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

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

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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

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. Loss of markers of trustworthiness of and certainty in social processes and organisations. Loss of the security that comes from established and settled senses of identity, not just of self but of others as well. Again, in the Australian context, Mackay claims that the one of the most significant features of the current time is the loss of national and personal identity: ‘growing numbers of Australians feel as if their personal identities are under threat... ‘Who are we?’ soon leads to the question, ‘Who am I? ’ (Mackay 1993, p.19). In such a climate of clamouring for self-definition, the importance of reflection on self and Other becomes paramount. Questions of identity are taking top billing in the postmodern Theatre of the Uncertain.

Rationale for the study

Societal

Racism remains one of the most vigorous expressions of social discrimination, subjugation and oppression, morphing into new shapes and forms as social relationships and mores are shattered and reformed in the postmodern and post colonial eras. But in all of this, racism retains its essential need to proscribe some in order to affirm others. That is, while there continue to exist inequalities and exploitation, there continues to exist the need to rationalise and excuse by way of naturalising a relationship of injustice. The rationalisation process throws up the need for racism, sexism, ableism and the like - all the descriptors and categories of difference from a norm that is usually invisible, unnamed and unchallengeable. From this perspective, race becomes one of a number of social fictions necessary to allow for the justification of the denigration or sub-humanising of certain identifiable groups in order that their exploitation continue with relatively clear consciences for the beneficiaries of the process. Racism throws up the need to establish and assign racial identities, not the reverse.

Matters of race are currently among the most visible social issues facing the world: indeed, for some, racial imagery is central to the very organisation of the modern world (Dyer 1997, p 1) From the death in 1999 of a black South African by being chained and dragged to his death behind a truck driven by his white employer - an act of brutality previously rehearsed by three white men in the United States of America with the same horrifyingly fatal results - to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns pursued in the Balkans. From the overthrow of the Fijian government because of the equality of treatment accorded by the Fijian Constitution to Indian Fijians to the rioting of ‘illegal immigrants’- all non-white- kept for some years under security guard in containment camps in South Australia, race presents as a major point of societal stress and rupture. To many, it is perhaps the major point of accumulation of prejudice, proscription and paranoia in the contemporary world.

In Australia, the most obvious arena for the development and display of racism is that of White - Indigenous∗ Australian relations. An almost-national re-consideration of the effects of two hundred and twenty-odd years of permanent white settlement in Australia on the country has been underway since the bicentenniel anniversary in 1988 of the first permanent white settlement on the shores of what is now known as Sydney Harbour.

∗ Out of respect for their cultures and as recognition of prior ownership of and connection to the land now known as Australia, throughout this thesis I use capitalisation for any words referring to the inhabitants of Australia prior to the arrival of European settlers. This includes ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous Australians’ as well as ‘non-Indigenous Australians’ as a differentiating term. 4

This process has focussed on everything from the effects of the application of European-derived conceptions and uses of the natural environment to the core damage done to pre-existing cultures and the Indigenous population by virulent forms of European imperialism, both physical and cultural.

Rendered legally invisible in 1788 by the doctrine of terra nullius, Indigenous Australians have come to more recently constitute a conscious presence in the life of the Australian and world communities through campaigns over such matters as land rights (Native Title), the Stolen Generation and Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. They have also provoked the development of a self-awareness on the part of non-Indigenous Australians that race is a characteristic attaching to all. In other words, white Australia has caught a glimpse of itself, and for some the image is not all that attractive.

This reaction is seen in the Reconciliation movement, in the number of groups formally apologising to Indigenous Australians for past injustices perpetrated by the white community on the Aboriginal people of this country, and in reviews and re-writes of histories and school curricula. (While these expressions of concern about and regret for actions from the past are important steps in the building of a more racially-equitable society, the more difficult and imperative step is that of acting to end present and continuing injustices and discrimination).

Other axes of race relations also present as significant sore points in the egalitarian nation mythology that comforts the Australia psyche. Since the abandonment of the formal political White Australia policy in the mid-1960’s, immigration policy has become an increasingly contested area. After bi-partisan flirtations with broader notions of a multicultural future for Australia that occurred during the 1970’s and 1980’s, the cultural (read ‘racial’) composition of Australia has arisen as a major electioneering platform for the major political parties and has, arguably, spawned a number of new parties and organisations and propelled them into the public arena with great bravado and speed.

What is unspoken in the rhetoric of Australian multiculturalism is that core culture - that which ‘we all share’ - remains essentially European-based and derived; it is a culture of whiteness that requires a surrender of much that constitutes cultures of Other origin and an embrace of much that is for members of those cultures, foreign.

For some sections of the Australian community, such reconstructions of racial demographics and race relations are fraught with difficulties and present previously unimaginable challenges to White hegemony. For an apparently sizeable minority, Australia is and remains a (largely

unacknowledged and certainly unnamed) White nation and any changes to this are seen to inevitably rupture the stability and integrity of the society.

In such a climate, racism presents as a matter of increasing concern. One of the most obvious and common responses from such groups of disaffected harbouring an increasingly intense white angst has been explicitly racist acts. Groups espousing explicitly racist views about non- whites are more and more visible and active. Some commentators argue that racism in Australia is perhaps no more prevalent now than in previous decades of this century, but that it is now far more organised (Adams 1999) and making effective use of new forms of communications technologies.

Racism and racially-based violence – both physical and symbolic – have surfaced as major points of social concern in contemporary ‘Western’ societies in general, and in Australia in particular. Much has been written about the emergence of what Giroux has termed ‘a new racist discourse’ (Giroux 1997, p 287) and in the Australian context, the recent and continuing experience of the public articulation of this discourse has led to clear demarcations within the community between the neo-racists – epitomised by and demonised as the One Nation party, but by no means confined to that peculiar alliance of the various disaffected – and their opponents.

Considerable ‘official’ evidence exists to suggest that acts of racism and racist-based violence are on the increase in Australia. Statistics of the number of complaints made to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) show a clear increase in the number of reported race-based discriminatory events and occurrences (See Table 1). Year to June ATSI∗ NESB∍ ESB# Not stated Total

1991 121 135 79 17 352 1992 109 130 55 42 336 1993 83 228 53 6 370 1994 103 158 75 123 458 1995 124 273 117 193 707 1996 110 250 90 133 583 Table 1: Complaints received under the Racial Discrimination Act between July 1991 and June 1996 (Source: HREOC 1996, p 31)

∗ ATSI stands for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ∍ NESB stands for Non-English Speaking Background # ESB stands for English speaking Background

The significant increase in the number of complaints in 1995 reflects the effect of changed legislation that allowed for specific types of racial hatred complaints to be lodged with the Commission for the first time. The number of complaints shown for that year reflects a one-off release of a backlog of these complaints. The following year’s figures show a return to a more ‘typical’ number of complaints, maintaining a general increase over the period covered by the table.

This trend to increasing numbers of race-based complaints further intensified in the following year (1997). In HREOC’s 1997-98 annual report, Race Discrimination Commissioner, Zita Antonios, notes that while ‘formal complaints statistics are notoriously unreliable indicators of the many forms of racism in our community’(p 90) , there has nevertheless been an alarming increase in complaints of racial discrimination received by HREOC's central office, these having ‘sky-rocketed’ by almost 150% over a three-year period (Green Left Weekly, September 23, 1998). Such an increase might be the result of factors such as greater awareness that racially- based discrimination is unacceptable and illegal, or it might reflect greater confidence on the part of those making a complaint (Matheson 1991) but, regardless, there is a clear public perception that racism and race-related acts of violence in Australia are increasing. In the HREOC annual report (1997-98), Human Rights Commissioner, Chris Sidoti, makes the point that ‘racism and intolerance are stains that have discredited much of our history and continue to infect our present.’ (p 66).

Anecdotal evidence collected by agencies such as HREOC further establish the virulence of racism in the Australian community: …anecdotal evidence…suggests for example that where race discrimination might occur in employment, high levels of job insecurity and scarce opportunities for alternative employment have resulted in a real reluctance by employees to lodge complaints for fear of victimisation. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that where racist abuse or racist harassment occurs in public this is frequently committed by strangers and in the absence of a name and contact details it is simply not possible for a complainant to name and therefore pursue a remedy.(HREOC 1998, accessed online, unpaginated).

