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University of Southern Queensland Becoming Racially Aware: Explorations of Identity and Whiteness with Pre-service Teachers A Dissertation submitted by Jon Austin, Dip. Teach(Primary), M.Ed. For the award of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2001 i Abstract This dissertation reports on the use of dialogic forms of engagement with white pre-service teachers in exploring the processes and events that led to self-awareness of the racialised aspects of their personal identities. The nature of whiteness as a structural system of privilege and of white racial identity as an individual dimension of identity in the Australian context forms a major part of the contextual background to this study. The study concludes that white racial self-awareness is a necessary pre-requisite to white identity reconstruction and that certain types of experiences seem to provoke and promote this awareness. Giroux’s notion of identity trauma and Spivak’s ‘moments of bafflement’ provide major planks of the conceptual framework here. Based in life history techniques, the main evidentiary material was elicited by the use of learning conversations and was analysed with the assistance of the NUD•IST 4 software package. Considerable attention is paid to methodological issues of transcription, the role of the researcher and the incorporation of researcher presence into the study and the report thereof. ii Certification of Dissertation I certify that the ideas, experimental work, results, analyses, software and conclusions reported in this dissertation are entirely my own effort, except where otherwise acknowledged. I also certify that the work is original and has not been previously submitted for any other award, except where otherwise acknowledged. ____________________________________ _____________________ Signature of Candidate Date ENDORSEMENT ____________________________________ _____________________ Signature of Supervisor Date ____________________________________ _____________________ Signature of Supervisor Date iii Acknowledgments To my family, Helen, Sybilla and Hugo, who have been patient beyond belief. It's o.k. to be noisy around the house again. To Tony Rossi, a friend, fellow traveller, and confidante. To Frank Crowther, a colleague and friend, my supervisor who admitted he sometimes didn’t know what I was talking about and let me keep talking anyway. Thank you for your insights and your honesty. To the people who let me into their lives and who listened to parts of mine. May your teaching be all that you each believe it will be. To Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, the intellectual provocateurs who have challenged me to make something of my time. iv Table of Contents TITLE PAGE ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. ABSTRACT II CERTIFICATION OF DISSERTATION III ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IV TABLE OF CONTENTS V CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY 2 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IDENTITY IN AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY 2 RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY 4 ASPECTS OF THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 13 RESEARCH PROBLEM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 15 THE DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH 16 SUMMARY OF THE CHAPTERS 17 CHAPTER 2 RELEVANT CONCEPTUAL LITERATURE 20 THE STARTING POINT 20 IDENTITY AND UNCERTAINTY 23 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE OTHER 28 RACE AND ETHNICITY 32 WHITENESS AND WHITE ETHNICITY 37 TEACHING, TEACHERS AND WHITENESS 49 CHAPTER 3 CULTURAL AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONTEXT 51 INTRODUCTION 51 AUSTRALIAN WHITENESS 51 THE PERSONAL-PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT: THE UNIVERSITY AS A FIELD OF IDENTITY. 58 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS STUDIES: A CHALLENGING UNIT 59 CHAPTER 4 THE INQUIRY PROCESS: LITERATURE AND ENGAGEMENT 65 QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH 66 CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH 71 v LIFE HISTORY 73 TRUTH AND ITS REPRESENTATION 78 EVIDENCE GATHERING 86 INTERPRETATION OF EVIDENCE AND DATA ANALYSIS 89 SELECTION AND (RE)PRESENTATION 104 CONCLUDING COMMENTS 105 CHAPTER 5 TERESA 107 107 EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH RACE 112 CARTOGRAPHIES OF RACE: THE CAKE SHOP AND THE MILK BAR 117 ENCOUNTERING DIFFERENCE 122 MORE RECENT EXPERIENCES WITH RACE 124 WITNESSING RACISM 125 LEARNING TO BE THE OTHER 128 UNSETTLING IDENTITIES: THE 80146 EXPERIENCE AS RACIAL IDENTITY TRAUMA 128 WHITES, WHITENESS AND IDENTITY: A CONCEPTUAL WHIRLPOOL 134 ‘I KNOW I’M WHITE BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS’: IDENTITY AND UNCERTAINTY 144 WITNESSING RACISM, BUILDING RESISTANCE, FORGING PEDAGOGIC IMPERATIVES 151 CRITICAL PATHS TO RACIAL AWARENESS: A PLATFORM FOR WHITE IDENTITY RECONSTRUCTION 154 CHAPTER 6 FELLOW TRAVELLERS 155 INTRODUCING THE OTHER PARTICIPANTS. 