (Wetherell and Potter 1992, 70). I take an expansive approach to racism: stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination and unwarranted attention are all
63 CHAPTER TWO possible forms of racism. As Chapter 5 explores in detail, I leave this definition open to encompass and critique the ways that ‘normative’ racism is framed in divergent and overlapping ways by students, teachers and in popular culture. Importantly, guided by Essed’s (1991) concept of ‘everyday racism’, I understand racism not only as discrete or extreme incidents, but also as day-to-day social practices that have cumulative harmful effects. While, as we will see, students generally framed racism as an action by or trait of individuals, ‘everyday racism’ further emphasises that racism may be social, structural and relational (see also van Dijk 1987) and foregrounds outcome rather than intent.
In contrast, I use the term ‘racialisation’ to describe students’ behaviour that invokes cultural difference (be that constellations of race, ethnicity, religion, language etc.). Whilst racialisation has multiple meanings across the literature (see Barot and Bird 2001), I use it to refer to how Greendale students rendered peers ‘racial’ in certain moments, or viewed and interpreted social life through an ethno-racial and religious lens. It is the process by which ethno-racial difference is made to matter, but is not necessarily racist. In other words, I frame racialisation as a practice and process that can have “racist implications” (Essed 1991, 52). Whether or not these racist implications are activated is open to interpretation. My thesis spotlights this ambiguity as I attempt to tease out the situated meaning and import of racialising practices in Greendale peer sociality. Thus, I use the term ‘racialisation’ in the coming chapters to keep the spectre of racism ever-present without foreclosing the unremarkable or productive ways in which cultural difference came to matter at Greendale.
Producing Ethnographic Knowledge
Tracing how ‘racialising’ or ‘racist’ practices manifested in the field, multiple themes emerged consistently, thus compelling sustained analytical attention (cf. Wetherell and Potter 1992). Repeated and detailed readings of my fieldnotes elicited patterns and contradictions around which the chapters of this thesis are organised (O'Reilly 2009; Madden 2010; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). As Madden suggests, “it is in the systematic and repetitious
64 CHAPTER TWO revisiting of ethnographic data that we finding meaning” (2010, 155). However, the process of ethnographic coding and analysis is a more interactive process than this intimates. As Duneier describes in the context of his ethnographic research, “I had research questions vaguely in mind, and I was already making mental comparisons between what I was seeing and what the sociology literature had to say” (Duneier 2004, 97). In the case of my ethnographic study, themes and analysis developed in dialogue with previous research on lived multiculture and associated sensitising concepts, like that of racism, conviviality and cosmopolitanism. My analysis was further honed through using an approach of ‘writing as method of inquiry’ (Richardson 1994). According to Pelias, researchers develop clarity, conviction and a scholarly argument through the progressive practice of writing about striking incidents, dynamics and “personal discovery” in the field (Pelias 2011, 659).
One of the key strengths of ethnography is the ability to paint a complex, vivid and evocative picture of a given social world. What the ethnographer heard, witnessed and experienced through dedicated, long-term immersion in the field is transformed into a series of interwoven stories that help to build a rich, descriptive understanding of the social phenomenon under study. As Emerson, Fretz and Shaw explain:
Through participation, the field researcher sees first-hand and up close how people grapple with uncertainty and confusion, how meanings emerge through talk and collective action, how understandings and interpretations change over time. In all these ways, the fieldworker’s closeness to others’ daily lives and activities heightens sensitivity to social life as process (1995, 4).
The ethnographic lens I applied in my analysis and interpretation is a product of a critical understanding of how people performed themselves for each other and for me. Greendale social life was often one of drama, intensity and performativity. The conversations and practices that I witnessed may be overemphasised, overdramatised performances, but they are nevertheless
65 CHAPTER TWO illuminating; the material students drew on to achieve their performative ends reveals much about the logics that circulated in and structured this youthful culturally diverse sociality. My ethnographic interpretations were also shaped by my commitment to taking seriously young people’s own understandings of their social world and behaviour.
As I touched upon earlier in this chapter, the ethnographer’s own experiences of being deeply immersed within a social world are an important part of the production of ethnographic knowledge. As Hastrup and Hervik explain, “one’s own experience of the process of gradual understanding – and indeed of misunderstanding – in the field is still both the means to comprehension and the source of authority” (1994, 5) It is this immersive, first-hand experience at Greendale, with sensitivity to the inevitable incompleteness and subjectivity of knowledge, that allows me to contribute ways of theorising about youth multiculture that have relevance to broader debates and may be applied to other social contexts – as future research could test.
In trying to bring to life Greendale’s social landscape, I had to make careful decisions about the selection of stories and the stylistic representation of other people’s lives and voices. The fast-paced, ever-shifting rhythm of peer conversations and their emotional energy amidst the frenetic throng of school life is key to understanding the context in which young people negotiated cultural diversity. I attempt to capture this in the ethnographic vignettes that intersperse this thesis. In the endeavour to represent the complexity of youth sociality while maintaining textual clarity, some students have been edited out of the ethnographic material I present. Additionally, I have created five composite characters by combining students with similar stories. Composite characters have the dual purpose of reducing narrative confusion by introducing fewer students and further concealing students’ identities. In this way ethnography is a ‘fiction’. However, it is not fictional (Geertz 1973); it is a way to render intelligible a complex social world, based on insights from long- term observation and in-depth analysis, informed by diverse literatures.
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School of Thought: Ethnography as a Guiding Ethos
The guiding philosophies of my written, analytical ethnographic practice were not informed by a particular discipline. Scholars in multicultural youth studies and ‘everyday multiculturalism’ studies more broadly come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, anthropology, human geography, cultural studies and urban studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, working with a supervision team and community of scholars from diverse disciplinarily backgrounds, I did not select one disciplinary perspective to anchor this thesis. Instead, I focus on ethnographic research as an anchor point that provides a ‘toolkit’ (see Madden 2010) that brings together a variety of literatures and theories helpful to making sense of everyday life at Greendale. This text is, thus, a product of grounded experience in dialogue with theory and engagement with ethnographic traditions.
My ethnographic, intellectual sensitivities developed through reading works associated with different disciplinary practices but also through workshops with visiting scholars, including James Clifford, Lila Abu-Lughod, Michael Herzfeld and Anoop Nayak. Rich discussions about reflexivity, positionality, representation, writing against culture and writing about race – much of which has developed within anthropology – guided my ethnographic practice, reflected across this thesis. Reading sociological ethnographies like Mitchell Duneier’s (1999) ‘Sidewalk’, CJ Pascoe’s (2007) ‘Dude You’re a Fag’ and Alice Goffman’s (2014) ‘On the Run’ and anthropological ethnographies like Jean Briggs’ (1970) ‘Never in Anger’ and Anna Tsing’s (2005) ‘Friction’ also provided me with a broad understanding of the range of intellectual sensitivities and writing structures and styles that constitute ethnographic research. In particular, ethnographies related to race and multiculture, namely Les Back’s (1996) ‘New Ethnicities and Urban Culture’, Mica Pollock’s (2004) ‘Colormute’, and Anoop Nayak’s (2004) ‘Race, Place and Globalisation’, guided my understanding of how to illuminate the complexities of a working-class and culturally diverse youth sociality. Following these ethnographies, my thesis
67 CHAPTER TWO engages closely with the data derived from my fieldwork experience to develop generative theoretical tools and questions that contribute to interdisciplinary debates taking place in youth studies, ethnic and racial studies, and the area of everyday multiculturalism.
Concluding Remarks
This chapter has detailed the key processes, decisions and learning curves that characterised the fieldwork and writing stages of my ethnographic research. Drawing on ethnographic material collected from the schoolyard, school classrooms, social spaces nearby the school and conversations on Facebook Messenger, the coming chapters explore the social world of a select number of young people at a high school on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. Whilst this thesis does not claim to be a representative study, the insights afforded by immersive ethnographic engagement in Greendale student life – facilitated by the trust and rapport I established with students through 12 months of fieldwork – raise questions relevant to research in youth multiculture, racism and antiracism. This thesis points to how current understandings of multicultural youth culture may be extended by taking seriously the social norms and perspectives of one group of young people in a particular place. The conceptual tools I develop may also be productively applied to other social settings, which I consider further in Chapter 8.
Inevitable Limitations
Whilst this chapter has largely focused on what I have been able to do, it is important to re-emphasise and elaborate on the limitations of the study. My research explores how young people navigated a multicultural school space and critically examines their ideas about cultural difference and racism that were expressed in the context of a peer audience in a school environment. While I wished to spend the first six months of 2015 conducting research with a small number of students in their wider social lives, delays in receiving ethics clearance for this amendment prevented me from taking my research in this
68 CHAPTER TWO direction (in part due to the ethical complexities of working with ‘vulnerable’ youth I mentioned earlier). As a result, the empirical and theoretical contributions I make are predominantly limited to the school grounds and school-related activities. As I discuss in Chapter 7, further research would be useful to tease out the extent to which patterns of sociability continue outside of school. I am also unable to factor in multiple aspects of students’ lives that may have informed and inflected their social practices at school. Family attitudes towards race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, for example, are not able to play a part in my analysis. Whilst I collected data about classroom teaching practices and school culture, with a focus on youth sociality here, it is outside the scope of this thesis to develop in great detail the ways institutional practices came to bear on students’ experiences and expressions of and orientations to racialisation and racism.
The School Year Begins
Using the methods I’ve detailed here – mindful of the scope and limitations of this research – the opening of the following chapter returns to the beginning of fieldwork; I take the reader into the schoolyard during lunchtime, describing some of my first impressions of and introductions to students and schoolyard life. It became clear almost immediately that the racialising of peers and space was a key organising feature of school life. Chapter 3 explores the significance of these routine racialising practices for understanding how young people got along and conceived of their culturally diverse social world. It provides a broad overview of the social context at Greendale necessary to understanding and more deeply exploring modes, patterns and lexicon of peer sociality developed in the chapters that follow.
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CHAPTER THREE The Lay of the Land: The Racialising Foundations of Student Life
The previous chapter told of the excitement of the school principal when talking about the schoolyard dynamics of Greendale’s senior college campus. In my first weeks of school, other teachers too offered with enthusiasm to give me a tour of the student social areas, in part to point out its “fascinating” racialised patterns of segregation, in part for the fun of catching students smoking. As this chapter explores, students also shared with me their understandings of Greendale’s social landscape. While the previous chapter surveyed the Greendale fieldsite from the perspective of my ethnographic experience, this chapter provides a ‘lay of the land’ of the Greendale schoolyard and social life as students explained it to me.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, it aims to familiarise the reader with the routine foundations of Greendale’s social world, in which students’ multifarious negotiations of culturally diverse peer sociality were embedded and manifested. This chapter outlines the key ethno-racial labels students used to refer to fellow peers and to categorise where people socialised at school. It also canvasses the markers of ‘difference’ that informed these labelling practices. In doing so, this broad overview provides a ‘road map’ and contextual backdrop to students’ discourses, attitudes and behaviours explored in depth in the chapters that follow. Secondly, the chapter considers the significance of these socio-spatial practices to understanding the import of cultural difference and racism at Greendale High.
Carving up the social landscape by social categories is a phenomenon of high school student sociality noted in multiple ethnographies across differing socio- cultural and national contexts (e.g. Eckert 1989; Ortner 2003; Willis 1977; Bucholtz 2011b; Lewis 2003; Modica 2015; Thomas 2011). Scholars grapple with
70 CHAPTER THREE the significance of these practices for understanding race, class and gender relations at school and their wider impact on students’ identities and trajectories (e.g. Willis 1977). Indeed, the animation of ethnicity and race is not inherently problematic or racist. Rather, “the categorization of individuals into groups whereby ethnic or ‘racial’ origin are criteria of access or selection [is] endemically racist” (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005, 16, my emphasis). In the context of a multiracial high school in America, Thomas’s (2011) research suggests that racialised and spatialised schoolyard practices produce tension, conflict, divisions and discomfort and reproduce wider systems of power. Scholars researching the experience of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds in white dominant public spaces also expose “the pedagogical relationships between space, racism and the capacity for movement” (Noble and Poynting 2010); spatialised racialisation can impact on young people’s sense of belonging and safety, restricting or shaping how they traverse schools, neighbourhoods and cities (Noble and Poynting 2010; Räthzel 2008; Nayak 2017). Yet I wish to interrogate whether these findings resonate at Greendale High where ‘friendliness’ was often lauded and racism downplayed (see Chapter 1).
Whilst Greendale teachers and students often described the schoolyard in ways that invoked race and ethnicity as key structuring forces in student sociality, in this chapter I consider whether this was reflected in day-to-day interactions between peers. I further explore whether labelling peers and marking social groups in ethno-racial terms (re)produced ethno-racial hostilities, racialised exclusions and power inequalities, or else operated in more banal and convivial ways. Whilst an overarching white-ethnic schoolyard division seemed highly salient and problematic, as we will encounter, intercultural engagement and investments were intricately woven into and inflected this complex, contradictory socio-spatial terrain.
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My Introductions to Schoolyard Life
Every day, when the bell rang for recess and lunch, classroom doors swung violently open and a mass exodus of students filled the main outdoor social space – a large quadrangle enclosed by classrooms. A substantial toilet block stood in the middle of the space in front of a small set of stairs, dividing the quadrangle. Visually obscured from each other and separated by the stairs, two distinct social worlds existed: the section closest to the school entrance was called the upper courtyard while the other half behind the toilet block and down the stairs was known as the lower courtyard. The following illustration is a simplified mapping of the school layout.
Figure 3: Greendale High Layout
The upper courtyard was dotted with trees and widely interspersed lunch benches. A large group of male students with pimply pale skin were a permanent fixture in the eastern section of this courtyard before school, at lunch and after school. Their sweaty, odorous bodies blocked the main entrance to the school when they played handball, or commented on the game from the sides waiting for their turn. I had to squeeze my way through every morning and afternoon, along with the rest of the staff and students, to access the carpark and the bus stop, the smell of stale cigarettes following behind me.
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At the upper courtyard lunch benches, Anglo-looking boys in baggy school jumpers and girls in short school dresses pinned in tightly at the waist typically sat in small groups, chatting languidly whilst sipping soft drinks and checking their phones. Looking through the glass doors to the side of the upper courtyard, a much more chaotic scene appeared. The small canteen was always packed with students from diverse backgrounds and year levels jostling for a spot in the line, or else sitting with their friends, propped on laps and the edges of chairs due to a lack of space. The atmosphere was thick with shouts and chatter and the smell of fried food.
The lower courtyard was equally frenetic. Brown-skinned boys with New Zealand accents flicked rugby balls around and hurled themselves at each other – a mountain of navy blue sports uniforms and bright Nike sneakers. At the other end of the space, boys speaking Hazaragi and Dari (languages from Afghanistan) swapped between volleyball, soccer, or simply throwing the ball at each other as hard as possible. The rugby and soccer balls often missed their mark and landed at the feet of students eating lunch at the handful of tables in the lower courtyard. Almost every lunchtime, a group of young women wearing colourful hijabs and school hoodies shared one Tupperware container filled with homemade biryani or other leftovers. Their tinny iPhone speakers played a mix of Justin Bieber and Urdu music. At other lunch tables, small groups of students from diverse backgrounds sat close by engrossed in conversation.
Sitting at the sidelines of the schoolyard in the first few weeks of fieldwork, working out even the basic patterns or practices of school sociality seemed impossible. The schoolyard social scene appeared to my eyes at once both cliquish and a seething, amorphous mass. How could I break into and begin to understand peer social life?
Perhaps they noticed me staring; a girl jumped up from a lunch table in the lower courtyard and starting walking towards where I sat at the side of the action. She stopped in front of me and in a formal, polite voice asked if I’d like
73 CHAPTER THREE to join her and her friend, Milena. I stuttered in my nervousness and bumbled my way over to their table. The table was wooden with baby blue paint peeling off; chip packets were squeezed between the planks. The three of us sat on three sides of the square table, facing each other. I recognised Milena from one of the year 12 humanities class I had regularly attended. She was easy to remember due to her bright purple hair extensions and matching long, purple fake nails. Milena, with dark olive skin and a broad Australian accent, projected an air of toughness and confidence as she lounged back on the bench. Bec, her best friend, had pale skin under a layer of orangey foundation and a big smile revealing the metal glint of braces. She sat further forward on her seat, her eyes darting towards Milena in deference to Milena’s opinions and reactions.
“So if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?” Bec asked, breaking the awkward silence. “28,” I replied. “That’s so old!” Milena exclaimed. Bec and Milena discussed between themselves how young I looked and decided that I looked between 18 and 21 years old. “Do you have a boyfriend?” Bec questioned. “Yeah. Do you guys?” I asked. Both of the girls shook their heads. Bec lamented how hard it was to find a guy who lived close by; public transport was a nightmare in the area and nobody was yet old enough to drive. Teasing Bec, Milena told me about an Afghani guy at school that Bec had a crush on. “He doesn’t look Afghani though!” Bec qualified quickly, as if to assuage judgment. Apparently, he had light-coloured skin and blue-eyes. Milena said she preferred green-eyes because they are less common. Spotting a young man crossing the lower courtyard, Milena asked: “is that [X]?” Bec swivelled around to look. “Who are you talking about?” I interjected. “That, um, …darker-skinned guy over there,” Bec clarified, seemingly unsure of the appropriate terminology.
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“That black guy added me on Facebook last night,” Milena explained matter-of- factly, “but I wasn’t sure who he was coz I can’t tell them apart!”
A few of Milena’s male friends, all born in Afghanistan, came and joined our table. They each gave me a small smile before turning to Bec to chat. “Aren’t you going to introduce yourselves?” Milena demanded. The boys said hello sheepishly and told me their names. Whilst they chatted with Bec, Milena fixed her attention on me and stated decisively, her chest puffed out, “I’m going to tell you about everyone!” “Well, the Afghanis really annoy me,” she began, “they always speak their own language, which we can’t understand. It’s rude. I can speak my language but I don’t speak it here. It makes me think they are talking about me. You go to an Aussie school, talk the language!” Her outburst finished, she relaxed back in the seat with smile. “What language do you speak?” I asked. “Maltese. My mum is from Malta but born here, and my dad was born overseas.”
Continuing with my education, she categorised the schoolyard in sweeping gestures with her right hand. She told me that the “fobs” hung out in the eastern half of the lower courtyard whilst the “Afghanis” were in the western half; the “druggies and smokers” were on the oval; the “white” students and “sports” players were in the upper courtyard while other sports people played at the back of the school. She added “nerds”, pointing in the direction of the library as an afterthought. “…and the Asian nerds!” Bec piped in. “Yeah,” Milena confirmed, “and the fat people are in the canteen!...nah, just kidding.” The fact that Milena (who would fall into other students’ categorisations as a ‘wog’), Bec (‘white’) and their friends (‘Afghani’) hung out together everyday in the lower courtyard did not temper her analysis. “What does ‘fob’ mean?” I asked. “Like those guys up there,” she gestured again to one side of the lower
75 CHAPTER THREE courtyard where a big group of boys were throwing a rugby ball. “‘Fob’ means ‘fresh off the boat’, yeah?” I clarified. “Oh, I dunno what it stands for. We just say fob. It’s easier than using like Islander or Maori,” Milena responded. Two sisters in navy blue hijabs, born in Afghanistan but raised in Pakistan, got up from a table nearby and walked past us. “Ohhh, they talk so cute,” Milena crooned.
The pace and intensity of the banter and the swift turns in topic were challenging to keep up with; covering my shock at the flippant use of dubious racial comments also took practice. Little did I know it then, but this early introduction to school life by Milena and Bec canvassed some of the main themes significant to culturally diverse peer sociality that continued to manifest and deepen amongst peers over the course of my fieldwork. Chapter 4, for instance, explores students’ racialised hierarchies of dating and desire, including the (de)valuing of black and Afghani male peers. Chapter 5 considers how flippant joking based on ethno-racial stereotypes functions. The current chapter, however, focuses specifically on the racialisation and spatialisation of the schoolyard that Milena outlined.
A very similar outline emerged, unprompted, by Gamze, a year 12 student who also hung out in the lower courtyard. Midway through term one, I walked past Gamze sitting by herself at a table in the lower courtyard when everyone else was in class. She was slouched forward in her baggy school jumper and tracksuit pants watching a YouTube video on her iPhone. Born in Australia but with Turkish parents, her olive skin was covered in a thick slathering of foundation makeup and dark eyeliner highlighted her big, dark brown eyes. She asked where I was heading. “Home,” I told her, complaining about how long and tiring the previous class had been. In her usual succinct and assertive tone, she told me that Greendale High was “boring” and “shit”. It used to be good, she told me; people used to mix and get along. According to Gamze, since the new year 10 cohort (15–16 year olds) – a whiter demographic than previous years
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– had arrived in the senior school, everything had changed for the worst; people stayed in their groups and hated everybody else (this perception about year 10 students was echoed by others and is explored further in Chapter 6).
Gamze started pointing to different parts of the school. She told me that the “white sports people” stayed in the upper courtyard, the “white smokers” on the oval and “the year 10s” in the middle section of the schoolyard. Next she explained that “fobs” were in one section of the lower courtyard, the “Muslims” in another, whilst a mix of “fobs and wogs” shared the rest. “Sudos” and “Afghanis” played sport at the back of the school. “What does ‘fob’ mean?” I asked (to compare with Milena’s definition). “Here it just means Islander,” she replied. Gamze further complained that she didn’t feel comfortable walking into school in the morning past all the white boys at the entrance. “They look at you as you walk past,” she said, mimicking turning heads and narrowed eyes, “like you’re not supposed to be there…and then you get into the lower courtyard area, and it’s okay.”
Before examining the significance of these racial and spatial ‘mappings’ of the schoolyard and experiences of comfort and discomfort across social spaces, it is first necessary to clarify the meanings of the ethno-racial labels that Gamze, Milena and Bec – along with the rest of the study body – employed to describe and categorise their peers.
The Shared Ethno-Racial Lexicon and Labelling System
At Greendale High, there existed a collective labelling system to classify peers. These terms were appropriated from wider social discourse and adapted to the socio-cultural context of the school (see Stratton 1998). Students new to Greendale High, even those with very limited English proficiency, very quickly learnt and adopted the shared discourse.
Expanding on many of the ‘School Dictionary’ definitions provided on page xiii, in this section I describe the meaning of the five central ethno-racial labels at
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Greendale and the process by which students were categorised or self- identified. Skin colour was not the sole marker of difference in this social space. Peers were categorised on the basis of perceived features related to appearance, ancestry, accent, particular interests and where students socialised in the schoolyard. Echoing anthropological arguments about ethnic and racial distinctions (Wallman 1978b; Jenkins 1996; Wade 1993), I found these category markers to be fluid and inconsistent, as will be discussed later in this chapter.
Fob
At Greendale High, ‘fob’ referred to students from Islander and Maori backgrounds, including Cook Islands, Tonga, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Solomon Islands, regardless of whether they were born and raised in Australia, New Zealand or the Pacific. As I discussed with Milena, ‘fob’ typically referred to ‘fresh off the boat’ in Australian vernacular (along with other countries such as the US) and can be applied to any group of new immigrants. However, this term is most likely to apply to racialised groups viewed as not having (yet) learnt or adopted the new country’s language and socio-cultural norms.21 During my own high school years, for instance, I had heard this term refer only to students from China. Gamze seemed to reference this when she said ‘fob’ means Islander “here”, at Greendale High, suggesting that it means different things in other places.
In wider social discourse, this term is deployed as a derogatory label for others, or as a reclaimed self-ascription.22 At Greendale, however, it was most commonly used as an almost neutral descriptive term without understanding of its political etymology. This was the case for students of Islander background and non-Islander peers alike. Esther, whose parents were born in the Cook Islands, described herself as a ‘fob’ during a class exercise on identity and belonging. Answering the teacher’s question, she told the class that she felt the
21 See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fob for a wide range of lay definitions of ‘fob’ and ‘fresh off the boat’. 22 Reclaiming this term for humour, identity and belonging is exemplified, for example, by the US TV series ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ starring an Asian-American family.
78 CHAPTER THREE most sense of belonging at school with her friends “coz I’m a fob and we have the same religious beliefs, culture…they understand me.” As a label of ascription by others, primary gauges of ‘fob-ness’ seemed to be a combination of tanned bodies, New Zealand accents, an interest in rugby, performing traditional dances at school assemblies, and hanging out (with other ‘fobs’) in the lower courtyard.
Afghani
The label ‘Afghani’ belies a heterogeneous mix of students – students born in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Morocco, Pashtuns and Hazaras, Sunnis and Shiites, economic migrants and unaccompanied refugees. It was sometimes used as a term of self-ascription but more commonly students born in Afghanistan identified as Hazara or Pashtun or else as Pakistani, having spent almost their entire lives there as a result of war as well as increased economic and educational opportunities. In EAL (English as Another Language) class one morning, I heard somebody from across the room say, sharply “don’t call me Afghan. Call me Hazara.” Moving closer, I heard him explain about the Buddhist origins of the Hazaras. The conversation dissolved as he and his friend started hitting each other with rulers.
In describing their peers, students often conflated the terms ‘Afghani’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ as ethno-racial categories or used them interchangeably (cf. Harris 2013). Interestingly, when Milena complained about ‘Afghanis’, her comments were specifically directed toward ‘Afghani’ boys, not girls; she considered the girls “cute”. Thus, this shared lexicon also had gendered features, which will be discussed in Chapter 4.
‘Afghani-ness’ at Greendale High could be described, following Noble, Poynting and Tabar in the case of ‘Lebanese-ness’, as “more a cultural marker than a category of nationality” (1999, 40). To attend EAL classes, play soccer, wear a hijab, socialise in a language other than English, and hang out in the lower
79 CHAPTER THREE courtyard, solidified the likelihood of being classified as ‘Afghani’.23 Rose, a student who wore a hijab and socialised with female Muslim friends in the lower courtyard, was so fed up with being labelled ‘Afghani’ that she chose to have ‘Tunisia’ printed on the back of her year 12 jumper (students usually chose nicknames). One young man born in Afghanistan but raised in Australia often escaped being labelled as ‘Afghani’ through his Australian accent, involvement in AFL football, disparagement of new Afghani arrivals, and lack of contact with students in the lower courtyard.
Language proficiency and accent were particularly strong distinguishing features at Greendale; the vast majority of the student body spoke fluent English in Australian and New Zealand accents. In contrast, students enrolled in EAL classes had arrived in Australia anywhere between a few months to six years ago, and were still learning English. Aside from three students, these classes were comprised entirely of students from the Middle East, predominantly Afghanistan. All other Greendale students attended mainstream English classes.
Black & Sudo
‘Sudo’ was short for Sudanese and was used synonymously with the label ‘black’. ‘Black’ was also used to refer to black-skinned peers from African backgrounds more generally, and in abstract reference to black popular culture. Despite the frequency of references to ‘Sudo’ and ‘black’ peers, as the following chapters critique, there was only a small number of students from African backgrounds at Greendale. The label ‘black’ was sometimes extended to include brown-skinned Maori, Islander and South Asian peers, often for humorous effect (see Chapters 5 and 7). Thus, the label ‘black’ was a sliding signifier related to skin colour, ethno-racial identity and socio-cultural practices (Oray 2013; Hall 1993).
23 These markers might not, however, be the basis of such classification; they might only augment an assumption of ‘Afghani-ness’ based on how people's appearance correlates with expectations of what Afghanis look like.
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While Greendale students generally considered Aboriginal people, the first people of Australia, to be ‘black’, this was not the descriptor typically used. Rather, Aboriginal Australians were described as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’, or more problematically as ‘abo’ which students claimed no longer had offensive connotations (Chapter 7 considers these distinctions more closely). None of the students I spoke to named Aboriginal peers when talking about peer groups. One reason for this, as Chapter 7 explores in depth, was that many students did not realise that Aboriginal people attended Greendale High.
White
As noted in the previous chapter, ‘white’, ‘Aussie’ and ‘Australian’ were also common labelling terms at Greendale High. They typically had separate meanings, but were also used interchangeably at times. When prompted, Angl0-Australian students would generally identify as white Australian or simply Australian. Non-white peers tended to distinguish between ‘Aussies’ and ‘Australians’. ‘Aussies’ typically referred to Anglo-Australians whilst ‘Australian’ was more commonly inclusive of all Australian citizens. Class- and race-related associations attached to ‘Aussie’ students will be considered in Chapter 6.
‘White’ could refer to both Anglo-Australian students, students with pale skin, and those who ‘pass’ as white. The label ‘white’ could attach to Greendale students on the basis of a constellation of skin colour, comportment, social activities, schoolyard location and friendship circles (see Hage 1998, on accumulating whiteness). Aleksandra, for example, was commonly defined as ‘white’ despite her dark olive skin and Georgian-Turkish-Czech background. Jase alluded to this in drama class with Aleksandra one day when their friend wanted to cut a student from the play. “No, we have to keep him,” Jase joked, “coz we need a brown person in it…. otherwise it will look bad – it won’t be multicultural.” While Jase was being facetious, making fun of tropes of multiculturalism and inclusion, his statement revealed that Aleksandra was not categorised as ‘brown’ or as contributing to ‘multicultural’ diversity, despite her skin-colouring and origins.
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A pale skin colour was, thus, not the sum total defining feature of whiteness. Having skin tones within a certain spectrum of white-brownness, hanging out in the upper courtyard, as well as participating in mainstream youth culture were all key factors in being identified as, or ‘passing’ as, white. Activities like drinking alcohol and partying are, according to Harris, “fundamental to hegemonic youth culture” associated with dominant white culture (2013, 62). Yet, to add to the complexity, students like Milena, who engaged in hegemonic youth practices but hung out in the lower courtyard with friends from diverse backgrounds, tended to be classified as ‘wogs’, not ‘white’. For boys classified as ‘Afghani’, ‘Arab’ or ‘wog’, participation in partying culture seemed to be attributed to racialised masculinity, not whiteness (racialised, gendered othering will be discussed in Chapter 4).
Wog
While used less frequently than ‘fob’, ‘Afghani’, ‘white’, ‘Sudo’ and ‘black’, for Greendale students ‘wog’ referred to people from Eastern and Southern European backgrounds, like Turkish, Bosnian, Romanian, Croatian, Maltese, Lebanese and Italian. In wider Australian parlance, this term has long been in circulation, initially as an offensive term for post-war migrants (particularly Italians and Greeks), and then reappropriated and popularised as a marker of pride, community and humorous self-deprecation (Clarke 2005). Like ‘fob’, at Greendale High ‘wog’ was a term that was deployed as both ascription and self- identification to describe an ethnic identity as well as particular cultural practices. Jase, who identified as white and Jewish, for instance, described his shisha smoking as “woglife”24, whilst Gamze talked about her sister’s “big wog wedding.”
Nash
At Greendale High “what’s your nash?” was a common question amongst students. ‘Nash’, derived from ‘nationality’, referred to ethnic background since
24 This likely references a trending hashtag on social media (#woglife): e.g. https://twitter.com/hashtag/woglife.
82 CHAPTER THREE the majority of students at Greendale High were Australian-born or Australian citizens. In contrast to generalised ascriptions like ‘fob’, self-identification about ‘nash’ included naming country of birth (or parents’ birth). Students, for instance, would answer ‘Turkish’ or ‘Colombian’ or else reply with mixed-race identifiers, like ‘Sri Lankan and Indian’. Similar to the race talk Pollock (2004) identified in an American high school, Greendale students sometimes simplified identities down to very basic ethno-racial terms (like fob and wog) and at other times challenged these simplistic labels, particularly when talking about their own identities.
“What’s your nash?” was not a question generally asked of white-looking students at Greendale High (cf. Winkler-Reid 2015). As a very pale-skinned researcher, I was only asked about my ‘nash’ on rare occasions and only by non- white students. My impression was that this question only arose when I did not conform to their conceptions of what an Anglo-Australian was like, whatever that might be. Most of the time, however, my background was wordlessly assumed. The implicit ‘normality’ and ‘culturelessness’ of whiteness in peer sociality and contrary moments when it became visible and stigmatised in a multicultural school environment will be explored in Chapter 6.
The Specificity and Significance of Ethno-Racial Classifications
The ethno-racial labels Greendale students used echo many of those identified in Harris’s (2013) research with Australian young people from five different Australian cities. Harris lists these labels as:
‘FOBS’ (fresh off the boat), ‘wogs’ (Europeans), ‘Aussies’ or ‘skips’ (Anglo- Australians, after the children’s television programme Skippy the Bush Kangaroo), ‘Lebs’ or ‘Lebos’ and ‘habibs’ (Lebanese or even Middle Eastern more generically) and so on (2013, 17).
Whilst there are clear crossovers between our research participants’ labelling due to the shared Australian context, there are also divergences resulting from local differences. For instance, the Greendale municipality did not have a large
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Lebanese population unlike some other areas of Melbourne and, therefore, I never heard Greendale student use the terms ‘Lebs’ or ‘habibs’. In contrast, young people in Winkler-Reid’s (2015) London-based school ethnography grouped peers into white, black and Asian. Thus, language and social ordering practices differ depending on both local and national contexts. There are also significant differences between countries regarding who exactly these ethno- racial categories include. In the UK, for example, ‘Asian’ typically refers to South Asian people whereas in Australia ‘Asian’ generally means people from China and South-East Asia. In contrast to the UK and US contexts, black and white relations in Australia refer to the fraught relationship between dispossessed Aboriginal Australians and white colonisers (and their descendants today).
It has been important to clarify Greendale students’ ethno-racial terminology and labelling process as these terms were a regular feature of school life and are present in many of the ethnographic vignettes explored throughout this thesis. The fact that students had a shared ethno-racial lexicon to describe their peers suggests that cultural difference was a defining aspect of school life. Certainly, students’ frequent use of these terms initially gave me the impression that cultural difference was highly significant to their peer relations. Yet, to what extent was this the case, and what impact did this racialising practice have? My early experiences of hearing Milena and Bec make flippant and sometimes disparaging comments about ‘black’ and ‘Afghani’ peers sounded like racism from my etic perspective. But was it from students’ emic perspective?25 Whilst subsequent chapters explore these questions in greater depth, the following sections of this chapter provide a broad sense of how and when ethno-racial differences did and did not come to matter in everyday school life. Returning to Milena and Gamze’s descriptions of peer groups at Greendale, it is clear that
25 Borrowed from linguistics, in ethnographic research “an emic perspective is one that reflects the insiders’ or research participants’ point of view, whereas an etic perspective is one that echoes the outsiders’ or researchers’ point of view” (Madden 2010, 19).
84 CHAPTER THREE the ethno-racial categories outlined in this section were central to how students understood social divisions in the schoolyard.
Mapping the Schoolyard: Race and Space
Unprompted, Milena and Gamze both described student sociality to me in spatialised terms, using the racialised shared lexicon of Greendale High. Their mappings were very similar and yet revealed some differences in classification. For example, for Milena (Figure 4), ‘Afghanis’ and ‘fobs’ were the most salient groups in the lower courtyard, whereas Gamze (Figure 5) outlined the same space in somewhat different constellations – fobs, wogs and Muslims. They also differed in whether classifications were racialised or not. For Milena, basketball players and soccer players occupied the back section of the schoolyard, whilst Gamze viewed these students through a racialising lens: as ‘Sudos’ and ‘Afghanis’ respectively.
Figure 4: Milena's School Mapping
Figure 5: Gamze's School Mapping
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Intrigued by these convergent and divergent patterns of spatialisation, I decided to ask Jase about school social groups. Whilst Jase was initially wary of me, after a few months in the field he had become a good friend and facilitated my entry into social life in the upper courtyard. He was quite the character, with perfectly quiffed golden hair, lily-white body and theatrical mannerisms; his performative self was equalled only by his sharp aptitude for introspection and critical, social observation. Walking into the upper courtyard to find him, I saw Jase and another young white man hitting each other with their backpacks. Jase was in full-flight and flushed, dodging back and forth in attack and defence. A group of mostly Anglo-looking boys watched on suspended between laughter and apprehension. “One sec, Mel,” Jase puffed when he saw me approaching. The backpack battle finished, he joined me at one of the tables. I told him that people had said the schoolyard is split into groups. He agreed with this, and broke it down for me from his perspective – a perspective influenced by his reflexivity and awareness of my research interests (this awareness was exemplified in Chapter 2 when Jase remarked “this is so high school”). According to Jase (Figure 6), the upper courtyard was “only white people…like an exclusive white space” whilst the lower courtyard was “ethnics”. He added that the year 10 students hung out between these two spaces, whilst the “smokers and stoners” were on the oval. While he did not assign an ethnicity to these groups, Gamze had described them as ‘white’.
Figure 6: Jase's School Mapping
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Even more intrigued about these differences in perceptions but also glaring similarities in the racialised division between the upper and lower courtyard, I decided to ask a range of students to map the school space.26 After talking with Jase, I went to the canteen, the library and lower courtyard to collect ‘mappings’ from a range of different students. I took copies of the school map from the reception desk, and students drew on them or pointed at certain areas. Unlike Jase, I gave them no explanation for the exercise. I simply asked “where do people hang out?”
Stop 1: The Canteen
Aleksandra and a friend of hers, Nicole, were sitting together in the canteen with a few male friends. I asked them to fill in the map. A common thread was emerging: “fobs” and “Afghans” were in the lower courtyard. “And the upper courtyard?” I asked. “Aussies,” Nicole’s boyfriend prompted, when she and Aleksandra faltered. The “nerds” were in the library and a “mixed” group hung out in the canteen. When they had finished, I asked them what their own backgrounds were in case it was relevant to my analysis later. Nicole described herself as white Australian, her boyfriend said El Salvadorian and Aleksandra said Georgian-Turkish-Czech.
Stop 2: The Library
In the library, I saw Mohammed and Lacey, friends of Jase, sitting with a few students I didn’t know. Mohammed and Lacey usually hung out in the upper courtyard. I explained that I needed help working out where people socialise and they took up this task with enthusiasm. Sport was listed first; football players on the oval, soccer players at the back of the school and four-square and “a boy mix” in the upper courtyard. “Afghans” were in the lower courtyard and library, “fobs” were in lower courtyard, whilst “year 10s who think they’re too cool” hung out in the middle section between the two courtyards. “The bitches” dominated the canteen, while “smokers and stoners” hid on the oval.
26 I learnt later that Mary Bucholtz (2011b) also used this method in her ethnography of race (particularly white identities) and youth culture at an American high school.
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They all laughed gleefully when identifying the “bogans” (an Anglo-Australian class-based distinction discussed in Chapter 4 and 6) as hanging out near the portable classrooms.
This group did not specify the ethnicity of the bogans, sports groups, bitches or boy-mix, which may indicate that their ethnicities were self-evident, associated at Greendale with particular sports, sub-cultures or social spaces. Sport, for example, was racialised at Greendale High. ‘Fobs’ typically played rugby, ‘Aussies’ played AFL, ‘Afghanis’ played soccer and ‘Sudos’ played basketball, whilst the handball players in the upper courtyard were typically ‘white’. Thus, sport as a spatialised category may have acted as coded language for ethnicity, whether used consciously or not. This group’s lack of specificity about ethnicity may have also meant that these social circles could include anybody. The porousness and mutability of social categories will be considered in a later section.
When I asked where their peer group would fit in all of this, Lacey said she wasn’t sure, explaining that it’s the other groups that would categorise them. “I feel bad. I feel like a bitch. It’s all just stereotyping,” she said softly. The group discussed this: “yeah but there are groups…so how else do you describe them?” a student raised. I asked Lacey how we could avoid such stereotyping. “Well, I guess we can’t. You’d have to get to know everybody individually.” After a long, thoughtful pause she added, “but we know that individuals who hang out together influence each other and create a group culture…I still feel bad though.” Lacey was an exception in voicing her discomfort in these discussions. As per the previous group, I asked the students about their backgrounds. This question raised interesting issues that I take up in Chapters 6 and 7, but suffice to say Lacey was labelled ‘Aussie’ to her chagrin by another student, a girl called Tess identified as Aboriginal and Welsh but said that nobody realised she was Aboriginal, whilst another pale-skinned peer said she didn’t know, “I’ve never thought about it.” As I described in Chapter 2, I inadvertently insulted
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Mohammed by describing him as ‘Pakistani-Australian’, whereas he identifies as “just Mohammed.”
I moved on to a group of five girls sitting a few tables away. I squatted down at the table next to them and explained my task. “Do you mean cliques?” one of the girls clarified. Quinn, a girl I knew from English class, commented that Greendale High does not really have any cliques, but then a friend jumped in: “except for the sports!” “Yeah, the jerks!” Quinn acknowledged. Now fully engaged in the exercise, the girls started pointing excitedly towards different parts of the school on the photocopied map. Sports people and smokers were on the oval, soccer players in the upper courtyard and “Afghanistans” or “middle east” people were in the lower courtyard, “doing their own thing, whatever they do” – they all nodded at this statement, laughing. “Gossipers” were in the canteen and “geeks and loners” were in the library. They described their own group as the geeks – namely, the subgroup “anime geeks” and “fandom geeks”. These Anglo-looking girls all identified as “Australians”.
Stop 3: The Lower Courtyard
Na’ima and Aisha helped me with my task down in the lower courtyard.27 Aisha told me that she would describe herself as “born in Afghanistan and then moved to Pakistan, and lived there, and then came to Australia and I now live here so now I am Australian. I’m all of them.” Na’ima identified as Eritrean. Pointing to the map, they said that “Afghans” hung out in one part of the lower courtyard, whilst “New Zealand people…fobs” were in another part. People who played basketball and soccer were down the back of the school and “everyone” – presumably not divided by ethnicity or interest – was said to hang out in the library and canteen. “Who is in the upper courtyard?” I prompted. “Australians,” Aisha replied, with a trace of awkwardness.
27 Gamze and Milena who gave their accounts on an earlier occasion, also spoke from the perspective of people who hang out in this space.
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The following diagram (Figure 7) collates their answers. The responses with asterisks indicate the schoolyard section in which the respondents typically hung out.
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Figure 7: Combined Mappings of School Social Spaces
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Clearly, the social world of Greendale High was not uniformly interpreted. Rather, students categorised peer groups according to differing saliences and subject positions. Yet, they all shared a common pattern: the social landscape of Greendale High was seen as both racialised and spatialised.
Mapping it Out
As I noted earlier, the spatialisation of peer sociality – and the marking of differences it entails – is a key and enduring part of the fabric of student life at many high schools, identified by a number of high school researchers (e.g. Eckert 1989; Bucholtz 2011b; Modica 2015; Thomas 2011). For example, in the case of Thomas’s (2011) research about a multicultural American high school, students explained that the schoolyard was divided into white and Asian ‘punks’, ‘goths’ and ‘rockers’, Hispanic ‘gangsters’, ‘the Armenians’, and the popular group. For ethnographers working in schools with predominantly white student bodies, social class distinctions are by contrast, often the overarching categories that define high school sociality (e.g. Willis 1977; Eckert 1989).