In fact, the visibility of race-based conflict in the Australian community on the mid-90’s led the Race Discrimination Commissioner to describe the race debate in Australia as having escalated to new proportions, attracting not only domestic but international attention:

Feelings on race issues have seemed more heated than ever, and I continued to be asked time and again at home and overseas whether Australia is a racist nation.(HREOC 1998, p90).

In the popular (white) imagination, racism has emerged as both a significant social phenomenon and as a feature of Australian society that needs direct, visible and immediate

political attention. (In the non-White experience, racism and race-related violence are very much long-term, ever-present features of life even in a so-called multicultural society.)

At the Commonwealth level, the current Commonwealth (Federal) government has reacted to increasing community concerns about racism and race-related violence by introducing a specific anti-racism program (Living in Harmony http://www.immi.gov.au/harmony/index.html) which has as its focus the development of community (read ‘racial’) harmony. This program is a response to an acknowledged sense of unease about the changing racial (if not necessary cultural) demographics of Australian society on the part of an electorally-significant percentage of the population. The program is based upon a number of principles that assert the value of a culturally-diverse community as well as exhorting the discounting of national racial memory (‘There is no role for nostalgia’ http://www.immi.gov.au/harmony/index.html).

In terms of action to reduce or eliminate racism, the objectives of this program are presented as a challenge all Australians to:

1. take a stand against racism, prejudice and intolerance;

2. help build a peaceful and productive future for our children by setting an example of how to live in harmony, making the most of our racial, cultural, social and religious diversity; and

3. put into practice the best of traditional Australian values – justice, equality, fairness and friendship.

(Living in Harmony http://www.immi.gov.au/harmony/index.html)

It is in the context of such a public and political environment that the potential for making long- term inroads into the scourge of racism in contemporary Australia now presents itself. The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs responsible for the conduct of the Living in Harmony program at the time of writing acknowledges that any long term impact on the battle against racism and race-related violence can only be achieved through direct broadly-based community education activities, and, in particular, with a number of identified target groups.

The community consultations and the research indicate that projects developed as part of the living in harmony initiative should target all Australians but with specific emphasis on involving: • youth groups • school communities, including parents, because of the potential to influence young people. (Living in Harmony http://www.immi.gov.au/harmony/index.html)

Schools present as sites of paradox in considerations of the practice and experience of racism and the development and application of successful anti-racism measures. On the one hand, schooling plays a major role in the socialisation of children into the cultural mores of a society, and it is through the formal and informal, or hidden, curriculum that students come to be exposed to potent formative images and messages about race and difference (see, for example, Austin 1996). Ladson-Billings succinctly links schools to racism: ‘racism exists in society and therefore the school as an institution of society is influenced by racism’ (Ladson-Billings 2000, p 207)

On the other hand, schools and schooling offer important possibilities for the development of anti-racist work. In other words, schools both perpetuate racism and at the same time offer hope for its elimination.

That racism in the school environment is emerging as a feature of school life that can no longer be seen as an isolated phenomenon of relative overall insignificance is evidenced by the recent commissioning of a major research project on racism in Queensland schools by the Anti- Discrimination Commission of Queensland. This project has attempted to identify the extent to which racism is a feature of daily life in schools as well as to capture what has been termed ‘best practice’ in combating racism. The final project report itself is yet to be made publicly available - a major launch of the report and follow-up work based upon its recommendations is planned to coincide with the beginning of the 2001 school year - so consequently it is not possible to draw directly from it or to cite it formally.

The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission sees anti-racist education in schools as ‘an investment in the future of Australian society and asserts that ‘recent studies suggest that young people are generally very committed to non-discrimination and are comfortable with Australia’s cultural diversity’ (HREOC 1998, p 91).

In summation, social division by categories of race and the violence - physical and symbolic - of racism are as visible and as virulent as they have ever been. This study approached the problem of overcoming racism from the perspective of charting the path to racial awareness of six pre-service teachers with a longer-term view to make a contribution to the development of anti-racist pedagogy.

The Personal Dimension

This thesis is also the product of a personal involvement with and commitment to socially-just practices in general and anti-racist work in education in particular. I had become interested in

the broad social betterment aims of what has become known as critical pedagogy many years ago. The term ‘critical pedagogy’ is something of an umbrella caption for a range of educational practices that have as their basic purpose the social betterment of members of currently marginalised, disadvantaged, oppressed and exploited groups in society. (See, for example, Freire 1998; Giroux 1988; McLaren 1995; Weiler & Mitchell 1992). Critical pedagogy is a pedagogy based on a merging of critique and possibility. Included amongst the narrower or more specialised pedagogies huddling under this umbrella are emancipatory pedagogy, democratic pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, border pedagogy, radical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, transformative pedagogy and situated pedagogy. For most of these, the qualifying adjective provides some hint of the specific target of the pedagogical practices attaching to or summoned up by the particular fissure of injustice to be addressed. The contribution of education to social transformation has long attracted me, and when I look at how my professional life has evolved, it is apparent that most of the time I have been concerned to use my position to assist in the exposure of social injustice, at the very least, and more recently have been concerned to attempt to contribute more in action terms to the overcoming of some of the major axes of disadvantage that affect society.

In this evolution, I have been crucially influenced by the works of four main authors: George Counts, Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux. It was two pieces by the last of these writers (Giroux 1988; Giroux 1997) that led me to realise that what I was interested in doing and had become increasingly committed to contributing to was a critical pedagogical approach to teacher education through a specific focus on anti-racist pedagogy and, within that, on studies of whiteness.

Through my university teaching, research and scholarship, I had become involved in the broad area of Australian Indigenous studies, in particular educational aspects of Indigenous-white Australian relationships, and the possibilities existing for education to lead to more socially just outcomes for Indigenous Australians. I had worked on a number of projects related to this - research into alternative paths to teacher preparation and registration for Indigenous education workers; contribution to the development and teaching of a compulsory unit in Indigenous studies in initial teacher education programs; and supervision of post-graduate student research work in the areas of multiculturalism, bi-culturality and education in Indigenous Australian contexts as examples. I had worked with colleagues in international education organisations on curricula for cross-cultural understanding, for a time acting as international convenor for the environmental education strand of the Pacific Circle Consortium, an OECD- derived educational organisation with membership drawn from OECD countries bordering the Pacific.

A crucial point in my development in this area of work was a six-month secondment to Hubei University in Wuhan in the People’s Republic of China in 1992. I was involved in helping members of the International Relations Department at that university establish an Australian Studies Centre and presented a series of lectures on aspects of Australian society to the professoriate there. In living and working as a minority group member - one of less than 100 white foreigners in a city of over 8 million people - I experienced first hand what it means to be different, particularly in a racial and cultural sense.

What was puzzling for me, however, was that not once during my time in Wuhan did I ever consciously experience negative discrimination as a result of my difference - my inability to use local languages, my skin colour, eye shape, clothing and hair styles, my height all marked me as clearly and visibly different, yet this was not the focus of any deliberate exclusionary or discriminatory practices against me. I often thought of what might be the situation confronting any of the citizens of Wuhan should they find themselves in the middle of Sydney or Brisbane; if, that is, our situations were reversed. I always arrived at the same answer, and it wasn’t particularly heartening. Were Australians so much more racially intolerant or were the Chinese people so much more accepting? Perhaps what was happening was that the universalising of White culture was proceeding apace, even in southern inland China, such that I was not an object of suspicion, derision and fear but rather I was the carrier of a new view of the world for the Chinese: the Middle Kingdom had been broached by the hordes and it wasn’t as bad as many thought. Whiteness was working its way into the Chinese psyche. My difference was desirable, to be observed and imitated.

A further occasion of consciousness-raising occurred when my daughter was preparing for a Speech and Drama examination. Her speech teacher had selected a poem by Guyanese poet John Agard for her to work on. I found the particular poem in a small volume of his children’s poetry (Agard 1983) held by the university library and brought it home for exam preparation purposes. In that volume, I found another poem that made me see more clearly what it meant to be white and at the same time what being non-white meant, even in practices as seemingly ‘culturally-blind’ as birthdays:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DILROY!

My name is Dilroy. I’m a little black boy And I’m eight today.

My birthday cards say It’s great to be eight

And they sure right Coz I got a pair of skates I want for a long time.

My birthday cards say, Happy Birthday, Dilroy! But, Mummy, tell me why They don’t put a little boy That looks a bit like me. Why the boy on the card so white? (Agard 1983, no pagination)

I checked my own children’s birthday card collections, and apart from cartoon characters, all the children on these were white. I just hadn’t noticed it before, but then why would I: it’s only a kid’s birthday card. And my children are white. When one’s world is drenched in one’s own personal defining characteristics, it is easy to ignore these altogether.