155 AN EARLY IMMERSION IN THE LANGUAGE AND EFFECTS OF RACIALISED IDENTITIES 163 FREQUENT AND POWERFUL POSITIVE ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENCE ACROSS A NUMBER OF AXES, OFTEN IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY CONNECTIONS 168 BEING OTHERED AND AN OUTSIDER 172 PERIODS OF RUPTURE OF OR CHALLENGE TO SETTLED IDENTITIES 175 A SECURE SENSE OF PERSONAL IDENTITY 180 DEVELOPING AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHITENESS AND WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY 182 WORKING TOWARDS THE REDUCTION OR ELIMINATION OF DISADVANTAGE DERIVED FROM DIFFERENCE 189 REALISING THE IDEOLOGICAL KNIFE-EDGE POSITION OF TEACHERS AND THE POTENTIAL FOR EITHER HEGEMONIC OR TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE. 192 CHAPTERS 5 AND 6: CONCLUSIONS FROM THE STORIES 195 CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS. 204 LIVING AND IMAGINING WHITENESS 205 THEORISING WHITENESS 213 TRIGGERS AND PROVOCATIONS: PROCESSES AND STRATEGIES FOR RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING 213 vi LESSONS ABOUT IDENTITY: WHAT THE STORIES HOLD FOR EMANCIPATORY PEDAGOGY IN TEACHER EDUCATION 220 CONCLUDING PERSONAL THOUGHTS (A WORK-ALWAYS-IN-PROGRESS) 223 REFERENCES 229 APPENDIX 1 245 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS STUDIES (UNIT 80146) UNIT SPECIFICATION 245 APPENDIX 2 246 PRINCIPLES OF PROCEDURE 246 APPENDIX 3 249 CATEGORY DEFINITIONS 249 APPENDIX 4 251 CATEGORY LIST 251 vii Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Study In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) But knowing brings burdens which can be shirked by those living in ignorance. With knowledge the question is no longer what we know but we are now to do, and that is a much harder matter to deal with. It will continue to perplex us for many years to come. Henry Reynolds (1999 p. 257) Knowing, as Henry Reynolds points out in the epigram above, is a perplexing thing, and has become even more so for me as I have worked through the investigation that forms the essential focus of this thesis. At various times in this investigatory process, I have believed that I had come to know something, to be certain of the existence of a particular phenomenon or relationship, to have discovered the ‘facts’ of the matter. When I commenced this work some years ago, that was what I thought would be my purpose: to be able to discover a truth about the origins and causes of racism and to then be able to definitively present ‘an answer’ to that problem derived from what I now knew. What I have come to ‘know’ is something quite different and it is the aim of this thesis to present something of what I now know about racism, identity and trauma as well as about a process of self-enlightenment. In reality, what this thesis presents is more about what I have come to believe, hope and imagine. These seem not to be the ‘usual’ substance or focus of the doctoral thesis, but they seem to me to be the things about which I can confidently assert a claim to know. But to the start. The significance of identity in an age of uncertainty The clicking over of the clock to midnight on 31st December, 1999 signalled the start of a global celebration of a long process of the replacement of the old and certain by the new and the unforeseeable. Regardless of the arguments over the starting date of the new (Christian calendar) millennium, the arrival of the year 2000 released an energy and excitement that, in part, masked a degree of concern about who and what lay ahead and where the world was headed in this new era. It is fair to say that, for many people worldwide, the calendrical change from one era or epoch to another was merely a symbolic bookending of a preceding period of intense disruption - societal and personal - that had caused many to wonder not just ‘what 2 next?’ but ‘who next?’ The coinciding of very long-term and antagonistic forces of globalising economics and fragmenting national states produced a ‘series of jolts and jars and smashes in the social life of humanity’ (Economist, 11th October, 1930, cited in Kennedy, 1993, p 330) that have been reverberating around and throughout the world. Kennedy (1993, pp 330 ff.) documents a number of crucial features of this unravelling of certainty: a rapid rise in the world’s total population; rising demographic imbalances between rich and poor nations; technology explosions; environmental challenges and breakdown; new systems of production with the attendant restructuring of jobs and production relations; the communications revolution; the disintegration of feelings of national self-efficacy and control. For many in the world, this final feature - the sense of loss of national and community control over their own destiny is replayed at the personal level. In the Australian context, commentators have described the last two decades as constituting an age of the ‘end of certainty’ (Kelly 1992) and the Age of Anxiety and the Age of Redefinition (Mackay 1993). It is at this time that Australia, not alone in the world in this regard, is experiencing ‘unprecedented social, cultural, political, economic and technological change in which the Australian way of life is being radically redefined’; a time when ‘all Australians are becoming New Australians as we struggle partly to adapt to the changes going on around us, and partly to shape them to our own liking’ (Mackay 1993, p.6 emphasis in the original). Perhaps the one defining feature of the period of the late 20th century for many living in the (so- called) Western world is that of a pervasive sense of loss. Loss of anchors of certainty about values, morality and justice.

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