At Greendale High, ethnicity and religion, year level, social class, participation in sport or smoking, ‘bitchy’ behaviour and ‘nerdy’ interests constituted the major divisions of social life in an array of constellations – at least in how students described it. As I will explore later in the context of racialised divisions, my observations of peer sociality revealed much intercultural interaction that defied these supposed boundaries. Across the school day, I was regularly surprised by the hugs and fist bumps between students from different ethnic backgrounds and peer groups who I did not realise were friends or even knew each other. Indeed, most of the students in the mapping exercise were socialising with their friends from diverse backgrounds at the same time that they were describing the school space as if it were made up of discrete racialised cliques.
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Labelling and categorisation of peers were largely based on external ascription; as Lacey astutely pointed out, it was the other groups that would categorise her and her friends. The ‘smoker’ group was identified by all but two respondent groups. Students’ involvement with smoking (and drugs) marked them as a distinctive social group, of particular note and visibility within peer sociality likely due to their illicit rule breaking and, for some, their intimidatingly ‘cooler’ behaviour (see Eckert 1989). Year level, too, was meaningful to students and formed social barriers. Peers in the same year tended to socialise with each other, although friendships did develop across year levels due to shared interests (like sport) and shared ethnic and religious backgrounds, more so in the case of ethnic minority students. In the mapping exercise, year level was not often mentioned, perhaps because it was a taken-for-granted social organiser. The fact that three respondents singled out and marked year 1os as a discrete social group may be explained by the recent entry of these 15-16 years olds to the social world of the senior college, but also because they were perceived by students like Gamze to represent less ethnic diversity than previous cohorts.28 Year 11 and 12 students seemed to use ‘year 10’ to denote ‘white students’ and interrelated stigma attached to this younger cohort: being cliquey and not knowing their place – “being too cool” as Mohammed’s group described them – according to the tacit rules of this youth culture.
Subcultural groups such as ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’ were also relevant social distinctions. It is revealing, however, that these classifications were more often used by Anglo-Australian students in place of identifying a white ethnicity. Whilst non-white students invariably saw the upper courtyard as white, Quinn’s groups, for example, did not mention white identities. While she and her friends viewed the lower courtyard through a racialised (and monolithic) lens, the upper courtyard and other spaces in the school were described using non-racialised, nuanced categories of sports, anime geeks, fandom geeks, loners, and gossipers. Nicole and Aleksandra, too, needed prompting to
28 As we will encounter in Chapter 6, a teacher also used ‘year 10s’ when referring only to Anglo- Australians who “think they have got no culture.”
93 CHAPTER THREE categorise the upper courtyard as ‘Aussie’ but readily identified the lower courtyard as ‘Afghan’ and ‘fob’ territory. Just as Quinn saw ‘white’ heterogeneity where others saw none, down in the lower courtyard respondents similarly divided the ‘ethnics’ into more heterogeneous groupings. For those habituated to lower courtyard sociality, the “diversity within diversity” (Ang et al. 2002, 4) seemed to be more discernable and relevant. Across the respondents, these racialised divisions variously included the ‘fobs’, the ‘Afghanis’, the ‘Muslims’, the ‘wogs’ and the ‘Sudos’. This suggests what is relevant and salient to social life is somewhat dependant on students’ positionality. As Chapter 4 explores, this extends to how young people talked about sex, dating and desire in the lower courtyard and the upper courtyard. As we will discover, the ethnicity of potential partners tended to only be a significant feature of discussion for students who socialised in the lower courtyard.
What was most striking was the high level of overlap between all the participants in the mapping exercise when it came to describing either or both the upper and lower courtyard in racialised terms. With the aim of exploring the significance of cultural difference in peer sociality, following Eckert (1989), I look beyond students’ assorted social assemblages to the broader categories of difference. In the case of Greendale High, age, interests and particular ethnicised groupings were “structurally subordinate to overarching differences” (Eckert 1989, 17) of ‘whites’ and ‘non-whites’. Jase described Greendale’s social landscape in the most ‘black and white’ terms (both literally and figuratively) – the upper courtyard was “an exclusive white space”, whilst the lower courtyard was where “ethnics”, otherwise termed ‘fobs’, ‘Muslims’ and ‘Afghanis’, hung out.
The White-Ethnic Division: Social and Pedagogical Effects
This white-ethnic division has been a key force in Australian schools for decades (Stratton 1998) and likely reflects racialised power relations pervasive in wider Australian society. Racialised and spatialised practices do not simply spring up from nowhere, nor exist in a vacuum; rather, as Eckert notes, they
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“represent divisions that go far deeper in the community” (Eckert 1989, 99) Young people’s experiences of a racialised social space can be a form of tacit learning about wider society and their place within it (Thomas 2011; Eckert 1989; Noble and Poynting 2010). This is well illustrated by Aisha’s categorisation of the upper courtyard as “Australians”, which indirectly categorises the lower courtyard as ‘not Australians’, not quite belonging in the dominant culture. Thus, ethno-racial spatial configurations can have negative effects on feelings of belonging, comfort and safety, and can constrain young people’s movement, sustaining racist systems of power (Noble and Poynting 2010; see also Räthzel 2008).
As described earlier, Gamze felt like she did not belong when she walked through the upper courtyard; she would move quickly and keep her head down to avoid the judgmental looks she feared. From Gamze’s viewpoint, the white male handball players thought her ‘out of place’; both gender and race were likely significant to her perceptions of comfort and belonging in the schoolyard. I watched other students, too, scuttle across the upper courtyard, staying as close to the edges as possible. Until I met Jase, I also only reluctantly ventured into the upper courtyard. Lunch tables were widely separated creating a lot of barren space. My heart would beat quicker and my face would redden as I tried to find a familiar, friendly face to find an anchor and secure my social safety and belonging. The upper courtyard was much less populated than the lower courtyard, and eyes did seem to dart more to lone students who strayed into the territory.
I witnessed students in the upper courtyard experience similar discomfort when required to enter the lower courtyard. Jase, for instance, dropped his usual swagger when he neared the lower courtyard. In fact, if I was in the lower courtyard and he wished to speak with me, he often teetered in the liminal space between the two social terrains and beckoned me over with his arm. Sometimes he called me on my mobile phone; he did not want to step foot outside his ‘comfort zone’ – positional power potentially afforded by his
95 CHAPTER THREE friendships in the upper courtyard as well as by his ethnicity. Everyone had to walk through white territory because it lay at the entrance of the school. It is perhaps no coincidence that white students claimed the schoolyard area at the front of the school and on higher ground.
It is important to note these differing experiences of upper and lower courtyard sociality for two reasons. Firstly, it highlights that racial structures of power may have been an underlying feature of student life. Yet, as Jase’s discomfort in the lower courtyard hints at, this was sometimes unsettled within a multicultural peer culture. The following chapters provide texture to the significance of whiteness at Greendale. Chapter 6, in particular, considers how white power and privilege function in a multicultural, working-class peer sociality. Secondly, this section has underscored that even within the one school, divergent patterns of sociality emerged across different social spaces and students experienced social life in different ways. Whilst Gamze described the racialised schoolyard in divisive and hostile terms when I spoke to her, fellow peers explained racialised peer sociality in a more positive or indifferent way. For many students, racialised school segregation was not considered particularly salient or problematic. Indeed, the schoolyard, or parts of it, could be experienced as inclusive. As mentioned earlier, Esther also expressed that Greendale High was the place where she felt the greatest sense of belonging because of her ‘fob’ social network there. Even Gamze said she felt relief when she arrived in the lower courtyard after traversing the upper courtyard; it was a place where she felt belonging and security. These varying perspectives raise important questions for understanding how Greendale students ‘get along’. Is racialised segregation an indicator of endemic, problematic and potentially racist social relations?
Friends or Enemies?: The Significance of Racialised Demarcations
In contrast to Gamze’s account, Steph (a fellow classmate raised in a Turkish- speaking home) did not consider Greendale High divisive. In class one day,
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Steph had told me – likely in order to avoid doing the class work – that she used to attend a much more elite school but it “pushed religion too much.” Seemingly sensing a contradiction, she elaborated that she is not Muslim, just Turkish. She described how at her previous school nearly everyone was Turkish and Muslim, and that a girl who was neither Turkish nor Muslim got bullied and thrown up against a locker; she left three days later and never came back. “It’s not like that at Greendale,” Steph explained, “everybody is from everywhere so nobody really asks what your nash is. Like sometimes, when it comes up, like you say you’re going back to visit your family, then they’ll ask. So I don’t regret coming to Greendale, it’s better here.” She paused and then added that despite the poorer level of education, she wouldn’t leave Greendale: “I love the freedom students get here.” Nicole, who wasn’t part of our conversation, turned her head quickly, agreed with Steph and then turned back to her computer screen.
Steph’s comments bear striking resemblance to those made by residents in Wessendorf’s (2013) ethnography of the culturally diverse suburb of Hackney, London. Hackney residents explained to Wessendorf that members of their community “show little interest in each other’s origins because everybody comes from elsewhere and it is therefore not a particularly special topic to talk about” (2013, 411). Wessendorf coined the phrase ‘commonplace diversity’ to capture the normality and ensuing banality of ethno-racial, linguistic and religious diversity among residents in this London suburb (2013, 407).
Steph’s comment about her previous school implied that ‘commonplace diversity’ does not exist in places with lower levels of diversity, which she connects to higher levels of tension and increased amount of scrutiny about people’s backgrounds. By complaining about the (white) year 10 students, Gamze also seemed to be operating under the same logic that if diversity is diluted, racial tensions will emerge, threatening the convivial environment of Greendale High. For students like Steph, Greendale’s multicultural student body was interpreted as creating an environment in which everybody was
97 CHAPTER THREE accepted and nobody stood out. Somewhat contrary to Steph’s logic, I observed that the question “what’s your nash” and talk about ‘nash’ was an important part of social knowledge, part of bonding and joking, finding common ground and talking about sexual interests between friends and classmates. Thus, while cultural background was not necessarily ‘banal’, it was often invoked for inclusive ends.
Despite explaining the schoolyard in segregated terms during the mapping exercise, in more casual discussion Na’ima and Aisha also described Greendale as “really mixed” and “friendly”. The multicultural demographic and propensity to make friends with people from different background characterised school life for Na’ima and Aisha. The only exception Aisha mentioned was that the ‘Afghanis’ stay in their group “but nobody else does.” These kinds of claims about Greendale’s cultural diversity reveal an ‘ethos of mixing’ which Wessendorf defines as “the expectation that in public and associational spaces, people ‘should mix’ and interact with their fellow residents of other backgrounds. It describes the tensions that arise when groups of people do not adhere to this ‘ethos of mixing’” (2013, 407-8). Thus, positivity about cultural diversity can be associated with negative views towards groups seen as “not wanting to mix” (2013, 407). In the case of Wessendorf’s (2013) research, Orthodox Jews and trendy hipsters in the area were the targets of complaints for ‘not mixing’.
Gamze’s and others’ comments evince an ‘ethos of mixing’ which at once lauds the safety and comfort of ‘commonplace diversity’ and vilifies ethno-racial groups who breach this ethos. Motivated by a commitment to interculturality at Greendale, half a dozen students deemed prominent racialised groups problematic, namely ‘Afghanis’, ‘fobs’ and certain groups of white students, like the year 10s. Whilst ‘fobs’ and ‘white’ students rated a mention once or twice, it was ‘Afghanis’ who were most visible and audible in their difference, and were, therefore, most often singled out as ‘not mixing’. This was despite the fact that ‘Afghani’ students were friends with people from other backgrounds and were
98 CHAPTER THREE involved in multiple aspects of school life.29 The rebukes made about ‘Afghanis’ for breaching the ‘ethos of mixing’ by talking in their mother tongue languages and sticking to themselves were likely amplified by wider societal integrationist expectations of ‘mainstream’ Australia which often target the newest waves of immigrants and refugees. In Harris’s research, young people also named Afghanis specifically as “making insufficient efforts to integrate into mainstream culture” (2013, 2).
I most regularly heard Milena make complaints about the ‘Afghanis’ not mixing (even though she was good friends with a lot of students from Afghani backgrounds). On one occasion I heard her and some friends from Moroccan and Bosnian heritages lamenting that the racialised schoolyard reduced their ability to make friends from different backgrounds. However, they agreed that it was better at Greendale than their previous schools where groups were based on popularity and bullying was rife. This illustrates how, even when complaining about Greendale’s racialised social world, it was rarely described in terms that signalled hostility and tension. Indeed, as I discuss in greater detail in the chapters to come, I did not witness any conflict configured around cultural difference aside from within a joking framework inside friendship groups (see Chapters 5 and 6).
Even Quinn’s group’s comment during the mapping exercise that described ‘Afghanis’ in the lower courtyard as an enigmatic, alien mass “doing their own thing, whatever they do” did not reveal hostile and aggressive attitudes. While this remark indicates that they did not actively engage with peers across spatialised and racialised borders, Quinn’s group did not engage in territorial disputes and racist slurs like in Thomas’s (2011) American high school. Rather, their behaviour more closely reflected what van Leeuwen describes as “a
29 This is different to Wessendorf’s findings where only hipsters and Orthodox Jews were seen to have breached the ‘ethos of mixing’ because there were almost no “points of contact” between them and wider community (2013, 417). Whilst Vietnamese and Turkish residents were perceived as two particularly insular groups, they were not complained about because they were nevertheless involved in some part of community life.
99 CHAPTER THREE shoulder-shrugging indifference to the particularity of one’s co-citizens, co- workers, or co-students in the diverse urban context” (2010, 638). In the context of youth social relations, Harris describes this as “productive distance” in enforced proximity, whereby “the capacity to stay out of each other’s way is also a form of productive mix” (2014, 583). In the UK context, Hollingworth and Mansaray (2012) note that the idea among high school students that ‘everyone gets on’ may derive from the fact students have found ‘people like them’ to hang out with, rather than crossing ethnic, religious and class divides.
These possibilities are important for understanding the significance of ethno- racial and spatial classifications at Greendale. Whilst racialised boundaries did have a tangible significance for everyday sociabilities and feelings of belonging, and may reify structural racisms, students largely conceived of ethno-racial groups as a banal, non-inflammatory part of everyday life. Rather than signalling conflictual, exclusionary relations, students suggested that racialised terms and grouping performed less problematic functions. Most often, racialised classifications seemed useful to students to talk about complex social life in simpler ways. As Milena explained, it’s easier to use generic terms like ‘fob’ to describe people from a vast variety of backgrounds (the specificities of which students may not be aware). As Lacey acknowledged during the mapping exercise, to eliminate categorisation of peers, “you’d have to get to know everybody individually.”
Blurred Boundaries: The Limitations of Social Categorisations and Divisions
It is also important to re-emphasise that student’s ethno-racial categories, markers of difference and schoolyard divisions were a lot more flexible, porous and unstable than students described. Students’ spatialised and racialised cliques provided, what Bucholtz would describe as, “partial ideological crystallizations” (2011b, 50) of what was a much more complex and flexible everyday sociality at Greendale High. Whilst many students indicated that schoolyard sociality was broken into ‘white’ and ‘ethnic’ (and similar
100 CHAPTER THREE constellations), they simultaneously challenged this in their everyday sociabilities and their claims about Greendale’s ‘mixity’.
Many students did not fit neatly into simplistic groupings; students came from a considerably larger number of cultural backgrounds than students’ lexicon afforded, and students also regularly contradicted clear-cut racialised social divisions. For example, Bec, while Anglo-Australian, hung out in the lower courtyard. Another Anglo-Australian I was friendly with played handball almost every lunchtime with the ‘fobs’, and Mohammed, a Pakistani-born student, hung out in the upper courtyard. Aisha and N’aima were inseparable despite their ascriptions by peers as ‘Afghani’ and ‘black’. Indeed, Nicole (Anglo-Australian) helped me with the mapping exercise alongside her El Salvador-born boyfriend and her friend Aleksandra (Georgian-Turkish-Czech). Moreover, students did not accept these ethno-racial divisions and labels passively and uncritically. Students in the mapping exercise expressed awareness that these racialised categories were not precise and were based on stereotypes. Lacey, in particular, articulated her discomfort with categorising others. In the opening vignette of this chapter, Bec and Milena, too, were mindful of the stereotyping involved in categorisation; when Milena mentioned ‘nerds’ as a social group, Bec chimed in with “Asian nerds”. Recognising Bec’s use of Asian stereotypes, Milena followed suit by joking that fat people hang out in the canteen.
Whether or not a racialised lens was even applied to peers and school life varied from moment to moment and from student to student. The saliences, experiences and understandings of school sociality were constantly contested and shifting. Cultural background, school pursuits, age and gender were all shifting and interconnected lines along which students perceived school divisions and developed social bonds; in the daily flow of school life, racialisation was foregrounded and backgrounded. The chapters which follow trace when racialisation emerged within this inconsistent, complex terrain in
101 CHAPTER THREE order to gain a nuanced understanding of the meaning of racism and ‘getting along’ in this social landscape.
Conclusion
This chapter has laid the groundwork for the following chapters of this thesis, outlining the discursive, categorical and spatial practices students employed to organise peer sociality. Within Greendale’s social geography, race and ethnicity were significant markers of difference. These differences were read off the body; symbolic markers included accent and language, attire, and racialised assumptions about appearance. Location in a racially coded schoolyard was also a significant element in labelling practices as well as the policing of bodies and borders. In illustrating the existence of a white-ethnic divide between students, this chapter also hints at how patterns and experiences of sociality may differ between students in the upper courtyard (generally ‘white’) and in the lower courtyard (typically non-white). Whilst these racialising practices formed the foundations of schoolyard life, students’ own more complex identifications and porous modes of sociality challenge simple, typological understanding of this school social world.
Through charting the ‘ethos of mixing’, the value placed on cultural diversity, the lack of racialised conflict and the normalcy of intercultural friendships across peer sociality, this chapter illuminates some of the complexities in determining whether students’ racialising discourses and practices reflect issues of racism or else more convivial modes of sharing a multicultural school space. The white-ethnic schoolyard division hints at the way that wider systems of power, namely white dominance, informed and were reproduced in day-to-day student life. Indeed, it could be argued that their social world at school was always inflected by a shadow of structural racism; a critical reason why these students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and highly diverse ethnic backgrounds came to share the same school space is a result of race- and class- based inequalities in Australia’s education system.
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Yet what this chapter also highlights is the way that Greendale students may have unsettled these power dynamics, complicating interpretations of their behaviours as necessarily producing exclusionary and conflictual outcomes. Greendale was a multicultural school, where by and large, intercultural friendships were the norm, and rubbing alongside peers from different backgrounds was a normalised part of the fabric of school life. Many students also expressed their commitment to engaging with peers from different backgrounds, albeit often as part of policing others lack of mixing that had assimilatory qualities. In this context, notions of cosmopolitan conviviality and racism both emerged in entangled ways, prompting further attention to the significance of racialisation to ‘getting along’ at Greendale.
The following chapter turns to explore the second most common and visible way that Greendale peers activated ethno-racial labels and categories. One of the most common conversation topics that arose in the schoolyard was “what nash are you into?” (sexually). Responses to this question mobilised cultural difference in ways that ranked, sorted and (de)valued peers and that struck me as racist. However, as we will encounter, this is not how the Greendale students I came to know understood their exchanges. Thus, I explore their frequent conversations about sex, dating and desire as a significant entry point into understanding the logics of racism and conviviality in a culturally diverse peer culture.
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CHAPTER FOUR Sex, Dating and Desire in the Schoolyard: Racism or Convivial Cosmopolitanism?
Introduction
I arrived at school late one Friday morning – I had overslept. As I walked briskly across the lower courtyard towards the classroom I was supposed to be in, I saw Maduka wave me over from where she was sitting with her friends at a lunch table. I had met Maduka in an English class I regularly attended. She was Australian-born with Fijian-Indian parents. Sliding into a space next to her, I told Maduka I was reluctant to go to class because I knew I’d be told off for being late. “But you’re wearing an ANU [Australian National University] jumper – you’re clearly a uni student!” Maduka said, surprised that teachers would treat me like a school student. “Ahh yes, but I don’t actually go to ANU,” I responded sheepishly. “Yeah I thought you didn’t! Why are you wearing it then?” “It’s my boyfriend’s,” I admitted. “Ohh you’ve got a boyfriend!” she exclaimed, “what’s his nash?” “Indian.” “You’re into Indian guys, aren’t you?” Not really sure how to respond to this question, I explained that I had not dated an Indian guy before, but that had I dated someone from a Sri Lankan background. “Sri Lankan guys are hotter than Indians, don’t you reckon?” Maduka remarked.
During my year-long fieldwork at Greendale High, I was often troubled and dismayed by these kinds of ‘casual’ conversations about sexual desirability and the ethno-racial background of sexual partners. Students’ dating preferences were inflected with stereotypical understandings of racialised Others that have
104 CHAPTER FOUR racist histories; wider issues of “sexual racism” (Callander, Newman, and Holt 2015, 1991) informing dating preferences, power relations inherent to ranking bodies by desirability, and colonial legacies of fear and desire were all activated when interpreting these students’ behaviour. Yet, the onus is on the ethnographer to respect the emic experience. The Greendale students I got to know did not understand their racialising discourses as racist. Why might this be the case?
While the first half of this chapter critically examines the racist logics that may have informed students’ sexualised discussions, this reading of racism did not accord with how students understood their social world. In fact, Milena and two of her male friends from Morocco and Afghanistan concurred: racism doesn’t exist anymore because “white girls want to have sex with black guys”. They discussed this in my presence one lunchtime between mouthfuls of pizza hot from the canteen. Seemingly, from their viewpoint, if one is willing to get intimate with a person considered Other, it signals an all-embracing openness to and engagement with difference that does not reconcile easily with racism. As Connolly argues, it is critical to closely attend to youth perspectives to “more fully understand the nature of racism in their lives and develop and adopt more informed and appropriate strategies in order to counter it” (1998, 195). By taking seriously Greendale students’ perspectives, in the second half of this chapter I question whether standard readings of students’ behaviour as racist capture the complexity of young people’s racialised practices and logics, which as we will see, were based on inclusive orientations to and intimate investments in cultural diversity.
Through these two readings I highlight not only the problematic ethno-racial logics embedded within youth discussions of sexual desire and activity, but also the need to expand the range of conceptual tools and terms available to capture and address the sophisticated social practices and ideas that shaped multicultural youth sociality. In doing so, I return to the debates outlined in Chapter 1 about the dichotomy of ‘racism’ and ‘conviviality’ and develop an
105 CHAPTER FOUR alternate frame for understanding how young people at Greendale operated in conditions of cultural diversity; Greendale students’ sexualising and racialising social practices offer a grounded empirical explication of how ‘racism’ can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.
Let’s Talk about Sex: Discourses of Dating and Desire in Youth Sociality
Whilst there has been a “sexuality turn” in migration studies (Noble and Tabar 2014 discussing Mai and King 2009), dating and desire remain under-explored areas of consideration in multicultural youth studies.30 A literature search on dating and youth largely yields research on dating aggression and violence in teen lives. A further search on youth and sexuality unearths studies on sexual education and LGBTQ+ experiences of schooling. In the context of living in multicultural societies, how young people work through complex racialised, gendered and sexual social configurations and expectations as part of navigating peer sociality is an important area of study, yet only a limited number of studies engage with this youthful sexual terrain. Perhaps this is because, as Harris notes, “the potential sexual crossing of ethno-racial borders is not necessarily the kind of multicultural intimacy sought by proponents of social cohesion” (2013, 3, discussing Fortier 2008). If government and education policy and programs do engage with sexuality as part of racism and intercultural initiatives, this may have an interrelated impact on scholarly research that aims to inform or evaluate institutional approaches to youth multiculture (see for example Harris and Herron 2017, on the social cohesion agenda). The lack of in-depth research in this area may also stem from the need to develop high levels of trust with young people to access insights about intercultural mixity that occurs at “the level of the embodied, the emotional, and the unmanageable” (Harris 2013, 48; Fortier 2008).
30 Connelly’s (1998) ethnographic research exploring young children’s gendered and sexualised social relations at a multicultural primary school in the UK is a notable exception.
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Harris (2013) and Thomas (2011) are two scholars who have considered sexual attraction and dating practices among young people. In their interview-based research with young people in Australia and America, respectively, both describe how heterosexual dating and sexual interest were common conversation topics articulated with race and ethnicity. In the case of Thomas’s (2011) study in a multicultural American high school, when young women discussed future boyfriends, the potential suitors were always racialised. She found that “the boyfriend is impossibly race neutral, as the girls cannot imagine a boy who is not racialized somehow” (2011, 66). While Harris (2013) and Thomas (2011) valuably highlight the salience of racialised sexual interests to youth multiculture, how racism might inflect young people’s discourses and logics about sexual attraction is an issue that deserves greater analytical and empirical attention. Long-term, immersive ethnographic research lends itself particularly well to this endeavour.
Whilst the link between racism and sexuality has been a long-standing concern of scholars in the fields of ‘race relations’, whiteness and (post)colonialism (e.g. Bhabha 1994; Benson 1981; Hall 1988; Frankenberg 1993), my aim in this chapter is to contribute to the debates in multicultural youth studies on how young people negotiate lived multiculture, taking into account the entangled ways ethnicity, gender and sexuality structure social relations in youth cultures.
‘What nash are you into?’: Common Schoolyard Conversations
At Greendale High, particularly in the lower courtyard, (heterosexual) intercultural dating was normalised to the point that racialised interest in potential partners was generally assumed. One of the most common conversation starters or fillers I heard among students was “what nash are you into?” (sexually). The other version of this was “do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend?” then, “what nash are they?” I found myself participating in this discourse with Bec (Anglo-Australian) and Milena (Maltese background) as we filed out of the classroom after class one morning.
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“What nash are you into?” Bec asked a student teacher conversationally as we lingered outside the classroom. The teacher, a young woman of European and Asian descent, said that she had a boyfriend, indicating that the question wasn’t relevant. I turned the question back onto Bec. “White,” she said matter-of-factly, “actually, I want a New Zealand boyfriend.” “They are gorillas,” Milena remarked, “they’ll squash you…you know when…get a Sudo.”31 “Yeah, they are gorillas,” Bec echoed. Spotting a tradesman up on a ladder repairing a school building, I asked Milena and Bec: “What do we think of that guy?” “Too white,” Milena labelled succinctly. To my eyes his ethnicity was ambiguous and so I clarified: “Is he white?” “He is to me!” Milena said with a laugh. “But you’re getting whiter!” Bec teased, referring to Milena’s diminishing summer tan. “That’s true,” she acknowledged, inspecting her olive-skinned arms.
The ranking of ethnic groups by ‘hotness’ was also a common conversation topic. As I sat down at one of the tables in an EAL class, I realised that three boys from Afghani backgrounds were in the midst of discussing which girls of what ‘nash’ were hot. Echoing Maduka’s sentiments, one of them stated “Sri Lankan girls are better looking than Indian girls, don’t you think?” He looked at me for a response. “I think that’s mean,” I replied. He continued as if I’d said nothing or agreed with him – “Sri Lankan women are hotter. Just like South Koreans are hotter than Chinese, you know. And Japanese are also hotter than Chinese.” Aisha, sitting at a table nearby, caught my eye and rolled her eyes discretely.
31 Milena’s use of the term ‘gorilla’ in reference to ‘New Zealand’ boys likely referred to Maoris or Islanders (‘fobs’), articulating either a stereotype about rugby-sized bodies or else a racist epithet similar to the term ‘ape’ used towards Aboriginal Australian football players (see Chapter 1). Indeed, the president of an AFL football club was compelled to make a public apology for suggesting on Melbourne radio that Indigenous footballer, Adam Goodes, promote the theatre production King Kong (Paxinos 2013).
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Sitting with Gamze (Turkish heritage), Maduka (Fijian-Indian background) and two of their friends from Eastern European origins, I again became embroiled in these comparative rankings. Gamze turned to me and asked “do you like white guys or both?” I evaded the question. “I don’t find black guys attractive,” she stated. The group’s discussion turned to centre on hot guys on the bus and then to creepy, sleazy guys. Two of the girls claimed that “foreign guys” and “Muslim guys” were the sleaziest but Maduka argued that “fresh Indians” were even worse (When Jase and I hung out together, he also often complained about “old Arab guys” being interested in him on gay dating apps). Later in the week, Gamze’s friends talked about the rumour going around that a student teacher quit because she found some of the ‘Afghani’ male students sexually threatening. “I find them scary,” Gamze declared.
In another conversation after class one day as we walked to the lockers, Emily, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired student, told me how she felt that people gave her and her Sudanese boyfriend strange looks when they are were out in public together. She described how people at her previous school questioned why she would go out with a black man, rationalising that “it wasn’t multicultural there.” This remark reiterates the logic expressed by her Greendale peers, detailed in Chapter 3, that a lack of cultural diversity at school yields intolerance towards cultural difference and social scrutiny about peers’ ethno- racial origins. “What about at Greendale?” I asked. “Nah, it doesn’t happen here,” she replied, “although people do think ‘I like black guys’ but I’m like just because I’m going out with one black guy doesn’t mean I like all black guys.” She looked perplexed.
These ethnographic moments exemplify the ways that discussions of sex, desire and dating were invariably racialised by Greendale students. It was not the kind of treatment of racialised bodies often discussed in accounts of everyday racism – the violent burning of Bangladeshi women’s hair (Nayak 2017) or racist slurs of ‘smelly’ and ‘dirty’ hurled at Indian bodies (Velayutham 2009); violent or
109 CHAPTER FOUR antagonistic racialised conflict was a very rare occurrence at Greendale High. Rather, students produced a discourse that talked about and positioned people in sexualising and stereotyped ways that valued and devalued certain racialised, gendered bodies. While on some level unremarkable, for these students intercultural intimacies and interests were at once a source of entertaining conversation and a form of meaningful social performance.32 What these ethnographic vignettes elucidate is that students’ provocative talk drew on the language of sexual ‘taste’, the comparison and ranking of bodies, and the use of social rewards and sanctions to police students’ social practices. Black, Indian, Muslim and Afghani male bodies were subject to particular scrutiny by the young women I socialised with in the lower courtyard. The following section considers these key social practices and the possible racist associations, logics and tenors that produced or informed them. I then turn to explore an alternative reading of students’ racialising behaviour.
The Racist Backdrop
The Language of Preference and Taste
The term ‘sexual racism’ is gaining traction in the media and scholarly research to describe racial online dating preferences (Callander, Newman, and Holt 2015; Allen 2015). According to Allen (2015), while gay men’s online dating profiles might read “no blacks” or “no Asians”, racism is denied and behaviour explained in the language of ‘preference’. Dating profiles may also draw on food metaphors to advertise sexual (dis)tastes; “no rice” or “no curry”, for instance, tell Asian and Indian men respectively “they don’t have a shot” (Allen 2015). When questioned about racialised sexual preferences on dating websites, gay,
32 It should be noted that the interpretations offered in this chapter are based on how young people talked about their racialised dating lives, not their actual sexual practices. Whether or not sexual choices are indicative of racist beliefs, or are influenced by other factors, is beyond the scope of this research. Rather, students’ provocative talk is illuminating; discussion among classmates and friends about intercultural sexual interests was at once mere salacious gossip, and meaningful social knowledge and performance.
110 CHAPTER FOUR adult male participants in Robinson’s research told him “it doesn’t mean anything” (2015, 323). Greendale students also appeared to understand their conversations about racialised ‘tastes’ as unproblematic, not associated with circulating scripts that “provide us with seemingly natural sexual preferences for some partners and intuitive aversions to others” (Nagel 2006, 545; see also Bourdieu 1984 for wider critique of 'taste'). Discussions among friends and classmates sounded like casual, amiable food-related conversations: do you prefer Chinese food or Korean food? Do you like Indian or Sri Lankan cuisine better? I like Japanese food, but I’m not a big fan of African dishes (cf. hooks 1992 on 'shopping' for sexual partners). Yet such comparative discussions of sexual interests have a distinct “boutique multiculturalism” (Fish 1997, 378) flavour to them, marked by the celebration of diverse foods and festivals and the exoticism and commodification of the Other (Hannerz 2006).
In this racialised and sexualised commodity culture, according to hooks “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (1992, 21). For hooks, what is concealed beneath this cosmopolitan veneer is the power and privilege implicated in ‘eating the Other’. At Greendale High, whilst intimate intercultural relationships with peers were normalised and commonplace, students were not immune to the workings of power, privilege and inequality that characterise Australian society. As noted in Chapter 3, white dominant culture likely informed racialised schoolyard divisions. However, in the context of Greendale’s multicultural peer sociality, students from a diverse range of backgrounds participated in discussions of racialised ‘taste’, which complicates readings of privilege and power. In fact, as will be discussed later in this chapter, explicit expressions of racialised desire were less common among white students. Therefore, how white domination functions is not the line of critique I wish to pursue here (see Chapter 6 for closer consideration of white privilege at Greendale). What I wish to focus on is how students mobilised concepts of cultural difference and power in ways that made sense within their peer sociality, creating contextual, shifting racialised hierarchies and fluid criteria for (de)valuing and policing peer practices.
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Racial Rankings: Social Cachet and Stigma
Among the Greendale students I came to know, particularly in the lower courtyard, conversations about dating and desire most commonly centred on which ‘nash’ you found most sexually attractive or most often dated. However, these discussions invariably led to rejecting certain racialised groups as less sexually attractive or desirous. In this process, some kinds of ‘diversity’ were rewarded with social cachet while others were stigmatised. In one comparative ranking, Sri Lankans were valued for being hotter than Indians, with Indians facing additional stigma for associations with ‘fresh’ or new immigrants, inferring that their cultural difference pushed the limits of acceptability and desirability. Students who mentioned Indian boyfriends or sexual interests were often subject to teasing by school friends. Similarly, Bec who had a crush on an Afghani student felt compelled to make claims like ‘he doesn’t look Afghani though!’ when Milena teased her about it (see Chapter 3). Thus, a socially negotiated hierarchy emerged from this discursive practice based on interlaced ideas of race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender.
As Fortier emphasises, the twin process of “embracing and repelling” is not uniformly applied to particular bodies – “not all minoritized subjects are othered in the same terms” (2008, 10). Whilst Milena termed ‘fob’ boys “gorillas” in her conversation with Bec detailed earlier, young men from Maori and Pacific Islander backgrounds were generally popular and many female students from diverse backgrounds had ‘fob’ boyfriends. Indeed, Maduka seemed proud to announce that she was dating a boy from Samoa late in the school year. Recalling Chapter 2, the school principal also alluded to the sexual desirability of ‘fob’ boys in recounting surprise that a student would be motivated to go to class if there were more hot ‘fob’ boys there. Focusing here on young women’s schoolyard conversations, Indian men and men variously termed ‘Afghani’, ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’, however, typically ranked lowest in what was a partial and variable hierarchy of desire. The desirability of black men was, by contrast, much more unstable; students evaluated black bodies in both
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‘positive’ and negative ways (as will be discussed in detail later). The complexities of how ‘white’ bodies were evaluated will also be touched on in a later section.
Students’ conversations and proclamations about sexual interests were performances; students were attempting to position themselves in peer sociality, while simultaneously positioning peers and being positioned themselves. Claims about ‘which nash’ students would or would not date were highly useful as a resource for reputational work. To manage this successfully they had to learn and navigate the ethno-racial scripts about sexually desirable, but more importantly, sexually undesirable Others. What then were the likely ethno-racial logics that informed shared understandings at Greendale High about Indian, Muslim/Afghani and black men?
Stereotypes and Stigma: South Asian, Muslim and Afghani Men
Circulating discourse about South Asian men across Australia and the UK paints them as effeminate, soft-bodied and physically vulnerable alongside a number of other stereotypes (see Lim 2012; Connolly 1998). Noting the impact these narratives can have on children’s sexualised practices, Connelly describes that he never observed white or black girls playing the popular ‘kiss-chase’ game with South Asian boys during his ethnographic research in a British primary school (1998, 127). In the context of Greendale High, evaluations of Indian men seemed to shift between competing notions of asexuality and sleaziness. Given that Greendale High had only a very small number of South Asian students, the prevalence of depersonalised and sexualised discussion of Indian men is likely explained by the pervasiveness of racial and sexual scripts about Indians in wider public discourse. This discourse may be particularly salient in Melbourne where racism towards Indian people has a violent and fraught recent history, with young international students particularly subject to brutal attacks and thefts (Singh 2011; Mason 2012). Canvassing Australian media responses to this violence, Baas (2015) documents how Indian people have often
113 CHAPTER FOUR been described as ‘weak’ or ‘soft’ targets, which resonates with wider emasculating narratives about South Asian-ness.
For South Asian men who are Muslim, masculine and sexual associations can take a strikingly different form (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2014). In the Australian context, research suggests that young Muslim men’s sexuality is viewed as aggressive, misogynist and animalistic (see Poynting et al. 2004). According to Harris, while many young Muslim men participate in hegemonic youth cultural practices like drinking, sex and making sexual comments about women’s bodies, for young Australians in her research it was “not enough to grant [them] membership in the sexist fraternity of young Australian men entitled to judge women” (2013, 78). While she is referring to the policing of acceptable masculinities by male peers, at Greendale High young women were also a core part of this policing; Gamze and others deemed these kinds of hegemonic youth practices “scary” when performed by Muslim Afghani peers.
In all these schoolyard discussions, discourses about dating and desire marked distinctions between racialised groups in language that was generalising and othering. However, slight differences in language were revealing. Students commonly referred to male students of Middle Eastern, Muslim backgrounds as “the Afghani boys”, while black students were spoken about as “black guys.” By comparison, the former category is familiarised (perhaps endearingly) but emasculated (cf. Tilbury 2007), while the latter is viewed as more masculine but also as more abstract and unknown. Discussing literary works including Fanon’s (1967) ‘Black Skin White Masks’, Nayak poignantly remarks that “because the black man is surrounded by figments of a white imagination, ultimately he is ‘invisible’” (Nayak 2007, 747). While in the Greendale High context this was a practice that spanned more than white people, young black men were nevertheless talked about in highly essentialist, abstract terms. It was often hard to believe students were talking about fellow students, lovers, friends and acquaintances at all.
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The (De)valuing of Black Men
One Monday at lunch in the lower courtyard, Milena, Bec and three of their male friends hailing from Afghanistan were debriefing on a party they attended that weekend. Apparently, Milena met a ‘Sudo’ guy there and they were now officially dating. She mentioned that she sort of “hooked up”33 with another guy but she said she did not do much with him because she felt sexually uncomfortable with white boys – “the unknown” – she explained. She teased Bec about boys at the party who wanted to “hook up” with Bec. “I don’t do black guys. Why don’t they get that?” Bec vented in apparent frustration. In a calmer manner she added “there are only three black guys I like.” Conversation moved on to planning Milena’s next party. Whilst Milena and her male friends discussed arrangements for bouncers and photographers, Bec filled me in on the last party that she had hosted. She declared it a resounding success: “it was awesome. Everybody said so.” As if to further prove this claim, she added “there were only four black people. The rest of us were…”– she hesitated, seemingly unsure as to how to describe the skin colour of her Afghani friends at the table – “…darker-skinned and white,” she finished.
Spoken about in depersonalising terms, Bec drew on a common discourse at Greendale High that linked black young men with (cool/uncool) deviant behaviour, like starting fights and theft at parties. For Bec, socially acceptable and sexually desirable black male peers were the exception to the rule. Milena, in contrast, expressed familiarity and comfort with black male bodies. This often rendered her a spokesperson for the black Other. A common question, both as a nod to the trope and as a curious enquiry about the factual nature of the stereotype, posed by those known to have sex with black guys was “does he have the BBC?” “What does that mean?” I asked upon first hearing. “Big, black cock!” a group of friends sang gleefully in chorus. One such conversation took place among Milena’s friends one morning at recess. Milena was complaining
33 The expression ‘hooking up’ was used by Greendale students to describe casual sexual encounters (ranging from kissing to sexual intercourse).
115 CHAPTER FOUR about how a friend “cockblocked”34 her with “a black guy” over the weekend. “Which guy?” I asked. “There is only one hot black guy at Greendale,” she replied. Bec corrected her, mentioning a “lighter-skinned black guy” who was also hot. One of their friends asked curiously whether it is true that black men have “big dicks.” Milena nodded, knowledgeably.
This was typical of the way Greendale students drew on well-worn stereotypes without reference to their racist implications. In Back’s (1996) study of youth multiculture in 1990s London, young black men and women were also subjected to stereotyped sexualisation, differentiated by gender. Young black men were characterised as having large penises, whilst young black women were considered to have large sexual appetites and powers. Back explains that these discourses reveal how ideas of black masculinity are constructed in terms of “aggressiveness and sexual potency”, while black femininity is conceived in terms of fertility and bodily abundance (1996, 178). According to Benson, white English representations of blackness – sexuality and brutality – are a legacy of early colonial contact with Africa (1981, 5). Decades later, these narratives about blackness still resonate in my ethnographic material about Greendale peer sociality. Recent research also reveals how ideas of black male hypersexuality and ‘hard’ masculinity inflect youth sociality (and influence teachers’ practices) (Ispa-Landa 2013; Bucholtz 2011a; Ferguson 2000). Whilst these stereotypes can afford black students popularity and desirability, this can easily be turned into fear of the black male Other. Bucholtz explains in the case of her American- based school research that black male peers were identified as both “admirably powerful yet alarmingly dangerous” by white students (2011a, 399).
34 Urban Dictionary defines ‘cockblocking’ as ‘the act of obstructing one person's [sexual] advances towards another’ (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cock%20block, accessed 8 July, 2016).
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Sex, Sluts and Social Sanctions
Informed by these popular and pervasive logics, ‘black and white’ or ‘black and non-black’ sexual intimacy was marked out from other constellations of intercultural dating at Greendale High. This attention and accompanying discourse suggests that relationships with black peers violated norms, challenging socially sanctioned gender, sexuality and cultural practices and identities (see also Harris 2016a; Kreager 2008). For instance, jokes abounded about interactions between black and white students, sexualised by their friends for effect. A hug between these students might, for instance, incur a joke about “interracial porn”. In other moments, contrary to how Maduka and her friend’s talked about unwanted sexual advances by Indian and Muslim strangers, a number of female students of diverse backgrounds praised their alleged sexual objectification by black young men; overt sexual behaviour made black men ‘real’ (and therefore cool) according to stereotypical representations of blackness in popular culture. Notably, all these marked comments about sexuality involved black men not black women. This may be explained by the fact I spent more time in the field with heterosexual female students and gay male students. However, this focus may also be a legacy of colonial miscegenetic concerns about white women – rendered vulnerable or unable to control their sexuality – and black men as sexual aggressors (see Frankenberg 1993, 81).35
Milena sometimes bore the brunt of hypersexualised notions of blackness. In the prologue to this thesis, Tom (‘white’ from a Greek background) labelled Milena a “slut” for allegedly sleeping exclusively with young black men (he then added ‘Afghanis’). This contrasted to other social circles where Milena gained cachet for her sexual relations with exciting, potentially dangerous black bodies. Emily, in a long-term relationship with her Sudanese boyfriend,
35 It is also possible that the lack of discussion about black women also reflects that relationships between black women and non-black people tend to be less common, either because black women are stigmatised as less desirous, or else because interracial relationships are curtailed by pressures for black women to be the sexual, reproductive “guardians of blackness” (Youdell 2003, 10-11; Wanjuki 2015; Schwartz 2015).