Later when I read Peggy McIntosh’s various articles about what she called the invisible knapsack of privilege that Whites carry around with them every minute of every day wherever it is they go (McIntosh 1990; 1993; 1995; 1997), I realised the position one inhabits where there is no provocation or need to notice one’s race. I had lived for almost 50 years in that position and never once had discomfort caused me to notice it.

In describing a particular situation to me, a friend of mine once drew analogously upon his understanding of the physiology of amphibians and told of how to boil a frog: put the frog, alive, into a pan of cold water over a low heat. Gradually increase the heat until the water boils. Because of the slow increment in the temperature of the water and the nature of the frog’s physiology, the frog doesn’t realise it’s in a dangerous environment until it’s too late. The point of the story is that unless we become more aware of our condition, our environment may be so comfortable that we continually adjust to danger until a point-of-no-return is reached. In a way similar to the title of a Neil Postman book (Postman 1986) we may be effectively amusing ourselves to death. These two events - the birthday card poem and the story of boiling a frog - together led me to consider that the comfort of most Whites may in fact mask a slow process of being boiled alive in a pot of racism and intolerance.

That race and racism permeated and penetrated from the earliest age also became apparent to me through a conversation between my son (then aged 4) and my daughter (then aged 10) I overheard after school one day. Sybilla described how a student in her class had reported to her class an event that occurred the previous weekend: her neighbour’s house had been

burgled and the girl thought that she had seen the offenders leaving the house. Hugo, having listened intently to the whole story, asked a question to fill in a vital part of his imagining of the incident: ‘But what colour were their faces, Billie?’. I asked him why he wanted to know that piece of information. His response concerned me: he answered that if their faces were black, then they most definitely were the burglars. At the age of 4, this little boy had already developed a strong sense of racially-based otherness, of racist assumptions beliefs and stereotypes. The broad social pedagogies of racism had already been at work here.

These experiences are but examples of encounters of race and racism that have led to my merging of personal with social imperatives, and this intersection has led to me following certain life paths, one of which resulted in the writing of this thesis.

Aspects of the Theoretical Framework

In order to understand the position of the Other, one has to understand Self, and for members of the White community, this means initially coming to see and recognise oneself as possessing a slew of racial characteristics. This in itself is no easy task, since the seeming incongruity of broadly prevailing community notions of ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’ with white European- derived groups means that for many, the initial step may well be to work out what one is actually looking for. Identity work seemed to me to present as a major point of opportunity for the contribution to anti-racist pedagogy that I believe to be essential to the movement towards more socially-just educational outcomes and forms of social relations in the community.

There are two ideas that are central to the work reported on in this thesis. Both of these relate to the conditions under which questions about white racial identity previously unconsidered (and in all likelihood, unconsiderable) might emerge as personal imperatives. That is, the things that might provoke Whites to see themselves as being raced. These two ideas are that of ‘moments of bafflement’ described by Gayatri Spivak (1990, p137) and the notion of the function of identity trauma as a precursor to self-awareness developed by Henry Giroux (1997).

A central process of Spivak’s work as a feminist-Marxist literary critic is rooted in Derrida’s notions of deconstruction (Derrida 1976). From Derrida’s perspective, deconstructive activity aims not to expose error or the falsities of ideological obfuscation but attempts to unmask the ways in which truth is founded or constructed. As such ‘deconstruction can only speak in the language of the thing it criticises… The only things one really deconstructs are things into which one is intimately mired’ (Spivak 1990, p 135). To Spivak, the most powerful point of focus for deconstructing the nature of the social is through ‘small things: margins, moments, etc.’ (Spivak 1990, p 136).

For her, much of the work of the university operates to resist such deconstruction, it merely operates to refute rather than expose. It sets up a master-apprentice model of learning that would seem to fly in the face of the processes of developing authentic knowledge. In Spivak’s view, it is ‘more useful to enter into texts so that the moments of bafflement can become useful’ (Spivak 1990, p 137). It is this idea of moments of bafflement that I have found to be valuable in describing the initially-irreconcilable image that many Whites encounter when they glimpse an image of themselves as racialised or ethnicised. In this study, it is these moments that almost require an interrogation of what had been up until the time of their emergence a settled sense of self. Such moments appear to be relatively rare and risky, but link powerfully with the second of the conceptual strand in this study, trauma.

Trauma as a desirable state and as a deliberate pedagogical tactic would seem to be antithetical to the educative project. It is not usual for teachers to be encouraged to find ways to traumatise their students. Henry Giroux (1997) argues that in order for Whiteness and White identity to become something other than the exploitative social identity that they would currently seem to be, the nature and meanings of whiteness first need to be deconstructed and interrogated. It is the spur to this initial interrogation that must, in Giroux’s view, lead to trauma:

I attempt to fashion a tentative and strategic pedagogical approach to Whiteness that offers students a possibility of rearticulating "Whiteness", rather than either simply accepting its dominant normative assumptions or rejecting it as a racist form of identity....As a potent pedagogical tool, trauma refers to the subjectively felt effects of classroom practices that baffle, reorient, and challenge students' commonsense assumptions about race. ...Trauma represents that pedagogical moment when identities become unsettled, provoking both anxiety and the opportunity to rethink the political nature and moral content of one's own racial identity (Giroux 1997, p 293)

In this study, I have attempted to ascertain the contribution such an approach to the development of White racial identity might have. That is, I have organised aspects of the participants’ narratives around this idea of identity trauma, of an unsettling, anxiety-filled experience with Self that doesn’t fit with existing images and assumptions - of moments of bafflement that disrupt settled senses of identity.

Relevant Developments in Teacher Education

The importance of preparing teachers to deal with social (in)justice issues through their work has been long-established, and considerable attention has been turned to the fact of increasing

diversity - across numerous planes - in classrooms. In the United States of America, preparing teachers to engage with such diversity, in particular cultural diversity, has been the focus of a number of recent projects, proposals and programs. In a very recent review of ten national teacher education reform proposals, one of the two recommendations common to all of these proposals was that teacher education programs should develop multicultural competence in their students (Valli & Rennert-Ariev 2000). In a similar analysis of existing programs of teacher education, Sonia Nieto has argued that teachers have become more monolithic, monocultural and monolingual in past twenty-five years (see also Futrell 1999) and that ‘schools and colleges of education are still functioning as if they were preparing teachers for the classrooms of half a century ago’(Nieto 2000, p 181). However, as Nieto acknowledges, there is some movement in teacher preparation institutions in the United States towards addressing what she sees as the crucial issues of the age: increasing diversity, new international processes and forms of communication, the changed nature of and access to information, enormous inequities and lack of democratic opportunities for many people (Nieto 2000, p 182).

Such reorientations in teacher education programs are not necessarily achieved easily or without conflict. Gloria Ladson-Billings, for example, in discussing the importance of ensuring pre-service teacher education students experience diversity in as many forms as is possible in their preparation program points out that ‘teacher educators who have attempted to bring issues of race and racism to the forefront of their preparation programs have been subjected to resistance and harsh criticism from students’ (Ladson-Billings 2000, p. 207).

In the Australian context, there has been a somewhat slower response to the recognition of the fact of increasing social diversity. The peak academic organisation of teacher education faculties in Australia, the Council of Deans of Education, has to date failed to make any statement in policy terms about the importance of initial teacher education programs ensuring graduates are aware of and familiar with the pedagogical and personal dimensions of cultural diversity. This situation is likely to change in the near future as the new executive of the Council has had extensive discussions about this matter at its inaugural meeting (October 2-3, 2000) (personal communication, Professor Nerida Ellerton, Chair, Queensland Chapter, Australian Council of Deans of Education, 5/10/2000). Presumably, the importance of understanding self and other will become an even more important feature of Australian teacher education programs in the coming years than it is currently.

Research Problem and Research Questions

This research study was designed and conducted in order to arrive at some understandings of a central problem:

What meanings do white pre-service teachers make of the racialised aspects of their identities when they consciously reflect on their life experiences?

As a way of entering into this particular problematic, the research was structured around a series of more specific questions which address three different levels of conceptualisation of the problem. The first level of inquiry (questions one and two) relate to the interpretation of the evidence; the second level (question three) looks to the applicability of conceptual aspects of existing literature and theorising; and the third level (questions four and five) looks to the implications of the study for theory-building in teacher education and research methodology . The questions that directed the study are:

1. What life experiences do the participants perceive as having been influential in shaping their racial identity?

2. What do the pre-service teacher education participants in this research study perceive to be the impact of concerted programmatic experiences of cultural consciousness-raising on their sense of self?

3. What is the relevance of Giroux’s notion of identity trauma and Spivak’s idea of moments of bafflement in providing an explanatory framework within which to locate a sense of whiteness in Australian pre-service teachers?

4. What meanings are ascribed to whiteness and racial identity when pre-service teachers have been through a consciousness-raising experience?

5. What insights into personal identity and whiteness can be gleaned from the use of a dialogic research methodology?

The Design of the Research

The research project was based on the use of dialogic forms of research and personal biographical narrative and analysis. Six second-year pre-service teacher education students who had all completed a unit of study on Indigenous Australians volunteered to engage in a series of learning conversations about identity. All of the participants ultimately saw themselves as White, and their understanding of their own racial identity became a primary focus of the conversations. Transcripts of these sessions formed the primary source of evidence

for the extraction and interrogation of experiences that the participants recalled as significant, or at least memorable, in coming to a certain level of awareness of Self.

As researcher, I also featured prominently as a participant. A feature of this study is the braiding into the narratives of the student volunteers of my own biographical journey to and through the topic of white racial identity and, to a lesser extent, whiteness. This thesis presents the stories of the volunteers juxtapositioned with my own story at points where the narratives touch, intersect or run parallel to each other. I have used text boxes to carry my personal thoughts regarding aspects of the stories of the other participants, particularly Teresa. At times, my own biography paralleled or was at odds with parts of those of the other participants, or it occurred that elements of the life experiences of the participants provoked certain thoughts, ideas and the like that it seemed might be valuable to capture and present. Certainly this material chronicles some of my own life experiences and emerging understandings of the topics in question. The format of presentation allows for the reader to either read the other material straight through or to read my commentary in conjunction with each section of the main narratives. I have utilised this device mainly in conjunction with the main narrative - Teresa’s - because the degree of detail included there provided greater opportunities for parts of my own story to be included.

The power of the use of learning conversations as provocation to deepening levels of self understanding and the overall consciousness-raising effect of the use of dialogue as a research tool is reflected in the evidence presented here.

Summary of the Chapters

This thesis has been cast as seven separate chapters. This, however, should not be taken to mean that each is self-contained. There are many points of cross-over and interconnection between the various chapters - a feature, I suspect, of the nature of the problem being addressed and the research methodology employed.

The first chapter, An Introduction to the Study, attempts to delineate the scope of the problem that drove the study as well as the social and personal significance of the work at hand. The research problem and the research questions that were generated are outlined here. This chapter also summarises some key theoretical elements upon which I have drawn in constructing an appropriate research framework.

Chapter Two, Relevant Conceptual Literature, presents my synopsis of and commentary on published theoretical and research work that bears directly on the study’s research problem and questions. This chapter is organised around broad conceptual categories (Identity ,

Whiteness, Race and Racism.) and further elaborates on the theoretical elements briefly described in the first chapter (particularly the idea of racial identity trauma and moments of bafflement). This chapter also identifies a number of gaps in the existing published work touching on this study.

In Chapter Three, Cultural and Phenomenological Contexts, my purpose is to locate matters of whiteness and white identity in an Australian socio-political context, including the operation of the White Australia Policy and the current moves to Indigenous-non-Indigenous Australian reconciliation. To understand the state of dominant, White, identity in contemporary Australia, one needs to understand something of the historical development of some of the more visible expressions of national identity. This chapter also draws upon my personal experience with and understandings of a unit of study on Australian Indigenous cultures, histories and issues.

Chapter Four, The Inquiry Process: Literature and Engagement, deals with the approach taken in the research and examines a number of problematics attaching to the application of particular techniques and tools to assist in the inquiry process. This chapter delves into a number of philosophical as well as technical issues relating to research generally, life history approaches in particular, and issues and dilemmas of evidentiary and data analysis.

The stories of the participants, which constitute the body of evidence in this study, are presented in Chapters Five, Teresa, and Six, Fellow Travellers. In the first of these, detailed excerpts from the narrative of one of the participants is presented and analysed in order to extract events, occurrences and phenomena seemingly significant in the process of coming to understand the racialised nature of Self. In the second of these evidentiary chapters, more truncated extracts from the stories of other participants are presented and discussed in relation to Teresa’s narrative. From these two chapters, I have identified a number of commonalities and themes that form the basis of the final chapter.

Chapter Seven, Conclusions, presents my perceptions and understanding of the research problem and the research questions identified in Chapter One. In this section, I have attempted to draw out not just my (tentative) answers to these questions, but also a number of implications for teacher education, anti-racist pedagogy and Australian multiculturalism. In the final section of this chapter, I focus on the research process and my personal development and consciousness raising as a result of involvement in the project. I also draw some conclusions regarding the role of dialogic forms of research in work of this type.

While, as I have already mentioned, there is a certain linearity to this structure, it is highly likely that a reader will move across and between chapters to establish and re-establish certain links and evidentiary bases. This, perhaps inevitably, creates something of a ‘messy’ reading

process, but one that more closely parallels the actuality of the postmodern identity and which admits of the construction of a number of different readings and interpretations.

Chapter 2 Relevant Conceptual Literature

You never get there by starting from there; you get there by starting from here. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope.

The starting point

This thesis is based in an optimism that it is possible for white teachers to develop such a sense of self and identity that they become secure enough to engage in a project of reinvention of that identity. Stephenson (1997, online) argues that ‘becoming aware of white advantage is a necessary requirement to challenging it’. It was the purpose of this study to uncover ways in which preservice teachers came to the first crucial point in this process: an awareness of their own racial identity.

The research in this area of teacher education is very thin, a function, presumably, of the ‘muted discussion of racism and whiteness within teacher discourse’ (McIntyre 1997a, p. 655). In her United States study with similar hopes and almost-parallel paths to my work, Alice McIntyre attempted to capture a feel for the ways in which white self-awareness might be turned to the development of ‘teaching strategies and research methodologies aimed at disrupting and eliminating the oppressive nature of whiteness in education’ (McIntyre 1997b, p. 7). The McIntyre study was explicitly couched in terms of exploring the anti-racist pedagogical dimensions and possibilities of White racial identity (McIntyre 1997a, p. 660) and drew upon the potency of participatory action research to stimulate reflection on and critique of the relationship between white racial identity and pedagogical practices with a view to exposing how

similarity can blind us to our own complicity in the perpetuation of racist talk and the uncritical acceptance of racist actions. [The study] is about the need to learn by doing - to engage and reengage whites in discussions about whiteness and to continue to develop strategies for critiquing the very discussions we generate. It is about publicizing and politicizing our whiteness - being vulnerable and “fessing up” to how we contribute to the routinization of racism in our teaching practices (McIntyre 1997b, p. 7).

The participants in McIntyre’s study were women from privileged backgrounds, even by White standards. They viewed whiteness as either a fairy tale (anything is possible for Whites) (McIntyre 1997b, p. 80), a domineering ‘norm reference group’ (p. 84), the repository and guarantor of ‘the American Dream’ (p 88), or as a problematic, dualistic location (‘We’re good, they’re bad and don’t blame us’, p. 95). In a teaching context, whiteness manifested itself in

images of teachers as either ‘white knights’ intent upon saving non-Whites in distress (p. 123) or as pedagogically ‘colourblind’ and dismissive of race as a factor in classroom relations and practices (p. 126).

In my study, I have limited my investigations and reflections to the nature of racial awareness on the part of white pre-service teachers in an Australian context. The pedagogical imperatives growing from such an awareness, while my ultimate focus of anti-racist educative work, is but tangentially touched upon here, and forms the basis for future projects.

As explored in Chapter Three, Australian whiteness is quite different in many ways from (United States of) American experiences of whiteness. Additionally, there is, a crucial naivety surrounding Australian whiteness which provides both a buffer against intense scrutiny and a robustness that allows it to fend off challenges. All of this, of course, is couched in an egalitarian nationhood myth that makes for an extremely complex paradoxical interplay of the simultaneous position of centrality and proclaimed inconsequence of whiteness.