117 CHAPTER FOUR escaped this ‘slut’ label at Greendale. According to Emily, she did face scrutiny at her previous school for her interracial relationship. She also said that when she first met her boyfriend’s parents they did not like her because “they think white girls are slutty.” As Frankenberg explains in her research on the meaning of whiteness in white American women’s lives, “white women who choose interracial relationships are presented as sexually ‘loose’” (or else sexual failures or radicals) (1993, 77). As described earlier, Emily viewed Greendale High as an unusual haven from judgmental eyes regarding her relationship with a young black man. Nevertheless, this relationship cast Emily in the school social order as having a particular preference for black men. This kind of social discourse acted to position both her boyfriend (black man) and her (white or non-black woman) in restrictive and value-laden categories.
In the case of both Emily and Milena, peer reactions revealed that their behaviour was something that needed to be explained because it was perceived as somehow aberrant. For Milena, her dating and sex life was used against her, to denigrate her supposed sexual proclivities for ‘Sudos’ and ‘Afghanis’ which apparently said something about her character and moral fibre. At Greendale High, to ‘sleep around’ labelled young women as on one level of slut, but to sleep with ‘Sudos’ and ‘Afghanis’ was a whole other level of sluttiness. Thus, peer judgments expose a hierarchy of ‘sluttiness’ at school articulated with an ethno-racial hierarchy, which was placed onto female bodies. This echoes the logic voiced by a white female participant in Frankenberg’s research who remarked that “for a woman to have sex with a Black man is like being the worst slut in the world. I mean it's bad to be a slut anyway, but with a Black man it's so degrading” (Frankenberg 1993, 87, emphasis in original).
Despite the existence of a vast array of intimate relationships and sexual interests among peers, this singling out of sexual relations with black peers often gave the impression that students’ dating lives were reduced to a black and white binary. Gamze’s questioning, “do you like white guys or both?” was a powerful example of this. ‘Black’ did not even need to be stated here, such was
118 CHAPTER FOUR the apparent potency of the black and white dichotomy when discussion turned to sexual desire (The assumption of heterosexuality also manifest here is taken up in Chapter 6). Indeed, in a conversational context where this binary framing was activated, Bec found it difficult to work out where her “darker- skinned” Afghani friends fit within this social picture. Milena and her male friends also invoked this binary when they refuted the existence of racism on the basis of their assumption that white women want to have sex with black men. At other moments a black/white binary was redrawn as black/non-black or white/non-white. Milena actively policed a colour-line in which she positioned herself on the black or non-white side. In a half-whispered classroom conversation with Gamze about a party over the weekend, Milena criticised Gamze’s Turkish cousin for hooking up with a boy that was “too white for her” – citing his blonde hair and blue eyes. As described earlier, Milena also expressed discomfort crossing this colour-line herself when it came to sexual intimacy, referring to white men as “the unknown”.
This discussion of the ideas that potentially informed students’ conversations about sex, dating and desire has made visible the complex sexualised, gendered and racialised social configurations and modes of policing at Greendale that may be read as racist. Provocative claims to racialised ‘tastes’ have exclusionary, homogenising and exoticising qualities. The devaluing of Indian, Afghani and Muslim male bodies and the fetishistic essentialism of black peers were also likely informed by widely circulating racist and gendered ideas. Yet Greendale students repeatedly claimed or acted as if racism was not an issue at their school. Of course, they may simply have been unaware of how popular racisms and hegemonic gender and sexual norms pervaded school life and shaped youth culture. As Stratton argues, problematic racial ideas may be so engrained and normalised in Australian culture (and elsewhere) that people “don’t even recognise themselves as making decisions based in a racialised history” (Stratton 2006, 662). As Frankenberg writes in the American context:
The terrorist Muslim; the asexual Asian man; his always-sexually-available
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female counterpart; the inherently dangerous young African American man; the overtly fertile African American woman…are all-too-familiar tropes. Stereotypes would be banal were they not so lethal, so apt to wound physically, emotionally, spiritually (2001, 73).
However, Milena and her friends’ claim that racism no longer applies because of intercultural sex and desire resists a single reading of students’ sexualised schoolyard conversations. In taking the emic seriously, do these analyses about the racist backdrop of their social world do justice to Greendale students’ negotiation of a culturally diverse sociality? How easy or productive is it to label people and practices as racist? Other incidents in the field brought to the fore the relevance of these kinds of questions. The following section brings into discussion further examples of students’ sociabilities to critically explore the possibility of an alternative framing of students’ behaviour beyond that of ‘racism’.
Returning to the Emic: Is it Racist?
After school one afternoon, Jase (white Australian), Aleksandra (Georgian- Turkish-Czech) and I went to smoke shisha. Here, sprawled on a big square Persian carpet, propped up by cushions of all shapes and sizes, we gossiped about school and social life over a large, shared shisha pipe. As usual, Jase got the shisha pipe going – sucking in air deeply as the water bubbled and heated the tobacco – and I poured the tea, spooning in lots of sugar for Jase. Jase and I went to shisha together about once a week. When we first started this ritual, I made use of the individual plastic mouth inserts provided so as not to catch whichever school illness was circulating that week. However, by the middle of the school year I had stopped bothering. We seemed too close for such prudishness; we’d shared too much already – more him than me though, which was the case for all the students. Whilst students were polite or interested enough to ask me a few questions about my life, I usually deflected conversation back to them. This was not only because of my role as a researcher, but also because I felt my life to be too boring and irrelevant within
120 CHAPTER FOUR their youthful social world. However, when conversation turned to boyfriends and girlfriends, I felt these barriers dissolve.
My boyfriend called whilst I was at shisha. After getting off the phone, I told Jase and Aleksandra about him. “We’d better be invited to the wedding!” they laughed. I told them that it would be a pretty interesting wedding – not your run-of-the-mill white wedding – because he’s a practising Sikh Indian. “Ohhh,” Aleksandra said as if realising something, “are you into Indian guys?” “I’m into this Indian guy,” I replied, purposefully rejecting the school-wide discourse. “Does he talk like this?” Aleksandra asked in a stereotypical Indian accent with accompanying head wobble. Racist! I thought to myself as I laughed along with the others. A few rounds of the shisha pipe later, she asked, head bobbing again, “does your boyfriend listen to this music?” What a racist! I thought to myself again. This is not Hindi/Punjabi Music, it’s clearly Arabic, I reasoned silently – we were, after all, in an Arabic shisha lounge with a Middle-Eastern owner.
Before we left, Aleksandra decided to prank call a friend of hers, putting on the same thick Indian accent and pretending to be from a call-centre. Jase followed suit, calling another friend whilst attempting a vaguely middle-eastern accent. As soon as we parted ways I called my boyfriend and recounted, dumbfounded, the kinds of comments that were made about him. “…AND it wasn’t even ‘Indian’ music!” I ended emphatically. “Well, actually it was Hindi music,” he informed me – he had heard it over the phone. I was wrong. Aleksandra was right – about the music, at least.
Despite my willingness and swiftness in labelling Aleksandra’s comments and behaviour as racist at the time, this was troubled in face of more knowledge. I later learnt that Aleksandra had a boyfriend from an Indian background herself. She had never mentioned his ethnicity in my presence; the information about
121 CHAPTER FOUR him that was usually deemed salient was whether he was treating her “right” and about their sex life. This is suggestive that her comments were tongue-in- cheek or ironic and authorised by subtle ideas about who has the right to say things inflected with racist risk. The logic might run that because she has an Indian boyfriend she is clearly not racist towards Indian people and is, therefore, at liberty to joke about and perpetuate stereotypes to serve the interests of repartee – making it more ‘interesting’ and ‘humorous’. This kind of thinking and shared agreement might extend to people who are friends with or friendly with peers from backgrounds burdened with stereotypes and prejudices.
Perhaps, in a culturally diverse sociality where engaging with friends, peers and lovers from different backgrounds was a banal part of everyday life, an idea of the ‘post-racial’ had also emerged. As will be explored in Chapter 5, Jase often made targeted racialised jokes about his friends as part of showing how ironic, subversive and progressive he was. Within a post-racial frame, racist stereotypes “seemed valid for humorous use because given the assumed unacceptability of racism, the images have been stripped of their racializing power” (Titley 2016 my emphasis). In this context, students’ felt need for reflexivity about racist attitudes and practices may have lessened, and drawing on racist scripts to fuel repartee might have become more of a reflex. On a few occasions, I heard Aleksandra refer to a black-skinned friend of hers as her “nigga bestie” or “NB” for short.36 Rather than being driven by intent to offend, I suspect Aleksandra was experimenting, albeit uncritically, with what was appropriate or edgy banter. Raised here as possibilities, these notions of irony
36 Reappropriating the white supremacist ‘er’ version of the N-word, ‘nigga’ is a popular term in black youth culture. According to Sheinin and Thompson (2014) “there is no other word like [nigga] in the English language, encompassing both the ugliest sort of hate and a communal, if subversive, sense of love and affection, depending upon who is saying it and in what context. It can be wielded as a tool of both white racism and black empowerment.” The use of ‘nigga’ by those outside of the black community is, thus, highly contentious. It is outside the scope of this thesis to examine the complexities and politics related to Aleksandra’s and other non-black students’ use of this word at Greendale High. However, Chapter 5 looks at what might have motivated students like Aleksandra to draw on language and concepts that link blackness with ‘coolness’ and ‘hardness’ (‘nigga’ for example is a word commonly used in hip-hop culture).
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(Chapter 5) and racist reflexes (Chapter 7) are appraised across other social contexts at Greendale in the coming chapters.
Aleksandra’s behaviour towards me may also have been intended as form of cosmopolitan bonding; a charged in-joke between two women who share a certain life experience of intercultural dating, navigating cultural differences at an intimate level and being personally privy to the kinds of racism our partners face. My own motivation to exoticise an Indian wedding further suggests that a kind of cosmopolitan cachet accompanied this discussion of culturally ‘different’ boyfriends. Aleksandra’s and my interactional motivations unsettle easy divisions of appropriate and inappropriate in terms of what kind of commentary is acceptable fodder for developing rapport and intimacy. Interestingly, most conversations about racialised desire I participated in were used to, or resulted in, bonding and inclusion among peers by finding common ground or a common reference point. The student teacher, mentioned earlier, and I, an adult researcher, were included in students’ social lives through this social discourse; talk about racialised sexual preferences was used for entertaining, boredom-relieving and inclusive ends, rather than as a way to exclude and offend (if we focus on intent and not outcome, as students tended to do – an issue I take up in Chapter 5).
The incident with the Hindi music also complicated simple labelling of stereotypes and racism. If Aleksandra did indeed know the music was Hindi – and this was not a lucky guess – her selection of stereotypes was informed by what Kromidas would call a “fund of cosmopolitan knowledge” (2011b, 86) that was more sophisticated than my own. Even when Greendale students used such intercultural awareness to tease their friends in ways that had the capacity to annoy and offend (see Chapter 5), this capacity was nevertheless indicative of a certain level of closeness with culturally diverse peers (see also Harris and Herron 2017). The Hindi music incident certainly made me question: if I was wrong about this, what else have I been wrong about?
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Considering sexualised, racialising conversations amidst other practices in the broader flow of school life also paints a more complex picture. Students’ repartee gives a much stronger impression of racism than when taking into account their less risqué moments socialising in the schoolyard and their actual practices of mixing, including sexual encounters. While Bec was complicit in stigmatising Afghani attractiveness and acceptability, she was sexually involved with young men of this background. Milena frequently policed sexual, racial borders and drew on black stereotypes, yet at the same time she worked through culturally diverse sociality in more nuanced ways. She had a mixed- race baby from an interracial relationship and socialised with her large group of black and Afghani friends on the weekends. She even went out of her way to invite Aisha (who was new to the school) to shisha with her because, as she explained to Aisha, “it’s part of your culture”. Thus, Milena was doing everyday cosmopolitanism – intimately crossing and dissolving racialised boundaries.
These complexities call for, and students deserve, a re-reading of dating and desire discourses and other social behaviours beyond that of disembedding racist logic. A lens of racism does not sufficiently account for students’ perspectives and practices; students were not simply moving between racist and convivial exchanges. Rather, these young people had extended the possibilities of the appropriate and convivial within their social world. In the following section, I therefore propose an alternative framing – one that I term perverse cosmopolitanism – to capture how racist discourses (from an antiracist etic perspective) about sex, dating and desire were informed by a convivial, inclusive cosmopolitan ethos.
Perverse Cosmopolitanism: Theorising ‘Fucked’ Intercultural Engagement
Hannerz defines cosmopolitanism as “an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other. It entails an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences” (1996, 103). This openness and willingness to engage with peers from different backgrounds emerged in how students talked
124 CHAPTER FOUR about sexual desire and interacted with peers in ways that often crossed, subverted or transcended racialised boundaries. According to the logic of Milena’s friendship group, young people’s willingness to intimately engage with those considered Other disproved the possibility of racism. A cosmopolitan “commitment to dialogue with others” (Noble 2013, 173) was also hinted at by students’ ‘ethos of mixing’ detailed in Chapter 3.
As discussed in Chapter 1, notions of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ have developed in response to normative ‘top-down’ theorising about elitist and optimal forms of intercultural engagement. ‘Everyday cosmopolitanism’ focuses on “strategies used by ordinary people to bridge boundaries with people who are different from them” (Lamont and Aksartova 2002, 1) through commonplace encounters with difference and diversity. This grounded cosmopolitanism goes by many names. As Werbner explains in the case of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, it “belongs to a family of concepts, all of which combine in similar fashion apparently contradictory opposites” (2006, 496). These include ‘ordinary’ (Lamont and Aksartova 2002), ‘vernacular’ (Werbner 2006), ‘working class’ (Werbner 1999) and ‘rooted’ (Appiah 1997) cosmopolitanism. Drawing on botanical metaphors, ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism advances an understanding of cosmopolitanism in situ as a ‘grassroots’ practice that may be grounded in the local.37 Applied to cultural practices and connectedness more broadly, to root or be rooted is to “establish deeply and firmly”.38
Intriguingly, in an Australian slang vernacular, ‘root’ means to have sexual intercourse in both noun and verb form.39 In the past tense, it can also take on connotations of an object, situation or state that is considered ‘fucked’ −
37 For Appiah this enables understanding how people can be “attached to a home of one's own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people” (1997, 618). 38 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/root, accessed 19 October 2015. 39 Ibid.
125 CHAPTER FOUR broken, exhausted, seriously drunk or having gone badly.40 These meanings suggest some useful inflections for developing a more complex concept of everyday cosmopolitanism for youth sociality than is currently conceived. Firstly, the relevance of sex and sexuality comes to the fore; these are important elements of young people’s social worlds. By overlooking the sexual aspect of youth multiculture, we fail to give due attention to the potentially transformative, agentive and creative ways in which young people are dealing with complex intercultural sociality. Failing to recognise this also risks overlooking the co-production of potentially troubling ethno-racial ideas (and their entangled bedfellows – gender and sexuality) that lie embedded in this sexual terrain. Secondly, the Australian meaning of ‘rooted’ points to how everyday cosmopolitanism can be ‘fucked’ − fraught with risk and practised in problematic ways.
This latter point builds on current research findings and framings by scholars exploring everyday multiculture in local geographies. As outlined in Chapter 1, urban multiculture and multicultural youth studies research has illustrated how both everyday racism and everyday cosmopolitanism (otherwise called conviviality) can co-exist within interpersonal encounters and shared spaces without producing ‘panicked’ multiculturalism (see Noble 2009b). Research by youth studies scholars like Harris (2013), Back (1996), Nayak (1999) and Clayton (2009) have further evidenced that young people shift between expressing racist or more convivial sentiments depending on the situational context and their interactional intentions. In the context of white school student behaviour in the UK, Nayak, thus, argues that racism is more usefully conceived of as a “competing discourse in the lives of young people” (1999, 183, emphasis in original). As I explained in Chapter 1, such empirically-informed arguments have been particularly significant for taking into account both inclusive and exclusionary youthful behaviours, moving beyond single framings which represent young people either as racists who require intervention or else
40 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rooted, accessed 19 October 2015.
126 CHAPTER FOUR vanguards of productive, transformative ways of dealing with multicultural living. However, such framings continue to position ‘racism’ (as a form of conflict) as on one side of the coin, and ‘cosmopolitan conviviality’ as on the other side.
In the case of Greendale students and their dating lives, this dichotomous framing and pendulum- or coin-like characterisation of their behaviour fails to capture the sophistication of their discourses and practices; they were not simply moving between forms of racist exclusion and inclusive openness. In this context, I argue that an alternative frame is required, one that reconciles these dichotomies, to capture some of the complex logics of these young people’s culturally diverse social world. As discussed in Chapter 1, scholars have recently acknowledged that racism and conviviality may be closely related or enmeshed (Tyler 2016; Wessendorf 2016; Wise and Noble 2016). In the context of Greendale High sociality, I propose the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ to capture the emic logic and contextual circumstances of this enmeshment.
Informed by a whole host of complex factors, ‘racism’ may have operated in Greendale peer sociality as a form of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ – a ‘rooted’ (in the Australian sense) or ‘fucked’ (sexual as well as problematic) cosmopolitanism – that encompasses sexual intercultural intimacies and everyday engagement with difference embedded with risk, tension and problematic ethno-racial logics. This concept captures how young people’s troubling racialising discourses may be enacted from a position of inclusivity and openness to difference, at times drawing on intimate knowledge of culturally diverse peers. To respect the emic here is not to deny that students’ discourses had real power to wound and perpetuate damaging prejudices and inequalities. Students’ disavowal of racism, or lack of concern about it, does not of course mean that racism did not exist. Irrespective of students’ social norms, it is clear that sexualised, gendered racisms towards Indian, Muslim and black people that circulate in and structure Australian society, were influential in
127 CHAPTER FOUR these young lives. The concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ addresses the need for alternative conceptual resources to better capture the complex ways in which racialisation operated in and was understood by young people invested in a multicultural social space. Young people’s social relations were much more complex than the dichotomous framing of ‘racism’ and ‘conviviality’ allows.
Indeed, this “dichotomy of ‘bad’ racism and ‘good’ conviviality” in scholarly representations of multiculture may obscure recognition of the possibilities for convivial practices to commodify, festishise and essentialise racialised Others (Lapiņa 2016, 39). ‘Perverse cosmopolitanism’, as a conceptual resource for understanding Greendale students’ dating and desiring practices, makes visible exactly these kinds of complexities embedded within practices students considered convivial and acceptable. ‘Perverse cosmopolitanism’ may also help explain Greendale students racialising discourses, attitudes and practices in other aspects of their social life at school. The following chapters appraise the extent to which a perverse cosmopolitan ethos emerged within – and aids understanding of – Greendale peer sociality. As will be considered in Chapter 8, these chapters also hint at how ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ might be productively applied in other research settings.
My selection of the term ‘perverse’ intends to highlight how students’ cosmopolitan orientations were “contrary to the accepted or expected standard or practice”, according to the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘perverse’41. While initially glossed as ‘fucked’ (or ‘rooted’) to directly critique Greendale students’ sex-related behaviours, ‘perverse’ offers a more comprehensive term to consider other aspects of youth discourses and practices. The Oxford Dictionary also defines ‘perverse’ as “showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable.”42 This kind of intentionally provocative behaviour was hinted at by Milena (Chapter 3) when she made candid claims about ‘Afghanis’ (“they really annoy me”) and black people (“I
41 http://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/perverse, accessed 15 May 2017. 42 Ibid.
128 CHAPTER FOUR can’t tell them apart!”). As we will encounter in the following chapter (Chapter 5), such performativity also emerged in racialised joking exchanges between friends as well as in the context of jokes about gender and sexuality politics (Chapter 6).
Before turning to this more expansive exploration of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ at Greendale High, it is first important to note that that the analytical interpretations made in this chapter are more relevant to certain students and parts of the school than to others’ conversations about dating and desire. Of course, many Greendale students did not engage in these racialising discourses, or to the same extent. In fact, judging from my interactions with students in the upper courtyard, “what nash are you into?” seemed to be a less common question. There appeared to be limits to the explicit significance of cultural background to dating for students who socialised in predominantly white circles.
Age and Social Class: Dating Discourses in the Upper Courtyard
In the upper courtyard, when I was not hanging out with Jase’s friends I often chatted with Daxon. I had a soft spot for Daxon; he was a kind-hearted year 11 student with a round, smiling face and dirty blonde hair. When we were standing together at the side of the upper courtyard one lunchtime, Laura (Angl0-Australian) bounced up to Daxon and gave him a big hug. She teetered in conversation with us before ruffling up his hair and running off to talk to a friend a few benches away. I grinned into my coffee cup. Daxon saw me: “Shut up!” “So you and Laura are friends now?” “Yeah, it’s weird. She never used to speak to me and then one day she started punching me and then we’ve been friends ever since.” “Is this like the whole primary school ‘she’s mean to me because she loves me’ thing?” “Yeah maybe. That happened to a friend of mine – without the punching bit.
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They didn’t speak to each other then all of a sudden they were dating.” “Do you like her?” “Yeah, she’s okay…” “Would you go out with her if it was on the table?” “Yeah probably…but she’s younger than me! She’s 16 but she looks 17.”
Daxon sent me a Facebook message a few weeks later to tell me that he asked her out but she said no – he was very embarrassed. The following day at recess, I bumped into Laura and I asked her about what happened with Daxon. She explained firmly, with a slight scoff, that she couldn’t possible date him because “he’s a bogan.” More softly, she added that her friends would judge her.
Class was a significant influential factor in Laura’s dating discourse and practices. As will be explicated in Chapter 6, many Anglo students at Greendale were vulnerable to being labelled a ‘bogan’. Despite the fact that the student body predominantly came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, the stigma of this identity related only to white students. To be white, live in particular low-socioeconomic suburbs and be associated with perceptions about a working-class lack of refinement, were all factors in this labelling process. In the eyes of his peers, Daxon appeared to align with these indicators (see Chapter 6). In this context, it is likely that Laura felt she had to distance herself from Daxon to protect and maintain her own tenuous white respectability and social status amongst her friends (see Nayak 2004; Skeggs 2009). In her predominately white peer group, circumnavigating class was likely a more significant priority for her than navigating peer ideas about race regarding dating and desire. Unlike the multicultural friendship groups in the lower courtyard, dating non-white students did not seem a salient part of the dating narrative in Laura’s more monocultural social circle.
For Daxon, age appeared a significant factor in choosing an appropriate girlfriend. One of Jase’s Anglo-Australian friends, Lacey, also spoke about the age and height of young men as determining their suitability as boyfriends. I
130 CHAPTER FOUR gained the impression that she only envisioned her boyfriend as white. Cultural background was, therefore, not a factor that needed to be discussed; whether or not the young man in question was older and taller than her was a much more salient talking point. Hall writes that white ethnic identity in the British context is “the empty signifier, the norm, against which ‘difference’ (ethnicity) is measured” (2000, 221). The ‘normality’ of whiteness seemed so deeply embedded among Anglo students at Greendale that many did not realise that they had an ethnicity or culture at all – or at least not one to be proud of (as Chapter 6 explores). The racial privilege inherent in white students ability not to think about ethnicity and race is also explored in Chapter 6. Frankenberg (2001), however, revises scholarly framings of whiteness as ‘unmarked’ or ‘invisible’ by arguing that whiteness is only invisible some of the time and not often for people of colour. Indeed, ‘white’ bodies were evaluated alongside other ethnicities in students’ discussions of desirability in the lower courtyard.
As we learned earlier, down in the lower courtyard, the first thing I learnt about young people’s dating lives was almost certainty about ‘nash’; a ‘multicultural’ peer culture seemed to have emerged in which ethno-racial origins were a highly relevant and interesting element to everyday social life. The disparities between the upper and lower courtyard suggest that the white/ethnic division, outlined in the previous chapter, was active here, modulating patterns of sociality. Despite the fact that the upper courtyard space was more diverse than students’ socio-spatial categories made out (see Chapter 3), dominant white cultural norms regarding relevant conversation topics may have dictated how young people in this space talked about sex, dating and desire. When white students socialised in less monocultural circles, what were salient and sanctioned conversation topics may have shifted. Differences in sociality across social circles and space were also blurry and partial. For example, in conversation with Aleksandra and Jase at the shisha café, the discourse of ‘nash’ was central to Aleksandra’s questions about my boyfriend. Tom and other ‘white’ students were also active participants in invoking ethnicity and race to
131 CHAPTER FOUR tease or shame peers for alleged sexual activity with people from particular stigmatised ethnic backgrounds.
Conclusion
This chapter has put young people’s frequent conversations about racialised sexual preferences and activity in the spotlight; sexual discourses and intimacies were a significant part of how Greendale High students negotiated social relations in conditions of cultural diversity in ways that may reveal productive engagements with difference as well as the perpetuation of deeply embedded, problematic ideas with racist histories and effects. As part of negotiating social life at school, students from diverse backgrounds drew on ethno-racial categories and stereotyped characteristics and used these categories to police and revere peers’ sexual interests and practices. The salience of race to dating was, however, less pronounced in upper courtyard sociabilities. Class, age and appearance were more likely to come up in conversation and influence students’ claims about dating and desire. Despite these textural differences in the Greendale social landscape, intercultural dating and desire among peers was normalised and navigated in unremarkable, non-conflictual ways. These students regularly demonstrated commitment to inclusive interculturality and cosmopolitan capabilities to navigate a culturally diverse peer-oriented environment inflected by sexual, gender and class politics.
Attention to students’ perspectives and their conversations about sex, dating and desire has illuminated how expressions of everyday racism and cosmopolitanism can be enmeshed and co-produced in relational, dynamic ways that are more complex and sophisticated than the binary construction of racism-conviviality in urban multiculture and youth multicultural studies is able to capture. I have developed ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ as a conceptual frame to reconcile these modes of relationality. The Greendale students spotlighted in this chapter did not simply move between forms of exclusion and
132 CHAPTER FOUR openness, rather these practices were utterly entangled as they worked out ways to co-exist in a shared space. Engaging with peers in enforced proximity “beyond respectful, arm’s-length regard for difference” (Harris 2013, 47) seemed to be generating intimate intercultural knowledge, delicate means of gaining social status and ways to fuel repartee and rapport.
Whilst their close friendships and intercultural intimacies may suggest their discourses were simply forms of convivial ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, the pervasive ideas they drew on – for example that ‘Afghanis’ are sexually “scary” – suggest that their behaviours were more problematic than current concepts of normative or everyday cosmopolitanism suggest. A perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism highlights how students’ engagement with difference could be inflected with risk of offending, marred by troubling discourse, and formed by youth experimentation with social positioning and ways of being in a culturally diverse sociality.
The animation of problematic racialised, gendered logics at Greendale could have had negative pedagogical effects. Students may have been implicitly learning, normalising and transmitting ideas and behaviours with discriminatory, inferiorising and othering impacts. Indeed, their ethno-racial logics had resonance with Essed’s definition of everyday racism that “the integration of racism into everyday practices becomes part of the expected, of the unquestionable” in ways which “activate underlying power relations” (1991, 50). However, what this chapter demonstrates is that labelling something as racist so as to mount an educational, social or sociological attack on it, may not provide scholars or educators with effective ways to unveil and address such subtle, embedded and ‘convivial’ forms of racialisation – particularly if students do not recognise their social practices and interactional intentions as ‘racist’.
This conceptual critique about racism and the development of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ have evolved out of immersive ethnographic attention to students’ sexualised conversations. The following chapter extends this
133 CHAPTER FOUR exploration by teasing out how Greendale students actually defined ‘racism’ and when and how racialising behaviour manifested within the school grounds. Building on this current chapter, I consider the extent to which young people’s racialising practices and experiences challenge current understandings of racism and the racism-conviviality binary. Close attention to youth meanings of racism, as compared with those common to the social sciences, the school curriculum and popular culture, sheds light on why Greendale High students rejected or made light of racism in the school context. By focusing on two friendship circles in particular, the next chapter offers further insight into why ‘racism’ might be downplayed or refigured in complex, creative and convivial ways.
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CHAPTER FIVE Meanings and Manifestations of ‘Racism’
Introduction
The previous chapter illuminated a finding that for some students, sex across racialised borders signalled the end of racism. Despite the racist histories underpinning their discourses and practices, conversations about sexually (un)desirable Others were apparently not considered racist. I explored some possible reasons for this, including that students may have conceived of their actions from a place of cosmopolitan openness. This led me to theorise that ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ might be a useful conceptual frame to better access how racism operated and came to bear within this peer sociality. In this chapter, I continue to explore when racialisation manifested and how it was constructed and negotiated at Greendale High. In doing so, I centre on two aspects of ‘racism’: how racism was conceptualised by Greendale students, and how racialisation (or racism from an etic perspective) was practised in peer social relations.
This chapter is, thus, divided into two parts: 1) Talk about Racism, and 2) Racism in Talk. Walton, Priest and Paradies (2013b) use these conceptual framings to describe typical divisions in the literature about racism. Here, I bring together both lines of inquiry to canvass the density of meaning and complexity of both performance and experience of ‘racism’ at Greendale High. The section ‘Talk about Racism’ traces when and how students deployed the word ‘racism’ across the daily flow of school life. It reveals students’ tacit definitions of the term, the points at which they were confused about its scope and how their understandings of racism jarred with those of their teachers, curriculum and popular orthodoxy. This section hints at how students’ limited construction of racism clashed with their much more complex practices and experiences of racialisation at Greendale. ‘Racism in Talk’ delves more deeply into this incongruity, examining when racialising quips manifested between
135 CHAPTER FIVE peers. Focusing on two friendship groups in particular – Gamze’s group in the lower courtyard and Jase’s group in the upper courtyard – this section examines the moments in which racialised differences became meaningful and potentially problematic amongst friends. Just as I learnt during the shisha encounter with Aleksandra, it was not very easy to identify something or someone racist at Greendale High. Indeed, as we will see, the racialising remarks that I witnessed always occurred within a humorous frame and always among friends. Building on the arguments in the previous chapter, this chapter illuminates how Greendale students’ modes of relationality challenge standard framings of racism as conflictual and contrary to conviviality. As we will discover, the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ helps to make visible and aids understanding of the highly complex ethno-racial logics that seemed to inform school friendships. Although I touch upon the potential impact of racialising behaviour on the friends targeted by racialising ‘jokes’, this chapter focuses most closely on the possible motivators for and meanings of these supposed witticisms. Chapter 6 more closely considers the experiences of students on the receiving end of comments that invoked their cultural ‘difference’.
While this chapter explores the meaning of racism and the emergence of racialisation in a discourse-driven school environment, my focus here on students’ talk does not mean to reduce racism to simply a matter of what people say (see Wetherell and Potter 1992). As highlighted in Chapters 3 and 4, racism can emerge through embodied, spatial, sexual, social and structural practices that (re)produce social and institutional inequalities and diverse forms of suffering. As Wetherell and Potter assert, “words are central to that process but racism is made manifest, too, through physical violence, through material disadvantage, and through differences in opportunities and power” (1992, 62). Thus, in this chapter, I predominantly focus on students’ verbal interpersonal interactions in order to explore – following Wetherell and Potter – how social discourse “gives voice to racism and how forms of discourse institute, solidify, change, create and reproduce social formations” (1992, 3).
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PART ONE: Talk about Racism
What is Racism?: Student Understandings
Racism as a Black/White Phenomenon
One lunchtime, I sat on the end of a bench in the lower courtyard listening to the jokes, gossip and laughter emanating from the group of eight friends of diverse backgrounds sitting around the table. Dee, a year 12 student who identified as Lebanese-Afghan, mentioned someone “getting put on her blacklist”. “That’s racist!” accused a male friend of Islander background. Peals of laughter ensued. “I wasn’t. I’m not being racist!” Dee said quickly but hesitantly, her eyes darting towards two black friends at the table. “You’re wearing a white t-shirt!” the young man continued. Simultaneously, half the table raised their arms to make a tent shape above their heads. I asked what it meant. “The KKK!” (Ku Klux Klan).
Another lunchtime in the arts building, Asghar, a slender young man from EAL class, called me over to where he was sitting at a piano flanked by two friends. Asghar introduced me to Jack, a broad student with a big smile who I recognised from the Samoan dance performance at the last assembly, and to Matt, an Anglo-Australian in a black t-shirt, Blundstone boots and the beginnings of a spindly beard. Seeing that I was holding my phone, Jack joked that I should take a photo of Asghar. “Yeah, you faggot,” Matt baited Asghar. “See how they bully me?” Asghar laughed. Jack started playing the piano and I asked him what the song was called. Matt replied on his behalf: “You’re Gay.” “Nah, it’s called ‘You Can’t Play’”, Jack directed at Matt. “You look shifty,” Matt commented to Asghar, continuing the insulting banter. “Nah, you look shifty,” Asghar countered. “It’s probably because you’re wearing black!” Jack joked, referring to Matt’s black t-shirt.
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“Racist!” Matt declared. “You’re white. I said your clothing is black,” Jack defended.
The joking between both sets of friends drew on ideas of black and white racism. Dee mentioned a “blacklist”, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “a list of people or groups regarded as unacceptable or untrustworthy and often marked down for punishment or exclusion.”43 Dee’s friends’ joking accusation of racism worked by attributing this meaning to black people, teasing her for having negative views about this racialised group. Such inferiorisation and exclusion of black people has a long and violent history. Her white t-shirt was used to strengthen this joke’s argument, further proving her white supremacist beliefs as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, notorious for their white garb and extreme violence toward black people.44 Even though her two friends of African descent looked unfazed by these jokes and joined in the teasing, Dee’s glances towards them as she fended off accusations of racism arguably implicated them as victims of racism due to their black skin colour.
In the second incident with Asghar’s friends, ‘black’ clothing was associated with ‘darkness’, ‘criminality’ and ‘suspicion’ – linked, for effect, to ideas about black people and racism. This kind of playful hyperbole, and the racial concepts that formed its logic, also continued inside the classroom. It was very common when teachers said the word black – for example in talking about ‘black cockroaches’ – for someone to pipe up “that’s racist, Miss!”45 Jase also yelled out “yo yo yo” – lingo associated with black popular culture – when a teacher spoke of the “black economy”. Similar to Jase’s quip, a black South African student who had shown no interest in music or dance was awarded ‘most likely to be in a video clip’ by students at the end of year assembly. Raucous laughter filled the gym. The laughter seemed to exude the sense that this was a risqué joke, which drew on stereotyped notions of blackness in global pop culture. Jase, sitting
43 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blacklist, accessed 29 August 2016. 44 Billig (2001) writes about the racist jokes deployed by supporters of the KKK. 45 Chapter 7 explores students’ unpredictable yells of “racist!” across school classrooms.
138 CHAPTER FIVE next to me cross-legged on the floor, raised an eyebrow, while I heard another girl behind us laugh loudly and then more quietly say “oh that’s probably racist”. I got the impression that she and Jase, and perhaps others, were not quite sure whether or not teasing a student (who was very popular) about ‘positive’ ideas about blackness was racist. These more ‘positive’ joking references were, after all, routine. If a girl sported a new spray-tan at a special event, you could be sure that black references would follow. “Do I look black?” was a common question, one with a positive spin compared to its negative pairing “do I look fat?” Indeed, I heard the quip “you’re almost as black as Eli!” used as a compliment among excited white-skinned students at a school function where Eli – a brown-skinned student from a Venezuelan background – was the only non-white attendee.
A pattern emerges from all the joking references canvassed here. The word ‘black’ was closely associated with a racial category that was coupled with a combination of ideas: black people were interpellated as deviant and dangerous, victims of racism, and/or ‘cool’ representatives of black youth culture. These ideas echo those that seemed to inform students’ sexualising conversations about black bodies detailed in Chapter 4. To understand why blackness was so often revered at Greendale, even alongside students’ awareness that black people are targets of racism, it is important to consider the geographical and socio-economic context in which these ideas and practices emerged. Students construction of ‘cool’ as related to being ‘tough’, ‘dangerous’, ‘hard’ and ‘savvy’ – traits they commonly connected to black people – was arguably a way students from diverse backgrounds could subvert the stigma of living in a disadvantaged area.46
As noted in the prologue and Chapter 1, students spoke about their working- class neighbourhood as a “shithole” and “pov”. Multiple students also described to me and in my presence the difficulties of dealing with drug users in the
46 In this context, black students may also have drawn on these ideas about blackness as a form of strategic essentialism.
139 CHAPTER FIVE street (and problematic drug use among family members), facing break-ins at their houses and sometimes talked about participating in violent altercations outside of school – in ways that suggested to me a sense of defiant pride. In his ethnographic research with primary school students who lived in impoverished housing estates, Connelly argues that “the ability to 'handle yourself’ on the street and thus to be street-wise tended to form an important aspect of their cultural capital” (1998, 48). Greendale students may have made jokes and references to blackness to acquire a similar kind of cultural capital (such as when Aleksandra spoke of her black friend as her “nigga-bestie”, as discussed in Chapter 4).47
What is also significant about the quips students made about racism was that they often positioned white people as the perpetrators of racism. In the white-t- shirt joke among Dee’s friends, white people were construed as racist oppressors of black people. Using an inverted form of this logic, Milena’s friends also invoked this idea of the white racist perpetrator (and the black victim) when they said racism no longer existed because white women want to have sex with black men (Chapter 4). Interestingly, even though Dee identified as Lebanese-Afghan and so did not easily fall into the ‘white supremacist’ category – and despite the fact her friends were clearly being tongue-in-cheek – she was nevertheless at pains to defend herself from the charge of racism. Jack (Samoan), too, was adamant in defending himself. Thus, despite their framing of racism as a white trait, in practice students from all backgrounds wished to distance themselves from the label of ‘racist’. This suggests that racism was a very serious charge, which is likely why friends used this concept as fodder for daring, salacious teasing.
47 As Chapter 6 will explore, among Greendale peers whiteness was often positioned as boring and bland. With blackness sometimes framed as a form of radical difference, Anglo students may also have perceived black people as ‘interesting’ (and exploited this to effect).
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Racism as an Individual Pathology
One reason that students may have been anxious to ward off accusations of racism – even in clearly joking contexts – is that racism seemed to be understood as an individual trait marked by prejudice, bigotry and malicious intent to hurt, discriminate and oppress. According to Miles, “to claim that someone has expressed a racist opinion is to denounce them as immoral and unworthy” (1989). In an interview with Sam Bell-Adler (2015), Robin DiAngelo explains that white people are threatened by accusations of racism due to the idea that racism is “about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts”. Whilst young people may develop these viewpoints from a range of sources, including parents, school, friends and the media (Rizvi 1993; see also van Dijk 1987), the classroom is a significant place in which ideas about racism are learnt (or verified) (Bryan 2012).
Investigating ideas about racism endorsed in high school textbooks in Ireland, Bryan found that “racism was almost always narrowly defined in school texts as a set of ideas or beliefs, and was associated with prejudicial attitudes and/or beliefs of superiority” (2012, 607). Teachers’ discourse about racism was likely also highly influential. At Greendale High, when a teacher prompted the class to define racism, for instance, she asked: “say Emily is a horrible person and has a prejudiced view of [a] group. What would that mean?” Some teachers also used words like “stupid” and “ignorant” to describe proponents of racist political policies in Australia. Milena echoed this notion in discussion with a friend of hers during class one day. When her friend remarked that “Arabs are really racist” she disagreed with him saying “I’ve been to Dubai. They aren’t. They’re really nice.” When I asked her whether it was possible that, just like in Australia, some people are racist whilst others are not, Milena confidently replied “nah, Dubai is really developed. They are smarter than us.” As Rizvi explains, this popular view of racism posits that racism is “a consequence of an individual’s inability to reason correctly. Racism is thus constituted as an
141 CHAPTER FIVE individualized, exceptional phenomenon located in ignorance and irrationality, or even in a pathological personality” (1993, 128; see also Bonilla-Silva 1997).
If racism is defined as an individual pathology – making you a “horrible person” – it is arguably unsurprising how quickly students defended themselves from this label and seemed disinclined to label their friends’ behaviour as racism (as will be exemplified later in this chapter in ‘Racism in Talk’). This was the case in Raby’s (2004) interview-based research about experiences of adolescence with young women in Toronto, Canada. According to Raby, the individualised stigma attached to the term ‘racism’ made her research participants unwilling “to attribute [it] to themselves, their friends, or their school” (2004, 372).
Racism as Extreme and Anachronistic
During my fieldwork in 2014 several observer videos of aggressive, verbal tirades towards non-English speaking tourists and non-white Australians on buses, trams and trains went viral on YouTube, which contributed to making racism a common theme in the media (e.g. Safi 2014; Farnsworth 2014; Kembrey 2014). Not only were these incidents written about in highly individualised ways – of drunk, abusive, mentally unstable perpetrators – but they also accentuated extreme manifestations of racism. This was also the case in Greendale classrooms; racism was a concept teachers used for critiquing films, books and historical events relating to severe incidents of racial vilification and persecution, like apartheid in South Africa or frontier violence between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and white colonialists in Australia. Teachers appeared to purposefully elicit responses about black/white biological (old) racisms. This kind of framing was manifest in Dee’s friends joking quips about the KKK.
One of Australia’s largest violent racial altercations, the 2005 Cronulla riots, was also discussed in Greendale classrooms as part of the curriculum unit on identity and belonging. As a documentary on the riots screened in class one afternoon, students watched intermittently, between doodling on their folders
142 CHAPTER FIVE and checking their phones as the video footage of the violence unfolded (see Chapter 6 for further discussion of this reaction). As I have written about elsewhere (Harris and Herron 2017), students did not seem to consider the Cronulla riots especially relevant to them; such extreme racism and violence that happened a decade ago was far removed from their everyday lives. The class looked to react with indifference or at best semi-dutiful attention, just as they had the week before when watching a video of the Prime Minister’s apology to Aboriginal Australians; it seemed just another part of the obligatory curriculum.
In the context of classroom discussions about multicultural literature at an American high school, Modica also found that “racism is presented as a historical phenomenon with little connection to students’ everyday lives” (2015, 137). Clearly missing from students’ definitions and educational materials was recognition of ‘everyday racism’ (Essed 1991). As identified by a number of scholars (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Raby 2004; Hattam and Atkinson 2006; Ahmed 2012; Essed 1991), the focus on historical, extreme and individualised notions of racism obscures recognition of more normalised, embedded and ambiguous racisms. In other words, while students played with the ideas of “frozen racism” (see Lentin 2015, 39) to make joking quips, these narrow framings of racism may have made it difficult for students to recognise and name more subtle and multifarious forms of racism in their day-to-day interpersonal interactions. Indeed, by rendering racism in black/white and extreme terms, Greendale students persistently invoked ‘racism’ in ways that did not at all reflect the complex diversity and dynamics that characterised their school.
Colour-Blindness Ideology: Is it Wrong to See or Speak Race?
Students also seemed to have absorbed mixed messages about whether it was okay to talk about ethnicity, race and ‘difference’ – at least in front of authority figures. In English class one day, a student was under pressure from Ms D to answer questions about South Africa’s apartheid. “Who would want to leave during apartheid?”
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“…umm” “There are black and white South Africans.” “Um, the darker-skinned Africans?” “You can say black. It’s not racist,” Ms D corrected.