The existence and effects of discrimination - whether based primarily in race, gender or any other particular characteristic - have been acknowledged for a long time in the social welfare literature and embodied in compensatory programmatic efforts to redress these social wrongs. Similarly, that these programs have but limited positive effect is also readily apparent, despite, for example, increases in participation rates of women in upper management, completion rates in high school of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds and the like. In the area of racial discrimination, this leaves the very crucial question: ‘How can so destructive a force as racism continue to exist in the face of its negative consequences for society?’ (Fernandez 1996, p.158).

A partial answer to this question is, basically, that a large or powerful enough sector of society sufficiently benefits, consciously or not, from the maintenance of a racist social structure as to warrant its allegiance to, support (deliberate or not) and defense of and active participation in a systematic process of selective allocation of race-based privileges. That sector of significance is, in racial terms, Whites.

One way to approach the problem of racism would be to continue along the liberalist road of education and enlightenment, the basic premise being that if a population becomes more aware of a problem, its causes and effects, then it is more likely to be moved to want to change the situation. This has certainly been the underlying basis for many of the anti-discrimination programs conducted in Australia over the past two decades. That these initiatives are important prongs of attack on racism cannot be denied - they send messages of official policy and statements of changing social values. That they have been largely unsuccessful in their

eradication (or even reduction?) of racism is also largely undeniable: the public rhetoric and personal practice dichotomy carves out the essential problem with this enlightenment approach. To further embed the authority of the State in the disapproval of racism, legislative measures have been enacted to add a supervisory and punitive dimension as well as the striking of various boards of review, complaint and supervision (e.g. The Anti-Discrimination Commission of Queensland).

A modification of that approach has attempted to turn the spotlight away from the effects of racism on the victims and onto those who are seen to be perpetrators of it. To this end, there is a growing body of literature that documents the negative effects of white-based racism on those thereby most advantaged. Arguing that most racist attitudes and behaviors are the result of a cultural socialization process, Bowser and Hunt (1996), for example, identified a number of impairments to the quality of life experienced by Whites as a result of the acceptance of and participation in a white-racist social system. Racism operates to the detriment of all Whites, qua Whites in the following ways: • by isolating them from persons of colour and dividing them from one another • by promoting an ignorance and disdain of other races and cultures that becomes more dangerous as the world community grows closer and more interdependent • by invasions of in-group behaviour by the habits of out-group oppression • by sometimes feeding or aggravating psychiatric disturbances • by promoting misperceptions of overlapping interests with non-Whites and thereby losing opportunities for social progress • by basing their orientations to reality on distorted views and allowing misinformation and false fears to control and limit their lives • by the stunting of human potential caused by inauthentic personal and social relationships • by ‘sociological ambivalence’ - the moral and social confusion that distorts images of reality; causes uncertainty about one’s feelings and beliefs about self, others, and the world; and forces one to act cautiously and indecisively • by personal and racial insecurity (Bowser & Hunt 1996a,pp. 237-238).

This attack on the problem of racism goes some way towards forcing a more self-reflective approach to race and identity: its intent is to make Whites look at their own location within a system of privilege and to see some of the damage - psychic, social and material - that the maintenance of that system enacts upon even those most advantaged by it. For example, Hollins (2000) argues the importance of a ‘healthy sense of ethnic identity to one’s

psychological well-being’ (p. 224). This is in many ways what is denied to members of the White ethnic group or groups who do not or are not able to come to awareness of and to terms with their racial and ethnic existence.

A more likely way to overcome racism, to inoculate society against this illness, seems to reside in a more thorough interrogation of privilege rather than a continuing exclusive focus on disadvantage. Before exploring this notion, however, it is important to issue two caveats. Iris Marion Young (1990) makes the point that, while the measure of a just society isn’t only to be found within the material domain, there is much to be said for a more equitable distribution of material goods within a community. Further, she acknowledges that, in fact, this may well be the first stage in the development of more truly just communities - it’s easier to apply oneself to the broader philosophical issues and imperatives of justice when one has a full stomach and a warm house in winter. bell hooks (1990) encourages the turn of the gaze away from the disadvantaged and onto the face of the privileged, but not so exclusively that the daily struggle for survival of people of colour is ignored. Tread warily is her caution: Whites already hold centre stage, let’s not call for an extended season. That is, by focussing on whiteness, by spotlighting the primacy of the dominant cultural or racial group, we might well further embed the centrality of white culture rather than unsettle it.

With those concerns and cautions in mind, a crucial question becomes, What does it mean to turn the interrogative eye onto the centrality of white ethnicity in contemporary white- dominated society? It would seem that this is essentially an individual project, one that requires self-reflection and -evaluation. The first step would involve an understanding of and reconciliation with a sense of identity.

Identity and Uncertainty

Identity is a contemporary buzzword, a ‘keyword’ (Williams 1976, p 13) and as such has come to assume multiple meanings. One thing, though, is apparent: ‘identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty’ (Mercer 1990, p.43). The effects of the increasing deterioration of many of the purported certainties of social life in the modern era have attracted the attention of many social theorists. Lyotard (1984) identified what he termed the postmodern condition, and his explorations of the psycho- and socio-cultural dimensions of the postmodern turn have been taken further by virtual hordes of theorists.

While the existence of a distinguishable era, epoch or period that might be called the postmodern has been generally acknowledged, there is not a universal acceptance. Appardurai, for example, refers to this period as an extension of modernity, a period of high modernity (Appadurai 1990); Giddens (1991) describes it as late or high modernity. Jameson saw what was termed postmodern as the ‘specific cultural logic of contemporary multinational capitalism’ (Dickens 1994, p. 95). For him postmodernity was an idea, a concept ‘whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order’ (Jameson 1983, p. 113).

In trying to capture what it was that was significantly different or distinguishing about this new era, Lyotard’s central premise was that the period is characterised by the breakdown of the grand narratives that provide a framework for comprehending the world. In particular, the metanarrative of science as universal human problem-solver (‘the certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty would be profitable to mankind as a whole’ (Lyotard 1999, p 144) ) had been shown to be a fiction, a ‘language-robbery’ in Barthes idea of mythologies (Barthes 1957,1972, p 131) .

Lyotard pointed to evidence of the betrayal of modernity’s faith in science to lead to greater human comfort and emancipation: for example, the human failure of Auschwitz, and techno- sciences as the origin of rather than scourge of disease (Lyotard 1999, p 144). With the removal of the modernist notion of progress from the vortex of hope for the human species, a void has been created at the centre (Solomon 1998, p 39) leading to the so-called postmodern angst - ‘a sort of sorrow in the Zeitgeist’ (Lyotard 1999, p 144). As Stafford maintains, ‘We now live in an amorphous frame of time: a ‘post’ history where both our knowledge of the past and our confidence about the future have been shaken.’ (1996,p. 114)

Rutherford describes the general malaise of the postmodern era :

‘Not belonging’, a sense of unreality, isolation and being fundamentally ‘out of touch’ with the world become endemic in such a culture. The rent in our relation to the exterior world is matched by a disruption in our relation to our selves (Rutherford 1990, p.24).

Clearly, it is not possible here to meander too long through the often semantically turgid fields that constitute the landscape of postmodernism, its theorising and critique, but the key features and effects as they relate to the question of identity need at least to be raised. If we accept that the postmodern is an appropriate way of capturing current social forces, that it in ways at once philosophical, ethical, cognitive and material butts up against and draws breath from the

radical fracturing of the certainties and consistencies of the Modern period, then it becomes possible to map essential lodes of difference and departure.

In terms of relevance to this study, the postmodern era is characterised by: • a weakening or fading of the absolutist values of the Western Enlightenment; • the collapse of foundational myths and master narratives of rationality and progress; • the fragmentation of traditional sources of authority and identity; • the displacement of collective sources of membership and belonging; • the decentring of political consensus and the emergence of differentiated subjectivities ; • the certainty of uncertainty; • multiple perspectives of reality; • the evaporation of claims of authenticity and the Authentic Self, • the centrality of communication technologies in providing global access to a culture of mass reproduction and simulacra, or copies of which there is no original. (Baudrillard 1983; Gitlin 1998; Lyotard 1984; Lyotard 1992; Meehan 1998; Mercer 1990; Miller & Real 1998; Solomon 1998; Weeks 1990).

Postmodernism reflects a ‘cultural attitude’, a multitude of ways of engaging with the daily stories of contemporary struggles to make sense of life:

In its most general sense, postmodernism represents a new mode of perception fostered by an age of instant communication: by radio, cinema, and most importantly, by TV. Gazing upon the world as if it were one vast variety show, the postmodern eye perceives the course of human events as a narrativeless and nonsensical series of skits, as one long "Monty Python" (Solomon 1998, p 36)

In all of this, the importance of narratives for the construction of identity cannot be by-passed. In a psycho-social sense, narratives operate much like myths in that they are stories intended to make and convey a sense of existence. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, this process was one that drew on the power of the sacred:

[I]n the face of our own meaninglessness as human beings, we have decided to tell a story, a narrative complete with a beginning, middle and end, "written" by a divine Author who will make sense of our lives, tell us what we’re here for. For nearly two thousand years, the Judeo-Christian Bible has provided the West with a narrative that has created meaning out of chaos by framing history between the limits of a creative origin and an apocalyptic end…In essence, that is the purpose of all sacred narratives: to centre our lives around a creative origin and to give meaning thereby to our mortality. In semiotic terms, narrative itself is sacred, constituting our greatest – and perhaps only – weapon against death (Solomon 1998, pp 38-39)

In the world of the postmodern, the power of the sacredness of linear history is extremely difficult to maintain, given the ascendancy of seeming senselessness and a rejection of the primacy of the Western tradition by:

rejecting the traditional narratives of the West, the postmodern myth has rejected the centering structures that have long given meaning to human history. At the postmodern center there is only a void, which is the same as saying there is no center to the postmodern worldview. History has neither a beginning nor an end, neither a creative origin nor a purposive goal. Life is nothing more than a decentred, narrativeless course of waiting for death – or for a nonexistent God who never comes (Solomon 1998, p 39)

When there are no transcendencies, no universal referents to admit a connection to a unifying ‘human nature’, it is not possible to identify essential identities. In the postmodern worldview, there is no such thing as an essential "Me", no centering self-identity, no in-born character. There are only roles, images we take up in imitation of other images (Solomon 1998, p48.), and in this way there is a need for the individual to interrogate what it means to Be. This is why the postmodern era seems almost-obsessively concerned with matters of identity, of what it means to be and to belong.

In the Australian context, social commentators have chronicled both the ricochets of rapid social change and the social conditions attendant upon that change. Mackay asserts we are presently in a period of ‘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).

In attempting to unravel the manifestations of the Big Angst, Mackay asks a seminal question: ‘Why, as we move into the middle of the 1990’s, should Australia be in the grip of an epidemic of anxiety?’ (Mackay 1993, p.15). In answering this question, he identifies what he sees as the underlying problem for contemporary Australian society - that is, that the Age of Anxiety is, in reality, nothing other than a symptom of a more apposite description of the era: the Age of Redefinition. In this age - which by Mackay’s reckoning commenced over twenty years ago - the very certainties of identity and belonging have been eroded such that ‘growing numbers of Australians feel as if their personal identities are under threat... ‘Who are we?’ soon leads to the question, ‘Who am I?’ ’ (Mackay 1993, p.19).

In the Australian political realm, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party captured the attention - and imagination - of the community with a platform that, for many, captures and expresses this angst. At the peak of its popularity, opinion polls indicated that 25% of the eligible

population would cast a vote for a One Nation party candidate if a Senate election were to be held at that time. This, clearly, was not a fringe movement. Seemingly exclusively Caucasian in membership and eurocentric in outlook, groups such as this tend to be anti-government, seeing the governments of the day as having sold out the “ordinary” citizen to the interests of big capital and big labour. Populist in the extreme, these groups frequently espouse a strong anti- intellectual stance and speak from first hand experience and with great emotion of the effects of the conspiracy - usually global -to subjugate the masses to the demands and desires of a new elite. Many of these groups are overtly racist, seeking to preserve the perceived deserved position of dominance secured by white culture. All of this, in reality, a reaction to the loss of security and certainty and an anxiety to restore what was.

In another, but very similar social context, Lamy describes what he calls the tribulation that grows from the perception of a small but increasing number of white (United States of) Americans as they witness what they see as the chaotic end to the millenium - the disintegration of (United States of) American cultural mores and social cohesion is interpreted by those who have come to be known as the survivalists as evidence of identity crisis so major as to herald the onset of the Christian Armageddon and Doomsday (Lamy 1996).

What is left unsaid in analyses by many populist social commentators, however, is often very much more significant than what is said. Mackay’s analyses and commentaries, for example, are based upon an unstated assumption of location of reference in dominant (white) society: while asserting that ‘it makes less sense to talk about typicality than about diversity’ (Mackay 1997, p. 10), diversity is identified only by reference to an invisible point of reference. While there is an identifiable trend towards a tolerance of diversity in contemporary Australian society evidenced by ‘a willingness to jettison ethnic stereotypes and to regard ethnicity as just another dimension of our diversity’ (Mackay 1997,p. 183), there is little to suggest that this increasing focus on ethnicity is anything other than an outward looking cultural act, one that fails to include dominant (white) ethnicity in the identity reconstruction project. It is to this missing part of the reconstruction process that this study is addressed.

Identity

As a word, ‘identity’ joins the postmodern lexicon in the company of ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ as key terms for the description of a new social reality. This language of uncertainty segues perfectly into the postmodern motifs of displacement, decentring and disenchantment that play at the core of contemporary society (Mercer 1990, p 49). Identity as a concept needs to be excavated.

In this study, identity is engaged from a socio-cultural perspective rather than from a psychological one. This is not to deny that the process of identity formation is, in the final instance, inherently individual and dependent upon the interplay of processes of cognition and affect that constitute the world of the psychologist.

The loss of a clear sense and place of belonging is a two-edged sword. The increasing ambiguity of identity is symptomatic of both the disintegration of traditional cultural and political forms and of the undermining of the role of central social actors in the postmodern era (Mercer 1990, p 44) bringing about a ‘predicament that threatens fragmentation and psychosis’ (Rutherford 1990, p24). But this state of uncertainty also opens the spaces for the reformulation of extant and the invention of new forms of identity that offer the possibility of the more democratic forms of social relations.

Janet Helms described racial identity as 'a sense of group or collective identity based on one's perceptions that he or she shares a common racial heritage with a particular racial group’ (Helms 1993, p 3, emphasis in the original). Similarly, Weeks defines identity as being :

about belonging, about what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others. At its most basic it gives you a sense of personal location, the stable core to your individuality…At the centre, however, are the values we share or wish to share with others (Weeks 1990, p 88).

The assumptive aspect of identity is important to note here - the individual assumes an identity, claims it for her- or himself based on a feeling or perception of commonality with others whose essential characteristics are able to be identified, named and compared, and ultimately accorded value.

Simultaneously, identity is conferred. In naming self, one names the not-self in ways that require the construction of dichotomous relationships: self/other; insider/outsider; normal/deviant; same/different. The conferring process, in itself the soil bed of discriminatory practices, is the other half of the assumptive process: as we claim for self, we bestow on others.

The construction of the Other

The process of identity-formation and identification requires, and of necessity throws up, what has come to be called the Other. This view of the divided, dissected and incomplete nature of identity has attracted the attention of a number of theorists working in post-colonial furrows, but the subject is by no means one of contemporary making. Bellow (2000) relates a Platonic myth of the origin of and imperative driving the search for the Other part of identity :

Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn’t Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. In the beginning men and women were round like the sun and the moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In some cases both the organs were male. So the myth went. These were proud, self-sufficient beings. They defied the Olympic Gods who punished them by splitting them in half. This is the mutilation that mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again.(p. 24)

This process of identity formation (individual or group) which involves originating an Other has been a much-explored phenomenon (see, for example, Bhabha 1990; Bhabha 1994; Hage 1994; hooks 1997; JanMohamed 1985; McLaren 1995; Mercer 1990; Said 1978; Said 1993; Solomon 1998; Spivak 1990; Thompson & Tyagi 1996; Winant 1998). From this perspective, the act of identifying requires the simultaneous act of not-identifying. In the act of coming to represent Self, we project the Other, that identity or thing that is not us. This constant comparative process operates along multiple axes of identity-formation (Pitt 1997, p 128). This is not to suggest that such axes of difference run parallel to and separate from each other: there is obviously considerable overlapping and criss-crossing. This means that identity is in a constant state of flux and emergence, that it is not a absolute, final achievement: ‘Identity then is never a static location, it contains traces of its past and what it is to become’ (Rutherford 1990, p 24)

Each axis of identity is bookended by a pair of binary oppositionary locations and labels such as male/female; masculine/feminine; black/white; culture/nature; advanced/primitive; rational/irrational; and hard/soft. One of the terms, appropriated by hegemonic or dominant elements of a society or community as a way of positively describing itself, constitutes the Centre. The opposite term, the excluded, marks the Margin or the periphery. Identity is formed along, between and among these axes, such that identification resides within a veritable matrix of potentialities and possibility that are constantly in motion, with particular facets assuming greater or lesser importance at particular points in time and place.