This was a common scene. Despite the fact many students spent a large proportion of their social life in diverse social circles, and frequently used ‘black’ to describe their friends and peers in the schoolyard, they often spluttered and stuttered labelling somebody as ‘black’ in more formal settings. (Chapter 3 illustrates Bec doing this when talking to me). Pollock’s (2004) ethnographic research found that white staff in an American high school stumbled over using the word ‘black’ like no other word. Pollock (2004) suggests this exposes the fear of being called a racist and of inaccurately or inappropriately using a racial term, particularly in the American context where the word ‘black’ has historically been used to negatively evaluate people and their worth. This was certainly manifest in Greendale students’ joking about ‘the blacklist’.
According to Bonilla Silva (2006) and Pollock (2004), a ‘colour-blind’ and/or ‘colour-mute’ ethos can emerge in discursive environments where race labels are seen to describe ‘problems’ “rather than simply describing ‘difference’” (Pollock 2004, 205). To avoid being labelled racist, people are not supposed to notice race (colour-blind) or talk about racial differences (colour-mute) (Pollock 2004; Bonilla-Silva 2006; Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b). This ideology seemed to emerge in Greendale students’ uncertainty about what language was appropriate to use to describe people based on colour or ethno- racial background. I witnessed this confusion amongst Gamze’s friends when we were sitting together in the lower courtyard directly after Ms D’s class on apartheid. Sajra, from a Bosnian background, started saying something about a boy who was playing handball with a group of male students in the distance. The girls’ heads all turned to look in his direction. “Which one?” Gamze asked. “The guy over there who looks Mexican,” Sajra replied before adding quickly,
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“oh I don’t mean to be racist.” “You’re not being racist, you’re just trying to describe him,” Gamze declared. Surprised at her apparent confidence explaining this, I wondered whether Ms D’s expressed views about racism had been highly influential.
Like Bec’s hesitance over using the word ‘black’ in my presence, it is possible that Sajra’s sensitivity to the risk of racism was voiced because I was there (although her comment did seem to be directed at Gamze). At other times students seemed to disregard concerns about political correctness and instead intentionally flouted colour-blindness ideology for provocative effect. As the white/black t-shirt jokes and the ‘black cockroach’ quip reveal, students often purposefully made colour visible – making fun of what should not be said as will be explored further in ‘Racism in Talk’. This kind of teasing may have acted as a form of resistance to teachers’ authoritative claims (and related disciplinary measures) about what constituted racism, which clashed at points with students’ notions of what was appropriate in their schoolyard sociality. Anti- colour-blind talk could turn the tables on the power structures that were palpable in the classroom, allowing students to defiantly assert their own situated rules about acceptable discourse.
I often witnessed teachers’ attempts to moderate students language use according to their own ideas of acceptable lexicon that did not match well with students’ own views and social norms. In one classroom, an Anglo-Australian student was reprimanded when she said the word ‘wog’. “Don’t use that term. ‘Wog’ is racist,” Ms G said. In another class, Mr P corrected Esther for calling herself a ‘fob’. “Don’t say fob. It robs you of your Australian-ness, your right to be here,” he explained. This was despite the fact that she had used this term to express that it was being with fellow ‘fobs’ at Greendale High that gave her the greatest sense of belonging (see Chapter 3). Mr P was evaluating discourse on the basis of different ideas about inclusion and exclusion that did not fit with Esther’s experience.
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Mr P’s and Ms G’s reactions to the use of ‘fob’ and ‘wog’ suggest that they were only interpreting these words on the basis of their historical, derogatory etymology. These terms, as Harris emphasises, “require knowledge of the context and individual to understand if the deployment is affectionate or insulting” (2013, 17). Thus, greater attentiveness is required not only to students’ co-constructed meanings of these terms but also to whether these potentially racist discourses reflect students’ ways of relating to culturally diverse peers. Simply forbidding this language, immediately rendering it ‘racist’, does not help us to understand the ways in which young people understood their behaviour and interpreted the behaviour of others. It also obscures the ways they may have interacted with people from diverse backgrounds in convivial and unproblematic ways. As I have hinted at here and explore further in ‘Racism in Talk’, prohibiting certain language may even provoke students to ‘perform’ racism in talk.
Concluding Remarks
This section, ‘Talk about Racism’, has illuminated the definitional contours of ‘racism’ for many students at Greendale. Circulating ideas of racism as an individualised, prejudiced pathology and as an act of extreme (and often anachronistic) hostility and discrimination appear to have shaped Greendale students understandings of what racism entails. In turn, this may have limited their ability to recognise or name ‘everyday racism’ at their school – a finding echoed by other scholars researching youth (Raby 2004; Modica 2015; de Finney 2010; see also van Dijk 1987). However, this section has also touched upon the possibility that Greendale student were creating new rules about how to speak and joke about racialised cultural difference and issues of racism. Had students reconfigured ‘racism’ in a way that was considered socially acceptable at Greendale and that negated racism’s harmful effects on friends and peers?
Working towards an answer to this question, in the next section ‘Racism in Talk’, I focus in on Gamze and Jase’s friendship groups to critically consider how racialising comments – potentially glossed as racism from an etic
146 CHAPTER FIVE perspective – emerged in student life. While the word ‘racism’ was freely bandied about in jokes about racism as detailed earlier, as we will discover, ‘racism’ was not often used to mark actual racialising encounters between friends. As we will see, when racism was implicated in these interactions, the suggestion of racism was usually laughed off. Close attention to these ethnographic moments reveals patterns about the nature of ‘racism’ among friends and peers in a culturally diverse sociality: friendship intimacy, joking norms, power plays, and ironic, subversive intentions, all factored into how difficult it was to identify behaviour simply as ‘racist’. Building on the insights developed in ‘Talk about Racism’, I reveal how students’ racialising schoolyard practices challenge scholarly, educative and popular characterisations of racism and instead more closely align with my concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.
PART TWO: Racism in Talk
Greendale students did not flatly deny the relevance and existence of racism. On a few occasions students told me about incidents they were involved in that they considered racist. Milena (Maltese background), for instance, told me about a fight that broke out at a party one weekend. Apparently some Islander girls physically and verbally attacked her black friend (calling this friend a “nigger” and a “slut”). As I will relate in Chapter 7, Milena also told me about an altercation Bec had with a young Muslim woman outside the local shopping centre. In Chapter 6, in discussing the issue of ‘reverse racism’, I also detail stories that Daxon and Emily – both Anglo-Australians – shared with me about their apparent experiences of racism in the local neighbourhood (for Daxon) and at a boyfriend’s house (for Emily).
I did not witness these incidents and therefore cannot comment on their wider context or the accuracy of the storytelling. What is significant here is that Milena, Daxon, Emily and others portrayed such racism as happening elsewhere, outside the gates of Greendale High (or else by teachers, not peers –
147 CHAPTER FIVE see Chapter 6).48 Despite the racialisation of the schoolyard (Chapter 3), and the hierarchical ranking of racialised, sexualised bodies (Chapter 4), there was very little overt racialised tension and violence at Greendale High. Whilst conflict between friends and peers did occur at Greendale it was not configured directly around cultural difference (as will be explored in Chapter 6). Instead, racialising comments with potentially racist connotations emerged between friends in light-hearted ways. Thus, friendship dynamics are the focus of ‘Racism in Talk’. Racialising discourses about Aboriginal Australians were, however, an exception to this ‘friendly’ form of race talk. This divergent discourse is explored in Chapter 7.
Gamze’s Friendship Group: ‘Just Joking’ about Racism
Down in the lower courtyard, Gamze (Turkish heritage) was the ringleader of her friendship group; she held the power to direct conversation, she authorised opinions about other peers and friends and was the most likely to tease her friends in racialising ways. One lunchtime, Maduka (Fijian-Indian background), Sajra (Bosnian background) and their friend Kanarina (born in Romania) were busy giving Gamze consoling nods of support as she complained in a long monologue about how unfair it was that she had been healthy all year but right before her Turkish dancing concert – that she had been preparing for all year – she had come down with a nasty cold. “Are any of you guys going to the concert?” I enquired, thinking maybe I’d tag along. They shook their heads. “Nah, it’s just Turkish,” Gamze explained, “you’d be the only black person there!” she commented to Maduka with a laugh. There was a pause, an infinitesimal flinch, before Maduka said “Uh, that’s rude”.
48 Within the school grounds, I did hear about (but never witnessed) a couple of fights which students and teachers discussed in racialised terms. Whilst the students only mentioned these fights once or twice to me in passing (e.g. Andy in Chapter 1), teachers told me about these incidents repeatedly, and discussed them amongst themselves in the staffroom, which gave me the impression that such incidents occurred much more often and in dramatic fashion. When I asked teachers more about these fights, it became clear that nobody was quite sure about the extent to which they were racially-motivated, explaining that the fights were triggered by sports feuds and conflict over romantic interests. As this thesis focuses on students’ accounts and experiences of life at Greendale High, I do not discuss racialised fighting.
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“Nah, you know I love you,” Gamze responded, brushing her comment off as a joke. “Yeah, just joking,” Maduka quickly replied. I hadn’t realised until this point that I had been holding my breath; I felt a palpable awkward tension and I didn’t know how to react – whether or not to say something, stay quiet or laugh along.
I heard Maduka call ethno-racial teasing “rude” in another encounter among friends – this time more assuredly. Maduka and Kanarina sat together every maths class along with Hakim, a young man from Afghanistan, who had a crush on Kanarina. He would constantly try to distract her from her work, crooning about how much he loved her and teasing her. On this particular day his teasing took the form of calling her “Albanian” instead of her name. “I’m not Albanian!” Kanarina snapped. “Don’t call her that. She’s Aussie,” Maduka defended. Hakim said it again. “I’m not Albanian, I’m Romanian,” Kanarina grumbled. “It’s rude, don’t say it,” Maduka ruled, turning her back to him. When they ignored his subsequent string of teasing comments, he remarked “why do you not like Afghanis?” That got Kanarina’s attention. “That’s rude,” she retorted, “why would I not like Afghanis?”
I was unaware of the stereotypes attached to Albanians but they were made clear to me when Maduka and Kanarina told their friendship group about this incident after class, and Gamze laughed about how Albanians are all drug dealers. Apparently Bosnians had a similar reputation. In history class when the teacher rebuked Sajra for talking, she protested “but Gamze was the one that was talking!” “HEY!” Gamze retorted, “Bosnians! You can’t trust them…nah, just kidding.” Sajra gave a small, nondescript laugh before the teacher continued with his lecture.
What’s a Bit of Racism among Friends?
There is a small body of literature to guide understanding of how racism manifests within friendships (Back 1996; Hewitt 1986; Harris 2016b; Fozdar 2011;
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Modica 2015; Bennett et al. 2016; Jackman and Crane 1986; Winkler-Reid 2015). Exploring friendships between Maori and Pākehā (generally white New Zealanders), Fozdar’s (2011) interview-based research revealed that intercultural friendships do not necessarily reduce prejudice and increase intercultural awareness; friends concealed their differing opinions and racist views from each other. Indeed, Jackman and Crane dispute the truism that “social intimacy implies acceptance and equality” (1986, 459). Considering the infamous expression ‘some of my best friends are black, but…’ they argue that this “suggests a more insidious relationship between personal friendship and intergroup attitudes” (1986, 462).49 Thus, racist tensions and prejudices may simmer under the surface of intercultural friendships.50
Yet, what was striking about the exchanges between Gamze’s friends in the lower courtyard and maths classroom was how their ethno-racial jabs had a playful, humorous quality; Gamze and Hakim’s racialised comments had what Sharpe and Hynes would call a “lightness of tone” (2015, 97), presented within a joking frame. Was such racialised repartee authorised within a co-constructed friendship dynamic, which accommodated racist joking without causing social rifts? Or does the “supposed goodness of humour” (Billig 2005, 5) conceal the harmful effects of racialised joking? How do we explain Maduka’s charge of “rude” and her bodily flinch or Sajra’s nondescript laugh? In the following section I attempt to shed light on these questions through attention to literature on racist humour and engaging with the situated logics and contexts that informed Greendale friendship dynamics.
49 The justification ‘I’m not racist/homophobic, some of my best friends are black/gay etc.’ is well documented and critiqued by scholars and online social critics alike (e.g. Plumer 2011; King 2015). 50 On the basis of interviews with young Australians, Harris (2016b) suggests that friendship is not contained by the term ‘intercultural’ as multiple social differences are activated by and are overcome by youth friendships in spaces of cultural diversity. The following chapter explores this kind of intersectionality.
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‘Just Joking!’
Personal accounts by online social commentators tend to position racist joking as definitively racist. In her article, ‘I’m Done with Ignoring a Little Harmless Racism between Friends’, Hong Kong based writer Louise Hung (2016) discusses her journey from laughing along with Chinese jokes (“in the name of self-preservation”) to standing up against “the racism that acquaintances or friends think is OK to sprinkle into interactions.” Aude Konan (2015), a London-based French Ivorian writer, has also written about her experiences growing up being on the receiving end of racist jokes. Konan recalls an incident that echoes the joking about the KKK among Dee’s friends at Greendale:
A former friend, one I could have given my life for, welcomed me at one of her parties with her and her boyfriend screaming “Ku Klux Klan” at every one of my steps. I told her I wasn’t even African-American and, regardless, it didn’t make any sense (I didn’t bother explaining to her how offensive it was). Plus, she was Middle Eastern, why would she make these kind of jokes? She kept laughing, and kept chanting until I went to another room (2015, par. 3).
Emanating from the harassment and othering she describes, the discomfort she felt and the offensive overtones of the KKK reference, racism here was unmistakable (if we define racism as about impact not intent). While her friend’s Middle Eastern background was a source of confusion to Konan, it raises questions about whether her friend’s joking was a misjudged attempt at inclusive, albeit provocative, repartee. Interpreting humour is, after all, highly complex. As Billig notes, “one person’s harmless bit of teasing will be another’s cruelty” (2005, 8).
Recent scholarship on the role of humour in culturally diverse places of enforced proximity calls into question whether ethno-racial jokes between schoolmates and work colleagues are necessarily performed and experienced as hostile, offensive and a means to exclude (Winkler-Reid 2015; Wise 2016; Grigg and Manderson 2015). Grigg and Manderson’s (2015) Australian high school
151 CHAPTER FIVE participants from both majority and minority groups considered racist humour to be largely acceptable. In the UK, research participants in Bennett and colleagues’ (2016) study of high school multiculture claimed that racist joking was acceptable within one’s friendship circle. Echoing the repartee of Gamze’s friends, one student in Bennett et al.’s research explained, “every culture has their own like little stereotype so you tease them about their stereotype and they tease you back about your stereotype, and when it’s amongst friends it’s okay” (2016, 10). This student acknowledged that outside of close friends and their shared joking rituals, such behaviour might offend people (2016, 10). According to Bennett and colleagues, these young people seemed “skilfully aware of how joking tanks when the balance of power feels unequal and individuals do not feel ‘on the same level’” (2016, 10, in reference to Lockyer and Pickering 2008).
Humour based on ethno-racial differences was also considered a key means of ‘getting along’ for participants in Wise’s (2016) research on sociality within culturally diverse workplaces. For these blue-collar workers, even seemingly “outright and unequivocally offensive” exchanges could be considered appropriate means to and forms of positive repartee, trust, bonding and belonging (2016, 490). This was also the case for secondary school students in Winkler-Reid’s (2015) study of peer relations in a culturally diverse London high school. For these students, ethno-racial joking was a key force in producing “a convivial sociality” that enabled students to deal humorously with perceived differences that could prove divisive (2015, 24). Students drew on racialised differences in everyday “quick-fire banter” to tease friends and make light of prejudice (2015, 33). As one of her (black) participants explained:
We rip the piss out of everyone, like with our friend Tariq we say he’s a terrorist, or with a friend who’s Irish we’ll say ‘alright Pikey’...If you go somewhere that’s blatantly racist then that’s rubbish, if you make a joke out of it and say ‘why aren’t you talking to me, is it because I’m Iraqi, do you think I’m going to bomb you or something?’ or ‘why aren’t you talking to me, is it because I’m black, do you think I’m going to mug you?’ then
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that’s okay…Because it’s in society and it’s a very hurtful thing so you make fun out of it, to downplay it (Winkler-Reid 2015, 37).
These quips have strong resonances with Hakim’s barbs about Kanarina snubbing him for being Afghani and – as will be discussed later – Jase’s teasing of Mohammed for being a terrorist. Do these similarities indicate that Greendale students also used ‘racist’ jokes to produce a “convivial sociality” (Winkler-Reid 2015, 24) in ways that strengthened social bonds and belonging?
This seemed to be the case when Gamze made light-hearted yet disparaging comments about Indian people. Maduka usually responded with “hey, I’m Indian!” and Gamze would retort that she’s not “real” Indian, bobbing her head in a thick accent (akin to Aleksandra’s behaviour in Chapter 4). “That’s true,” Maduka conceded, laughing along; she was included as ‘us’ and not ‘them’ (however problematically) in these encounters. Maduka often, herself, joked among her friends and with me about being black as a form of humorous teasing. When a mock verbal altercation between Maduka and me reached crescendo, Maduka quipped, “do you want to fight a black woman?” puffing out her chest. The fight was over; she had won. Akin to Wise’s (2016) research, these friends were able to use potentially offensive language and stereotypes to have fun with each other. In these co-constructed forms of banter, the joking was inclusive, the quips multidirectional and reciprocal, without any one friend being singled out.
In contrast, teasing which contravened these norms was not necessarily understood as inclusive or a form of bonding. For Kanarina, taunts about being ‘Albanian’ were interpreted as offensive or annoying despite Hakim using this as a means of provocative flirtation. Sajra’s non-descript laugh and Maduka’s bodily recoil, too, were suggestive that Gamze’s comments may have breached the terms of their co-produced ‘joking relationship’ (see Wise 2016). However, the term ‘racism’ was not used in these moments. Instead, behaviour was labelled as ‘rude’, comments were laughed off, or what I interpreted as
153 CHAPTER FIVE uncomfortable body language ensued. What can be inferred from these responses? Did the students consider these ‘friendly’ racialising jokes ‘racist’ or not?
Classifying race-based humour as racist, for young people and researchers alike, can be exceedingly difficult in a quick, shifting playing field of peer sociality marked by ambiguous, lively banter (cf. Grigg and Manderson 2015). Humour has long been attributed to a form of pervasive and difficult to challenge ‘everyday racism’ (Essed 1991). This form of racism is hard to combat as it presents in “unmarked”, “noncontroversial” ways (Pagliai 2011, E108) and is “not to be taken seriously” (see Velayutham 2009, 266). It is often difficult for victims (or bystanders) to stand up against racist joking as they face ridicule as being ‘too sensitive’ and risk exclusion by peers for ‘not being able to take a joke’ (see Winkler-Reid 2015; Konan 2015). This is a weighty risk in a school environment when group inclusion is critical to social survival. In contrast, to go along with these jokes (however much the quips might hurt) can secure one’s inclusion (Winkler-Reid 2015). The need for group acceptance may, thus, deter friends from labelling behaviour as racist and hurtful.
In a similar vein, perpetrators of ‘racist’ jokes are also likely to risk social exclusion if their behaviour is labelled racist, having breached friendship acceptability. As in the case of Dee and Jack earlier, the mere threat of this label provoked much anxiety. This threat enabled Hakim to change the power dynamic by alluding to Kanarina’s racism towards Afghanis and incited Kanarina to return her attention to him in order to defend herself from this label. In doing so he deflected attention from his own potentially offensive racialising remarks. Not dissimilarly, Maduka was, in some way, able to turn the tables on Gamze by marking Gamze’s behaviour, rendering Gamze’s remark abnormal and requiring explanation (see Pagliai 2011). By using the retort “that’s rude”, Maduka placed Gamze in the position of having to justify her comments. Drawing on Herzfeld’s exploration of the significance of gesture, Maduka, Sajra and others may have also “subtly but insistently” (2009, 133)
154 CHAPTER FIVE destabilised Gamze’s power and their own powerlessness in these exchanges through gestures, pauses and ambiguous laughs.
Admittedly, Maduka quickly added that she too was joking. This seemed a repair strategy to smooth over relational tension by removing the accusations of rudeness (or racism) from Gamze and confirming her own ability to recognise and take a joke. According to Pagliai (2011), facework is a considerable factor in whether or not people speak up against racism. Her research found that people often became complicit in racist interactions in order to manage face, be polite and avoid an argument, particularly important when in a lower status position (see also Konan 2015; DiAngelo 2011). As Pagliai explains, “no matter how strong our personal convictions, the requirements of face may often take precedence over people’s sense of moral justice, and of adequate retribution” (2011, E99). Maduka’s retort was uttered in a tone that bordered on hurt and humour. This ambiguity may have enabled her to uphold face in the interaction. The “de-committed” (Sharpe and Hynes 2015, 100)nature of joking, as Sharpe and Hynes term it, minimises the chance of being losing face, or being labelled a racist in the case of Gamze. As Sharpe and Hynes explain “the user can always hide behind the claim that he or she is ‘only joking’” (2015, 89). Indeed, “just kidding, you know I love you.” as Gamze said, was a common refrain between friends at Greendale High after making an ethno-racial barb or other ‘difference’-centric comments that had the potential to offend. This is illustrative of the logic among these young people that affection across ethno-racial difference negates (for the perpetrator, at least) the possibility of hurtful racist intent.
Friendship and Intent
Examining lay understandings of racism among adults in Australia, Walton and colleagues’ research reveals that assessment of a person’s intent is a significant factor in deciding whether to classify comments as “friendly banter or as hurtful” (2013b, 81). For Grigg and Manderson’s (2015) high school participants, beliefs were more important than behaviour in determining whether something
155 CHAPTER FIVE was racist or not. It is possible then that amongst Gamze’s friends comments that seemed offensive were not deemed racist because they lacked malicious, hostile intent and “were made by people who have friends from diverse backgrounds” (Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b, 85). This latter point echoes the logic of Chapter 4 that to be intimately engaged with those from different (and stigmatised) ethnic backgrounds precludes one’s capacity to be or act racist.
Gamze, Maduka, Sajra and Kanarina had been friends for a few years, knew each other well, and generally enjoyed each other’s company. In this context, it would likely be very difficult to classify a friend’s behaviour as racist when racism was commonly understood as making someone a “horrible” and prejudiced person. This individualising of racism – involving a focus on interlocutor’s intent – does not leave much room to call out friends’ behaviour as having a harmful effect without disrupting the friendship. It was, in fact, these young women’s close friendships and familiarity with each other’s cultural backgrounds that provided the fodder for targeted ethno-racial quips. Rather than racist joking evincing lack of understanding or acceptance of cultural difference, these friends’ ethno-racial teasing demonstrated, as suggested in Chapter 4, a “fund of cosmopolitan knowledge” (Kromidas 2011b, 86).51 Hakim who teased Kanarina was able to do so based on the knowledge that she does not identify as Albanian, but has Albanian parents, and he possessed knowledge of the stereotypes attributed to this ethnicity. Gamze, too, was able to use her knowledge of Sajra’s background and the stereotypes associated with it to tease her for betraying her to the teacher. Gamze, Hakim and other students knew that their friends were more than these ethno-racial stereotypes and labels, but they made quips about Bosnians, Albanians and Indians anyway – seemingly for effect. They may have been trying to be clever, to show off, to spark provocative flirtation and entertaining repartee, but,
51 It also challenges programmatic responses under social cohesion rubric that call for young people to learn about each other’s cultures to foster inclusive, antiracist behaviour (see Harris and Herron 2017).
156 CHAPTER FIVE significantly, they were not trying to cause offence based on racist beliefs. In this context, ‘rude’ – as in a breach of friendship civility and respect – may have been more applicable to these girls than the label ‘racism’.
Through exploring ‘friendly’ racialising repartee in Gamze’s friendship circle, the difficulties of working out whether behaviour is considered racist and appropriate within students’ social world is made clear. However, in teasing out some of these complexities, students’ exchanges suggest that ‘racist’ jokes had the capacity to be precariously inclusive and convivial. Racial taunts did not necessarily reveal thinly veiled hostility or a desire to eliminate intolerable ethno-racial Others, but one ‘playful’ way to present oneself as cool or funny, or momentarily gain power and attention in a youth culture environment marked by constant efforts for inclusion, belonging and survival (see Harris and Herron 2017; see also Back 1996). As Guerin points out, making fun of people in racialising ways can be enacted not primarily to hurt people, but “to gain social status within a group or to have the listeners like you” (2005, 56). In this context, I suggest students’ racialising jokes operated as a form of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ which drew on knowledge about and engagement with culturally diverse friends and classmates at the same time that it was fraught with the risk of offending friends and perpetuating negative stereotypes and experiences of othering.
Jase’s Friendship Group: Ironic, Subversive and ‘Post-Racial’ Racisms
Friendship dynamics among Jase’s friends in the upper courtyard exhibited similar patterns of sociability; ‘racism’ manifested in the form of joking with a “lightness of tone” (Sharpe and Hynes 2015, 97). Again, ‘racism’ functioned in a way that could be precariously inclusive, reflective of a commitment to interculturality and underpinned by the belief that racism is wrong. Jase, like Gamze, was a driving force of much racialised teasing of his friends. Whilst Gamze’s jokes seemed to trade on a threat to social inclusion (and its inverse - social bonding), Jase’s humorous deployment of ethno-racial stereotypes was more strongly a form of subversive social commentary. Jase’s friendship
157 CHAPTER FIVE practices suggest further possibilities for why students might not consider ethno-racial repartee at school as ‘racist’; his practices pushed the boundaries of standard notions of both racism and cosmopolitanism.
Peripheral friends came and went across the day but the core group remained the same: Jase, Mohammed, Lacey and Aleksandra. I could usually find them sitting together around a bench in the upper courtyard or on rainy days, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the grey carpet of the school corridors. Whilst the ‘nash’ of love interests was not usually a talking point among this group, jokes based on the ‘nash’ of Mohammed certainly were; Jase and his friends drew on varied combinations of stereotypes attached to brown, South Asian, male, Muslim bodies as fodder for humorous repartee. One lunchtime when Aleksandra, Jase and I were walking back from the local shops, a siren rang out in the distance. “Hey, the cops are after Mohammed!” Aleksandra laughed, “Bomb threat at Greendale!” In his absence, his friends had – for laughs – rendered Mohammed a terrorist on the basis of his Muslim faith. In his presence, his South Asian-ness was a more common trope.
Traffic on the freeway meant I entered my first class of the day well after the bell had rung. Mohammed rose out of his chair, reaching out with his hand – “Give me a high five, Mel!” Our hands slapped and I slipped into the seat between him and Jase. Without looking up, Jase slid a white earphone to his left. I picked it up and placed it in my right ear. We watched YouTube clips together with only a few words spoken: “have you seen…?” “What do you want to watch next?” In an effort to control the class, the teacher directed Jase and others to put their phones away. Unfazed, Jase found a new source of entertainment – talking about drinking and drugs. “Drugs and drinking are stupid!” Daxon (Angl0-Australian) interjected. Ignoring him, Jase asked whether I drink. I played my role in our game, farcically trying to change the subject. I asked Mohammed whether he drinks. “Nah, its haraam.” “Do you speak Urdu?” I probed, out of interest. He nodded. Daxon butted in: “Like every single word?”
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“Yeah, almost,” Mohammed replied. “Almost is not all! Daxon challenged. “You don’t know every word in English,” I interposed. “Yes I do!” Daxon defended, hotly. “You’re not precocious enough to know all the words,” I teased, with a cheeky smile. “I might not know what that means, but I know how to say it,” he argued. “Well Mohammed probably knows how to say every word in Arab…or whatever the language is,” Jase retorted. “That probably sounded really racist,” he added as an aside to me, shrugging with a wry smile. Before I had a chance to muster a response, Jase commanded Mohammed to say something in Urdu. Mohammed faltered, not knowing what to say so Jase gave him an example in English, imitating an exaggerated Indian accent.
As was the case for Gamze’s quips, Jase’s comments did not appear to be motivated by antagonistic and prejudiced beliefs. Jase did not disparage Mohammed’s religious practices (not drinking alcohol) and he, in fact, supported Mohammed’s assertions of his bilingualism (an ability that Greendale students were often very impressed by). His use of the ill-fitting term ‘Arab’ and his imitations of an Indian accent were deliberate – his aside to me confirmed this. In his usual reflective way he was performing himself in a way he knew teetered on the edge of the appropriate. Back terms such joking practices among friends, like throwing insults at each other and ‘wind-ups’, “duelling play” which he defines as “a process whereby young people test out the boundaries of interpersonal relationships (i.e. how far play can be extended and pushed)” (1996, 74). As Back explains, “the tension in this kind of early and late adolescent play is centred around the issue of whether these acts mean what they stand for or not” (1996, 74). The provocative potential to offend is what makes it work as witty and entertaining banter, relieving boredom amongst friends and classmates in classrooms and the schoolyard.
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Crossing the Line
There were occasions when his friends felt he had pushed these boundaries too far. When Jase got up to go to the canteen for food at recess one Monday morning, Lacey, Mohammed and some other of their friends remained behind at the bench. When he was out of earshot, Lacey recounted to me what Jase had done on the previous Saturday night. Apparently after a bottle of vodka, Jase continually called Mohammed a taxi-driver. Mohammed remained impassive throughout the retelling. I asked him how he felt about it. “He was drunk,” he shrugged, his eyes downcast. The girls told me that this was typical of Jase but did not elaborate. The purposeful dramatic effect of this comment was left hanging as the bell rang. Everyone clambered out of the benches and moved off to their lockers, whilst Jase wandered back over with his usual pink- iced donut in hand. “You called Mohammed a taxi-driver?” I asked aghast. I was striving for a tone that delicately indicated my disapproval (as Maduka perhaps did with Gamze). “What?” Jase laughed, “he was wearing a vest and everything!” Jase went on to tell me about his own experiences at the party – how much he drank, who he kissed, and how he ended up vomiting in a wardrobe. I brought the conversation back to his friends’ veiled accusations of his racism. “Yeah, I was suspended twice for racism. When I was in year six I said I preferred ‘the white Sarah’. A few years ago I made an Asian joke in front of a teacher. As you can tell, I’m quite the racist,” he drawled, dryly.
His friends’ reaction to Jase calling Mohammed a taxi-driver was the closest I felt anyone came to labelling their friends’ behaviour racist. Perhaps it was the element of alcohol and the repetition of the joking insult (that revolved around associating Mohammed’s South Asian origins to taxi-driving) that moved the context from ‘light-hearted’ joking to something darker and less ambiguous – more akin to a negative belief than an ephemeral joking metaphor. This may have made it easier for his friends to call his behaviour out as racist. Despite his friends’ disapproval, Jase did not agree that his comments had a racist impact. His flippant responses to the suggestion of him being a racist were revealing.
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When Jase acknowledged to me “that probably sounded really racist” (my emphasis) regarding the ‘Arab’ quip, he implied that his behaviour is a performance of racism, not racism itself. As I will explore, this logic suggests that knowingly acting ‘racist’ with subversive and ironic intent distances oneself from being racist. Indeed, this behaviour is a caricature of those assumed ‘real’ racists. His reference to ‘white Sarah’ (“I prefer the ‘white Sarah’”) particularly demonstrated his knowledge of racist tropes and his ability to play with them.
Subversive Racism
Douglas describes joking as an “attack on control” which purposefully contravenes and devalues dominant values and casts doubt and disorder onto social structure; it is subversive (1968, 364). According to Douglas, joking “consists of a victorious tilting of uncontrol against control, it is an image of the levelling of hierarchy, the triumph of intimacy over formality, of unofficial values over official ones” (1968, 366). This explanatory frame is relevant for considering Jase’s nod to the trope of multicultural inclusion (discussed in Chapter 3) in which he rejected cutting a brown-skinned student from their drama group because “we need a brown person in it – otherwise it will look bad…. it won’t be multicultural.” He was playing with the idea here of what is supposed to be said and done regarding multicultural rhetoric and colour- blindness and flouting this for humorous effect. His jokes did not seem intended to be racist or offensive, but were performances to showcase his cleverness. Indeed, to play with social form, first you have to understand it well.
Douglas’s analysis is also useful for understanding Milena’s practices detailed in earlier chapters. Milena often made defiant remarks, including making claims that she could not tell black people apart and that the ‘Afghanis’ annoy her (see Chapter 3) even though she had many black and Afghani friends. Her first comment was a nod to a racist trope, and appeared to be a purposeful rejection of the limits to what can and cannot be said, championing intimacy over formality and rejecting the authority of the school teachers and perceived social
161 CHAPTER FIVE pressure of ‘political correctness’ (cf. Nayak 1999, 193). Roberts, Bell and Murphy describe this behaviour as ‘flipping the script’, whereby young people “invert the unspoken rules of ‘polite’ talk about race and assert their authority to talk about it in their own terms” (2008, 346). At the time I was surprised that Milena’s Afghani friends didn’t seem offended by her comments. It may be that her friends were familiar with her desire to push the boundaries of ‘polite’ talk, and therefore did not take offence at her comments, realising her statements did not match her actual practices of convivial intercultural friendship. While Jase’s behaviour also ‘flipped the script’, his provocative racialised quips appeared to have different motivations. Even through his performance failed at times, read as racist even by his friends, Jase’s quips were not only a show of his intelligence and wit, but they were also ironic; he seemed to deploy racist tropes to demonstrate just how progressive and not racist he believed he was.
Ironic and Post-Racial Racism
‘Ironic racism’ was a key form of humour employed by students in Winkler- Reid’s (2015) research. According to Winkler-Reid, using racist stereotypes ironically can be an effective means of getting along with culturally diverse peers because this form of humour recognises and critiques wider social discourses and acts to destabilise the power of the racist comment. As noted earlier in this chapter, one of her participants explained that racist jokes between school friends were acceptable “because [racism is] in society and it’s a very hurtful thing so you make fun out of it, to downplay it” (2015, 37). In other words, the logic that informs ironic racism, as one social critic explains it, is that “racism is so obvious and overstated that it’s meant to be laughed at, and that people are laughing at the racism and the racists, not supporting the ideas which are supposedly being mocked” (Smith 2012, par. 4).
Due to the ambivalent nature of irony, this kind of humour is risky; interlocutors may interpret ironic comments in diverse ways, including taking offence (see Winkler-Reid 2015). Despite Jase’s friends strongly hinting that his behaviour could be racist at times, Jase refuted the possibility that his
162 CHAPTER FIVE behaviour towards Mohammed and others was racist as he looked to conceive of his comments and beliefs as beyond racism. Jase presented himself as too progressive to be racist, and also acted as if his jokes could not possibly perpetuate racist beliefs or further subject their friends to racism that could echo their wider life experiences. As I speculated in the previous chapter, the idea of the ‘post-racial’ – that race and racism are no longer relevant and harmful constructs – seemed to be operating among many Greendale students (see Lentin and Titley 2011 on dangers of post-racial ideology more broadly).
As noted in the previous chapters, Jase and others positioned racist stereotypes and beliefs as existing well outside of Greendale student life – existing in the past (“maybe 20 years ago”) or at least in less diverse places, populated with ignorant people who, for example, actually believe Muslims are terrorists.52 From the viewpoint that Greendale High peer sociality was disconnected from the racial intolerance and racist discourses of wider society (either currently or historically), the effects of racialised jokes – according to students’ perspectives – could only be ironic and playful and the suggestion of being racist ridiculous.
Hipster Racism
To date there is very little discussion of such ironic, post-racial and ‘liberal’ racism in the literature (see Current and Tillotson 2016 for notable exception). While Winkler-Reid (2015) focuses on ironic racism amongst high school students, she does not engage with how a post-racial and post-modern ethos might be implicated in the production of ironic quips. Conversation, debate and theorising about what has been coined ‘hipster racism’ is instead taking place online in blogs and opinion pieces written for a popular audience (cf. Current and Tillotson 2016). ‘Hipster racism’ and its sister concept ‘hipster sexism’ were developed by social critics to capture how people use racism and sexism in ironic ways to “seem jaded and urbane and oh-so-witty”, and to present an “edgy” persona by pushing the boundaries of the appropriate (Smith
52 For Gamze, her jokes were not ironic as she acted as if stereotypes (for instance about Indians) did hold, but not among her friends.
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2012, par. 2). ‘Hipster racism’ counterpoises conventional “un-ironic, explicit, violent, banal” (Quart 2012, par. 7) forms of racism (and sexism) in order to make visible and problematise this ironic, ‘well-intentioned’ and ‘post-racial’ behaviour (see Oluo 2015). According to columnist, Lola Okolosie, the logic that informs hipster racism is:
I am not a racist because you (insert ethnic minority label) are my friend, so how can I be? I am not a racist, so I can share this brutal and brutalising joke with you. I am simply engaging in audacious wordplay, taking part in the postmodern irony that is a sign of our ambivalent times (2013, par. 8).
These descriptions of hipster racism have clear resonances with Jase’s ethno- racial joking; his provocative ‘wordplays’ showcased his avant-garde wit, blasé attitude and cosmopolitan, progressive principles that racism (along with sexism and homophobia – see Chapter 6) is wrong and ridiculous. Yet the behaviour of Jase and fellow students diverged from characterisations of ‘hipster racism’ in significant ways. ‘Hipster racism’ is written about as exclusive to white and middle-class identities (e.g. West 2012; Read 2012). For example, internet blogger Lindy West in ‘A Complete Guide to Hipster Racism’ writes:
It's, you know, introducing your black friend as "my black friend"—as a joke!!!—to show everybody how totally not preoccupied you are with your black friend's blackness. It's the gentler, more clueless, and more insidious cousin of a hick in a hood; the domain of educated, middle-class white people (2012, par. 1).
Whilst West’s example of the “my black friend” joke bears resemblance to Greendale students’ quips and attitudes, this account of whiteness and class does not fit with the Greendale High demographic. Firstly, ironic and post- racial teasing was not solely carried out by white students at Greendale; such quips also sprang from the mouths of friends from non-white backgrounds as well. For example, as noted in Chapter 4, Aleksandra referred to a black- skinned friend as her “nigga bestie” – perhaps as part of experimenting with ‘edgy’ repartee. Secondly, Greendale students did not fit within class-based
164 CHAPTER FIVE categorisations of racism. The Greendale student body was not middle-class and part of gentrifying, hipster culture scathingly described as where “most of [hipsters’] contact with people of colour comes in the form of the service personnel serving them their food, cleaning their wine bars, and picking their organic produce” (Smith 2012). Greendale students came from working-class backgrounds and closely engaged with classmates, friends and lovers from different backgrounds on a daily basis. Thus, students like Jase complicated not only scholarly accounts of racism but also popular characterisations of ‘hipster racists’.
Significantly, students’ modes of relationality also challenged the idea of the (white) working class as un-cosmopolitan, racist bigots (Binnie and Skeggs 2004). West invoked this popular portrayal of the racist working class in her reference to ‘hicks’, otherwise termed ‘rednecks’ (see Hardie and Tyson 2012), or ‘bogans’ in the Australian context (The following chapter explores the stigma of class and its connection to racism from Greendale students’ perspectives).53 As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Greendale students came to share a highly multicultural school space because of the ways structural race and class inequality coalesce in Melbourne’s outskirts. They shared a low-socioeconomic background and lived in a region that was characterised as ‘bogan’ in the public imagination. Rather than reflecting popular ideas that link the working class to racism, arguably they developed sophisticated knowledge about how to negotiate cultural difference, including how to play with racist stereotypes in convivial and subversive ways (even if this sometimes misfired). This knowledge and practice may have emerged because they attended a culturally diverse, disadvantaged school where interaction and friendships with people from a range of backgrounds was a routine part of everyday life. In doing so, students also defied framings of archetypal cosmopolitans.
53 Levelling responsibility for racism onto the working class for racism has been critiqued for absolving white middle-class liberals of responsibility in maintaining power structures of racism and classism (Gillborn 2010; Hubbs 2014; Arthurson 2015).
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Cosmopolitan virtues have been described as “capacities for irony, self- reflexivity…diverse cultural literacies and a commitment to dialogue with others” (Noble 2013, 173). Just as in the narratives about ‘hipster racism’ these traits are regularly positioned “as the preserve of an educated and cultural elite” (Pardy 2005, 11-12). Greendale students’ intercultural capacities, supporting theorisations of ‘working-class’ or ‘vernacular’ (Werbner 2006, 1999) forms of cosmopolitanism discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, challenge classist views of cosmopolitan aptitudes and investments. Indeed, Jase’s behaviour regularly involved irony, self-awareness and investment with friends from different backgrounds. Rejecting the way cosmopolitan dispositions tend to be associated only with the ‘cosmo-multicultural’ elites as Hage calls them (1998, 2003), Werbner (1999) details an emerging ‘working-class cosmopolitanism’ among working-class migrant labourers. She argues that:
working class labour migrants may become cosmopolitans, willing to ‘engage with the Other’; and that transnationals – Hannerz’s term redefined to encompass migrants, settlers and refugees as well as occupational travellers – inevitably must engage in social processes of ‘opening up to the world’, even if that world is still relatively circumscribed culturally (1999, 18).
In the context of Melbourne, Pardy also notes the capacity for people living in culturally diverse and disadvantaged outer suburbs to produce ‘working-class cosmopolitanism’ “materialising in a compelled and continual confrontation with strangers and others by migrants and whites alike in a suburb with a particularly unclassy demographic” (2005, 118, emphasis in original). As I noted earlier, Greendale High provides a similar space for routine confrontations and experimentations with multicultural living. Jase’s and Gamze’s friendship group, whether by engaging with culturally diverse peers, ironically subverting racist tropes, or operating from the belief that racism is wrong, support the concept of ‘working-class cosmopolitanism’. Yet attention to the complexities of their social relations suggests that this concept needs to be revised to better encompass the ways in which racism is intricately entangled in their friendship
166 CHAPTER FIVE practices. Indeed, as I suggested earlier, Greendale students’ working-class disadvantage may have compelled some of their fetishistic essentialising of black peers. In this context, I suggest that racist joking among Greendale peers provides another example of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’: a complex and sophisticated practice and ethos that defies characterisation as either simply racist or convivial/cosmopolitan.
While ‘hipster racism’ is written about as necessarily “insidious” and harmful (however ‘well-intentioned’) (West 2012, par. 1), the dynamics of Gamze’s and Jase’s friendship groups call this into question. As this section, ‘Racism in Talk’, has illuminated, their social relations test current understandings of racism. ‘Racism’ in the form of joking among friends had the capacity in this setting to be partially inclusive and indicative of cosmopolitan, accepting sentiments. The young people discussed in this chapter were not simply moving between forms of exclusion and openness, conflict and amiability. Rather these practices were utterly entangled as they engaged ‘all in’ with their ‘skin in the game’ – to use gambling metaphors of high-stakes risk and reward – in a complex sociality and worked out ways to co-exist in a shared space. Notions of what was respectful and appropriate behaviour were likely shifting through this negotiation of togetherness and changing the state of play.