It is from the Centre that universalising motifs and narratives emerge:

Those terms that are pre-eminent and invested with truth, achieve that status by excluding and marginalising what they are not …[T]he centre expels its anxieties, contradictions and irrationalities onto the subordinate term, filling it with the antithesis of its own identity. The Other, in its very aliennness, simply mirrors and represents what is deeply familiar to the centre, but projected outside of itself. (Rutherford 1990, pp 21-22).

This is not to suggest that identity or locations within the dichotomous relationships constructed here are in any way homogenous or separate: ‘the interrelationships of differences

are marked by translation and negotiation’ (Rutherford 1990, p 26) both within, between and across identities (Weeks 1990, p 89).

The Self becomes the Centre and the Other, that ‘repository of our fears and anxieties’ (Rutherford 1990, p 10), is relegated to the Margin. In this alienating and separating process, the fear of difference becomes sedimented into various exclusionary and discriminatory discourses and material practices: racism, sexism, classism are but some examples. From the Centre, the Margin is a feared and reviled place: it is there that the threats to a secure sense of Centred self reside and fester. It is there that all that has been found unacceptable and expelled from the Centre has been embodied, the Gulag of identity. It is ‘dangerous territory’ (Roman & Eyre 1997) because it is in this place that the forces for reformulation of the identificatory relationship congregate and well up. It is at the margins that the prospect of disrupting settled identities gathers its bravado and hope.

The boundary between Centre and Margin operates as a disciplining mechanism, attempting to constrain the emergence of new identities, and yet it is here where the intersections of blurred boundaries occurs that identity is formulated (Rutherford 1990, p22). In using language as a solidifying agent, the Centre tries to rein in volatile relationships of difference so as to better contain and regulate the periphery and pathologise difference as deviance. That this process is increasingly unsuccessful is perhaps a (the?) defining feature of the postmodern era as the steam of difference escapes from the fissures of unsettled relationships. New forms and uses of language are drawn up to name these new identity locations - language itself becomes a site of contestation and struggle. What this means is that ‘there are no ready-made identities or categories that we can slip into. Our struggles for identity and a sense of personal coherence and intelligibility are centred on this threshold between interior and exterior, between self and other’ (Rutherford 1990, p 25, 24).

Identity, then, is • claimed and bestowed; • at once interdependent and relational (Rutherford 1990, p. 10); • constituted across multiple landscapes, some of which at times are mutually incommensurable, contradictory and antagonistic; • fluid and in a constant state of flux and movement;

A primary consequence of the breakdown of homogeneity and the multiplication of possibility is an increasing presence of difference such that the public sphere must be reconceptualised in such a way as to be able to draw in and celebrate ‘unequal, uneven, multiple and potentially antagonistic political identities’ (Bhabha 1990, p 208, emphasis in the original). Difference

becomes the defining feature of the postmodern era, and needs to be counterpositioned with diversity, a term frequently used interchangeably with it.

Where diversity fronts and sustains the liberal adoration of plurality, difference demands acknowledgment and a re-working of cultural relationships. Diversity encourages a passport approach to culture, the musee imaginaire of culture in Bhabha’s terms (1990, p 208) : visit, come to experience and perhaps understand elements of those cultures that are not one’s own, all of this within a framework of central or dominant culture which leaves untouched a hegemonic universal. The raising on high of diversity as a desirable social characteristic, along with its attendant concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism, has led to the disguising of the operation of an invisible cultural centre (Bhabha 1990; Hage 1994 ).

That an approach to minimising socio-cultural antagonisms through the recognition of diversity, the endorsement of multiculturalism and the exhortation to tolerance is largely ineffectual can be seen in the continuing rampage of racism, sexism and other discourses and material practices of discrimination and oppression. Australia is a good example of this: a society caught in the grip of the process of ‘a creation of cultural diversity and the containment of cultural difference’ (Bhabha 1990, p 208, emphasis in the original). In this situation, the maintenance of an invisible cultural norm is required in order to accommodate divergent cultural forms - one must diverge from something, one must be diverse within a central conceptualisation of normalcy. This is the essential point of separation for two main approaches to the resolution of problems attaching to discrimination: one path follows the line of enlightened tolerance, the other the more difficult trek through the recognition of and reconciliation with difference.

The importance of this for the current study is that overcoming the feared face of difference, to crumble the rock-like façade of pathologies of Otherness, requires an acceptance of a cultural politics of difference that :

pays attention to the old liberal adage that we must learn to live together - not attempting to construct oppositions based on hierarchies of value and power, not through that politics of polarity, but in the recognition of the otherness of ourselves, through the transformation of relations of subordination and discrimination (Rutherford 1990, p 26, emphasis added)

Seeing ourselves as (potentially and actually) Other is a vitally important idea for this study since it is through a recognition of the specificity of location that one might come to understand the identity politics attaching to a reformulation of relations of dominance and subordination. In this case, the Othernesss requires a disassociation from and a disavowal of the privileges location within the Centre characteristically secures.

At any historical moment, certain coalitions of identity features will assume primacy and dominance within a society. Throughout the period of Modernity, white heterosexual male values, world views and identities have been ascendant, and this position has led to a hegemonic shaping and sustaining of a particularistic cultural politics wherein the desirability and value of the cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) attaching to those identities has been entrenched.

Robert Solomon identified the process whereby the particular Weltanschauung of one group within a society becomes equated with a universal view of the nature of the world. He called this process the ‘transcendental pretense’: ‘the self-congratulatory pretense that we - the white middle classes of European descent - were the representatives of all humanity, and as human nature is one, so its history must be one as well’ (Solomon 1993, p.xiv).

Race and Ethnicity

Intricately bound up in considerations of whiteness is the concept of “race” and the semantics of race have not been quarantined from the struggle for the control of language visible in all other forms of cultural contestation in recent decades, particularly since the outbreak of ‘ethnic fever’ (Steinberg 1989; Keating 1995, p 913) in the late 1960’s. These almost-paradigmatic tectonic forces of contestation between competing discourses of race have been well-and-truly enveloped in the culture wars (Gates 1992) that have been raging throughout the postmodern period in Western society. As a result, ‘race’ and attendant terms are no longer easily contained and mutually understood as may have been the case in decades past. Despite a view that race is ‘man’s [sic] most dangerous myth’ (Montagu 1974), the discourse of race is one of the most potent metanarratives of contemporary society (King 2000, p. 141)

There is a continual need to define and re-define the particular meanings associated with and attached to the discourse of race, such is the fluidity of the conceptual base and the increasing intensity of scrutiny of the area. While some commentators have been disparaging of these conceptual and linguistic developments - Gabriel, for example, decries the myopia of definitions of race - both academic and common-sensical - that have circulated in the past thirty years (Gabriel 1998, p 1) - the field has by most accounts become increasingly dense intellectually and unstable semantically. One result of this has been the need to attempt to clearly define what it is that is intended by the use of certain terms, but regardless of how it is seen, race is a significant marker of social and cultural location (Glasberg 1996, p 228; Kramer 1997). It is also one of the most visible carriers of status.

In modernist discourse, race was primarily a biological concept, based on ‘scientific’ pronouncements and categories of human diversity. From an alternative perspective, race is seen as a social construct, a semiotic marker of difference location (Kramer 1997, p 2) and as such is a political rather than a genetic marker. In the former view, race is a classificatory system that captures essential biologically-based features and conceptualises the aggregation into a descriptive schema.