Reflections on Racism
Expanding upon the frame of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ developed in the previous chapter, this chapter has illuminated how ethno-racial jabs among friends were able to operate as a precariously acceptable part of inclusive ‘play’. Deployment of racialising quips always occurred within close friendships and in the context of ‘light-hearted’ humorous repartee. Rather than driven by racist malice, racialised remarks were usually marked by playfulness, cross-cultural knowledge and liberal values couched in irony. They were also motivated by desires to secure social power, attention and popularity and flout authority, but not in ways that were exclusionary, causing social rifts. As I have written about
167 CHAPTER FIVE elsewhere (Harris and Herron 2017), for these young people it was possible to be close friends and also be “rude” (as Maduka called it) to each other. Intimacy and humour, particularly, “licens[e] the suspension of civilities” (Wise 2016, 491) which, as Harris and I note, “trouble standard readings of racialised and racist discourses and practices as inherently acrimonious and exclusionary – and based on a sense of distance from culturally diverse Others” (2017, 296). Often, racialised joking was generative of entertaining and inclusive social bonding. It was in this context that students downplayed the salience and impact of racism. However, attention in particular to body language, including my own discomfort, raised the notion that sometimes these behaviours went “a step too far”, or that moved from ‘bonding’ to ‘biting’ (Wise 2016, 481-2, discussing Boxer and Cortés-Conde 1997).
In making visible the complexities, sophistication and ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ drivers of racialising repartee among friends, I do not mean to discount that students’ barbs had the capacity to wound or perpetuate negative stereotypes. The harmful impacts of everyday racism have been well canvassed in racism literature and by social commentators (e.g. Essed 1991; Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013b; Konan 2015). This chapter suggests that although students may at times have found friends’ behaviour hurtful, disrespectful and frustrating, they did not necessarily interpret their experiences through a lens of racism. Perhaps the simplest explanation for this, illuminated in ‘Talk about Racism’, is that students’ narrow understanding of racism did not reflect or provide appropriate terminology to describe and conceptualise their experiences of racialisation by friends. Constructions of racism as a black/white phenomenon, a phenomenon of the past (or elsewhere) and marked by overt forms of hostility, violence and discrimination may have simultaneously enabled students like Jase to ridicule accusations of racism and constrained students like Mohammed from articulating mundane, routine and joking incidents of racialisation as ‘racist’. Explaining the methodological issue of interviewing young people explicitly about racism, Hewitt writes that “the social reality they live is not properly reflected in the narrow formulaic terms in which the issue is
168 CHAPTER FIVE socially aired” (1986, 8). Indeed, decades on, educational and popular discourses about racism still did not serve Greendale students with useful ways to describe their complex ways of navigating friendships in a culturally diverse space. Without a language to talk about the intricacies of everyday racism in day-to-day life – and without having to label friends or themselves as “horrible” people – Greendale students may have avoided using the word ‘racism’ (see Harris 2009).
Whilst it is important to take seriously the weight and impact of racism in young lives, and indeed Chapter 6 will consider Maduka, Mohammed and other students’ experiences of racialised othering in greater depth, it is also important to remain open to the possibility that students may not have been offended by comments that ‘sound racist’ to outsiders (to use Jase’s phrasing). As noted in Chapter 2, to assume that offensive, harmful racism and othering was at play amongst student may further subject students like Maduka and Mohammed to othering treatment. As an antiracist scholar, I was alert to practices that may cause harm and perpetuate inequality. Yet, in conducting research with these students, my sensitivities were constantly challenged by the lack of malice in many of their exchanges, the implicit terms of (partial) agreement on which these were enacted, and how differently young people understood what is offensive and acceptable in the context of their social worlds.54 As exemplified in ‘Racism in Talk’, racialising ‘jokes’ between close friends tended to take unexpectedly complex, ironic and playful forms; students subverted and poked fun at circulating racist scripts and tropes that did not fit with a much more complex and convivial peer sociality. In doing so, they displayed affections and affiliations with friends from diverse backgrounds and hinted at the possibility of a hopeful youth sociality that dealt productively with difference.
Friends’ joking about cultural difference may have been productive, not only as a means of inclusive bonding, but also in rejecting colour-blindness and openly experimenting with ways of negotiating culturally diverse living. As described
54 I later reproduced this reflection in Harris and Herron (2017).
169 CHAPTER FIVE in Chapters 3 and 4 and now demonstrated here in students’ friendship joking rituals, many students were often quite outspoken about ethnicity and race, at least outside of teachers’ earshot. ‘Talk about Racism’ illustrated that in formal settings students grappled with contradictory messages about whether or not it was acceptable to ‘see’, label or point out ethno-racial background and (assumed negative) ‘difference’. In contrast ‘Racism in Talk’ indicated that students directly engaged with cultural difference, experimenting with what can and cannot be said.
Instead of colour-muteness (Pollock 2004) or ‘happy talk’ about diversity (see Bell and Hartmann 2007; Ahmed 2012) that denies and obscures the salience of race and racism, Greendale students appeared to have normalised the existence and salience of cultural diversity and issues of racism in their day-to-day talk. As part of this, students seemed comfortable making humorous or provocative off-handed references to cultural difference and racism. As Roberts and colleagues explain, “through the shock value in jokes and words that adults consider out of bounds, youth can challenge polite norms of color-blind discourse and dramatically interrupt otherwise sanitized lessons that tiptoe around the issues [of racism]” (2008, 346). Thus, joking among school friends offers the possibility for constructive engagement with cultural differences and racialised frictions (Winkler-Reid 2015). This experimentation with ways of dealing with difference – arguably cultivated by sharing a multicultural space – necessarily comes at the risk of getting it wrong, offending friends and being accused of racism.
Greendale students were also actively displaying their cross-cultural awareness and skills through this open acknowledgment of ‘nash’. Returning to the story the principal recounted to me about the talent contest (Chapter 2), the principal was aghast when the student MC introduced the next act as “next up is two Arabs and a Turk”. The principal was horrified that it was not appropriate language (“you can’t say that!”) but also expressed bewilderment about how they could identify each other’s backgrounds. Thus, while students’
170 CHAPTER FIVE brazen racialised joking and flouting of ‘political correctness’ might seem racist to adult outsiders, it was intricately enmeshed with deep investments with peers from different backgrounds and ‘cosmopolitan’ literacies more typically associated with adult, upwardly mobile and (upper) middle-class privilege.
With an understanding of the ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ that underpinned many students’ performances of racialisation, it becomes clear that there is a fundamental flaw in moral imperatives like “don’t say that” (as was the principal’s first reaction) or “don’t be racist.” Any attempt to engage with practices of racialisation needs to start with an appreciation of what racism means to young people, and how they conceive of their social practices. What students say – what their discourses sound like – cannot be divorced from how racialisation actually plays out in schoolyard sociality. This chapter spotlights how, in the case of youth friendships, current notions of racism likely miss the mark at Greendale High. Indeed, Greendale students’ practices defied characterisations of both racism and cosmopolitan conviviality. In particular, I argue that either/or framings of racism and conviviality in multicultural youth studies do not allow the conceptual flexibility to make sense of the complex, situated and socially negotiated ways in which young people refigured the significance of racism in their social circles. The concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ attempts to spotlight how ‘racism’ emerges in young lives in complex ways and how new terminology and conceptual tools are needed in new times, for scholars, educators and young people alike, to capture contemporary youth experiences of everyday multiculture.
It is important to emphasise that my theorisation of partially inclusive and productive practices of racialisation at Greendale – glossed as ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ – is based on the interactions of a relatively small number of young people (see Chapter 2). Furthermore, as noted earlier (and will be expanded upon in Chapter 7) students did report incidents of racism outside of the school ground and it is likely that more overt racist encounters did occur at Greendale which I did not witness or hear about. In fact, as I explore in Chapter
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7, discourses about Aboriginal Australians closely aligned with conventional theorisations of racist talk. Rather than undermining my argument, these provisos, limitations and exceptions highlight that across social spaces, contexts and friendship circles, racialisation or racism can emerge in different ways. No one conceptualisation of youth multiculture can possibly cover the diverse ways racialisation comes to matter (or not) in young lives. This thesis offers one conceptual tool – that of perverse cosmopolitanism – to make visible some of the complex and sophisticated mechanisms of youth sociality related to humour, irony, investments in interculturality and a subversive desire to flout conventions, that are obscured by current conceptualisations of racism and cosmopolitanism.
This chapter, together with Chapters 3 and 4, has explored the contexts in which race and ethnicity (along with religion, language and other forms of cultural difference) became meaningful in peer sociality – ethno-racial categorisation of peers and the schoolyard, conversations about and practices of dating and desire, and joking repartee among friends at school. Whilst this chapter focused on racialising quips in order to delve deeply into racism’s complex manifestation, contours of appropriateness, and possible impacts, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of ‘racism’ embedded back within the daily flow of school life. By taking into account intersectional social experiences and wider patterns of sociability, the following chapter further explores why students may not have considered racialised teasing among friends as racist and why conventional understandings of racism may not align well with the complex norms of peer sociality. As we will see, conflict between peers with hostile and exclusionary tenors and impacts was not configured directly around cultural difference, but other “organizing categories of social difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995, 9). In particular, the significance of gender, sexuality and class are explored in order to understand how young people navigated friendships, conflicts and made sense of a culturally diverse sociality. The next chapter also considers in greater detail how whiteness and white privilege operated in this culturally diverse environment and returns to look more
172 CHAPTER FIVE closely at the ways Maduka, Mohammed and others did (or did not) discuss experiences of racialisation in amongst other life struggles, and what this reveals about racism in conditions of diversity and adversity.
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CHAPTER SIX Conflict and Context: An Intersectional Understanding of Racism and Racial Privilege
Introduction
Consideration of students’ definitions of racism in the previous chapter highlighted that the idea of racism as a prejudiced, exclusionary act, born of malicious intent or lack of understanding did not hold among the Greendale High students I spent time with. Analysing Gamze and Jase’s peer group dynamics in the previous chapter, the difficulties of naming behaviour as either racist or convivial emerged. At any given moment, ‘racist’ joking may have been informed by a whole host of factors that I suggested could be understood through applying a ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ frame. Students performed ‘racism’ – however (un)successfully – to express post-racial and cosmopolitan attitudes, to secure social power and popularity as well as to show their cleverness and subversive resistance to socially sanctioned norms. This chapter deepens this ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ analysis by exploring intersectional forms of sociality wherein practices of racialisation were embedded, emerged and experienced. How might the wider social context of students’ school lives shape how racialisation was produced and understood at Greendale High – in ways that unsettle standard concepts of ‘racism’ along with the racism-conviviality binary in multicultural youth studies?
Guided by the work of feminist intersectionality scholars (Anthias and Yuval- Davis 1983; Crenshaw 1991; Valentine 2007; West and Fenstermaker 1995), this chapter focuses on the enmeshment of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity in understanding racism and racial privilege at Greendale High. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis explain:
There is not a unitary system of signification that can be labelled racist nor is there a unitary perpetrator or victim. This position requires addressing
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the ways in which the categories of difference and exclusion on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity incorporate processes of racialization and are intertwined in producing racist discourses and outcomes. In our view, the explication of racisms therefore cannot be undertaken purely with reference to ethnic or race phenomena (2005, 2).
This chapter provides an empirical illustration of how sexuality, class, gender and cultural difference came to bear on the emergence and meaning of racialisation through the exploration of Greendale students’ social bonds, peer conflict and personal struggles.
Addressing these shifting, contingent and interrelated features of student life presents difficulties in linear chapter form. Representing and analysing social identifiers like race, gender, sexuality and class as if they are easily extricated, additive aspects of people’s identities and experiences has faced much critique (Brah and Phoenix 2004; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983; Valentine 2007). As Yuval-Davis argues, “there is no meaning to the notion of ‘black’, for instance, which is not gendered and classed, no meaning for the notion of ‘woman’ which is not ethnocized and classed, etc.” (2007, 565). To capture the “fluid coming together, of contingencies and discontinuities, clashes and neutralizations, in which positions, identities, and differences are made and unmade, claimed and rejected” (Valentine 2007, 14) at Greendale High, I present a layered, incremental analysis of peer social relations that is divided into four interrelated parts.
Firstly, this chapter explores a range of social factors and shared experiences that appeared significant in how young people established social bonds with classmates and had ‘edgy’ fun with their friends – forms of ‘fun’ that may nevertheless have had harmful, hurtful impacts. As we will see, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ spanned multiple forms of difference, not just racialised cultural difference; how young people oriented to gender and sexuality politics in navigating their friendships had both transformative and troubling features. Secondly, with a continued focus on how gender and sexuality were animated
175 CHAPTER SIX among Greendale peers, I consider how conflict was configured among friends and peers. Whilst the previous chapter showed how racialised jabs did not destroy friendships or occur outside of friendship circles, cutting slights and friendship fallouts did transpire during my fieldwork. Rather than cultural difference being invoked to offend and exclude, gendered and heteronormative pressures were key to understanding the lines along which students reckoned with and fought amongst each other. As I will show, the lack of race-related conflict is highly significant to understanding the relationship between ‘racism’ and ‘conflict’ in young lives beyond what has been theorised to date in youth studies and urban multiculture literature.
Thirdly, this chapter turns to explore how students on the receiving end of racialised treatment made sense of their experiences of being Othered in the context of their wider life concerns and experiences. Students’ testimonies of struggle call into question whether ‘racism’ as a discrete and formal term captures their lived experience. In the fourth and final section – adding a further set of complexities – this chapter attends to the pressures of social class and stigmas attached to ‘white’ identities at Greendale High. Attention to the duelling stigmas of being ‘bogan’ and ‘boring’ that Anglo-Australian students grappled with deepens understanding of why Anglo students might have enacted racialising behaviours, whilst also dismissing the possibility of racism. As I will also explore, these shared meanings of whiteness at Greendale suggests that racial power and privilege operated at Greendale in ways that complicate conventional accounts of racism and power. Together, these four layers of ethnographic analysis reveal the intricate, unstable terrain in which students positioned themselves and others, offering insight into the varied social factors, norms and experiences that shaped practices and interpretations of racism and conviviality at Greendale High.
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Layer One: Bonding and Banter – The Place of Race
Whilst the previous chapters have canvassed how ideas about racialised cultural difference structured students’ social worlds, it is important to be mindful that ethno-racial identifications are shifting and contingent dimensions in young lives (Noble 2009a, 2015). Noble’s (2009a) research strongly points to the need to reposition the place of cultural and ethnic identity in youth sociality. For Arabic-speaking young men and women in Noble’s research, gender and age were sometimes the most dominant categories they drew on to describe everyday sociality.55 As Harris has argued, young people are “not simply making their way between competing imperatives of ethnic and national identifications to find flexible spaces of belonging in diversity” (2016a, 14, discussing Tabar et al. 2010); rather, young people in her research had to negotiate the rigid rules about how to perform masculinity and femininity (Harris 2016a). Friendships could develop from shared aversion to gendered and sexual norms at high school, rather than in terms of bonding ‘across cultures’ (Harris 2016b; Harris and Herron 2017). At Greendale, invoking or discussing cultural background was only one among many ways the young people I observed established social bonds and had fun with friends and classmates.
Walking into English class after lunch one day, I saw Brayden jiggling up and down in his seat, pointing vigorously at the seat next to him, yelping in rapid speed “Come sit here! Come sit here!” The air-conditioner was not working again; the classroom was stifling hot, overcrowded and smelled like pubescent sweat. The same movie we’d watched the week before and every day this week was playing again for the benefit of the regular truants who had not yet seen it. Brayden, with pale, skinny legs with knobby knees that never stopped tapping, was as hyperactive as usual. Elewa, a black-skinned student with Sudanese parents, and Jase begged Brayden to do a “ghetto” impersonation. Fingers
55 For example, when these young people discussed ‘cruising’ in their cars – an activity that can be a racialised and problematised activity in Australian society – they framed this practice in terms of age and gender and not in terms of ethnicity (Noble 2009a, 880-82).
177 CHAPTER SIX clicking, he mimicked an African American vernacular. Elewa and Jase laughed. The next bit of entertainment was now needed. “Your turn. You try,” Brayden told them. “I can’t!” Elewa protested and turned to me for the next source of entertainment.
“I saw you smoking at lunchtime!” she divulged. “No I wasn’t,” I defended. “Yes you were! I saw you!” she said with a broad smile, eyes twinkling. She asked if I smoke weed. I suddenly showed great interest in watching the film. “You do, don’t you!” she cried. Brayden queried whether I get high after school. “She might even be high right now for all we know!” Elewa joked. I laughed loud, adding to the uproarious noise of the classroom. From time to time the teacher yelled for everyone to be quiet; the chatter dulled slightly before regaining its former strength and pitch. Elewa mentioned conversationally that she lived in a particular suburb. Jase and Elewa discussed how it is a scary neighbourhood and swapped stories of break-ins at their houses. Throughout the conversation, Brayden made provocative remarks about sexuality performed in a high- pitched theatrical fashion – seemingly daring us to ask him about his own sexuality but never revealing it himself. Jase, in contrast, openly talked about his recent venture onto Grindr, a gay ‘hook-up’ app.56
Akin to the dynamics between friends in the previous chapter, the risqué use of ‘difference’ was employed by these classmates to fuel banter, show off and enjoy one another’s company. What is significant here is that racial stereotyping (doing “ghetto”)57 was only one element to a fluid and quick-paced social performance that turned on many kinds of differences and shared experiences. Among these classmates, black stereotypes, illicit substances, sexuality and socioeconomic stigma were all appropriate and enjoyable material for pleasurable, boredom-relieving interactive discussion. Recalling
56 My article with Anita Harris (2017) includes further examples and discussion of social bonding among Greendale peers. 57 A term which connects impoverished living conditions with African American culture and associated ideas of cool – including toughness and being ‘street wise’ (see http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ghetto).
178 CHAPTER SIX the conversation topics between Tom and his friends described in the Prologue, drugs and smoking, teachers’ favouritism towards the ‘Afghanis’, Tom’s sexual orientation and judgements of Milena’s sexual behaviour comprised the lunchtime conversation.
These ethnographic vignettes illustrate the shifting and variable significance of ethno-racial identity and racialised humour to students’ rapport. What I wish to now consider is what this means for understanding ‘racism’ in the context of schoolyard banter that turns on a broad array of provocative, ‘difference- centric’ material. The following section returns to explore this question in the context of repartee among Jase’s and Gamze’s friendship circles.
Entertaining Social Differences: ‘Racism’ in Context
Fast-paced, provocative banter was central to how Jase’s friends had daring fun with each other, testing the limits of the appropriate. Jase, as the ringleader and biggest personality of the group, usually sparked this raillery. He had the skill of twisting any conversation or comment into witty, provocative riposte between friends and classmates. This is illustrated by one particularly lurid episode in the upper courtyard.
While I was chatting one recess with Jase (who identified as gay and Jewish), Lacey (Anglo-Australian) and a few other white-skinned peers, a pair of hands was suddenly thrust in front of my eyes from behind, obscuring my vision. “Guess who?” “Laura?” I deduced, used to her boisterous behaviour. “Aww, how did you know?” “She can smell your vagina from here!” Jase piped in. Jase started teasing Laura and another friend called Megan (both Anglo- Australians) about being lesbians because they were wearing choker necklaces that had just come back into fashion at Greendale High. “Seriously, what’s up with the chokers?” he ribbed. “What’s up with gays? What’s up with anal?” Megan snarled.
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“A penis is up!” Jase replied, brightly. “What’s up with Jews?” Laura added. As one of the other boys walked off at this point, Laura called out behind him “it’s because I’m white, isn’t it?”
Unlike the ethnographic vignettes explored in Chapter 5, in this schoolyard encounter, gender, sexual orientation, racial tropes and religion were all used as incendiary tools to tease friends. Jase’s friends appeared to operate within the logic that ‘difference’ can equate to ‘deviance’ and ‘exclusion’ and they exploited this for daring, humorous effect. Students selected whichever ‘difference’ was most applicable to their friends’ identities for cutting yet playful digs. The previous chapter offered examples of how Mohammed was targeted for his religious and ethnic ‘difference’. Here, Jase goaded Megan and Laura (who identified as heterosexual) for being lesbians, knowing that at a heteronormative high school (and in wider society) being a lesbian can be considered ‘deviant’ and stigmatised. Jase also knew the power of hegemonic femininity to shame, exclude and control, using a “smelly vagina” to playfully put his friend down, whilst also ironically eschewing such gendered and homophobic attitudes. They echo his ‘post-racial’ comments detailed in Chapter 5 through which he showed how self-aware and beyond racism he was by ironically playing with racist tropes. Friends also teased Jase about being gay and Jewish – identities marred by stereotypes and social stigma.
Laura ended this back-and-forth by subverting the common quip ‘it’s because I’m black, isn’t it’ which, as discussed in the previous chapter, links blackness with discrimination and exclusion. Here, she drew on her own whiteness to tease a peer for being racist – a flip in the usual discourse. They were all flips; they were ironic comments opposed to their purported beliefs, particularly as they were good friends with those they teased about these loaded identifiers. At the same time students’ jokes seemed to contain the threat of social exclusion. Their ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ orientations, spanned more than just openness to ethno-racial difference; a broader set of diversities was drawn upon in a way
180 CHAPTER SIX that at once actively engaged with difference, whilst problematically invoking and potentially reproducing wider social stigmas and inequalities. As will be discussed in Chapter 8, this suggests that the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ may be usefully applied to a diverse range of social relations and settings.
Building on insights from the previous chapter, wider norms of ironic “duelling play” (Back 1996, 74) help us to understand why Jase (and other students) made racist jokes that had the capacity to offend and why he did not view his behaviour as racist. Likely, he did not see ironic race-based humour as any more offensive than other ironic subversions of difference typical to banter between his friends that did not represent their real attitudes. So too, students like Mohammed and Maduka may have understood these comments within this frame. Indeed, Mohammed and Maduka were also active contributors to provocative banter in their respective friendship circles that drew of a broad range of ‘differences’ with the potential to offend.
Humour and Heteronormativity
I read an example of Maduka being the instigator of ‘duelling play’ with her friends on Facebook private messenger when Maduka asked if Gamze, Kanarina and I would like to go to the beach after school.
Gamze: Soz guys im busy haha Maduka: I hate you, bruh Gamze: Why?? Maduka: coz you never come out with us Kanarina: I miss youuu soooo muchhh Gamze Maduka: haha you faggots Gamze: ur a faggot, Duka, ur a faggot Maduka: K, hoe Kanarina: uze fkn kill me hahaha
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Pascoe’s (2007) research in an American High school in the 1990s frames ‘fag discourse’ as a toxic practice that constrains young men’s performances of masculinity and perpetuates homophobic attitudes. More recently, this idea of hegemonic youth masculinity has been questioned by the work of McCormack and Anderson (2010). Based on ethnographic research with young men in the US and UK, their research reveals increasingly progressive attitudes towards same-sex attraction (Anderson 2015; McCormack and Anderson 2010; McCormack 2014). The homophobic language that was so prevalent in Pascoe’s (2007) study was almost absent among 16-19 year old white working-class boys at a British high school (although their behaviour did reproduce heteronormative privilege) (McCormack 2014, 2011; McCormack and Anderson 2010). Greendale High attitudes and practices seemed to fall somewhere between these two findings. ‘Fag discourse’ was a regular feature of student sociability, which was most regularly used among and directed against young men and women who identified as heterosexual in a precariously inclusive and playful way. Notably, whilst Megan teased Jase for being “gay” she did not use the epithet ‘fag’. However, we will see that Jase did face some purposefully cutting insults about his sexual orientation from people outside his own friendship circles.
In the Facebook exchange between Maduka and her friends, ‘faggot’ was not a targeted insult for these heterosexual girls. The generality of this term seemed to make it much more acceptable and inclusive than racial comments. They were able to use this slur as well as ‘hoe’ (another term for slut) to humorously insult each other, without anyone getting offended. Maduka’s hyperbolic statement “I hate you” signalled a joking frame, and was carried on by the others. The “haha” prefix also helped flag the insult as not serious, as was the irony of attributing their friendship affection to same-sex attraction. In Chapter 5, Matt also drew on ‘fag discourse’ to tease his friends, Jack and Asghar, in a ‘light-hearted’ tone which they responded to in playful ways. In both these incidents, akin to Wise’s (2016) research in the workplace, school friends were able to use offensive language to have fun with each other. This is not to say
182 CHAPTER SIX that these discourses did not have negative implications, particularly in regulating youth masculinities and sustaining a heteronormative school culture that affects the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth.
In the class on the Cronulla riots discussed in the previous chapter, students also played on heterosexism to create social belonging across a classroom of students from diverse cultural backgrounds. The students remained unresponsive throughout the documentary’s commentary on racism and footage of violent assaults, except when a man with an effeminate voice was interviewed. Someone stage-whispered “gay” and the class broke into laughter. In this moment, heterosexist humour “constructed a form of inclusion through the shared production of a sexual narrative and complicity in its heteronormative codes while rejecting their interpellation as ethnic subjects who should learn from, or be offended by, the riots” (Harris and Herron 2017, 292). Students appeared to purposefully reject ethnicity and racism here as salient features of school life, students converging instead around common ‘playful’ disdain for breached norms of masculinity in youth culture. The heteronormativity of Greendale High was palpable in many other ways, some of which is threaded throughout this thesis. For example, the first or second question I was almost always asked by male and female students alike was whether I had a boyfriend (cf. Thomas 2011). As discussed in Chapter 4, this was also a common question between students, particularly regarding the assumed heterosexual partner’s ‘nash’. In fact, this thesis opened with the story of how Tom’s cultural background was defined as “gay”; for Laura, Tom’s sexual orientation was what made him most ‘different’ in that moment, likely because she perceived his sexuality as more atypical, ‘interesting’ or minoritised than his whiteness.
This section on social bonding among friends and peers has highlighted how gender and sexuality were particularly significant aspects of students’ social lives, on par with or more so than ethnicity and race in many social contexts. Racialised cultural difference, despite its salience in structuring the school
183 CHAPTER SIX ground (Chapter 3) and discussions of dating and desire (Chapter 4), was not always invoked or made central to how young people negotiated peer relationships. This section has illuminated how students’ frequent use of provocative ideas about ‘difference’ and ‘deviance’ amongst their friends may have influenced how racialising remarks were interpreted. Many kinds of daring discourse, including ‘racist’ teasing, seemed generally acceptable and normalised within friends’ banter and even generative of convivial, inclusive social bonds within students’ norms of sociability.
As noted in Chapter 5, I never witnessed and seldom heard that conflict and tension within the school gates centred on racialised difference. Racialising remarks emerged solely in context of (precariously) convivial bonds. On what terms then did students argue, insult and fall out with one another? As the following section will illustrate, gender and sexual politics emerged again as central to how hostile altercations and exclusion were configured. Jase faced antagonistic remarks based on his sexual orientation, while for heterosexual female students ‘slut’ was “the main discourse of impropriety” as was the case in Winkler-Reid’s high school ethnography (2014, 188). As I will explore, the absence of race-centric insults is highly significant for understanding the significance of racism in peer sociality.
Layer 2: Conflict at Greendale High – Sluts, Fags and Fatties
Jase had a way around the teachers; he was at once highly intelligent, cheeky and lazy. Only one teacher did not have a soft spot for him and the feeling was mutual. He would lie on the floor of her classroom sleeping or making asides to classmates. One day in the staffroom through her bitter tears, she said venomously to the consoling teachers around her: “he’ll play the gay card to get out of this.” Jase had come out as gay a year prior, and on the face of it, his popularity hadn’t wavered. Only at certain moments, like over a shisha pipe together, did certain stories marked with pain, confusion and victimisation surface. Jase recounted to me that during an argument with Milena, she said to
184 CHAPTER SIX him “you’re the reason there is AIDs in the world,” referring to his sexual orientation. According to Jase, he responded “well you’re the reason there is no cake left in the world”. From separate year levels and friendship circles, Milena and Jase were not friends; they were brought into contact through a conflict between Jase and a friend of Milena’s.
This encounter – regardless of its accuracy – is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it may help explain Jase’s casual dismissal of being racist. Whilst his behaviour described in Chapter 5 paints a picture of a particularly flippant attitude, the heteronormative context of Greendale indicates that this manner may have been cultivated to maintain his popularity and be in charge of how he was defined by peers after coming out as gay – which is no mean feat in high school. His need to protect himself from stigma by performing himself in witty, daring and nonchalant ways may have come at the expense of his friends’ feelings, but was nonetheless not driven by explicitly racist orientations.
As an openly gay teen intermittently subject to Othering and homophobic taunts, Jase may have also felt like he was working outside conventional power relations as a marginalised white young man, confident that his ironic jokes – whether they were racist, sexist or homophobic in tone – could only be understood in a spirit of inclusivity and solidarity. Similar to Aleksandra in the shisha café (Chapter 4), Jase seemed to operate under the logic that he was authorised to make comments on the basis of his intercultural investments, antiracist beliefs and marginalised sexual identity. Remarkably similar to his quips “that probably sounded racist” discussed in the previous chapter, he also said “I probably shouldn’t say faggots” after making stereotyped remarks about gay men. As a gay man, he felt authorised to say “faggots” whilst “straight” people were not; I heard him agree on this point with a gay peer.
Secondly and more significantly, racism was not the locus of the insults between Jase and Milena. As I illustrated in the previous chapter, race-related jabs were used in the context of humour between friends. In contrast, taunts
185 CHAPTER SIX about ‘fags’, ‘sluts’ and ‘fatness’ were almost exclusively the slurs used to intentionally offend at Greendale. Knowing that gender and sexuality were highly regulating aspects of school life – with attendant threats to social inclusion and acceptance – students were able to draw on gendered and sexual ideas for convivial banter, as canvassed earlier, or as a means to hurt and exclude. Whilst Milena’s slur was based on Jase’s sexuality as a form of difference/deviance, Jase’s alleged retort referred to Milena’s plump figure. He did not refer to her ethnic background or ‘wogness’ – which were available references at Greendale. By referring to her weight, Jase activated hegemonic feminine beauty standards to shame her. Hegemonic gender and sexuality expectations demand young women to be sexually attractive but not too sexual and dictate women be demure (Harris 2016a; Thomas 2011; Winkler-Reid 2014). These norms were also drawn on in the context of close friends to fight amongst each other and exclude friends from the group.
Friendship Fallouts: The Confines of Hegemonic Femininity
One recess in Term 3, the mood of Jase’s friendship group was uncharacteristically morose and flat when I joined them at their usual table in the upper courtyard. Aleksandra was absent and Lacey kept her gaze down, fiddling with the headphone cord in her lap, obscuring her puffy, red eyes. Jase filled me in during the next class that Aleksandra had made comments on Facebook the night before about Lacey being vain and “slutty”. Jase told me that Aleksandra’s real problem with Lacey surfaced offline later that evening; she was upset because she felt that Lacey was not spending enough time with her as a best friend should.
Many weeks passed and the stony silence between Lacey and Aleksandra continued. Aleksandra no longer sat with the group; the group had taken Lacey’s side. Whilst Jase’s circle of friends no longer spoke about the fight between the former best friends, Aleksandra’s absence was noted through the regular, albeit passing, defamatory comments about her. One day over lunch at KFC, Laura, Jase and Lacey bitched at length about a girl they all knew. As a
186 CHAPTER SIX closing remark, Jase declared that she had an ugly vagina. The others nodded. “How do you know that?” I raised an eyebrow. “Her ex-best friend told me.” This sparked off conversation about Aleksandra. Whilst picking at fries, they agreed that she’s a “raging slut”, and told stories about alleged slutty behaviours that became progressively less likely. “No, I don’t think that’s true,” Jase replied to one sexual encounter proffered and so they moved onto other topics as they finished their drinks.
Coincidentally at the same time of year, another friendship fallout was underway. Down in the lower courtyard, Gamze and Sajra had a Facebook argument leading to Sajra’s exclusion from the group of friends. At a lunch bench in the lower courtyard, Gamze, Maduka, Kanarina and a couple of other girls sat pouring over one iPhone, scrolling through a long Facebook email. Angry whispers of “bitch”, “I can’t believe she wrote that” peppered their reading quietude. As I sat down to join them, Gamze directed the girls to tell me what was going on. Between them, the girls pieced together a timeline of events. Sajra started to ‘like’ the Facebook statuses of Gamze’s love interest back in Turkey “even though she can’t read Turkish!” – considered strong proof of flirtation and betrayal. Over private messaging on Facebook, Sajra accused Gamze of hacking into her Facebook account and deleting him, which Gamze denied fervently. This quickly turned into a vicious Facebook argument between Sajra and Gamze.
Gamze handed me her phone so I could read it for myself. It was long and so I fell silent concentrating on the dense text. They continued to debate Sajra’s behaviour whilst I scrolled through the lengthy tirades. Sajra and Gamze accused each other of being ‘bad Muslims’; Sajra condemned Gamze for not fasting, and Gamze retorted that at least she does not send guys naked photos of herself like Sajra does. Sajra replied that the guy Gamze liked in Turkey would never have wanted to be with Gamze because she was a “fat slut” and he had been getting “his dick sucked by other girls”. Having reached the end of the textual saga, I handed Gamze back the phone. Gamze repeated her assertions
187 CHAPTER SIX that Sajra was a slut and a bad Muslim – “it’s harsh but it’s deserved.” The bell rang to mark the end of lunch and we split off in different directions to class. Sajra never rejoined the group. For the rest of the year, every time Gamze saw Sajra cross the schoolyard, she commented on the most recent ‘slutty’ photos Sajra had posted to Facebook and told us cutting ‘secrets’ about Sajra’s beauty tricks.
These friendship breakdowns were based on gendered ideas of friendship, femininity, sexuality and religion. Aleksandra allegedly mocked Lacey for vanity and promiscuity because she did not align with her expectations of a female best friend – to share everything with each other. Having deemed Aleksandra’s behaviour towards Lacey unacceptable, Jase’s group ostracised her by talking about Aleksandra’s alleged promiscuity. Upset by Sajra’s betrayal – chasing Gamze’s love interest – Gamze resorted to shaming Sajra for ‘slutty’ behaviours that contravened Muslim values. Sajra, in turn, shamed Gamze for not being sexually desirable enough to obtain/maintain the interests of the Turkish boy. Whilst in other moments Gamze’s circle of friends bonded over gendered social experiences and pressures (see Harris and Herron 2017 for an example), here they were used to shame and exclude. Peer sociality – both conflictual and convivial – regularly turned on gender and sexual mores.
As Harris writes, belonging in youth culture is “deeply…structured by hegemonic rules about gender and sexuality” (2016a, 372). In this environment, Gamze was vulnerable to stigma and marginalisation. In rare moments she opened up about insecurities about her body weight and lack of sexual experience, but in more public moments she cast herself as a respectable virgin and others as disreputable and superficial sluts. Like in the case of Jase discussed earlier, the conflictual encounter between Gamze and Sajra offers further insight into why Gamze may have instigated ethno-racial quips with a certain edge to them (as detailed in Chapter 5). Like Jase, her double-edged comments – such as jokingly calling Sajra an untrustworthy Bosnian – were likely motivated in part by the need to protect herself, guarding against her
188 CHAPTER SIX own loss of face and social positioning at high school where the dominant culture circulated around feminine sexual desirability. While she wielded power when invoking her friends’ cultural difference, she lacked power when it came to hegemonic femininity and sexuality; Sajra and Maduka conformed more closely to youth codes about women’s appearance, sexual desirability and practices. Gamze may have, thus, used racialised humour to hint at the possibility of her friends’ social unacceptability to cement her own inclusion and position of social dominance in the group.
Whilst Gamze’s racialising remarks may have had hurtful impacts, informed by uneven power dynamics, this is a very different kind of, and motivation for, racism than a belief in the inferiority of culturally different Others (old racism) or the refusal to share space with them (new racism). It does, however, have the individualising tenors of new racism; by rejecting their behaviour as having racist intent, students like Gamze and Jase rejected the capacity for their comments to have hurtful effects and to contribute to systemic racism. In the context of high school pressures and close friendship, it is possible, however, that Gamze’s friends recognised her ‘racist’ jokes as a defence mechanism and attempts to maintain dominance and therefore did not take her comments to heart as ‘racist’ and instead more closely constituted being a ‘bad’ friend – “rude” as Maduka ambivalently termed it (Chapter 5).
Returning to the arguments between Sajra and Gamze and Lacey and Aleksandra, racialisation was not the cornerstone of these arguments nor the justification for Aleksandra and Sajra’s subsequent exclusion. Ethnicity, race and religion were, however, implicated and compounding factors in these friendship breakdowns and the policing of peer behaviour. Race, gender and sexuality are enmeshed social forces in youth culture (Harris 2016a; Back 1996; Thomas 2011) as was described in Chapter 4 regarding how young men’s racialised masculinity and sexuality was circumscribed. One of the stories Jase’s friends told about Aleksandra’s ‘slutty’ pursuits mentioned the Eastern- European ethnicity of the men she allegedly slept with. This detail seemed to
189 CHAPTER SIX be used to heighten the allegation of her deviant behaviour and justify her exclusion according to hegemonic norms of feminine sexuality. As explored in Chapter 4, Tom also drew on these norms to police Milena’s alleged sexual activity with Afghanis and black peers by calling her a slut. Her violation of feminine sexual norms – not her cultural difference – was the source of Tom’s insult. Race was invoked in this instance, but it was in reference to the racial background of Milena’s supposed sexual partners used to substantiate the claim that she was a slut.
By denying that his comments were racist (“I’m not being racist, but…”), Tom appeared to acknowledge the potential for his invocation of race to be inappropriate and offensive. As we saw in previous chapter, students had some language around which to name and talk about racism and a widespread understanding that racism was wrong. While many students were at pains to distance themselves from being labelled racist, they did not mention that sexism or slut-shaming might be similarly problematic. Students’ apparent lack of worry about this form of social derision suggests that gendered, sexual slurs were more acceptable and normalised at Greendale; slut-shaming did not make you a ‘prejudiced’ or ‘horrible’ person like racism apparently did (see Chapter 5). Rather, verbal attacks on people based on sexuality and gender (inflected with ideas about race and religion) were considered “harsh but deserved”, as Gamze said.58 Students (and teachers) were also very comfortable using the classist language of ‘bogans’ as will we encounter later in this chapter.
Reconfiguring Racism as Conflict
That Greendale students maintained an ethos that racism was wrong, and did not invoke ethnic background and cultural difference as central to hostile, exclusionary conflict between friends and peers, challenges concepts of racism as an opposing force to conviviality. In the literature on ‘everyday multiculturalism’, ‘conflict’ and ‘racism’ are often written about as synonymous
58 See Winkler-Reid (2014) on the ‘ordinary ethics’ of sexuality in a London high school.
190 CHAPTER SIX or highly interrelated features of social life. Wessendorf, for example, writes that “contentious issues around sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and racism…exist in parallel to convivial relations” (2016, 460). Put simply, racism, intolerance and conflict are positioned as existing on one side, whilst convivial orientations and relations sit on the other. Even those scholars who position conviviality as a pragmatic, expansive concept that acknowledges that the achievement of social ‘togetherness’ involves a “fragile balance” of “conflicts, violence, racism, closedness and/or exclusion” (Lapiņa 2016, 4, reviewing conviviality debates), still inherently position racism as a form of conflict. Yet, as we have seen, this does not accord with the salience of racialisation to either social bonding or social rifts among many Greendale High friends. The opposite was often the case; practices of social bonding had highly racialising (or ‘racist’) features, while conflictual encounters did not.
Although Greendale students did shift between inclusive and exclusionary modes of interaction, they did not ipso facto move between ‘everyday racism’ and ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ in peer sociality (Noble 2009b) as current binary framings in multicultural youth studies assume. Whilst previous chapters have challenged the dichotomous framing of racism-conviviality, this chapter shows more explicitly how in many students’ social practices racism was constituted as conviviality rather than conflict, if we are to invoke the binary terms available to describe youthful sociality to date. Thus, I suggest that the conceptual frame ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ better accommodates the absence of conflict and the presence of playful inclusivity in what may nevertheless be problematic racialising social practices.
A broader consideration of student social bonding and conflict beyond moments of racialisation has allowed deeper insight into the complex significance of ethnicity/race and racism in many students’ lives. The prevalence and malicious quality of gendered, sexualised slurs as compared to ethno-racial ‘joking’ suggests that at Greendale High, race/ethnicity was not the most significant and problematic form of social difference. Indeed, this may
191 CHAPTER SIX help explain why students did not highlight racism as a particular problem at school. However, students’ disavowal of racism, or purported lack of concern about it, does not mean that racism did not exist. It likely existed under different guises, in non-conflictual, normalised, tempered and ambivalent forms, and under a different lexicon. Greater attention to the experiences of students on the receiving end of racialising treatment by friends is helpful in shedding light on why ‘racism’ as a discursive concept was not a feature in students’ accounts of their social and personal life.
Layer 3: Personal Struggle and Suffering – The Weight of Racism
Building on from Chapter 5, discussions of gender and sexuality in this chapter have aided understanding of the complex forces that shaped students racialising treatment of their friends. This chapter has also expanded on the range of possibilities for why students, like Mohammed and Maduka, may not have interpreted racialising treatment as racist; wider norms of provocative banter along with knowledge of friends’ own struggles and deeper attitudes were possibly at play. These arguments have a purposefully speculative tone while offering analytical possibilities about the intents, logics and impacts of racism raised by patterns of sociality I observed and was immersed in over the course of my fieldwork. As I detailed in Chapter 2, I made a methodological and ethical decision not to ask students about experiences and performances of racism unless students brought the topic of racism into conversation. On one occasion, however, I ask Mohammed about an incident of racism even though he had not raised it. As I recounted in Chapter 5, I asked Mohammed how he felt about Jase calling him a taxi-driver when his friends were talking about it in gossipy tones; whilst denouncing racism towards him, they did not ask for his input. In this context, I felt compelled to ask for Mohammed’s opinion. He told me by way of response that Jase was drunk.
On face value, perhaps he did not take Jase’s comments too seriously; the logic may run that under the influence of alcohol, Jase was not in control of his
192 CHAPTER SIX behaviour and was, therefore, not responsible for it or likely to have meant it (akin to the logic proffered in media accounts of racism on public transport discussed in Chapter 5). Or, perhaps, Mohammed’s dismissive response was intended to turn attention and conversation away as quickly as possible from him and this incident. Whilst Mohammed was an extraordinarily friendly student, he was intensely private and admitted that he despised being recognised and labelled on basis of ethnicity (see Chapter 2). By calling attention to him and this incident, I may have, therefore, inadvertently amplified his experience of racialised objectification and Othering at the hands of his peers.
While I have argued through the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ that racialisation has the capacity to be partially and precariously inclusive, I do not mean to undermine the capacity for students’ racialising behaviour to have negative impacts on their peers. The term perverse is intended to always keep in frame the unstable, potentially problematic effects of students’ discourses and practices, whether voiced and understood as racism, impoliteness or what Gardner terms ‘uncivil attention’ (1995, 92).59 However, in taking seriously young people’s accounts of their lives in this thesis, I focus attention on the meaning young people gave to cultural difference and racism in everyday school life. In the moments that students chose to open up in vulnerable ways to me, what is significant was that experiences of unwelcome racialisation (outside of school or by teachers) were mentioned fleetingly (if at all), in amongst a multitude of other personal worries and experiences and not named as ‘racism’. What this suggests is that ‘racism’ as a stand-alone discursive concept may not have been a salient frame for how young people made sense of their experiences. In the following section I explore this possibility through
59 According to Goffman ‘civil inattention’ is a social practice of respectful indifference, respecting people’s right to privacy, their right to share the space and ensuring one’s gaze does not linger, marking people as abnormal or threatening (1963, 84). As discussed in Noble (2005) and later Fortier (2008), Gardner (1995) has inverted this phrase to describe the visibility and harassment of women’s bodies in public places – calling this uncivil attention. This unwanted attention in the public sphere regulates women’s behaviour, movement and experiences (Gardner 1995; Noble 2005). According to Noble (2005) and Fortier (2008) this also aligns with the experience of migrants in particular spaces or political climates.
193 CHAPTER SIX focusing on how Mohammed, Maduka and Aisha described to me their life challenges.
Intersectional Life Struggles: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Walking towards the student carpark one afternoon, Mohammed told me that he wakes up every morning and wonders what the point of life is – “is life just about going to school and then going to work?” I scrunched up my face in sympathy “I wake up the same way.” He talked about working long hours to pay for visas and flights back to Pakistan, and he spoke to me about his aspirations to become a pilot and his uncertainty about whether that was an achievable dream. Aside from when he objected to me identifying him as ‘Pakistani- Australian’ (Chapter 2), Mohammed did not mention to me his frequent experiences of such racialisation by peers and teachers as a concern. One lunchtime, in contrast, Maduka and her friends did mention their frustrations about being positioned – often incorrectly – by ethnic background. They swapped stories about how it happened and the personal confusion about identity that this could invoke. When it was just the two of us waiting for the bus later, Maduka told me that her father was dying and that she shared the caring duties with her sisters. In other moments, she (and many other girls) shared stories about the sexual pressures young men were putting on her and the self-doubt this provoked. In this way, students positioned their racialising and/or racist treatment alongside the myriad other sources of frustration and struggle that Greendale students voiced; what to do after graduation, family tragedies, drug and alcohol related family breakdowns, battles with anxiety, depression and eating disorders, and pressures related to sex were common themes talked about in sombre, anxious and tearful tones among friends and to me.
Acknowledging the fleeting presence (or absence) of unpleasant racialising experiences together with many other personal concerns does not diminish the significance and impact of racism in young lives. Rather, it suggests that Mohammed and Maduka did not necessarily experience negative racialisation
194 CHAPTER SIX as an ‘exceptional’ feature of their personal and social lives that could be easily extricated from other worries and struggles. In this context, the discrete and normative language of ‘racism’ may not have provided students with suitable ways to describe their complex everyday experiences. An emotive conversation I had with Aisha (born in Afghanistan) one day in the lower courtyard shed further light on this interpretative possibility.
As I neared the lower courtyard one lunchtime, Aisha waved me over. She was sitting by herself at a table covered in colourful folders, textbooks and fruit cores. Once other students had departed for class, she opened up to me unprompted about the difficulties she was facing. One after another her worries spilled out in a long, emotional monologue. She talked about her intimate experiences of loss and trauma as a refugee and how hard biology homework was; she spoke of worries about gaining weight and of dealing with “bitchy” friends; she talked about soccer and how the coach calls her “Afghan” instead of by her name. “Why does it always have to be about background?” she lamented. She said that if she had children she would not want them to be girls because life is much harder for women; she talked about boyfriends, secret engagements and heartache. She talked and talked and talked until the bell rang to mark the end of the school day. She needed to leave for soccer practice. “Life!” I sighed, as a means of empathetic closure. “Challenge!” she agreed.
A whole host of factors were significant for Aisha in coming to terms with her life and its challenges; her inappropriate experience of being racialised by her soccer coach was wrapped up in the one emotional cavalcade of everyday life hardships. Essed’s (1991) concept of ‘everyday racism’ could be described more colloquially here as a ‘death by a thousand cuts’; each micro, ambiguous and insidious incident of racism takes its toll as it builds up a cumulative, pervasive experience of suffering. What Aisha’s experience alerts us to is that these ‘cuts’ are not necessarily only race-related. Her positionality as a racialised minority is significant but only one aspect of her everyday lived experiences. Here, she has recounted a whole host of moments of pain, suffering and discomfort; the
195 CHAPTER SIX experience of racism became one among many stories that came pouring out. This is no way undermines the impact of her coach’s treatment. Sport was the one thing in her life that made her feel happy and free; her coach’s ‘uncivil attention’ was a very upsetting experience for her. Indeed, she mentioned it again on another occasion. Yet, when she was venting to me in the lower courtyard, this incident was not given the word ‘racism’ or a heightened status above her other painful experiences. As a discrete concept, ‘racism’ as learnt about in school classrooms may simply not be considered a relevant or useful ways to make sense of a vast array of personal struggles.
This exploration of Maduka, Mohammed and Aisha’s experiences suggests that focusing on ‘racism’ alone without acknowledging the spectrum of daily challenges young people face may not be the most productive frame for thinking about how young people experience and make sense of life in multicultural, disadvantaged places. I now turn to one further set of interrelated social factors significant to this chapter’s exploration of the meaning, place and weight of racialisation and racism at Greendale High. The following final sections of this chapter explore how social class, whiteness and white privilege were configured and navigated at multicultural Greendale. Laura’s aversion to dating Daxon hinted at some of these pressures and complexities in Chapter 4. I begin my analysis by unpacking a particularly enlightening and densely packed ethnographic moment involving Jase and Daxon (white Australian students), Elewa (Sudanese background) and Mohammed.
Layer 4: Being White at Greendale High – Race and Class Manoeuvres
On the way to class one morning, I ran into Daxon and we walked together along the gravel path to the run-down old portable classrooms. Daxon opened the door for me with gallant theatricality. Spotting Mohammed, I looked for an empty seat next to him to no avail. “I tried to save you a seat but someone took it,” he blushed. Daxon and I found seats next to Elewa in the row behind him. As I sat taking notes about classroom interactions, Daxon asked what my
196 CHAPTER SIX background was. “White Australian…Anglo-Australian” I replied, unsure of the proper terminology. “So you mean English,” he told me, rather than asked. “Well no, my ancestors came over on the first boats as convicts.” “So you’re English?” He repeated the classification. “Umm...well I guess so. Danish and English.” Jase interjected from where he was lounging on top of a table a few metres away: “are you Jewish?” Mohammed, hearing this, swivelled around in his chair. “Does she look Jewish?” he scoffed. “Yeah, kinda. You could be Anne Frank if she was 10 years older,” Jase squinted at me, head cocked, with the trace of a facetious smile on his lips. “…I don’t think I even know what Anne Frank looks like,” I remarked. “She’s really pretty for a Jew. Anne Frank is really young so that means you look much younger than you are,” Jase persevered, tongue-in-cheek. “Did you just say pretty for a Jew?” I asked, pretending to be scandalised as I wrote this down in my notebook with a melodramatic flourish. Jase grinned.
Daxon added something that I didn’t quite catch. “Shut up, Daxon. You’re a bogan!” Jase teased. “What’s so bad about being a bogan anyway?” Daxon defended. As if reading slowly and precisely from a dictionary, Jase answered – “a bogan makes you a lower-class person which is why it’s derogatory.”
“What exactly makes someone a bogan?” I asked them. By way of response, Jase and Daxon made claims and counter claims at each other: “You wear thongs”60 “What’s so bad about that?” “Scummy thongs” “I don’t wear scummy thongs”
60 In Australia, ‘thongs’ refers to ‘flip flop’ sandals.
197 CHAPTER SIX
“You probably live in housing commission”61 “I don’t” “They play football. They name their kids Shazza and Sheila” Elewa cut in: “They’re just stereotypes.” “Yeah I know,” Jase said brightly, and launched back in with Daxon at his heels: “They probably live in Parkside” “I don’t live in Parkside” “Or Blackwood South” “I live in Rosevale” “Oh so you’re probably a rich bogan then.”62
The conversation had run its course. There was silence, made particularly noticeable in the wake of the fast-paced exchange. Breaking this conversational lull, Jase probed Daxon: “do you have any black friends?” “Yeah” “Who?” “If you don’t believe me ask Mitch” he said, calling out to an Anglo- Australian student in the classroom for backup. Jase then turned the question on me. “Do YOU have any black friends?” “Yes,” I replied, also noting the defensive and slightly panicked edge to my voice.
The speed and tone of this banter echoes that of much of the repartee between peers canvassed earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 5. The jokes about Jewishness were typical of Jase’s ironic, subversive humour; here he used his ‘insider’ status as Jewish to play with Holocaust narratives, objectifying Anne Frank for her looks, going against the grain of well-known, harrowing accounts of her life which are anything but sexualised (and trivial). In addition to illustrating again how potentially offensive material about cultural difference
61 This refers to government-funded housing estates. 62 Daxon did not escape class-based stigma for living in a less impoverished suburb. Jase simply instantiated another version of ‘bogan’ stigma - the ‘cashed-up’ bogan (see Gibson 2013).
198 CHAPTER SIX could be used for playful, ironic ends, what is particularly illuminating about this encounter is how Jase manoeuvred dexterously towards and against certain classed, white identity positions. With his usual sharp awareness, Jase’s teasing made visible the limited identities white students were offered in this multicultural, working-class peer culture, and the resourceful, albeit problematic, ways some students attempted to navigate these.
First, Jase positioned certain white people as uncultured bogans. Second, by referencing black friends, he maligned the cosmopolitan capabilities of particular white people and alluded to their racist attitudes. By positioning himself as Jewish, as the arbiter of who is bogan, and as friends with black people, Jase claimed for himself a different kind of identity – a cosmopolitan, nonracist, cultured and ‘less white’ one. The following sections expand upon and explore these racialised and classed logics, manoeuvres and pressures across Greendale peer sociality. This exploration aids understanding of how ideas about white power and privilege in analyses of racism might be complicated in this school context. I turn to consider this later.
The Bogan
The bogan was an interesting spectre in school life and in Australian popular culture; the bogan is both loved and despised (Haslam 2014; Gibson 2013; Rossiter 2012). There can be much affection for the archetypal bogan as a ‘true- blue’ Australian cultural emblem to laugh at or with, in what Herzfeld may term “rueful self recognition” (2005, 6). This is exemplified by the huge popularity of the Australian TV show Kath & Kim.63 Yet the icon of the bogan also represents “poor upbringing and bleak fortunes” associated with uncouth and uncultured stereotypes (Gibson 2013, 64; see also Lawler 2005). Bogans are regularly described as equivalent to ‘chavs’ and ‘white trash’ in the UK and USA respectively (e.g. Haslam 2014; Nayak and Kehily 2014). Rossiter, however,
63 This hugely successful TV series featured two Anglo-Australian women living in a historically working-class suburb of Melbourne. They aspired to fame and fortune through their consumerism (Arrow 2009, ch. 7) – yet their ‘tastes’ signalled their boganness (see Lawler 2005).
199 CHAPTER SIX disputes the ability to draw cross-cultural, cross-national parallels, explaining that in Australia, “we usually find not intense class hatred, war and disgust, but a form of contempt that is sometimes spiked with love” (2012, 81).
Popular depictions of bogans portray what could be called an ‘uncultured culture’ – considered to share a particular working-class way of life, set of aspirations, dress sense and accent. Greendale students frequently (and gleefully) described bogans in terms of wearing sheepskin ugg boots, thongs (flip-flops), having Australian-themed tattoos, hanging out at the welfare office, drinking beer in cans and speaking in broad Australian accents. Moreover, as Jase’s teasing highlighted, ‘bogan’ is also spatialised (Gibson 2013; Rossiter 2012), attributed to working-class outer suburbs around Australia. Jase and Daxon were well aware the Greendale area was considered ‘bogan territory’ in the wider public imagination; it was no coincidence that Kath & Kim was filmed on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Regardless of ethnic background, much of the Greendale student body shared a feeling of class stigma. As detailed in the Prologue and Chapter 1, students recognised that Greendale was a “shithole” and “pov” compared to other schools and areas. Such self-deprecating comments about disadvantage peppered the school day. A teacher also remarked, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, “you can’t polish a turd” when comparing Greendale students unfavourably to the nearby private school. Hollingworth and Archer (2010) note that the use of waste and excrement metaphors is characteristic of how working-class students across a number of research studies characterise their school and local area.
One Greendale student, Esther (Cook Islands background), more explicitly invoked social class during a classroom discussion on identity and belonging. When the teacher asked “where do you feel like you don’t belong?” Esther called out the name of an affluent shopping centre, adding “it’s social class. I feel like I’m lower than everyone else.” Dee, her friend from a Lebanese-Afghani background, reached over to high five her whilst the whole class reverberated
200 CHAPTER SIX with mutters of agreement. Thus, students from a wide range of cultural backgrounds shared a feeling of class stigma of going to a disadvantaged school and living in a disadvantaged place. Yet, interestingly, the term ‘bogan’ – loaded with particularly negative associations – did not apply to non-white peers like Esther and Dee. Jase teased Daxon for being a bogan and not Mohammed or Elewa for a reason: it was a distinctly white identity.
One of the many times this became clear was when Gamze (Turkish background) disparaged an Anglo-looking teacher walking through the lower courtyard for being bogan. She quickly turned to me and said “no offence.” From a middle-class background I was surprised by this inference. “Oh, am I a bogan?” I asked in surprise. “You’re Australian, aren’t you?” she checked. I nodded. “Ohhh…are all Australians bogans?” I asked, her point dawning on me. Puzzled she eventually expanded her thinking that some (Anglo) Australians might be “classy”. Gamze’s language invoked a division between those from migrant backgrounds and Anglo-Australians, simply termed ‘Australians’ here (like Aisha did in Chapter 3). When I asked Gamze and her friends whether people of other ethnic backgrounds could be bogans, they thought it unlikely. The fact that Gamze assumed all white Australians were bogans suggested to me that she was probably not familiar with many Anglo-Australians outside of the Greendale region. As we have seen, in working-class areas like Greendale there seems to be a strong socio-spatial connection – made by locals and the wider public alike – between whiteness and boganness.
While Gamze made little distinction here between white Australians, this was not the case for Daxon and Jase. In their classroom exchange, they were involved in a battle to position themselves as on the ‘respectable’ side of working-class whiteness, distancing themselves from the classification of ‘bogan’. As noted in Chapter 4, Laura felt she could not date Daxon out of fear for her social reputation. Writing in the UK context, Bottero explains that “the disreputable figure of the ‘chav’ (debauched, unruly and wholly undeserving)
201 CHAPTER SIX snaps at the heels of the ‘white working class’, a slur on their claims to social respect and resources” (2009, 11). Jase seemed to be reasonably sensitive about this, on occasion telling me how his friends were poorer than him or came from more dysfunctional families (cf. Nayak 2003, 2006).
Whether or not white students were ascribed the label ‘bogan’ was constantly shifting; it was a floating signifier. As Rossiter explains, bogan is a “mobile and fluid expression of a relational politics of class, a figure that circulates, though never fully occupied” (2012, 88). In the same way that Pascoe describes the epithet ‘fag’ at high school (2007, 61-2), the word ‘bogan’ felt akin to a ‘hot potato’ game among Greendale students; it could be thrown at almost any white peer. Neither Daxon nor Jase aligned with the full set of stereotypes about bogans. Daxon came from a close knit family who were employed and lived in a less stigmatised area, but other students tended to consider him slow and unsophisticated, and he often looked dishevelled in his stained, crumpled uniform. Jase lived in one of the most stigmatised neighbourhoods and talked about his family’s money making schemes, but he defined himself as Jewish and gay, was incredibly clever and witty, and had a hipster haircut. Whilst, they were technically both vulnerable to stigma, Jase was a lot more masterful than Daxon at avoiding the label of bogan. In this encounter, by positioning himself as the arbiter of who and what is bogan, Jase claimed for himself a more respectable white identity – with Daxon as the foil.
Yet, interestingly, there was another stigma attached to the label of ‘bogan’ in this multicultural space. Distancing themselves from the uncouth, poverty- stricken aspect of this identity was not always the most significant pressure for white students. As Jase hinted at through his questioning about black friendships, a bogan identity was connected with an inability or disinclination to mix in intercultural circles and had allusions to racism. As discussed in the previous chapter in the context of hipster racism, working-class figures are often scapegoated as unprogressive, racist bigots “associated with the reactionary politics of nationalism rather than the multicultural politics of
202 CHAPTER SIX cosmopolitanism” (Binnie and Skeggs 2004, 46). At a culturally diverse school – and one with an ‘ethos of mixing’ (see Chapter 3) – this was a weighty charge. This was well illustrated in a conversation that took place in the back of a classroom one morning between an Anglo-Australian student, Jesse, and his friend Maz whose parents were from Colombia:
“Greendale isn’t as great this year. It was way more multicultural last year,” Maz complained to Jesse. Overhearing this discussion in the back of class, I shuffled my chair closer and asked “what do you mean?” “It’s much more white [now], yeah?” Jesse explained, checking with Maz. “Yeah. There is not as good a vibe,” Maz confirmed. “So what’s the dynamic like now with all the new whities?” I asked. “Well, I’m white…” Jesse faltered. “I meant Aussie-white,” Maz said. “Yeah, bogan-white,” Jesse reiterated.
Maz and Jesse make clear that while ‘white’ or ‘Australian’ (working-class) students had the capacity to be cultured and inclusive, bogans (synonymous with ‘Aussies’) did not. These distinctions likely mattered in a multicultural school where from what I heard and observed a great number of students valued cultural diversity. Anglo students (and from Gamze’s point of view, middle-class white teachers and myself) were positioned as needing to prove that they were the ‘right’ kind of white person as defined by Greendale’s multicultural peer culture: willing and able to mix convivially with peers from diverse backgrounds.
As Gamze complained about in Chapter 3, the year 10 students (a more Anglo cohort than previous years) were rendered the ‘wrong’ kind of white; year 11 and 12 students often spoke about them as a threat to the friendly atmosphere and inclusive culture of multicultural school life. Almost all the participants in the mapping exercise pointed to the year 10s as a notable group who hung out in the space between the two courtyards (see Chapter 3). Mohammed’s group also
203 CHAPTER SIX explicitly named ‘bogans’ as a separate peer group who socialised near the school portable classrooms, well away from the main courtyard spaces. Anglo students were, thus, sometimes a highly identified group, vulnerable to stigmatisation for being bogan, unable to appreciate diversity and mix well with others, and with potential to be racist and exclusionary.
The specific social context determines both the type of identity that is stigmatised and the means to carve out respectability in spite of it. In Skegg’s (2009) research in Northern England, working-class women were able to construct self-worth through investments in mothering. Similarly, in Nayak and Kehily’s research of young women stigmatised as ‘chavs’, these women represented themselves as competent mothers and friendly, active community members (2014, 1331). In contrast, at Greendale High white students like Jesse claimed moral worth and social status through investments in interculturality. Indeed, Jase’s teasing of Daxon worked because of shared understandings about what whiteness meant and what gains social cachet at Greendale. Jase’s question about whether Daxon and I were friends with black people appeared to be an anxiety-provoking provocation; by putting us in the position of defending ourselves, Jase implicitly positioned himself as a skilled cosmopolitan and as not racist in this exchange.
My panic in response to Jase’s question was also born out of a fear of being caught out by Jase as ‘uncool’. The haste in which Daxon defended himself also suggested to me a similar fear. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, at Greendale High cosmopolitan aptitudes, including associations with ‘blackness’ or culturally ‘different’ boyfriends could garner social status. Whiteness, itself, did not work this way, as the following section illustrates. As we will see, in the encounter with Daxon, Jase had not only avoided the stigma of bogan ‘cultural cringe’, but he had avoided the other stigma of white people as ‘cultureless’, ‘boring’ and without much ‘urban savvy’.
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White Cringe vs. Multicultural Cool
Whilst scholars in the UK reveal how white youth struggle to navigate ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ working-class identities (see Nayak and Kehily 2014; Nayak 2006), this was not the only struggle white students at Greendale faced. At Greendale High there was an additional hurdle to respectability: a ‘cultureless’, ‘boring’ and ‘uncool’ white identity also had to be spurned. This often came to a head between friends. During the mapping exercise when I asked Lacey about her background (Chapter 3), a friend jumped in on her behalf. “You’re Aussie!” the boy exclaimed, in a delighted taunt. “Nah, I’m not Aussie,” she replied in rapid speed, “my Grandpa’s a Pom [English].”
A similar taunt was made about Nicole’s whiteness. Just after completing the mapping exercise with Nicole and Aleksandra, a male student who Aleksandra had a crush on walked into the canteen. “What’s his nash?” Aleksandra asked the friends around her. He was apparently Bosnian. “Why is he so tanned then?” said Nicole, curiously, “I thought Bosnians were white!” The boys sitting with us made some unintelligible remarks. “What? What is wrong with being white?” she asked in amused, exasperated confusion, interpreting their noise as if she’d said something offensive. “I’m white! I’m white white!” “My mum is whiter than you!” Nicole’s El Salvadorian boyfriend claimed. She rolled her eyes and made an aside to me: “We argue about this all the time. My arms are much darker.” “Yeah, her arms are not as bad as her legs,” her boyfriend teased. “Not as bad?” I said with a laugh. “Yeah, what’s wrong with being white?” Nicole laughed accusingly.
What, indeed, was wrong with being white – other than its associations with boganness? While bogan was a stigmatised ‘uncultured culture’, the other white identity available at Greendale was viewed as ‘cultureless’ or a ‘culture of no
205 CHAPTER SIX culture’ to borrow Traweek’s phraseology (2009).64 This trend is reflected in research with white school students across the UK and US (e.g. Perry 2001; Bucholtz 2011b; Nayak 1999). At Greendale, the diverse student body shared this conception of whiteness; many non-white peers even asked questions in class like “do they even have a culture?” In doing so, they – like Gamze earlier – positioned Anglo-Australians as distinct from migrant, refugee and Indigenous Australians. This collective notion of whiteness as cultureless enabled Lacey’s (English) friend and Nicole’s (El Salvadorian) boyfriend to tease the girls and compelled Lacey to claim connection to a different ethnic lineage. For Daxon, it seemed as if Anglo-Australian was not even an ethnic identity as he induced me to label my cultural background as English.
This devaluing of whiteness was linked to ‘coolness’. With white relegated as boring and undesirable, even some tenuous connection to a more ‘exotic’ background gained cachet. I experienced this myself on Greendale’s annual Multicultural Day when I wore a borrowed shalwar kameez. On the basis of a misunderstanding, multiple Anglo students assumed I must be of Afghani origin. “Oh my god you’re even cooler now,” one student gushed. Dejected comments followed: “I’m boring coz I’m Anglo-Australian,” “I don’t have a culture,” “I wish I had a more interesting background.” These students stood to the sidelines of the celebrations, feeling out of place. The only Australian cultural presence Anglo students could assert was the icon of the bogan and barbequed sausages in white bread, which neither appealed nor gained social cachet.
In the context of 1990s North-East England, Nayak’s (2004, 2003, 2006) ethnographic research illuminates the ways in which white working-class youth responded to social change and class-based stigma. In a post-industrial city, ‘New Geordies’ claimed respectability through positioning themselves as whiter
64 Studying the culture of a high-energy physics laboratory, Traweek (2009) coined the term ‘culture of no culture’ to describe “a community defined by the shared cultural conviction that its shared convictions were not in the least cultural, but, rather, timeless truths” (Taylor 2003, 556, discussing Traweek 2009).
206 CHAPTER SIX than the more stigmatised ‘Charvers’ (chavs) (2004). In the Greendale context, and in a much more culturally diverse locale, the pressures white students faced had different, even inverted, textures and impacts. Respectability and social cachet would not likely have been achieved by performing themselves as more white. Instead, many Anglo students at Greendale High, including Lacey, Jase and Emily, claimed links to more ‘exotic’ heritages, cultural practices and subcultures; whether derived from long-lost family, a step-parent, a friend, or particular interests (cf. Kromidas 2011a, 594). Whilst Reay and colleagues have discussed the accumulation of “valued (multi)cultural capital” as a middle-class trait (2007, 1055), many working-class students at Greendale performed themselves as a ‘darker shade of pale’ as part of navigating youth codes in a culturally diverse space.
Having being labelled ‘European’ by a teacher who rejected Emily’s counter claims, Emily vented after class “I don’t think of myself as European. Why do I have to be? There is no president of ethnicity!” Her white friends agreed and they listed the ways they contravened a ‘European’ identity, including that they were familiar with and were actively exploring different religions, cultures and ways of life. Emily had a very difficult family life and so spent most of her time at her Sudanese boyfriend’s house and her Mauritian best friend’s house; her home life was one of immersion in differing cultural practices. Jase also made what Kromidas would call “unconventional claims” to identity (2011a, 595). I witnessed Jase’s mother’s bemused expressions when Jase claimed to be Jewish. From what I could make out from our conversations, Jase had found out about a tenuous family connection to Judaism from his grandmother, and from then on in defined himself as Jewish. In his interactions with Daxon and me, Jase’s claims to Jewishness and friendships with black peers allowed him to overcome restrictions placed onto white bodies – rejecting bogan, racist stigma and an interesting, unique persona, and ‘belonging’ in a culturally diverse social world (see Kromidas 2011a).
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In his banter with Daxon and me, Jase could have boasted about friendships with a range of people from diverse backgrounds (or indeed, along other lines of ‘difference’). However, his selection of black peers in that encounter achieved particularly ends. Black-skinned peers were often positioned as most Other at Greendale High and in the wider community. In this context, to be able to make friends with black people was the ultimate proof of his cosmopolitan aptitudes. As Binnie and Skeggs explain, “certain objects are chosen to enable cosmopolitanism to be achieved (2004, 52). At Greendale High whiteness and blackness were often diametrically positioned. Whiteness was, as in the case of Kromidas’s research in a multicultural primary school, devalued “against a general ethos of urban authenticity, coolness and savoir- faire” (2012, 323), whereas black people were seen as possessing these traits in abundance. This kind of thinking emerged in discussions of black stereotyped sexuality (Chapter 4), musical and dancing talent (Chapter 5) and ideas about “ghetto” earlier in this chapter. To be able to make friends with black people was the utmost test of one’s ability to immerse into a different cultural world – and one positioned as dangerous and deviant. In fact, Jase often bragged to me that he was the only white student who could successfully navigate black social circles. In doing so, he reconfigured his white and working-class subject positions as singular, cool and ‘street-wise’. Jase’s attempts to fashion an identity counter to those offered and prove his cosmopolitan capabilities compelled him to render black peers in othering terms and compound the stigma faced by fellow white peers. Such behaviour could, thus, be considered a form of what I have called ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.
This intersectional exploration of whiteness and class at Greendale has further illuminated the complex terrain that students had to navigate in everyday school life. In their multicultural and working-class environment, many Anglo students struggled to manoeuvre between and against limited identities: being bogan (and therefore racist and/or uncosmopolitan) or being cultureless and uncool were both stigmatised and devalued identities in this youthful space. An understanding of the stigma of whiteness in a culturally diverse place is critical
208 CHAPTER SIX to reckoning with the significance of white privilege and power to racism at Greendale High. As Bonnett explains, in antiracism discourse ‘being white’ is typically characterised as an “immutable condition with clear and distinct moral attributes. These attributes often include: being racist; not experiencing racism; being an oppressor; not experiencing oppression; silencing; not being silenced” (1997, 180). Yet, the duelling stigmas of whiteness exemplified in the interaction between Jase and Daxon call into question the extent to which conventional accounts of white privilege and power apply in understanding the significance of racialising practices at Greendale High.
White Privilege and Power in a Culturally Diverse School
Across the literature on racism, as reviewed in Chapter 1, a “common approach to understanding racism is to consider it as a combination of prejudice and power” (Berman and Paradies 2010, 216, emphasis in original). In the context of white dominant societies, this link has caused debate over whether only white people can enact racism or whether those from ethnic minority backgrounds can also perpetrate racism, albeit perhaps in different forms with differing impacts (see Berman and Paradies 2010; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 2005). Social critics have also responded to the burgeoning idea in popular culture that ‘reverse racism’ – racism towards white people – is a legitimate phenomenon (e.g. Fish 1993; Krishnan 2016). In the final section of this chapter, I wish to explore the link between racism, power and privilege in Greendale’s multicultural and working-class peer sociality.
Whilst I have not yet explicitly addressed the issue of power in racialising practices at Greendale, the chapters of this thesis have implicitly illustrated the complex, unstable social terrain that unsettles conventional attributions of racial power and privilege. On the one hand, the schoolyard space seemed to be inflected with broader power relations and divisions of dominant white culture (Chapter 3). White students ruled the upper courtyard in ways that impacted on some non-white students’ sense of comfort and belonging. Additionally, as discussed in Chapter 4, white students in the upper courtyard had the choice to
209 CHAPTER SIX make race relevant or not (in the context of dating); this is a distinct privilege of whiteness (see Dubrofsky 2013). Whilst white students complained about their ‘culturelessness’ (this chapter), this indicates that whiteness was experienced as ‘normality’ which advantages white students and renders non- white students as ‘different’ Others (but also more ‘interesting’ in the Greendale context) (see Perry 2001).
On the other hand, Greendale students from a range of backgrounds participated in racialising practices with racist connotations. Other ethnographies of youth multiculture also show that young people from diverse backgrounds can be involved in perpetrating racism (e.g. Back 1996; Thomas 2011). The ‘normality’ and privilege of whiteness was also ruptured in certain moments in a multicultural, working-class peer space. This chapter has demonstrated how white identities were sometimes made visible, devalued and stigmatised whilst Chapter 3 revealed how some white students experienced discomfort in the lower courtyard, similar to that of their non-white peers in the upper courtyard. The intersectional focus of this chapter has further suggested that social power within peer sociality was constantly shifting depending on which assemblage of social factors related to class, gender, appearance, sexual orientation and cultural difference was invoked. Thus, as Frankenberg argues:
Whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather cross-cut by a range of other axes of relative advantage or subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it” (2004, 113).
If we consider Jase’s white identity in isolation, his flippant ‘racist’ remarks arguably suggest that his white privilege has blinded him to how his comments may be hurtful and reinforce systemic racial inequality and oppression. Yet taking into account his wider experiences at school, particularly in regard to his sexual orientation, we see the ways that his privilege was undercut or inflected. It may be that in certain social spaces, some students are indeed privileged by
210 CHAPTER SIX whiteness, while this is diminished in other contexts and places – “in other words space and identities are co-implicated” (Valentine 2007, 19). As Nayak writes, “the exercise of power is subject to context and situation, and can come to mean different things at different moments” (2004, 152).
In this complex environment, the question raised is how much power did white students have in a multicultural, working-class peer culture? To what extent does white privilege aid understanding of racialisation or racism in this space? Working towards an answer to these questions, I focus on the idea of ‘reverse racism’ voiced by Daxon and Emily, two Anglo-Australian students.
Reverse Racism
Scribbling down fieldnotes in my journal during class one day, Daxon asked me why I decided to do “this job”. “I guess because I’m trying to stop racism,” I replied, hesitantly, not sure if this answer really did the complexity of my project justice. He looked at me quizzically, confused by my hesitancy. “Are you racist?” he asked. “I hope not,” I said after a long pause, grappling with my own internal monologue about the extent to which we are all racist to some degree and at some moments. “Are you?” I inquired. “No,” he said, firmly, “Kiwis and Maoris call you ‘white’ and I’m not a fan.” I asked whether I could write this down. He nodded and watched as I wrote his comment down word-for-word. He gave me a nod of approval when I reached the final word and then began speaking again. He explained that racism (calling people ‘white’) is “massive” in the suburb he lives in because there are lots of Islanders there: “they say stuff like that around there but not really at Greendale [High].” He went on to say “you heard about Parkview, right?” explaining that a gang of young Sudanese men had recently attacked a teenage boy. Whilst the connection between these two stories puzzled me at first, attention to the literature on ‘reverse racism’ provides some insight into its meaning.
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Bucholtz’s (2011a) research in a US high school highlights the sense of ‘reverse racism’ among white students. According to Bucholz, this idea often emerged through “tales of racialized fear and white persecution, in which white teenagers described their perception of being in danger of violence, harassment, or criminal behavior from their black peers” (2011a, 387). This may help explain why Daxon mentioned the incident of young Sudanese men instigating violence in the local community after complaining about his experiences of being called white in his neighbourhood. While Daxon did not mention the ethnicity of the teenage victim, in this context it could be assumed that the boy was white. Modica’s (2015) high school research raises another interrelated possibility for why Daxon seemed comfortable in invoking experiences of ‘reverse racism’. According to Modica, white American students believed that it was “harder to be cool” as a white person which produced a victim mentality that they were the ones unfairly discriminated against (2015, 402). Indeed, in both incidents Daxon recounted to me, white people were removed from responsibility regarding racism and racial tension: it was the Sudanese and “Kiwis and Maoris” who were at fault. As illustrated in the previous chapter, Greendale students framed racism as individual and interpersonal, not as structural. Within this framing, Daxon did not need to acknowledge his complicity in or benefit from systemic racism (see also Bucholtz 2011a).
When prompted by classroom discussion, Emily also mentioned she had been subject to racism; she told the class that her Sudanese boyfriend’s parents had said their son should date a “black queen”, not a white girl. As noted in Chapter 4, Emily said this was because white girls are considered “sluts”. The teacher told her this was not racism, explaining that racism is tied to power and that she, as a white person, has power and privilege. While the teacher’s response was arguably appropriate, it nevertheless acted to invalidate Emily’s feelings of stigmatisation based on intersecting ideas about race and gender (and perhaps class). By taking into account Greendale’s complex, intersectional youth codes and experiences, white students’ sense that they faced equal (or reverse) forms
212 CHAPTER SIX of discrimination is arguably understandable – albeit not necessarily helpful to antiracist action or reflection on the times and ways in which they are advantaged.
Changing cultural and economic times further complicate notions of white power and privilege in working-class, post-industrial areas where white youth may feel a distinct lack of power in the face of diminishing economic opportunities (see Nayak 2004; Hage 2003). As canvassed throughout this thesis, students were well aware that they attended an impoverished school and lived in a stigmatised, post-industrial area with very high levels of unemployment. Combined with the stigmas of being ‘boring’ or ‘bogan’ at Greendale, it is arguably not surprising that white students did not feel they benefited from white privilege. Perhaps stemming from an appreciation of their mutual socio-economic disadvantage, students from diverse backgrounds seemed to have developed a shared sense – however precarious and partial – that peer relations were “reciprocal and symmetrical” (Wise 2016, 491), not based on uneven racialised power.
Anglo students’ sense of exclusion or stigma does not negate or reverse white privilege and attendant racial inequalities that exist in Australian society and that course through institutional, staff and student culture at Greendale High. However, in understanding how young people negotiate culturally diverse peer sociality, it is important to take seriously the devaluation of whiteness by the student body and the ways that white students struggled for inclusion, belonging, respect and popularity within this multicultural, working-class context. In this school, whiteness was not always, nor even often, understood in powerful or privileged terms. Students’ practices challenged “the jaundiced view of Whiteness as simply a trope of domination” (Giroux 1997, 302, quoted in Nayak 1999, 178). Ipso facto, white students (or their friends) did not necessarily interpret racialising behaviour through a lens of racial power.
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Conclusion
This chapter has traversed many of the interrelated, multifaceted complexities of Greendale peer sociality. Through attending to the intersectional forces of school life, this chapter has brought into focus how racialising practices were embedded across the daily flow of school life and how cultural difference, racism and racial privilege might be side-lined, diminished, inflected or cross- cut from moment to moment. To focus analytical attention on ethnicity and race alone runs the risk of rendering cultural difference an ever-present and prominent feature of social life; it also positions racism as a leading concern in young lives, ignoring the ways in which it is weighted against and entangled with other kinds of sociabilities and struggles that young people reckon with.
To unravel the norms and rituals of peer sociality that came to bear on students’ racialising behaviour, Jase and Gamze proved instructive to focus particular attention upon. Jase and Gamze were exemplars of the manifold, shifting intersections at play at high school around which students must quickly manoeuvre. Their treatment of peers and their own experiences demonstrate that students’ behaviour could not be easily divided into “bad racists” and “good multiculturalists” (Wise 2005, 183), nor could white students be divided into “ferret-eyed fascists” or “anti-racist angels” (Macdonald et al. 1989, quoted in Nayak 2009, 35). Students performed and experienced racialised teasing whilst also performing and experiencing other kinds of convivial and hostile social practices, related to gender, body shape, sexuality, class and so forth. Ethno-racial identifications were just some elements within the “diverse circuits of recognition” (Noble 2015, 70) that comprised Greendale students’ networks of belonging (see also Harris and Herron 2017).
Building on the arguments of other chapters, this chapter further illuminated how racism and conviviality are not necessarily separate sides of the same coin in young lives. Racialised quips occurred within a convivial “holding frame of recognition” (Harris and Herron 2017, 294), whilst overt conflict turned on
214 CHAPTER SIX other forms of difference. The prevalence of fag-, fat- and slut-shaming at Greendale High provided insight into why racism might not be considered by the students to be a key issue at the school. In amongst other forms of suffering, racism may not even be a distinguishing frame young people use to describe and make sense of their experiences. By focusing on the experiences of Mohammed, Maduka and Aisha, it became evident how difficult it is to disentangle and identify the impact of unwelcome racialisation in amongst their other experiences of pain, frustration, suffering and social survival.
Ethnographic attention to the context surrounding racialising social practices also enabled understandings of the motivation for and downplaying of ‘racist’ quips beyond standard readings of racism, white privilege and power. Many white students were motivated by cosmopolitan orientations and, as in the case of Back’s research, by a “search for notions of identity that are not laced with racism” (1996, 138). Whilst the classed and racialised pressures they faced differed from those of their non-white peers, the highly diverse student body were all participants in the racialising of space and in the ‘racist’ teasing of each other. The wider student body was also complicit in producing, and navigating, a gendered, heteronormative social terrain. In fact, at times, students eschewed cultural differences for heteronormative inclusion at the expense of students like Jase.
The recognition that racialisation was entangled within and tempered by wider social practices and experiences at school does not negate the fact that students’ practices and orientations, including the rejection of white privilege, might perpetuate inequality and discrimination and be hurtful to others. As I have argued in other chapters, the point of this discussion is to highlight how current ways of framing racism as necessarily conflictual and as separate from convivial and cosmopolitan practices and investments may miss the mark in speaking to young people’s much more complex lived experience. Prevailing notions that frame racism as being a key problem in young lives, based on prejudice, lack of understanding, unwillingness to share space or driven by
215 CHAPTER SIX white power and privilege are untenable at Greendale. The binary between racism/conflict and conviviality/cosmopolitanism is also untenable. Students’ performances and interactions with one another were regularly guided by an investment in interculturality, inflected with strategies to reckon with the shifting demands of dominant school culture. In turn, their school culture was at once structured by whiteness, multiculturalism, hegemonic gender and sexuality politics and class stigma. In this context, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ spanned multiple forms of difference and was formed by young people’s experimentation with social positioning, self-preservation and ways of being in a culturally diverse, working-class sociality. Many of the ways they navigate social life extended the possibilities for what is appropriate and inclusive racialising behaviour. The fact that they did not produce conflict on racial grounds particularly suggests the co-creation of a promising youth sociality that dealt productively with the possibilities and tensions of living with difference – at least in terms of racialised difference.
However, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ at Greendale had its limits. As we will see in the following chapter, Aboriginal people were the exception to the rule. There was a distinct division between (precariously) inclusive forms of sociality and the exclusionary racism expressed at Greendale High. Racist talk about Aboriginal Australians appeared not to have diminished or transformed in this shared space of cultural diversity; inveterate racist discourse about Aboriginal Australians was vehement and unrelenting among many students from diverse backgrounds whenever classroom curriculum turned to Aboriginal cultures, histories and social justice. This divergence from an ethos of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ is critical for understanding youth sociality and racism at culturally diverse Greendale High as the next chapter explores. Before turning to this, I describe an incident in my own social life that frames the gravity and prevalence of the issues that Chapter 7 critiques.
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Interlude
Let us leave the school for a moment and jump forward to over a year after I had finished fieldwork: I sat in a fine-dining restaurant in the city at a friend’s birthday dinner. It was Saturday night. I had Sunday earmarked for beginning Chapter 7 on racism towards Aboriginal Australians. As the only full-time student amongst the group of medical specialists, I scanned the menu for anything vaguely affordable whilst they ordered expensive champagne. One of my friends, let’s call him Rishi, asked how my PhD was going. He was also doing his PhD in addition to his specialist practice; he spent his weekends at the university laboratory trying to find a cure for cancer. “So are kids more or less racist these days?” Rishi asked. As I began to explain that I couldn’t speak in such generalities, or to a historical perspective, he cut me off. “Yeah yeah disclaimers, disclaimers. You and your disclaimers. Just tell us.” I explained, as Chapter 7 will develop further, that whilst young people at Greendale were generally producing sophisticated, complex forms of ‘racism’, this complexity disappeared when talking about Aboriginal Australians: “you know, they say the usual stuff about how Aboriginal people are lazy and should get jobs,” I added, expressing my concern about this finding with a despondent sigh.
“I know it’s not politically correct, but I get where they are coming from,” he responded blithely, “Aboriginal people are like that. They don’t help themselves. They don’t try at all. You should see the ones who come into the hospital.” Before I had uttered even half a sentence of rebuttal, he interrupted: “so you think they don’t have any responsibility?” I tried to explain how Aboriginal people certainly have agency, but it’s important to consider the structural barriers that limit this, and that maintain inequity in Australia. As I began to list what these structural factors might be, I was cut off again: “Oh my god, stop being an academic, so intellectual, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Explain it like it is.” I felt very small; I was after all an academic (as was he) and I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable talking about ‘Aboriginal people’ in
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the homogenising, negative and unequivocal terms around which he continued to narrow this discussion.
For Rishi, anecdotal evidence was worth more than scholarly knowledge. He began to tell me about his experience in the health system and how ‘we’ “bend over backwards” for Aboriginal people, giving ‘them’ the best treatment at the expense of a (non-Indigenous) ninety year-old man not receiving the same level of care. “Is he any less deserving?” Rishi posed. What a powerful rhetorical weapon. I attempted to address this by returning to focus on the effects of colonial dispossession, persistent institutional racism and the need for equity (‘positive discrimination’) not equal treatment. He had a ready reply for this too: “the past is the past.” He talked about how many benefits ‘we’ give ‘them’, how they squander them and asked me to give him any example of an Aboriginal person who has made something of themself. I squirmed in discomfort. I felt completely out of my depth battling these individualising arguments, forced to engage in a discursive battle against racism on the superficial terms Rishi set for me.
Entering into his logic, I listed a few Aboriginal Australian politicians, musicians and actors. “Who are they? I don’t know them. Keep going,” he goaded, his fingers raised as if to tick them off, as if a certain number would suffice as evidence. I tried a different tack. I talked about how as an Anglo- Australian I feel responsibility for dispossession and its ensuing legacy, and how I benefit from this by living on this land, complicit in colonialising systems. “So you’re to blame for what your ancestors did? Do you really believe that?” he asked, in apparent incredulity. “Yes I do. And it’s not really my ancestors. This all happened in the last 200 years, and the Stolen Generations happened only a few of decades ago!”65 When I asked whether he felt any sense of responsibility as he too benefited by living on stolen land, he
65 The Stolen Generations refers to the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and placed in the care of white families and institutions from the late 1800s to 1970s.
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said no and theorised it might be because he’s a migrant, not Anglo like his girlfriend and I. Gesturing to the other end of the table where she was deep in another conversation, he remarked that “she would agree with everything you’re saying.” He told me that having been born in India and raised in Africa, he’d seen much worse. He argued that Aboriginal people do not have it that bad and in any case colonisation had many benefits like the building of infrastructure. He added that people have been stealing land for thousands of years anyway; it’s just how it is. You have to leave the past in the past and move on. I tried to talk about racism towards Aboriginal people as having damaging effects. “Racism affects heaps of people,” he countered, “I came to this country and worked hard and got through despite racism. Racism is just a fact of life.”
I tried to draw the conversation to a close; we were getting nowhere. I had no idea how to counter these ideas. When nuance is discounted, academic knowledge mocked, structural factors both past and present annulled and comparatively ‘worse’ situations and anecdotal evidence championed, how can you counter that? We entered back into conversation with those around us, talking about weddings and drinking gin and tonics. Yet, my hurt and anger remained, eating away at my stomach. His vehement and obdurate tones gave rise to a sinking awareness (anew) that these powerful racist beliefs continue unabated across Australian society and across the life course. This incident, whilst demoralising and disturbing, proved a timely reminder of the relevance of the findings of the coming chapter to understanding racism and ideas about who belongs in a multicultural society.
Rishi repeated almost word-for-word the arguments I heard many Greendale students make a year prior, in a completely different social setting. Anti- Aboriginal racism transcends the schoolyard, youth, socio-economics and education level. It also transcends cultural background. What Rishi and Greendale students had in common was an individualising, neoliberal, class- inflected discourse that positioned Aboriginal people as a problem against a more deserving Anglo and Migrant ‘us’. Whilst many Greendale students were
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able to rework racism towards many racialised peers in practice, when talking abstractly some reproduced unadulterated fervent anti-Aboriginal discourse. The following chapter considers what this might mean for understanding the logics of inclusion and exclusion at multicultural Greendale.
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CHAPTER SEVEN The Exception to the Rule: Aboriginal Australians and The Limits of Perverse Cosmopolitanism
Introduction
There seemed to be two different forms of racialisation operating at Greendale: the perverse cosmopolitan norm among peers, and its troubling exception in some classroom discussion. In this chapter, I explore why this stark contrast may have existed in a multicultural peer culture and what this suggests about racism and multicultural inclusion in these young lives. As previous chapters have developed, many students’ racialising practices were complex, sophisticated and convivial, challenging conventional theorisations of racism. They hint at a youth culture where cultural difference can be worked through in inclusive and non-inflammatory ways, popular racisms subverted and commitment to cultural diversity cultivated. Yet, as this chapter will detail, this complexity sometimes disappeared and hostile attitudes emerged in school classrooms when it came to talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Many students expressed views that closely aligned with ‘racist talk’ identified by scholars working in Australia and New Zealand (see Tuffin 2008, for overview) and lacking the “lightness of tone” (Sharpe and Hynes 2015, 97) characteristic of racialising repartee between friends and classmates.
This chapter is a point of departure, not only for its illumination of conventional racisms, but also for its focus on classroom discourses rather than schoolyard sociality. I did not intend to give much attention to classroom discussions in this thesis. With a focus on peer relations, the classroom material I collected on topics of ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity and belonging generally fell outside the scope of this thesis. As I noted in Chapter 2, the classroom debate I observed was typically highly regulated by the teachers, and students’ responses commonly appeared subdued, compliant or uninterested. However, in the process of analysing my data it became
221 CHAPTER SEVEN increasingly clear how strongly the impassioned and bitter talk about Aboriginal Australians in school classrooms contrasted to the ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ peer sociality I have theorised in this thesis.
Consequently, this chapter centres on how non-Indigenous students talked about Aboriginal Australians abstractly in response to classroom curriculum. Only in the classroom, when responding to teachers’ prompts about Indigenous history, cultures and contemporary disadvantage did students make comment. I never heard any reference to Aboriginality among friends and peers in the schoolyard. Indeed, as I will explore, many students did not realise that some of their fellow peers identified as Aboriginal. Only one student, Tess, identified as Aboriginal (and Welsh) in my presence (prompted by the mapping exercise discussed in Chapter 3). She added, gesturing at her pale, freckled skin that nobody realised she was Aboriginal. Whilst these classroom discourses about Aboriginal Australians are, therefore, not directly comparable to my analyses of intercultural interactions between peers examined in previous chapters, they raise significant questions worthy of exploration. Namely, what logics license racist and othering treatment of Aboriginal people, and what does this indicate about the scope of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’?
This chapter is loosely divided into two parts. The first half of the chapter details the ways in which non-Indigenous students across a number of school classrooms talked about Aboriginal people. Through exploring both negative and positive discourses about Aboriginal Australians, this chapter exposes the prevalence and normalisation of Othering and anti-Aboriginal attitudes and examines how disparaging, racialising talk was legitimated in a social space that usually opposed or downplayed racism and the significance of ethno-racial difference. The second half of the chapter explores why this form of racialisation differed so greatly from the ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ practices discussed across this thesis and the significance of such contrast to understanding youthful ‘multi-racist’ (Cohen and Bains 1988) and multicultural practices within and beyond the confines of Greendale High.
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Before turning attention to discourses on Aboriginality in Greendale classrooms, it is first necessary to locate this chapter within an Australian social, historical and scholarly context. Briefly, Aboriginal Australians are the first people of Australia, arriving in Australia over 50,000 years ago (Devlin 2016). With the arrival of the first fleet of British ships, the year 1788 brought colonisation, frontier violence and disease to Australian shores, with ensuing dispossession, state-sanctioned eugenics policies and cultural genocide. Under laws enacted in the early 1900s, Aboriginal people were not granted citizenship and were placed under the guardianship of the state. Until as recently as 1967, Aboriginal Australians were not counted in the national census and were not able to vote. The removal of ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal children from their families under the policy of assimilation was brought to an end in the 1970s. As a result of these practices, Aboriginal people today still face much inequality including in health outcomes, incarceration rates and levels of racism experienced.
According to Grigg and Manderson’s (2015) review of racism research conducted in Australia, 90 per cent of Indigenous Australians report having experienced racism. As Castles and Vasta write, “the two centuries in which racism was an almost universal tenet have left their mark on institutions, social practices, intellectual discourse, popular ideas and national culture” (1996, 4). This remains an ongoing issue. Indeed, at the time of writing this chapter, a historic summit between the First Peoples of Australia was held at Uluru to work against these inequalities through constitutional recognition and/or a treaty. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives sent a strong message to the federal government: “in '67 we asked to be counted. In 2017 we're asking to be heard.”66
In contemporary government administration in Australia, ‘Aboriginal affairs’ is separated from ‘ethnic affairs’ (see Castles and Vasta 1996). The former refers to
66 This statement is attributed to Pat Anderson, co-chair of the Referendum Council (see http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/05/30/indigenous-australians-call-politicians-have- difficult-conversation).
223 CHAPTER SEVEN policies, programs and services for Aboriginal Australians who constitute 2.5% of the Australian population, the latter relates to immigration and multiculturalism. This division is also manifest in academia (Hage 1998; Anderson 2000; Castles and Vasta 1996). According to Anderson, in Australia there exists “persistently discrete spheres of academic endeavour called ‘Ethnic and Racial Studies,’ on the one hand, and ‘Indigenous Studies,’ on the other” (2000, 381). Hage argues this “institutionalised division of labour” is discernible in how scholars think about and study multiculturalism and racism (1998, 24).
As Hage (1998, 24) describes it, “in this process, the Whites relating to Aboriginal people appear as totally unaffected by multiculturalism, while the ‘Anglos’ relating to the ‘ethnics’ appear as if they have no Aboriginal question about which to worry.” Hage (1998) himself acknowledges that his research on whiteness and multiculturalism in Australia scarcely explores representations of Aboriginality. Bloch and Dreher (2009, 205) also argue that research in Australia remains “conspicuously silent” on Aboriginal Australians’ experiences of multiculturalism and place-sharing, while Lobo (2014) and de Finney (2010) highlight the dearth of empirical research on Aboriginal-ethnic minority relationships in Australia and Canada, respectively. Along with a small number of youth and diversity studies scholars particularly (Lobo 2014; Rizvi 1993; de Finney 2010; McLeod and Yates 2003), I bring together the categories of ‘white’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘Aboriginal’ for youth into analytical purview. By doing so, in this chapter I make visible the uneven contours of racism, conviviality and multicultural inclusion at Greendale High.
Classroom Discourse about Aboriginal Australians
As the bell rang one afternoon at lunch, Imran, a young man Bec had a crush on (“he doesn’t look Afghani though”) invited me to his next class. Sitting down at the back of the classroom, a rugby ball came sailing past me before it was caught and lobbed across the room in another direction. Waving a plastic DVD cover in the air, Ms F told the class that we were going to watch the second half
224 CHAPTER SEVEN of the documentary ‘Utopia’, a damning cinematic portrayal of the injustices and disadvantages many Aboriginal Australians face in colonised, contemporary Australia.67 As the teacher loaded the DVD, students complained bitterly that they did not want to watch it because it had “a bad vibe” and “it’s racist”. Ms F patiently explained that it’s not racist; it just explains the conditions that Aboriginal Australians experience. Someone who missed the previous class asked what it was about. “It’s about black people,” one boy replied, “…Aboriginal people I should say,” he added. Ms F explained that some people say that Aboriginal people should ‘just get a job’ whereas this film highlights the kind of obstacles they face. “Well they should get jobs,” one student, a second-generation Australian from an Albanian background, muttered loudly. An Anglo-Australian young man next to him backed him up: “yeah they get too many advantages!” Ms F tried to put forward a counter argument but her voice was lost amongst the more boisterous opinions being hurled around the classroom.
As the film played, projected onto the whiteboard, an Islander student leaning back in his chair called out “racist!” A little later he yelled out “racist!” again, not seemingly directed at any particular aspect of the documentary. Aside from these outbursts, only two students seemed to be watching the documentary. They both stared unblinkingly at the screen, perched forward in their chairs. The rest of the class chatted amongst themselves or propped their mobile phones on the desk in front of them watching YouTube or typing messages to friends. A young man from an Indian background pulled out a stack of sandwiches from his backpack. “Curry?” his friend James (who identified as white with ‘wog’ parents) asked eagerly. Tearing one in half to share, they gulped them down with wide smiles. A few boys snuck out of the classroom one by one when the teacher was not looking and did not return.
67 This 2013 documentary ‘Utopia’ (directed by John Pilger and Alan Lowery) documents how discriminatory and sometimes violent policing practices lead to Aboriginal Australians being incarcerated and dying in custody at disproportionate rates (Dartmouth Films, UK, http://utopiajohnpilger.co.uk/).
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Exasperated by students’ lack of engagement, Ms F turned the film off before it reached the end. James told her that Aboriginal people were trying to make ‘us’ feel guilty: “they take advantage. Why can’t they just be like other black people?” Other students expressed similar views:
“They don’t try to change themselves” “They spend all their money on drugs and alcohol” “They blame us for their problems”
When Ms F prompted them to consider how the documentary may explain some of this, the student from Albanian origins responded that the filmmakers were biased “showing you a glimpse of what they want you to see.” The students continued to argue how Aboriginal people “brought it on themselves” and did not have it that bad compared to other countries; they are only thrown into jail, not murdered. Ms F looked heartbroken, but her attempts to get them to reflect on alternative perspectives only caused further vehement accusations.
When yet another student mentioned Aboriginal people getting “advantages” I questioned whether that was true. “Don’t you agree?” the student replied. “I want to hear what you think,” I stated. “You clearly don’t agree. Why else would you ask?” he astutely accused. Trying to rectify the situation, so as not be perceived as yet another teacher or filmmaker with an agenda, I announced to him and everyone listening that I had never heard any of this before and was confused. With this proclamation of naivety, students were happy to help me understand. “They get uni cheaper,” one Anglo-Australian girl called out. Feigning confusion, I asked “oh yeah, but don’t people who live in rural areas and who are poor get cheaper uni too?” I was told that this was different; Aboriginal people were different. When I added that I think Greendale High students get prioritised on university applications, a student informed me that Greendale High students should have these opportunities because they will use them to get out of disadvantage whereas Aboriginal people do not work hard and do not make the most of opportunities like others do. One student asked why Greendale High is considered
226 CHAPTER SEVEN disadvantaged. A classmate responded “because of the drugs” whilst Ms F explained that parents in the Greendale area do not have tertiary education. One of the most outspoken students acknowledged that generational disadvantage is hard to climb out of and others followed suit – “yeah it’s not all of them”, “but it’s some who give them all a bad name”, “they should stop the others from doing it”. One girl remained indignant, informing the class that Aboriginal students get to go on Greendale school excursions for free – “it’s not fair”.
The bell rang and ended the discussion. Two Anglo students, the two who had been watching the documentary intently, lingered behind, looking like they wanted to tell me something. “What did you guys think?” I asked them. One of the boys responded that he thought it was really bad what is happening to Aboriginal people but then added, as if to balance his stance, “some Aboriginals are really nasty though”. The other young man exclaimed passionately that he couldn’t handle the racism – Aboriginal people are treated so badly. “Their only crime is being human!” he cried. Then, by way of a conclusion, he declared: “if that makes me an abo-lover then so be it!”
Later that week, I tagged along with Gamze to her year 12 class that had also been watching this documentary. When the teacher arrived, he flicked the lights off and switched on the projector. Scanning the classroom for students’ faces to tick them off the attendance roll, he asked the class where one particular student was. “Racist!” students called out with glee. The class burst into laughter that Mr G could not find a brown-skinned student in the dark. After the documentary had finished, Mr G prompted class discussion. One student mentioned that they lived next door to an Aboriginal family who drink too much. Mr G asked whether this was only the case for Aboriginal families or whether other people might drink to excess. A student piped in saying that she lived next door to a drunk white family, but “they don’t drink goon” she added, referring to cheap, boxed-wine. Speaking up for the first time, Gamze made the observation that due to poverty more Aboriginal people are on the street, and
227 CHAPTER SEVEN therefore it seems that they have more of a drinking problem than the rest of the population because of their increased visibility.
Conventional Racist Discourses: A Checklist
Greendale students’ discourses bear striking similarity not only to Rishi’s (see Interlude), but also to racist talk identified in Australian empirical research. In the 1990s, Augoustinos and colleagues’ research with Anglo-Australian university students revealed that the construction of Aboriginal people in negative terms was “perhaps the most recurring and pervasive feature of the group discussions” (1999, 96). Writing about her experience of primary school teaching in 1980s Australia, Wendy Holland similarly found that white students’ negative ideas and stereotypes about Aboriginal people “far outweighed” more positive understandings of Aboriginality (1996, 107). Two decades on, little seemed to have changed in these Greendale classrooms.
The negative views expressed by Greendale students also echoed almost exactly the racist talk identified in New Zealand towards Maori people (e.g. Fozdar 2008; Nairn and McCreanor 1991; Wetherell and Potter 1992). In Fozdar’s (2008) interview-based research with white New Zealanders, for example, racism towards Maori was downplayed through claiming that Australian Aboriginal people face worse conditions, and that treatment of Maori is not as bad as the ethnic cleansing that occurred in former Yugoslavia. Greendale students made similar comparative arguments; the (alleged) fact that Aboriginal Australians are not murdered as in other countries diminished claims to racism and disadvantage. As detailed earlier, one Greendale student during the first classroom debate also compared Aboriginal people unfavourably to other ‘black’ people (the significance of which will be explored later). The belief that Aboriginal Australians have more severe alcohol problems as compared to non-Indigenous Australians is another central stereotype evidenced in the literature (Pedersen et al. 2006; Augoustinos, Tuffin, and Sale 1999).
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Problematic representations of and beliefs about Indigeneity seem to have a remarkable robustness. Reviewing racist discourse in Australia and New Zealand over the past 20 years, Tuffin argues that the strong similarities between racist talk over time and space suggests these racist ideas are “powerful, pervasive, and historically persistent” (2008, 604). This kind of racist talk has, thus, been well canvassed in the literature: my findings are nothing new. But this is what makes it so significant at Greendale High. Gone were the ironic subversions of popular racism, reflexive nods to stereotypes and racist tropes, and the racialising teasing born from conviviality and familiarity with peers I discussed in previous chapters. Gone were the racialising practices which unsettle current scholarly theorisations of racism and conviviality. Instead, classroom discourses returned to well theorised territory, invoking the tenets of ‘new racism’.
Individualising Racism, Eliding Racism
Drawing on ‘new racism’, not the biological inferiority of ‘old racism’, these students’ racist discourses were coded in language about economics and cultural difference, which elide the label of ‘racism’. As outlined in Chapter 1, ‘new racism’ is based on notions of incompatible cultural difference that justifies exclusion and subordination of those rendered Other (Yuval-Davis 1997). This ‘new’ or ‘modern’ racism is also defined in terms of “resentment towards coloured people that is embedded within a wider set of moral values such as the work ethic, self-reliance, individual achievement, and self- discipline” (Augoustinos, Tuffin, and Sale 1999, 90; see also Goldberg 2009; Bonilla-Silva 2006). Individualising arguments that place blame on Aboriginal Australians and absolve non-Indigenous people as complicit in racist practices were a key part of Greendale classroom discourses.
As explored in Chapter 5, students constructed racism as an individual pathology. Indeed, when students were asked in class one day to discuss an incident of racist abuse towards an Aboriginal football player, one student explained it as “some drunken idiot saying something racist.” Alcohol, here, like
229 CHAPTER SEVEN in the case of Mohammed and Jase (Chapters 5 and 6), was used as an explanatory and potentially exonerating factor. Neither the pervasiveness of racist attitudes towards Aboriginal people nor systemic structural barriers that maintain discrimination and inequality in Australia were taken into account. This individualisation of racism, at the expense of structural racisms, coalesces with (neo)liberal discourse. The most vocal Greendale class participants rendered Aboriginal people “authors of their own ‘plight’” (Augoustinos, Tuffin, and Rapley 1999, 361), attributing social problems to individuals who had “brought it on themselves”, Aboriginal people who are not trying hard enough (“they don’t change themselves”), not contributing to the economy (“they should get jobs”) and don’t have proper self-discipline (“they spend all their money on alcohol”). As Mullings asserts (2005, 679), “like neoliberalism, these contemporary explanatory frameworks facilitate the denial of racism and conceal the inner workings of the social system by attributing contemporary inequality to individual culture or meritocracy.”
Augoustinos, Tuffin and Rapley’s (1999) research is useful in elucidating why hostile views towards Aboriginal people appeared to be sanctioned among some Greendale peers. The university students in their study agreed that their negative views were not racist; it was not considered racism to be concerned as a “taxpayer” about how much money the government was spending on Aboriginal people (1999, 368). To these university students, this was not about race, it was about economics. As explored in Chapter 4, Milena and her friends dismissed the existence of racism due to intercultural intimacy. In other chapters, racism was downplayed in the context of progressive beliefs, intercultural friendships and a lack of racialised conflict at school. By contrast, in the classroom discussions detailed here racism was implicitly denied through the logic of economic rationalism and merely voicing ‘facts’ (see Tuffin 2008 on economic rationalism). Despite the teachers’ (and my own) attempts to interrupt generalised and anecdotal claims about Aboriginal people, these ‘facts’ proved difficult to dispel (cf. Pedersen et al. 2006). Many students also seemed to feel licensed to voice anti-Aboriginal views because of belief about
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‘unfair advantages’, likely based on a belief that everybody is ‘on the same playing field’. Indeed, ‘new racism’ is constituted by duelling values of egalitarianism and individualism (Augoustinos, Tuffin, and Every 2005, 337).
The historical forces of colonisation, genocide, dispossession and state- sanctioned racisms that have enduring and renewed effects in contemporary Australian society were discounted within an economic rationalism where individuals are “decontextualized, asocial, and ahistorical” (Tuffin et al. 2000, 35). That Aboriginal people were “just trying to make us feel guilty” as James asserted makes sense within an explanatory framework in which historical factors are annulled, making restorative measures like ‘positive discrimination’ unjustified and unfair (see Bonilla-Silva 2006). Interestingly, my suggestion that ‘rural’ or ‘poor’ people, including Greendale students, get ‘special treatment’ due to geographic or socioeconomic disadvantage was not rejected as unfair. Instead, these people – implicitly constructed as non-Indigenous – were rendered model neoliberal citizens who would make the most of these opportunities; the vocal students in classroom discussion claimed authority to decide who is deserving and who is not. In doing so, these students seemed to have constructed an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide not only in racialised terms, but also inflected by social class.
‘Us’ and ‘Them’ Discourses: Race and Class
Positioning Aboriginal people as Other was a highly significant feature of students’ discourse, as was the case in other Australian research (e.g. Augoustinos, Tuffin, and Sale 1999; McLeod and Yates 2003). ‘Us’ and ‘them’ constructions were used repeatedly; students were able to dexterously shift and expand their categorisation of ‘us’ to maintain clear differentiation from the separate and inappropriate Aboriginal Other (see Wallman 1978a, 1979; Barth 1969 on ethnic boundary making). Excessive drinking among Aboriginal Australians was, for example, somehow worse than for other people. Aboriginal people were positioned as a ‘race apart’, distinct from most Greendale students,
231 CHAPTER SEVEN distinct even from other black people. ‘Us’ in these classroom discussions, thus, expanded to include anyone who wasn’t Aboriginal.
Social class, too, seemed implicated in pathologising Aboriginal people as to blame for ‘their’ problems, positioning Greendale students and their social networks as more respectable and acceptable, despite their own varying vulnerabilities to classed and ethno-racial stigma. In the second classroom discussion, one of the students referenced ‘goon’, Australian slang for cheap boxed-wine, to make a classed distinction regarding poverty and impropriety between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. Echoing ideas about the (un)deserving, (un)classy and (un)respectable working class of the previous chapter, Aboriginal alcoholics were positioned as worse than white alcoholics because of their alleged cheap and unclassy choice of liquor. In fact, in an exchange I recount later, Aleksandra referred to all Aboriginal Australians as ‘bogans’ during class one day before clarifying (or correcting) that she meant Aboriginal people. Aboriginal Australians were positioned as similar to bogans, but were categorised separately because of race. As illuminated in Chapter 6, ‘bogan’ was generally considered a white identity at Greendale.
These class- and race-related comparisons raise questions about whether young people’s attitudes were informed by a sense of competition for government benefits, social space and power as Harris’s (2013) and Colic-Peisker and Tilbury’s (2008) research with migrant and Aboriginal youth suggest. The idea of white working-class resentment directed against ethnic minorities has also come to the fore recently as a (contentious) explanatory factor for England’s exit from the European Union (‘Brexit’), Donald Trump’s election as the American president and the resurgence of the One Nation political party in Australia – a party whose current platform centres on anti-immigration and previously focused on abolishing policies and programs that they viewed as ‘advantaging’ Aboriginal people (Dyrenfurth 2017; Mols and Jetten 2016). Whilst I am unable to comment at any length in this research about the applicability of these findings and debates to the Greendale context, the ethnographic
232 CHAPTER SEVEN vignettes here hint that anti-Aboriginal views (informed by economic rationalism) were espoused by students from a range of cultural backgrounds, and by middle-class, white-collar Australian residents (like Rishi). The question that is of significance to this research is why Aboriginal Australians were the targets of hostile, exclusionary sentiments and why this ‘racist talk’ seemed authorised in a peer culture that usually subverted popular racisms and lauded intercultural exchange. Before attending to these questions, it is important to briefly discuss the significance of more positive representations of Aboriginal
Australians that emerged during classroom discussion.
Courageous Counterpoints
As noted earlier, the comparability of classroom discourse with peer social relations outside of the teacher’s gaze is limited. In these classroom discussions, many students seemed to be pushing back against the teachers’ normative views about what students should think and say. It is possible that students produced a vehement and racist discourse in reaction to the teacher and that this did not reflect their views. However, this possibility is undermined by the fact that students did not react strongly when teachers’ spoke about other racialised groups. Moreover, prompts by the teacher in other classes produced more positive statements about and representations of Aboriginal Australians. For example, in a sociology class Ms G said “we all know that Aboriginal Australians are skilful at finding food and water where we might not see some.” Sajra effused “they are very creative! They made a boat [canoe] out of wood and reeds and stuff,” to which the teacher concurred “yes they are very creative, and with limited resources.” Together, they produced a ‘positive’ image of Aboriginal Australians, as a distant, homogenised and exotic Other – ‘them’ to the Greendale High ‘us’.
Whilst the most vocal students during the classes discussed earlier expressed negative points of view, Gamze and the two Anglo-Australian boys articulated counter arguments. I was momentarily heartened when the boys stayed behind after the bell to voice their dismay at the violence and apathy towards
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Aboriginal people shown by the documentary. The first young man’s disclaimer that “some Aboriginals are really nasty though” quickly dampened my spirits. The fact he felt it necessary to quickly add this proviso indicates that support for Aboriginal Australians is not considered socially acceptable. This suggests that there are two sets of incongruent norms operating at Greendale. Firstly, racism is wrong and unacceptable and secondly, pro-Aboriginal sentiments are abnormal. Aboriginal people are positioned as an exception to the rule, a separate case. The second young man – as I described in the first classroom vignette – made an equally revealing disclaimer: “if this makes me an abo-lover then so be it!” To be supportive of Aboriginal people seemed to cast him as a specific, distinct person; the markedness of this position invoked its deviation from the norm.
The juxtaposition of ‘abo’ with antiracist sentiments was particularly jarring. ‘Abo’ has long been a derogatory term for Aboriginal people. Yet, like the terms ‘wog’ and ‘fob’ which students claimed are no longer offensive (see Chapters 3 and 5), I often heard students tell teachers that ‘abo’ is only a shortening of the word ‘Aboriginal’, having lost its pejorative meaning. While it is possible that students had been able to transform this term into a neutral ascription, in light of the negative discourses surrounding talk of Aboriginality, this seems a fraught claim. The young man’s use of the oxymoronic ‘abo-lover’ seemed to signal his awareness of the abuse he would face by others in the school or wider community for expressing positive views.
In the second classroom, Gamze put forward an alternative perspective against the torrent of anecdotal evidence that students were eagerly contributing in her class. She noted that perceptions of alcoholism amongst Aboriginal people were distorted due to factors of poverty and visibility. That it was Gamze who offered this alternative explanation is of consequence to this thesis. Yet again, notions of “bad racists” and “good multiculturalists” (Wise 2005, 183) were unsettled. Whilst she was a ringleader in racialising (and slut-shaming) behaviours among her friends, her critical stance against anti-Aboriginal views
234 CHAPTER SEVEN supports that racialising behaviours amongst friends did not necessarily reveal racist attitudes and intentions. Moreover, as I explore in the following section, students’ othering comments at times seemed to reflect an uncritical reflex, rather than intentional racism towards Aboriginal Australians.
The Reflex of Racism
In English class one afternoon, students were supposed to be reading a novelised play that the teacher had distributed from a plastic tub. Instead, the books sat unopened on the tables whilst students talked loudly amongst themselves and walked around the classroom. To pass the time, I picked up a book and began to read it aloud to Mohammed and Aleksandra in a melodramatic manner. I acted out the sound effects described in the stage directions and at one point switched into reading the lines in a pirate accent. “You sound like a pirate!” Mohammed exclaimed. “But they’re Aboriginal. Can you do a bogan accent…an abo accent?” Aleksandra asked in what seemed like curious sincerity. “Ummm…no,” I replied, my face revealing my discomfort. I was taken by particular surprise as I had not realised it was a play about Aboriginal people. “You can do a great pirate accent though,” Mohammed consoled. Trying to make up for my judgemental face, I asked Aleksandra in a light conversational tone whether she could do an Aboriginal accent. “No, I don’t think I know what they sound like,” Aleksandra replied.
The word ‘abo’ and requests to mimic an Aboriginal English accent have racist connotations. Such caricature particularly brings to mind Australia’s racist history of blackface minstrelsy. Yet, rather than purposefully mocking Aboriginal people based on racist prejudices, Aleksandra seemed to be ‘trying out’ a learned discourse based on conversational cues, without any backing or understanding of what she was actually saying. The idea of racism as a ‘reflex’ was explored in Chapter 4 when Aleksandra drew on conventional stereotypes about Indian people when my partner’s background was discussed. In the shisha lounge, she did not seem to be deploying common stereotypes with
235 CHAPTER SEVEN malice; rather she seemed to be enacting a relevant and cued response. This sense of racism as ‘reflex’ also helps to understand why the Islander student called out “racist!” during the ‘Utopia’ documentary. At first, I thought perhaps that he was identifying racism faced by Indigenous Australians. Yet, the more I became accustomed to these shouts across multiple classroom contexts, the more I realised they were more like a reflex, part of a running joke among the students that did not seem to index anything other than it being a reactive, provocative reference and, therefore, fun and amusing to yell loudly. It was also amusing to students to watch the teachers’ palpable discomfort when they called them racist, akin to how students teased each other with the label ‘racist’ in Chapter 5. When it came to ‘racism’, whether students said what they mean was incredibly difficult to identify.
This complex variability and ambiguity is important for understanding racialisation or ‘racism’ at Greendale. Students may make ethno-racial jabs at friends, but be able to see through or stand-up against dominant racist beliefs about Aboriginal people. Equally, students might hold negative views or parrot stereotypes about Aboriginal people whilst being fully invested in intercultural mixity with their culturally diverse peers. These varied social modes of relationality further support – as I have argued across the previous chapters – the need for expansive and flexible conceptual framings of racism in youth multiculture. In this thesis I have argued that ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ offers one frame to make sense of how ‘racism’ can operate in precariously inclusive ways as a form of ‘getting along’. However, talk about Aboriginal people exposes the scope of this theorising. Whilst in many aspects of their social lives at school, Greendale students challenged the conviviality-racism binary in the everyday multiculture literature, the discourses explored in this chapter support the relevance of this binary; when talk turned to Aboriginal people, ‘racism’ aligned more with conflict and exclusion. In the following section, I consider what this suggests for developing a revised theoretical approach to ‘racism’ in youth multiculture to capture the unevenness and unpredictability of racialisation.
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Towards a Revised Approach to Racism in Youth Multiculture
As discussed in Chapter 1, the conviviality-racism dichotomy has been valuable in advancing understanding that social actors behave in contrary ways depending on the context. It moves beyond single frames that position people as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Wise 2005) and geographical places as ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ (Clayton 2009) sites of intercultural encounter. Social spaces and encounters involve moments of both “dialogue and exclusion” (Back 2004, 31). Through adding into discussion students’ racist talk about Aboriginal Australians, the existence of multiple forms of racialisation or racism is visible in the one school space at Greendale. In this way, students’ practices could be considered a testament to the existence of ‘multi-racisms’. Identified by Cohen and Bains (1988) in a 1980s British context, the existence of uneven, multi- dimensional racisms has since been recognised across the literature. Back’s (1996) research, for instance, exposed the existence of multi-racisms among young people in housing commission flats in London. As discussed in Chapter 1, white and black youth in Back’s (1996) ethnographic study were able to create social bonds whilst Vietnamese young people, by contrast, remained the out- group and suffered racist abuse. As such, young people sharing a social and physical space can work through inclusion and exclusion in different ways; there is not necessarily a uniform treatment of culturally diverse Others (Back 1996; see also Nayak 1999).
McLeod and Yates’s (2003) and Rizvi’s (1993) research, in the context of 1990s Australia, provide rare insight into the unevenness of racism in young lives at that time that included discussion of Aboriginal Australians. McLeod and Yates’s (2003) research in Victorian high schools showed whilst students characterised both Asian and Aboriginal people as Other, students differed over which group was viewed as more deserving of support and inclusion. In Rizvi’s (1993) ethnographic research in Victorian primary schools, students were also able to express dislike for Asians whilst supporting Aboriginal people as the rightful owners of the land. As Castles and Vasta write “there is no single racism
237 CHAPTER SEVEN in Australia, no simple black-white divide…Australia is in the contradictory position of being both a multicultural and a multi-racist society” (1996, 5). Many years since these research studies were published, Greendale High students’ practices continue to show and update insights about how appreciation of and investment in multiculture can exist congruently with practices of racism and exclusion. This is a significant point. I argue that the concept of multi-racism alone does not satisfactorily account for the interacting force of conviviality, the logics that drive these uneven practices of ethno-racial inclusion and exclusion, and the voices and experiences of young people. Indeed, the term ‘multi-racism’ does not contain linguistic recognition of how conviviality, inclusivity and a cosmopolitan ethos may be enmeshed in racialising behaviour and experiences with potentially racist implications.
Comparing Greendale students’ practices among their peers with abstract discourses about Aboriginal Australians makes visible a major drawback of both ‘multi-racism’ and the dichotomous framing of racism-conviviality. Not only do these concepts undermine complex forms of convivial racialisation, they also cannot articulate why precariously inclusive practices of ‘racism’ and more hostile and exclusionary forms of racist behaviours may converge and diverge at different moments. To deem all forms of racism as conflictual – as the conviviality-racism binary assumes – flattens and obscures the vast difference between Greendale students’ treatment of their peers and how they talk about Aboriginal Australians more abstractly.
It is, thus, vital to unsettle scholarly assumptions that posit the existence of such a binary a priori. When we leave open the possibility for different configurations of racism and conviviality, including ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’, we can make visible and interrogate how, when and why they cross orbits, merge and split apart in peer relations. This opens up critical consideration of questions like: Who is included and excluded in particular contexts? What logics inform these divergent practices? What impacts do they have and how might they best be addressed? This questioning informs deeper insight into the
238 CHAPTER SEVEN logics that underpin youth sociality in enforced proximity. In the case of Greendale, perverse cosmopolitanism structured many social relations, but it had its limits: namely, Aboriginal Australians were at best deemed irrelevant and at worst, excluded and vilified. Engaging with some of the questions I’ve raised here, in the following section I explore the possible logics that legitimated a differential treatment of Aboriginal Australians in a multicultural school space. Why did Aboriginal Australians exceed the reach of the ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ ethos that operated at Greendale? What does this suggest about the conditions for inclusion in a culturally diverse peer sociality?
The Limits of Multicultural Inclusion
The Invisibility of Aboriginal Peers: Contact Theory
Of the twenty Aboriginal students enrolled at Greendale High, only one student, Tess, identified as Aboriginal in my presence. As I noted earlier, she clarified that “people don’t know that I’m Aboriginal, so I guess I’d say I’m Welsh…so white!” In this context, many Greendale students did not realise that some of their peers and classmates identified as Indigenous. This may have been one reason why stereotypes and othering ideas about Aboriginal Australians persisted or were freely voiced (see Hickey 2016). The invisibility of Aboriginal people as fellow peers was made manifest during a class on Aboriginal Australian cultures. Mr P asked the class about stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous Australians on tourism ads. Students called out suggestions like “hunting tools”, “boomerangs” and “the outback”. Mr P pointed out that it is a misconception that Aboriginal people live predominantly in rural and remote areas of Australia. He explained that ‘they’ live in suburbs like ‘ours’ and live lives like ‘ours’. “Are there Aboriginal people at Greendale?” Gamze asked him. “Yes,” Mr P replied. “Really?” Sajra called out in surprise.
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“Like full-blood?” another student asked, and the class broke into laughter. She had referenced a term loaded with a colonial history of eugenics.68
The perceived absence of Aboriginal people was likely amplified by the narrow, exoticised and problematised ways in which Aboriginality was defined across the classrooms.69 Aboriginal peers, in the words of Hickey (2016, 7), “did not fit the preconceived ideas of what others imagined Aboriginal people should be like.” Relatedly, the white and brown skin tones of Aboriginal students could have been attributed by peers as ‘white’ (as in the case of Tess), ‘fob’ or simply part of the sea of unlabelled, ambiguous bodies at Greendale. Tom and his friends, as I introduced in the Prologue, were unsure if their brown-skinned friend Jay was Maori or from Mauritius. I asked Tom about Jay because I also was unsure, thinking he might be Indigenous. In the Canadian context, de Finney’s (2010) focus group research with young migrant women also identified the invisibility of Indigenous peers. The high school aged participants from migrant backgrounds made comments like: “when I first came here I didn’t even know there was Native people here”, “in school they make it sound like they’re just all gone” and “we just don’t know, we just don’t know each other, like we’re not told” (de Finney 2010, 482). Like these students, at Greendale High, unless prompted by classroom curriculum, there was little engagement at all with Aboriginality.
68 ‘Full-blood’ is part of history of governmental classification of Aboriginal people and systematic ‘breeding out’ of Aboriginal people in Australia – “a stratagem to erase 'colour', to bleach Australia white through programs of regulated reproduction” (McGregor 2002, 286). This practice of quantifying Aboriginal identity based on blood quartiles and genetics continues today with anti-Aboriginal populism dismissing ‘light-skinned’ Aboriginal people as inauthentic and using this identity to gain ill-gotten benefits (see Bird 2011). Students seem to hold partial knowledge about these discourses, confused by how to talk about Aboriginal identities. Esther and Dee, for example, asked me whether a girl at their school who identifies as Aboriginal was ‘full-blood’ because she had two ‘half-Indigenous’ parents. 69 Whilst teachers were aware that Aboriginal students attended Greendale, the way they represented Aboriginal people still had very othering and exoticising connotations. In the classes I attended, this was not as commonly the case when teachers spoke about other ethnicities during class. In this case they would ask students to contribute things they’d learnt from fellow peers and ask for contributions from students who identified with the ethnic identity in question. Whilst it is outside the scope of this thesis to critique how the teachers, school curriculum and institutional school culture reinforce these limited, othering ideas about Aboriginality, the classroom material discussed in this chapter certainly hints at this.
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This invisibility of and perceived lack of contact with Indigenous peers raises questions about the significance of contact to diminishing prejudice among young people at school. The ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ peer culture at Greendale High may be a product of local, habitual ‘labour’ (Noble 2009b), of getting to know each other, making friends and respecting each other’s co-presence (Ho 2011). The fact that many Greendale students were able to subvert conventional racisms towards their friends and peers, but not towards Aboriginal people regularly rendered external to their social world lends support to the ‘Contact Hypothesis’ that contact among people from different ethno-racial backgrounds reduces prejudice (Allport 1954; see Pettigrew et al. 2011 for meta- review of contact theory research). Contact Theory holds that a lack of contact between ethno-racial groups produces and sustains a “falsity of negative beliefs” and prompts conflict, discomfort and discrimination (Jackman and Crane 1986, 462). Thus, according to this hypothesis, bringing together people from different backgrounds into close, habitual contact – in ways in which they are on an even footing – will lead to intercultural engagement and the dismantling of cultural barriers (Jackman and Crane 1986; Pettigrew et al. 2011).
Contact Theory is hotly debated in the academy. Interdisciplinary scholars argue for and against the transformative capacities of intercultural proximity and mixity. For example, whilst Anderson (2011, 2004) considers particular spaces like market halls ‘cosmopolitan canopies’ within which people can mix, become comfortable with and gain greater understanding of people different from themselves, Valentine challenges this “worrying romanticization of urban encounter” (2008, 325). She argues that contact has the capacity to enflame prejudices and conflict and to reify perceived group differences (2008).70 Valentine (2008) also highlights that people do not necessarily mix across racialised boundaries just because they share a space (see also Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012). This debate has particular significance in schools. As I discussed in Chapter 1, schools are often targeted as sites for social cohesion
70 See also Hollingworth and Mansaray (2012) for review of these critiques in urban multiculture studies, particularly in the UK education context.
241 CHAPTER SEVEN under the assumption that “social mixing will lead to better understanding amongst pupils of each other's differences through social and cultural learning” (Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012, par. 1.2).
The development of two distinct forms of racialisation at Greendale – one for peers and one for those perceived as external to the school space – supports the idea that everyday contact (and visibility) had a positive effect on prejudice in Greendale peer sociality. Arguably, everyday contact with peers from diverse backgrounds led to creative adaptations of popular racisms and an ethos of mixity towards whoever was considered part of this peer culture. Within a contact theory frame, students’ perceived lack of contact with Aboriginal Australians, in particular, maintained prejudiced and othering views about this ‘out-group’. Whether or not the positive effects towards the ‘in-group’ (visible, included peers) can be scaled up outside of Greendale High will be considered in the final section of this chapter. Contact Theory, thus, offers one useful analytical framework for understanding students’ uneven practices of racialisation and inclusion. As the next section examines, the conceptual division seemed to students make between ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘Indigeneity’ may be another key frame to understanding why hostile and/or exclusionary sentiments towards Australia’s First Peoples endured and were authorised in this culturally diverse social world.
Multicultural vs. Indigenous Divisions: Who Belongs?
Echoing the distinctions made in academia, where multicultural ‘Anglo-Ethnic’ relations are separated from Indigenous affairs, many Greendale students seemed to be operating under these divisions. Indeed, the year 12 curriculum reinforced these divides. Students covered the unit on Aboriginal cultures before turning to a unit on ethnicity, in which multiculturalism was the focus. In an introductory year 12 class covering the theme ‘what is culture’, Mr B asked students to brainstorm attributes of Australian identity including Australian celebrations. One student put up his hand and asked whether the teacher was talking about multicultural or Indigenous culture. In fact, the Mr B was looking
242 CHAPTER SEVEN for neither, authorizing only quintessential ideas of white Australian national identity, like surfing and drinking beer at a barbeque. It is interesting that this student (from a Moroccan background) did not perceive of Australian culture outside of its multicultural make-up. It is further revealing that Indigenous cultures were positioned as distinct from a multicultural culture.
These divisions informed students’ constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ discussed earlier. In classroom discussion of Aboriginality, Anglo-Australians and students with migrants backgrounds came together against Aboriginal Australians. Similar to the ways in which students watching the Cronulla Riots documentary (Chapter 6) bonded together over laughing at an effeminate man, rather than as connecting as racial subjects, in classes on Aboriginality often peer solidarity seemed to be produced and their own belonging and authority maintained through invoking Aboriginal people as an irreconcilably different out-group. In such moments, divisions between culturally diverse peers, including spatial differentiation and uneven practices of Othering, were flattened; even migrant black peers most commonly rendered Other at Greendale were included within a multicultural ‘us’.
Black vs. Black
As described in Chapter 3, at Greendale ‘black’ typically referred to black- skinned students from African backgrounds and in reference to black popular culture. At times, it could also include peers from Maori and Islander cultures. It was difficult to distinguish exactly what criteria were used to constitute blackness, but they seemed to include ideas about skin colour and cultural practices (see Chapter 3). The label ‘black’ did not usually include Aboriginal Australians possibly because they were simply not considered as relevant, they were often invisible (including for their white skin), and because they were marked as a separate category from ‘black’ migrants. This distinction was reinforced across the curriculum as teachers taught students to refer to Aboriginal Australians as Aboriginal or ATSI (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders), not black. This likely explains one student’s self-correction detailed
243 CHAPTER SEVEN in the first ethnographic vignette: “black people…Aboriginal people I should say”.
Previous chapters revealed how black migrant peers and black people more broadly were rendered most abstract and Other by many Greendale students. When talking about dating, black people were spoken about in particularly exoticising ways (Chapter 4), references to the word ‘black’ cued jokes about racism and black coolness (Chapter 5) and Jase talked about black peers to prove his cosmopolitan competencies (Chapter 6). However, when classroom curriculum made Aboriginal Australians relevant, these lines of ‘us’ and ‘them’ were redrawn. In the first classroom discussed, a student said “why can’t they just be like other black people”. In this way, whilst black migrants were generally rendered the most Other, this shifted when Indigeneity was pitted against the multicultural. Black peers from migrant backgrounds appeared to be what Back terms “contingent insiders” (1996, 69).
Across this thesis, racialised binaries structuring school life have shifted repeatedly. At some moments students’ social world was broken into ethnic/white, black/white and black/non-black or at other times certain racialised identities were singled out among friends. Here, not only is Aboriginal black/migrant black made a salient division, so is Indigenous/non- Indigenous or what might otherwise be termed Indigenous/Multicultural. By invoking an Indigenous/Multicultural division, the vocal Greendale students – from a range of backgrounds – united themselves against the ‘real’ Other. I would suggest this acted to flatten their own differential claims to power and belonging at school and to claim authority to dictate the terms of legitimate behaviour in the Australian community. This complicates Hage’s (1998) idea of ‘White Nation’, a highly influential conceptual analysis of white hegemony and multicultural belonging and inclusion in Australia.
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‘White Nation’ or ‘Multicultural Nation’?
According to Hage (1998), those who have substantial claims to whiteness often position themselves as managers of the nation. He terms this the ‘white nation fantasy’. He argues that some ‘white’ people consider themselves “the overwhelming occupiers of the centre of national space” which grants them the managerial rights over the nation, including positioning ‘ethnics’ as “objects to be governed” (1998, 19 & 17). Whether espousing positive or negative views towards migrants and multiculturalism, Hage argues that white Australians reveal their sense of being the masters of the nation. However, in the Greendale context, I suggest that there emerged the possibility of a ‘Multicultural Nation’ imaginary.
Hage’s concept of ‘White Nation’ was largely developed on the basis of interview research with Anglo-Australians in the 1990s. Whilst ‘White Nation’ has been a valuable analytical tool for understanding multicultural and racist logic in Australia, it is worth reconsidering this theorisation in the context of contemporary multicultural Australia which includes much more diverse voices. As Bottomley (2000, 268) critiqued in a collection of responses to ‘White Nation’, Hage’s theorisation does not well account for how non-Anglo- Australians “sustain, resist, and alter relations of dominance”. Collins (1999, 391) also notes that the concept of ‘White Nation’ creates a false sense of “White unity” that fails to recognise the unevenness of white experiences and access to power and the important role migrants have played in the development of the multiculturalism agenda.71
In ‘White Nation’, Hage (1998) argues that claims to national belonging and managerial authority over the national space derive from the accumulation of whiteness. According to Hage, traits that can be converted into national belonging include, for instance, an Australian accent and Christian religious
71 Collins (1999) considers the omission of Aboriginal people a significant conceptual limitation in White Nation’s exploration of discourses on whiteness in Australia (which as I noted earlier, Hage [1998] himself acknowledges).
245 CHAPTER SEVEN beliefs (see also McLeod and Yates 2003). Within this frame, students at Greendale had differential claims to whiteness and belonging to the nation, coming from a range of different linguistic and religious backgrounds, having lived in Australia for differing lengths of time and having different racialised bodies.
Yet in the school classrooms I observed, students from a range of backgrounds revealed a ‘managerial hand’ (Hage 1998, 27-57) mentality towards Aboriginal Australians, regardless of the strength of their claims to whiteness or Australianness. Interestingly, students’ authoritative claims about who and what is legitimate within Australia were not necessarily calling for assimilation into whiteness; migrant black people who were usually considered Other were included within the multicultural ‘us’. Rather, like the ‘ethos of mixity’ described in Chapter 3, it had assimilatory tenors but with a multicultural twist. In this aspect of school life, we could argue that Greendale High more closely resembles a ‘Multicultural Nation fantasy’. An evocative illustration of this was the moment in class, as described earlier, when two students from white/‘wog’ and Indian heritages were happily sharing in a curry sandwich – an amalgamation of white bread and last night’s dinner – whilst claiming the role of arbiters of inclusion and acceptability in the Australian community. This felt symbolic of how multiculturalism at Greendale had become a banal and generally convivial part of school life from which Aboriginal people were passively or aggressively excluded. Within Greendale’s ‘Multicultural Nation’ students from diverse background converged as subjects (‘us’), at the expense of Aboriginal objects (‘them’). In other words, Aboriginal people were objects to be included or excluded at the whim of a united body of multicultural governors.
Hage’s concept of the ‘White Nation fantasy’ was partly symptomatic of what he calls “a discourse of Anglo decline” where Anglo-Australians felt like they were losing control of the nation and of a national identity and culture in face of multiculturalism (1998, 179-186; see also Hage 2003). Decades later and in the
246 CHAPTER SEVEN context of Greendale where cultural diversity seemed to be a banal, normalised part of everyday life, Anglo students’ behaviour was not necessarily informed by this point of view. The fantasy of ‘White Nation’ may have been diminished at Greendale High where no racialised group was able to claim outright numerical or social power and where racial power was distributed in complex ways, inflected by class, gender and sexuality politics, as explored in Chapter 6. Returning to the idea of “(multi)cultural capital” (Reay et al. 2007, 1055) briefly considered in the previous chapter, accumulating ‘white’ cultural capital may not have always been the (only) means to secure belonging, power and social status at Greendale. In fact, it seemed possible to accumulate too much whiteness or Australianness at Greendale (and risk being labelled a bogan).
In this context, it is possible that students developed a shared, albeit uneven, sense of belonging and authority to dictate the terms of acceptability at school and when imagining the wider community more abstractly. Milena, Jase and Gamze, to name a few students discussed in this thesis, unabashedly dictated the terms of belonging and acceptability at Greendale. Milena acted as if she had the right mix of (multi)cultural capital for her social circles: toughness, urban savvy, black boyfriends and an intercultural friendship set. This capital might have bolstered her claims to more conventional national belonging through her Australian accent, having been born and raised in Australia and her less stigmatised racialisation (‘wog’) than newer migrant groups. Regardless, Milena’s social positioning, inflected by ideas about class and ethnicity, seemed to gain her social cachet. In the conflictual exchange that Jase recounted to me – slurs related to being gay and fat – the ways he spoke suggested that they nevertheless treated each other as “as equally legitimate players” (Harris 2009, 201) in the school space. None of the conflicts I witnessed or heard about among peers at Greendale High invoked racism to render their peers inferior or to questions their right to share the school space; their belonging or acceptability in terms of citizenship in a white dominant nation, and a school space inflected with these racial power dynamics, was not called into question. Harris (2009, 201) argues that when young people from diverse
247 CHAPTER SEVEN backgrounds configure conflict on “equal footing”, they “encounter and produce one another as multicultural citizens”, and by doing so, decentre white hegemony. In this way, Greendale students’ ability to subvert popular racisms, avoid (directly) racialised conflict and produce a narrative of a shared multicultural identity seems transformative.
The concept of a ‘Multicultural Nation’ imaginary has been useful for interrogating the logic that sustains Aboriginal exclusion, alongside other forms of racialised inclusion. Whilst it may not inflect broader social relations outside of Greendale, particularly in the current climate of nationalist resurgence and a retreat from multiculturalism by the Australian government, the narrative of a shared multicultural identity typically framed peer sociality. This is in many ways positive, speaking back to socio-political anxieties about social cohesion in multicultural places. Peer sociality at Greendale was precariously inclusive of (or indifferent to) Muslims, Afghanis, Indians and Africans, “key out-groups in contemporary Australian society” (Grigg and Manderson 2015, 197). However, the development of a ‘Multicultural Nation’ ethos or forms of ‘multicultural capital’ may also have simultaneously sustained the irrelevance, inferiorisation or exclusion of Aboriginal people categorised as ‘Indigenous’ and positioned them as beyond the boundaries of Greendale High. Without (perceived) everyday contact or a sense of common ground, the robust racist attitudes about Aboriginal people that circulate in Australian society may have been left intact – falling outside the remit of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ at Greendale.
The way in which some Greendale students spoke about Aboriginal Australians in the abstract in negative ways also calls into question whether or not students’ precariously inclusive, subversive and transformative behaviours towards their peers were scaled up beyond the gates of Greendale High, to people they did not know as well. I turn now to exploring the significance of students’ uneven practices of racialisation for understandings the relationship
248 CHAPTER SEVEN between racism and conviviality in young lives within and beyond the confines of Greendale.
‘Racism doesn’t happen here’: But Elsewhere?
As I have illustrated across this thesis, many Greendale students regularly acted as if (and said) racism was not a significant problem at Greendale High, that cultural diversity was a reasonably unremarkable part of everyday life and that Greendale had a friendly peer environment overall. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, Milena, Emily and Daxon all recounted stories about racism but significantly they were all explained as occurring outside of the school, and not involving tensions between Greendale High peers. They spoke about racist fighting and being made to feel uncomfortable on the basis of cultural background or intercultural dating as a part of suburban life and characteristic of less diverse schools. Aisha’s experience of being called Afghan by her soccer coach did happen at school, however it did not occur between peers. Through these comments, students implicitly and explicitly characterised Greendale’s peer social world as a ‘safe haven’ from these concerns and distresses.
The discursive treatment of Aboriginal Australians by some Greendale students did not fit with this image of Greendale life. Applying a Contact Theory perspective (Allport 1954), this differential practice of racialisation may have emerged because non-Indigenous students had not had the opportunity (or realise they had) to get to know Indigenous peers, learn about each other and dismantle stereotyped, prejudiced beliefs. This is suggestive that the way students’ oriented towards school friends and peers may have been different to how they operated in other social spaces outside of school, outside of the friendships they had developed through school. As Bennett and colleagues explain, high school can be:
a protected and ‘safe’ sociable space in which young people are able to learn from and work with each other, while acknowledging tensions and awkwardness, but the way in which those experiences translate into their
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other worlds (and other places) is not always straightforward (2016, 13).
The differential treatment of those deemed ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ Others (Wise 2005) has been identified in multiple studies of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ with little evidence of the transferability of positive attitudes (Wise 2005; Wessendorf 2013; Clayton 2009; Tyler 2016). Based on her interview research with Australian youth, Harris (2016b, 513) concedes that whilst intercultural friendships might provide the foundations for learning about other cultures and fostering social cohesion, these more natural and ‘accidental’ means of accepting culturally different peers “may prove difficult to scale up.” In his ethnographic research within two London housing estates, Back found that the “locally achieved inclusion” of black youth in a shared space could co- exist with exclusionary ideas about black people in other places (1996, 72). He explains that young people had configured inclusion, or “neighbourhood nationalism”, around their immediate social relations that was not extended to include those outside of their local neighbourhood (1996, 53). Their research findings call into question whether or not Greendale students’ ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ attitudes and practices – honed through socialising together or co-existing side-by-side in a generally convivial culturally diverse school – were reflected in students’ engagement with ‘abstract Others’ in other contexts.
As noted in Chapter 2, my ethnographic research was unable to expand to students’ social lives outside of the school and its nearby surrounds and therefore I can only briefly explore this idea of transferability here. As briefly discussed in Chapter 5, Milena told me about a time when she and Bec witnessed a girl’s hijab flying off in the wind outside the local shopping centre. Bec allegedly laughed and told the girl not to bother putting it back on. In recounting this incident, Milena acknowledged that Bec was racist, but stated that she agreed with her. As we have seen, Milena often showed her understanding of what was socially sanctioned behaviour and discourse and purposefully flouted it. In this instance, this expressed attitude towards this Muslim girl seemed more hostile and did not reflect Milena or Bec’s usual
250 CHAPTER SEVEN behaviour towards Muslim peers at school. At school, Bec went out of her way to interact with hijab-wearing students in the lower courtyard, introducing herself and trying the home-cooked Afghani food they had brought for lunch. There were many Muslim boys in Bec and Milena’s friendship circle and they often spent evenings together smoking shisha at a local shisha lounge. As noted in Chapter 4, Milena also reached out to Aisha to invite her to shisha with them – “it’s part of your culture,” she explained.
In the case of Bec, outside of the ‘cosmopolitan canopy’ (Anderson 2004) of Greendale High or outside of the friendship networks she had developed, racism might appear in conventional forms. Yet this was one of the only incidents involving racism that Milena chose to share with me. Others encounters might suggest that Bec and Milena engaged more positively with culturally diverse strangers. As I will consider further in Chapter 8, research which traces the relationship between peer relations and norms developed in school and differing sets of relationships in other social and physical spaces in young lives would be highly significant to understanding whether or not these ‘achievements’ of multicultural living, including ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’, can be scaled up or have longevity in the years after leaving school. Research that specifically focuses on whether positive contact with Aboriginal peers diminishes racist attitudes towards Aboriginal Australians more generally would also be highly valuable.
Conclusion
This chapter provides a sharp counterpoint to the theorisations of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ and other ways in which young people’s social relations complicate, challenge and advance current conceptualisations of racism. Whilst there were some positive framings, discourse about Aboriginal people – prompted by the curriculum content – usually aligned with popular racism towards Indigenous people identified across the literature. In particular, their discourses closely matched theorisations of new, modern racism in which
251 CHAPTER SEVEN racism is voiced through the language of cultural difference, individualism and economic pragmatism. Even those students who did not actively support racism towards Aboriginal Australians, nevertheless, showed how rampant anti-Aboriginal sentiment is within Australian society. Regardless of positive or negative framings, Aboriginal Australians were regularly positioned as distinctly Other – not like ‘us’ at all.
Comparing ‘racist talk’ about Aboriginal Australians to the relational practices and discourses among culturally diverse peers offers greater insight into the dynamics of conviviality and racism. A binary between conviviality and conflict that is presumed to exist a priori in social relations cannot account for more sophisticated and complex forms of convivial racism and articulate why the binary may exist and vanish at certain moments and within different configurations of peer relations. Theorising why this stark distinction existed between treatment of racialised peers and racialising discourse about Aboriginal Australians, two overarching conceptual frames were considered. Firstly, within Contact Theory students’ practices suggest that cultural barriers are eroded and racisms subverted through daily contact with diverse peers. Aboriginal Australians, perceived as existing outside of school life, did not receive this treatment. This is one theory for why hostile attitudes were reproduced unaltered and unabated.
Secondly, I reconfigured the notion of a ‘White Nation’ as another useful theoretical frame to conceptualising young people’s social practices. When Aboriginality was pitted against multiculturalism, many students banded together as a multicultural ‘us’ against the Aboriginal ‘them’. Exploring the idea of a ‘Multicultural Nation’ ethos helped to shed light on the existence of a convivial, cultural diverse youth culture which unsettled hegemonic ideas about whiteness and belonging, alongside a shared practice excluding Aboriginal people as irrelevant or demonised Others. Thus, a perverse cosmopolitan ethos may only apply to peers within the Greendale High School boundary and considered ‘us’ within Anglo-Ethnic understanding of
252 CHAPTER SEVEN multiculturalism. This raised questions about the ability of these locally produced ‘achievements’ of convivial (or indifferent) intercultural living to be scaled up beyond the peer relations of the school.
Students’ uneven practices of racialisation across schoolyard and classroom life have great significance for developing a concept of ‘racism’ that resonates with young people’s lived experience. The following chapter explores the implications of these findings for theorising about racism and opening up new avenues for conversations and approaches to ‘educating’ young people regarding racism and antiracism.
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CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusion: Rethinking Racism
In 2013, as I began my PhD, a teenage girl called an Aboriginal Australian football player an ape. Ironically, as noted in Chapter 1, this was at the ‘reconciliation’ round of the AFL. In 2017, when I came to write the final chapter of this thesis, news reports detailed further verbal abuse and even bananas hurled at Indigenous football players.72 Despite the 4-year interlude, almost exactly the same offensive incident had occurred, with the same media outcry, and with repeated calls from public figures for institutional and educational antiracist intervention. Here we are again. Whilst disheartening, this cyclicality reanimates the need to reconsider how we approach racism. It certainly calls into question the efficacy of current approaches to racism: why has nothing changed?
2016 also saw the release of a report in the US titled ‘The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation's Schools’ which found that antagonistic political discourses had breached the school gates, enflaming racism among school peers (Costello 2016). In the current Australian and international climate, there is a sense of urgency to inculcate young people with antiracist and socially inclusive values. As recounted in Chapter 1, the ‘ape’ incident in 2013 prompted the then Victorian state premier to fund school- based educational programs to combat racism. Australian scholars, too, identify education as key to being able to identify and work against racism (e.g. Mansouri and Jenkins 2010; Walton, Paradies, and Mansouri 2016; Walton, Priest, and Paradies 2013a; Forrest, Lean, and Dunn 2016; Dunn and Nelson 2011). Dunn and Nelson, for example, write that ambiguous episodes of racism require “considerable skills and education to recognise them as well as the
72 E.g. http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/port-adelaide-investigating-racist-taunts-aimed- at-eddie-betts-paddy-ryder-20170410-gvi8bi.html.
254 CHAPTER EIGHT confidence to name them as racist. Recognising and naming racism will rely somewhat on a person’s level of education” (2011, 592).
This thesis, whilst often troubled by racism, unsettles such simplistic and decontextualised understandings of racism and educational intervention. Dunn and Nelson’s (2011) line of argument fails to recognise the complex reasons beyond their theorising of a ‘lack of education’ that might explain why young people may not identify something as racist. Indeed, these chapters have detailed the high level of knowledge these young people had about formal, authorised discourses on multiculturalism and racism as well as more intimate forms of knowledge about their peers from diverse backgrounds. Dunn and Nelson’s (2011) unsupported claims about ‘level of education’ also have ageist and classist implications, framing young people, and particularly those from working-class families and areas, as being in need of greater educational intervention. Further, they do not specify what ‘education’ is required to counter racism.
Close attention to Greendale students’ discourses and practices provides new avenues for thinking about the place and meaning of racism in young lives. Indeed, through immersive ethnographic research I found that young people have much to teach scholars, educators and the broader community about issues of racism and negotiations of what Ang terms “togetherness-in- difference” (2003, 141). The chapters of this thesis have traversed the specificity, relationality and complexity of racialisation, examining exactly how ‘racism’ entered into peer sociality. In doing so, I have explored how students at Greendale High did and did not ‘get along’ and whether their social relations support calls for antiracist intervention or challenge current understandings of racism and its relationship to conviviality. What I found is that notions of ‘racism’ and what is ‘appropriate’ and ‘politically correct’ by scholars, teachers and popular orthodoxy did not necessarily align well with these young people’s social norms, perspectives and practices. Current framings of racism in ‘everyday multiculturalism’ literatures did not sufficiently explain the
255 CHAPTER EIGHT complexities of Greendale students’ social relations and the qualities of racialisation and racism across the daily flow of school life. This is problematic because without an adequate understanding of the multifaceted and complex ways in which racialisation operates in youth sociality, scholars and educators may miss the mark when working from the assumption that we are all talking the same language or share the same ‘rules of play’.
Through putting the voices, performances and experiences of young people front and centre in this thesis, I have illuminated the contextual meanings and configurations of cultural difference and cultural cachet, racism, conviviality and power and conflict in a multicultural place. I have also shed light on how racialisation with racist connotations could exist within a social world where racism was denied, downplayed or simply absent as a conceptual frame of reference. Drawing on my fieldwork materials and experiences and working with the literatures on everyday multiculture and racism, I have proposed alternative ways of theorising about racism and conviviality in peer sociality. In this concluding chapter, I bring together the ethnographically and theoretically informed arguments of this thesis to argue for the need for more expansive conceptual approaches to the emergence and significance of racism in youth multiculture – including the frame of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ – which in turn, have the potential to inform more effective antiracist, intercultural initiatives.
Getting Schooled: My Own Education into Racism
I began this thesis with accounts of my early experiences in the field. I was puzzled by the seemingly contradictory ways cultural difference was foregrounded and backgrounded in a fast-paced peer environment. Many teachers also expressed mystified curiosity about students’ racialising practices. As I have described, I was often shocked at the sometimes casual and blatant ways students invoked cultural difference or ‘nash’. “That’s racist!” I often thought to myself uneasily. However, sharing in young people’s everyday
256 CHAPTER EIGHT friendship dynamics, classroom banter, schoolyard experiences and personal struggles over 12 months at Greendale High enabled me to listen and observe beyond the initial impulse of labelling students’ practices “racist” or echoing teachers’ moral imperatives of “you can’t say that”. Being there, participating, listening and observing allowed the tacit and heterogeneous meanings behind their language, practices and experiences of racialisation to surface. It allowed me to recognise that what students said did not always match their more complex social practices. Rather than calling for urgent and blanket interventions, modes of sociality at Greendale highlight the need for more careful and nuanced consideration of the meaning of ‘racism’, ‘conflict’ and ‘conviviality’ in a multicultural youth culture. Their practices reveal both transformative and troubling ways of dealing with difference that highlight the need for differential and more expansive framings of racism – and indeed ways to counter racism.
The previous chapter revealed how starkly treatment of Aboriginal Australians in the abstract differed from everyday social relations between students from diverse backgrounds at Greendale. While talk about Aboriginal people in school classrooms often had hostile, conflictual and exclusionary qualities, this was not the case for how peers invoked cultural difference when interacting with one another in day-to-day school life. Although many scholars in urban and youth multiculture studies (e.g. Tyler 2016; Wessendorf 2016; Harris 2014) continue – whether explicitly or implicitly – to draw on understandings of racism as a form of conflict that is separate from more convivial orientations and encounters, this framework did not apply well to the inclusive forms of sociality between Greendale students. Moreover, as I will consider in greater detail later, the binary of racism/conflict vs. conviviality/cosmopolitanism did not help to illuminate or interrogate the logics that produced and sustained disparate forms of racialisation. I therefore argue that this conceptual frame is too simplistic, failing to capture many of the diverse logics and dynamics that occur at its points of convergence and divergence.
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Breaking The Rules: New Forms of Racialisation
This thesis has illuminated how racism and conviviality can be intricately linked in complex, sophisticated and problematic ways; students were not necessarily rebounding between ‘paradoxical’ modes of sociality as youth multiculture research suggests (e.g. Clayton 2009; Nayak 1999; Harris 2009, 2016a; Back and Sinha 2016). Talk about sex and dating that seemed to draw on racist ideas, for example, generated social bonding and was shaped by intimate relationships with culturally diverse others. Indeed, ‘conviviality’ among friends and classmates had racialising or racist tenors while ‘conflict’ was configured along other lines of difference – further unsettling the racism-conviviality binary. Reconciling this framing, I proposed the concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ as one useful conceptual entry point to assess and address issues of racism. A ‘rooted’ (in the Australian sense) or ‘fucked’ cosmopolitanism involves openness to, engagement with and knowledge about cultural difference and culturally diverse peers that is enmeshed with risk and tension and shaped by peer pressures and social experimentation. It also holds the potential to perpetuate problematic racist logics despite its convivial and inclusive manifestation. ‘Perverse cosmopolitanism’ not only enabled alternative readings of students’ racialised dating discourses that took into account their perspectives on peer sociality, but it also aided understanding of the significance of racialisation to friendships, the management of conflict and tension, indifference to difference, ideas of post-racial sociality and the valuing of cultural diversity. The ability for ‘racism’ to be part of a cosmopolitan and inclusive mode of sociality reveals a key reason why students might have downplayed or denied that racism was an issue at their school.
Despite the moral panic that often targets the Greendale region, Greendale was a school where by and large intercultural friendships were the norm and peers from different backgrounds were an accepted and valued part of the fabric and “vibe” of school life. Young people’s in-your-face talk of ‘nash’ existed congruently with generative ways of dealing with difference in intimate,
258 CHAPTER EIGHT convivial and inclusive ways. Students regularly demonstrated commitment to interculturality and cosmopolitan capabilities to navigate a culturally diverse peer-oriented environment where acceptance, coolness and group inclusion were paramount concerns. Friends and classmates were able to talk and act in ways that ‘sound’ or ‘look’ racist, but from many students’ perspectives these did not have racist intents or effects: they were practised in inclusive ways, often driven by an ethos that denounced racism and lauded openness to and mixity across ethno-racial, religious and cultural differences. With an overriding ethos that racism was wrong, and therefore something to be joked about among friends at school (or tease teachers about), conflict among peers turned on other points of difference. Many Greendale students had, thus, extended the possibilities of the appropriate and convivial.
Greendale students’ ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ ethos also challenges framings of ‘hipster racism’ as a white, middle-class practice along with interrelated ideas about (white) working-class racism. In many ways peer social relations contest students’ positioning as on the periphery of ‘cosmopolitan’ Melbourne; young people at Greendale were producing a dynamic ‘working-class (perverse) cosmopolitanism’ shaped by their intimate, engaged experience in a multicultural social world. In this allegedly ‘bogan’ territory – with all the stigma of racism and uncultured-ness that entails – students were working out transformative and subversive ways to engage with cultural difference and issues of racism.
These chapters have demonstrated how young people worked against colour- blindness, engaging head on with ‘difference’ in ways that hinted at both problematic and progressive engagement with diversity. I have suggested that through their anti-colourblind behaviour, some students normalised and valued cultural diversity and ridiculed racist prejudices and tropes. The fact that students from multiple backgrounds were involved in these practices also complicates conventional ideas that link racism with white hegemonic power. In some moments white power was turned on its head. Not only was
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‘multicultural capital’ often configured as currency, white students also faced stigma as uncool, uncultured and racist in a culturally diverse youth culture which championed (and sometimes fiercely protected) intercultural mixity. Whilst whiteness remained a significant force as the cultureless ‘norm’ from which ‘difference’ was measured, standard readings of white dominance and the invisibility of whiteness did not easily apply to Greendale High (see Frankenberg 1993, 2001). Indeed, at times students invoked a shared multicultural identity that I glossed as ‘Multicultural Nation’ in Chapter 7. Whilst students had seemingly been able to “rework the terms of racial inclusion” (Back 1996, 10) at times to include both Anglo and migrant peers, Aboriginal people – framed as ‘abstract Others’ – were excluded. In classroom discussions, the way racist talk about Aboriginal people clashed with students more frequent ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ practices has significant implications for concepts of racism and, in turn, approaches to antiracism.
The Continuing Problem of Racism(s)
Students’ practices, whether it came to organising the schoolyard, discussing dating, hanging out with friends or talking about Aboriginality, reveal how popular racism and dominant racial power relations had infiltrated the school boundary and inflected peer culture. Indeed, based in a disadvantaged and highly diverse outer suburb of Melbourne these young people were living on a fault line of deep structural racialised and classed inequalities. The continued existence of racial logics that informed their sexual, spatial and social relations and sense of belonging and comfort may have had negative pedagogical effects. Problematic ideas about Black, Afghani, South Asian and Muslim bodies particularly seeped into everyday conversations, often invoked in a peripheral way, stuck to gossip about sex and dating and performances of coolness. This thesis has highlighted the importance of disembedding these ideas through close attention to a diverse range of youthful social practices that may not be directly configured around cultural difference or manifest in ways that are easy to identify as racist or not.
260 CHAPTER EIGHT
The concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ is not meant to underplay the potential for racialising discourses and behaviours to have harmful impacts. Rather, it brings three significant points to the fore that I argue are critical for understandings of racism in youth multiculture. Firstly, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ highlights that some kinds of ‘racism’ may be an acceptable or ‘unpanicked’ (Noble 2009b) part of how young people share space. Finding ways to share a space involves experimentation and therefore the risk of failure. Interestingly, the student-made Year 12 graduation video ended with the motto “we had a crack”. This was a humorous, self-deprecating nod to students’ low expectations regarding their educational achievement. What this maxim also well captures, however, is that these young people were actively engaging with difference on a daily basis as part of being forced to co-exist at school. They lacked the “luxury of living respectfully at a distance or of creating a detached openness towards cultural others” (Harris 2009, 193). In this context, their ability to create a generally convivial atmosphere, albeit it embedded with problematic logics and exchanges, is a positive sign. After all, it is arguably much easier to always say and do the ‘right’ thing when not engaged in dealing with the complexities of everyday multiculture. The way many students configured conflict in particular suggests a hopeful youth culture in terms of racialised cultural difference, although it highlights concerning issues with other forms of bullying and peer pressures at high school.
Secondly, through the notion of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ I highlight that the language of racism – commonly defined as a form of exclusion, discrimination and conflict – may have little purchase for young people. Irrespective of students’ social norms, it is clear that racist ideas and stereotypes were influential in peer sociality and this thesis points to some of the racialised targets and circulating ideas that require antiracist attention. However, this thesis calls into question whether current framings of racism will be effective in addressing many of their subtle, embedded and convivial forms of racialisation. The messages students received from teachers about what was appropriate stood in striking contrast to a social environment characterised by much more
261 CHAPTER EIGHT complex relations yet little open conflict. Having canvassed students’ understandings of racism in the context of conventional definitions of racism, denial of racism was arguably not surprising. It was considered something that happened in the past, or elsewhere, restricted to negative views about black people, extreme acts of hostility, violence and discrimination and an individual pathology. By considering the experiences of those who were on the receiving end of racialising treatment, I have further suggested that while students may experience racism at school they do not necessarily understand it in such distinguished terms easily removed from all other experiences of pain, frustration, suffering and social survival. If we mean to work against racism, we need to develop language and concepts that speak to young people’s contemporary lived experience beyond prescriptive, narrow and moralising definitions of racism. In particular, the concept of ‘everyday racism’ (Essed 1991) with recognition of how racism and other forms of oppression and suffering accumulate like a ‘death by 1000 cuts’ would be useful to counter ‘frozen’ (Lentin 2015) framings of racism as a discrete and extreme experience.
Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ makes visible the moments when these more convivial and generative possibilities of racism disappear. This allows us to interrogate why racism may manifest in more conflictual, hostile and othering ways. To presume a conviviality-racism dynamic a priori does not allow critical exploration of the uneven racialising treatment of peers and ‘abstract Others’ across different contexts and why popular racisms are replicated or subverted in particular moments and relational contexts. Whilst many modes of relationality I have considered across this thesis complicate current theorisations of racism and conviviality in everyday multiculture, discourses about Aboriginal Australians aligned closely with the definition of ‘new racism’, based on economic rationalism and highly individualising arguments. In this thesis, I have suggested that Contact Theory (Allport 1954) might be an influential factor in these differences. Everyday interactions in enforced proximity may have broken down boundaries allowing cultural difference to become normalised and new forms of generative social
262 CHAPTER EIGHT practices and modes of multicultural inclusion to develop. The fact that Indigenous Australians were considered external to this social space, not as fellow peers, may have limited the development of more positive and less othering views about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In this context, the vehement and widely circulating racism directed at Aboriginal people in Australian society (as the AFL football incidents reveal) may not have endured.
This differential racialising treatment has serious implications for how to tackle racism. While it is not within the scope of this thesis to provide a sophisticated analysis of how school-based antiracist education practices may be improved, my research clearly highlights the need for antiracism measures to be contextual and multifaceted. For example, combatting problematic ideas that inform conversations about sexual desire between friends clearly requires a vastly different antiracist approach to that of challenging neoliberal, economic rationalist ideas about Aboriginal Australians. Following a brief discussion of some of the key questions and issues this research raises for antiracism and education, I turn to consider the implications of my findings for future research more broadly.
Setting Homework: Working against Racism
In the context of more inclusive forms of racialisation, the antiracist rationale that “you’ve got to teach people that racism is wrong and then they won’t be racist” (Bryan 2012, 611) will likely be ineffective. Attempts to change students’ ‘racist’ attitudes may fall on deaf or defensive ears; performances of racism did not often seem to be motivated by deep-seated ethno-racial and religious prejudice (although knowledge that others subscribe to these ideas was used to effect). Students were well-versed about racism and normative notions of what is appropriate and ‘politically correct’. The way they casually and frequently hurled around the word racism indicates their saturation in antiracist messaging that targets young people; it was an available and loaded term, used
263 CHAPTER EIGHT to effect. They chose to enact provocative ‘racist’ practices regardless. Simplistic calls for more ‘education’ are troubled in this context.
As I noted earlier, antiracist approaches in schools may benefit from including ideas of ‘everyday racism’ as well as developing differing ways to discuss inclusive/convivial and exclusive/conflictual forms of ‘racism’. Additionally, antiracist education may benefit from greater attention to the ways that students’ discourses could have “real material consequences” (Connolly 1998, 13) in systemic, structural ways. As Connelly explains:
For example, the more that Black people are portrayed by negative stereotypes such as being volatile, aggressive and untrustworthy, the more likely it is that employers will actively choose not to employ them. Similarly, the more that South Asian families are seen as culturally different, the more likely it is that other people will not want them to live next door (1998, 13).
However, this is not necessarily an easy teaching point. Classroom discussions about Aboriginality at Greendale indicate that students may be reluctant to take into account the pernicious historical, systemic and institutional ways in which racism operates and perpetuates social inequalities. Moreover, we must also keep in mind that student may be intimately aware of these systems of power, experiencing and witnessing these inequalities in their everyday lives; in this context, their production of racist humour and racist tropes is possibly a way to challenge these ideas (see Winkler-Reid 2015). At the same time, being exposed to class material and discussion about racism may be uncomfortable, upsetting and exhausting for students. This may explain why students often seemed to disengage from the class curriculum, either through slipping out when the teacher’s back was turned, playing on their phones or talking to their friends. Taking into account these complexities, working against racism in schools requires great sensitivity, contextual understanding and awareness of its capacity to backfire – as Ms F and I experienced when trying to counter negative ideas about Aboriginal people. Indeed, anti-Aboriginal attitudes only
264 CHAPTER EIGHT seemed to emerge as a reactionary effect in the classroom. Further research is required to explore more effective ways of addressing racism in a multicultural school context. As the development of a ‘Multicultural Nation’ ethos made visible, caution is also needed when promoting antiracism through multicultural celebration as this can have exclusionary impacts for Aboriginal Australians.
The contrasting racialisation of Aboriginal Australians also calls into question whether students’ inclusive, albeit problematic, forms of sociality can be scaled up beyond the schoolyard, beyond their social networks developed at school. This thesis could not trace students’ patterns of sociality far outside the school gates, nor has it been able to follow these students into other parts of their social lives. The school is one node within a wider nexus of sociabilities and experiences, and my research only focused on one year of high school life. In order to break the cyclical recurrence of racism, in addition to new approaches to challenging racism through school-based education, further research is needed to assess the durability and transferability of these ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ skills and investments beyond the gates of the schoolyard.
In doing so, it would also be valuable to consider whether the acceptance of cultural diversity and the diminishment of racism through educational interventions as well as intercultural friendships translate to a rise in antiracism. The casual ways in which Greendale student often invoked ethno- racial stereotypes as an uncritical ‘reflex’ or else as a ‘post-racial’ joke raises the question about whether or not their interpersonal interactions activated antiracist dispositions. Researching the effects of black and white friendships in America, Jackman and Crane have asked the question: “is the issue of equality tied to the issue of personal acceptance?” (1986, 463). Based on data from a national survey, they assert that while having black friends seemed to reduce white people’s negative feelings and beliefs about black people, it had little effect on white people’s prevalent opposition to government policies for racial equity (1986). Applying this finding to the Greendale context, is it possible that
265 CHAPTER EIGHT their ‘perverse cosmopolitan’ behaviour may better be characterised as having qualities of ‘non-racism’ rather than ‘antiracism’. Greendale students may have played with racist stereotypes in ‘friendly’ and ‘subversive’ ways according to the norms of their peer sociality, but without developing a politically active antiracist ethos that transcended their immediate social circles. Without such social activism it may be hard to dismantle the wider structural injustices that maintain racism.
School’s Out: Future Research
As Ortner writes, “eventually, the intense emotions of high school, of winning and losing, of inclusion and exclusion, of inhabiting ill-fitting identities, come to an end. There is nothing ever again quite like high school” (2003, 141). This thesis has captured the social lives and identities of a number of Greendale students in a year of their ‘becoming’. As I came to write this thesis, they had already moved on, having different life-altering experiences. I heard of friendship circles that were quickly disbanded. There were breakups and new loves. Maduka had a baby, Aisha got married, Jase fell in love with a woman and got engaged. Students enrolled in courses to become hairdressers, fire fighters, police officers and child-care workers or started working in retail. A few students went to university, while others moved back overseas, or told me tales of forays into party and drug culture.
Whilst the experience of high school comes to an end, the conceptual contribution of this thesis has relevance for future scholarship in Australia and in other countries. The critique I have made of the racism-conviviality binary and my development of the conceptual tool ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ have implications for methodological and analytical approaches to researching everyday multiculture. A more expansive attentiveness to the dynamics between ‘racism’, ‘conflict’ and ‘conviviality/cosmopolitanism’ will hopefully make visible and enable critical consideration of a range of different forms of racialisation that emerge in shared spaces of cultural diversity. These insights
266 CHAPTER EIGHT can, in turn, lead to the development of effective, responsive and differential antiracist measures.
The concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ can likely also be productively applied to understanding social spaces and relations that do not invoke racialised cultural difference. As hinted at by the repartee between Jase and his friends in Chapter 6, ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ may aid understanding of behaviours that seem sexist and homophobic from an etic perspective. Thus, this conceptual frame provides further avenues to examine how young people manage social change and confrontations with multiple forms of ‘difference’, including in more monocultural schools, in schools and neighbourhoods with different social class configurations and in other shared spaces like universities and workplaces. To understand how people navigate increasingly diverse workplaces and universities, future research that explores ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ within social relations between adults and across generations would also be valuable; the conviviality-racism binary may also impede understanding of how adults negotiate enforced proximity. Indeed, it would be particularly interesting to trace how Greendale students – part of the next generation of adult Australians – engage with difference over the coming years. What might an adult ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ look like?
The concept of ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’ evolved out of listening closely to young people’s perspectives on their social practices and the absence of the word ‘racism’ as an explanatory frame. While I attempted during my fieldwork and the writing process to highlight students’ voices and respect and account for their perspectives, more could be done to reduce the distance between their experiences and the ethnographer’s intellectual and theoretical gaze. Engaging in a more collaborative dialogue with young people in order to develop a language for conceptualising the enmeshed and uneven complexities of everyday racisms and cosmopolitanisms could have enhanced my research. While I hope to explore this in future research, my spoken word poem in the opening chapter of this thesis was an attempt to bridge this divide and find
267 CHAPTER EIGHT more creative and less textual (or less scholarly) ways to describe the tensions and possibilities of ‘living multiculture’ (Neal et al. 2013) in young lives. It seems fitting, then, to end this thesis with a poem that Jase wrote and shared with me. This poem, called ‘The Truth in Youth’, was inspired by my research interest in ‘cultural diversity’ which, as I noted in Chapter 1, he thought boring as compared to everything else going on in students’ lives. His words below vividly highlight the need to respect the agency and creative capacities of young people, particularly as the voice of a new generation.
The Truth in Youth (written by Jase)
The truth in our youth? What is youth? Why is it called youth? When really it’s the euthanasia of our hopes and dreams It’s the best and worst time in our life and yet we don’t even have control of ourselves We have to conform to the tragic and uneasy state of being ‘just a child’ When our mind is mature and in a state of knowledge yet we still aren’t allowed to do as we want Or say as we want, or live as we want We are counselled by our parents We are medicated by society And controlled by the law But no, not the conventional law The law that says we need to eat, live and breathe having to keep in mind you’re just a ‘kid’ But the youth of today are here to spread the truth To lift ourselves up from this everlasting stereotype and show our true colours No mum, no dad, were not the kiddies you once knew We are the adults of tomorrow and it’s time for change We may not be able to vote to drink to go “hit the town” but we have a voice a voice so powerful not even god himself could prevent it from being heard Because our voice is our prophecy It’s what we were made to have Coded into our genetic gene-pool with characteristics like none of our ancestors.
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Appendix: Spoken Word Poem Transcript
The Poetry Foundation defines spoken word as “poetry intended for performance…characterized by rhyme, repetition, improvisation, and word play, spoken word poems frequently refer to issues of social justice, politics, race, and community”.73 Is it particular popular with young people as a form of radical and creative expression, with regular competitions and events across the globe. Jase shared with me a few of his spoken word poems – like the one that concluded my thesis – which inspired me to write one of my own. I was looking for a way to capture the energy of Greendale High, the burning research questions I had as well as the burgeoning perceptions I was forming about students’ lives. I was compelled to reject the formality of academic expression whilst in the midst of school life. I wrote the middle paragraph (beginning ‘These kids are living in diversity’) during my fieldwork. The voice moves from representing the ethnographer’s point of view to that of the students. I shared it with Jase and his friends one afternoon over shisha. They laughed a lot at the ‘pashing’ (Australian slang for tongue-kissing) section and said I got school life pretty much right. Later, I developed an introduction (Paragraph 1) and conclusion (Paragraph 3) in order to convey my research, including research aims, methods and significance, to audiences outside of Greendale High. Thus, there are some differences in tone and style.
73 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/glossary-terms/detail/spoken-word
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The Truth in Youth (written by Melinda)
So this research of mine, what am I doing and why? Well for starters I’m going to classes in a high school daily, dressed like a teenager with teenager behaviour. I slouch, I scuff my converses, I converse like a teen. I cut class with the smokers on the grass field. I field questions about homework, we eat home-cooked meals and sometimes the students open up and tell me how they feel. What is real – for them.
These kids are living in diversity in conditions of adversity and me, from this university, comes thirsty for knowledge, for understanding how these young people live, belong and get along. 'The Truth in Youth' as one young man titled my thesis. What he says and she says is: what's your nash? What nash do you pash? Fobs? Wogs? Sudos? Musos? What gets you most kudos? When the bell rings, you grab your things, you hop in cars, jump on buses and wander the streets, but who do you meet? And is it a feat to negotiate these social worlds and terrains? How do you train for the fights, the shite that comes your way – and it is a long way from Pakistan and Afghanistan to come to this hood and feel misunderstood. Do you find yourself in the selfies you take, the friends you make, the drugs you take through which to escape, the clothes you take off...you slut! I saw it on SnapChat. God you looked fat! Do you feel trapped in these categories of sexual activity, sexuality, ethnicity within the diversity of the municipality in which you find yourself serendipitously? Play football you faggot, don't go to class, and don't you lose that social mask. But the task is to find connection – moments of defection from social convention – open up and share not only your despair but to care for one another despite the othering that you keep encountering, finding things in common. Pass the biriyani, you should come to my party or we can study in the library. Just try me. Respect me, protect me, recognise me and value me. Coz, that's all we each want, yeah?
But why should you guys care about what’s happening there? Well, remember the news about those ‘terrorist’ youths and the youth of today who are disengaged, selfish and racist, well let’s face it, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. But is it true? And if so, well what should we do? Well I’m finding out through studying the lives of teens on an everyday basis when they encounter the faces of people with different beliefs and histories and unravel the mysteries of living together with difference.
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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s: Herron, Melinda
Title: Reconfiguring racism: youthful dynamics of conflict and conviviality in a culturally diverse, working-class high school
Date: 2017
Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/197681
File Description: Reconfiguring Racism: Youthful Dynamics of Conflict and Conviviality in a Culturally Diverse, Working-Class High School
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