While there has been a long process of refutation of genetic constructions of race, there is still a strong commonsensical view of race as being biologically determined. Kwame Appiah, a strong opponent of the notion of race as a biologically fixed and determined feature of identity, notes:

What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of "racial difference" is not supported by scientific evidence. While biologists can interpret the data in various ways, they cannot demonstrate the existence of genetically distinct "races", for human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations (Appiah 1992, p.21)

One effect of a biologically-based determination of race is that markers or signifiers become sedimented, separated from their socio-political points of origin with the resultant stabilisation of racial categories leading to “commonsensical” and uncrossable boundaries. In attempting to expose the dangerous terrain one enters when linking politically-based categorisations to intransmutable natural selection and codification, Keating makes the point that,

although we generally think of "white" and "black" as permanent, transhistorical racial markers indicating distinct groups of people, they are not. In fact, the Puritans and other early European colonizers didn't consider themselves "white"; they identified as "Christian", "English" or "free". (Keating 1995, p.912)

Significantly, then, the "white race" evolved in opposition to but simultaneously with the "black race": [T]he English adopted the terms "white" and "black" - with their already existing implications of purity and evil - and developed the concept of a superior "white race" and an inferior "black race" to justify slavery (Keating 1995,p. 912).

and today still operates to maintain a rationalisation, a justification for oppressive forms of social and economic relations. Certain ‘inherent’ sets of racially-located characteristics are valued at the expense of others. Prager (1982, p 111) argues that ‘the black experience in America is distinguished by the fact the qualities attributed to blackness are in opposition to

the qualities rewarded in society’. Edward Said (1978; 1993) has plotted similar political processes of justifying colonisation, oppression and exploitation in the construction of notions of ‘Asia’. This connection between race, economy and politics has been further underscored by analyses of the coinciding of changed views of non-whiteness and the development of the Western imperialist project: Blackness was evaluated positively in European iconography from the 12th to the 15th centuries, but after the 17th century and the rise of European colonialism, blackness became conveniently linked to inferiority (McLaren & Torres 1999, p. 52)

Ruth Frankenberg (1993) argues that ‘race is as much constructed through place, neighbourhood, region or household, as through more familiar considerations like physical appearance, language or shared beliefs and rituals’ (Glasberg 1996, p.229) but that, regardless of the legitimacy of the application of such a social construction, race is ‘real’:

It has real, though changing, effects in the world and real, tangible, and complex impact on individuals’ sense of self, experiences, and life chances. In asserting that race and racial difference are socially constructed, I do not minimise their social and political reality, but rather insist that their reality is, precisely, social and political rather than inherent and static. (Frankenberg 1993, p. 11)

For many whites, the word ‘race’ is a code word for the Other. It is used to signify the presence of non-whites in ways that turn the focus onto the non-white, effectively rendering unseeable the white centre. It also operates to hierarchically arrange various locations on the race axis, with whites at the top and others spread throughout the remaining positions (Erickson 1995). In the Australian context, common perceptions of race and race relations are inevitably taken to mean Indigenous Australians and matters touching upon their position within contemporary society. Rarely if ever does the term expand to incorporate white Australians as a focus.

In this study, the term and concept of ‘race’ is understood to be on all fours with the views of Glasberg (Glasberg 1996, p. 228 ) and Chandra Mohanty:

I use the term ‘race’ as a social set of power relations among racially constructed people and not a reified biological category (Mohanty 1997, p. xvi)

It is the ‘sociological reality’ (McLaren & Torres 1999, p. 49) of the term ‘race’ and its effects on community social relations that makes it a significant topic of study in itself, and even more urgent in the context of schools. For many decades, the use of categories of race and the ‘commonsensical’ stereotypical assumptions that underpin these have been unproblematically recirculated through the school: through its curriculum, formal and hidden; its practices and its pedagogies (For a personal account of these processes in an Australian context, see Austin 1996).

Along with race, ethnicity is one of the most commonly used categories of comprehension and formulation of notions of identity(Cornell & Hartmann 1998, p. 12) , and the two terms are often used interchangeably in the literature (Ng 1993, p. 51). The term ‘ethnicity’, as understood in the broad sociological literature contains a number of features, most of which are captured in Weber’s description of ethnic groups:

We shall call ‘ethnic groups’ those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or customs or both, or because of memories of colonisation and migration…It does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists (Weber 1968, p. 389)

Here, ethnicity attaches to relations of blood ties, real or assumed, wherein the belief that common descent exists forges a sense of community. Schermerhorn defines an ethnic group as

A collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood (Schermerhorn 1978, p.12)

Ethnicity, then, is a subjective state (‘the crucial issue is how we see ourselves’ (Cornell & Hartmann 1998, p. 17) ) and the evidence of such a claimed commonality or belonging is multiple: ‘varying from physical resemblance to shared cultural practices to a shared historical experience of intergroup interaction’ (Cornell & Hartmann 1998, p.17). Crucially, both of these definitions of ethnicity carry a self-consciousness that in many instances is not necessarily apparent among white ethnic groups.

That race and ethnicity overlap, conceptually, is apparent, but it is important to recognise the essential differences between the two, particularly in identity terms. Cornell and Hartmann (Cornell & Hartmann 1998) have provided a clear comparison between the two in summary form:

Ethnic Group Race • identity based on putative common • identity is based on perceived physical descent, claims of shared history, and characteristics symbols of peoplehood • identity may originate in either • identity typically originates in assignment assignment by others or assertion by by others selves

• identity may or may not reflect power • identity typically reflects power relations relations • identity may or may not imply inherent • identity implies inherent differences in differences in worth worth • identity usually constructed by both • identity is constructed by others (at point selves and others of self-construction, group becomes ethnic group as well as race) Source: (Cornell & Hartmann 1998, p. 35)

In the context of the current study, the terms race, ethnicity and ethnic group to a large extent cover the same territory, however the differences between these needs to be borne in mind.

Once one comes to see the features of race as being signifiers of worth or value, it becomes easier to understand racism. In one view, race and racial categories were thrown up in order to sustain and justify systems of iniquitous social and economic relationships:

In our view, it is essential for scholars to understand that the construction of the idea of ‘race’ is embodied in racist ideology that supports the practice of racism. It is racism as an ideology that produces the notion of ‘race’, not the existence of ‘races’ that produces racisms…(McLaren & Torres 1999, pp 47-48)

Racism adopts many faces and forms in pursuit of its ends, but a crucial question is ‘What does racism do to people?’(Schmitt 1996, p 35). In Franz Fanon’s view, the answer is it objectifies people, leaching out the essence that is human (Fanon 1967, p. 88). As such, racism might be seen in many locations and as operating in multifarious ways and practices: infantilisation, denigration, distrust, ridicule, exclusion, rendering invisible, scapegoating, violence (Schmitt 1996, pp 36-38). An understanding of the way in which racism might be perpetuated unthinkingly through an invisible racial centring process adds to this list. This would require that those inhabiting that centre interrogate their position of privilege.

Up until very recently, the focus of almost all of the written record of racism in the “western” world at the very least, has been on the effects of racism on those who have suffered most from it (Ashmore 1976;Bowser & Hunt 1996b). In itself, this is a crucial step in the sparking of a commitment to the elimination of racism as a feature of social life, but it is only a step, not the destination. According to some commentators, this state of affairs has arisen from the ways in which interracial relations were viewed throughout much of this century: the long-prevailing view that racism was a personal or individual phenomenon rather than a societally-based or structural one led to the liberal democratic idea that the stumbling block to the creation of more socially just non-racial social outcomes resided in overcoming individual prejudices, and that the most effective way of achieving this was through eliminating ignorance of the human suffering resulting from racist practices and attitudes. Consequently, the research and other

literature touching on this area was dominated almost exclusively by what amounted to exposes of racial suffering. (Bowser & Hunt 1996b, xvii). But a serious question arises here. As Michelle Fine asks: what if, by keeping our eyes on those who gather disadvantage, we have not noticed white folks, varied by class and gender, nevertheless stuffing their academic and social pickup trucks with goodies otherwise not readily available to people of color? (Fine 1997, p. 57)

As a result of the predominance of the liberal-individualistic view of racism until very recently, little has been uncovered to answer the question of how whites perceive their own racial being, their location within a racial hierarchy that more often than not has retained the pretence of invisibility of whiteness. (Jones & Carter 1996,p. 4) and a concomitant denial of structural group advantage.

Similarly, racism for a long time has been seen as a problem for the victim, not one to be addressed by the perpetrating group (Terry 1996, pp.181-182), and certainly not one occasioning reflection on the question of whether whites actually suffered as a result of white racism (Terry 1996, p.183). Bowser and Hunt (1996) maintain that ‘any agenda for research or social action that takes as its goal effective and permanent change in the character of race relations in the United States must focus explicitly on white citizens’ (Bowser & Hunt 1996a, p.231). This argument revolves around the basic idea that focussing on the victims is crucial in order to alleviate the everyday suffering that racism enacts upon them, but that to stop at the first aid stage is not to address the organic causes of the disease - in race terms, it is only by working at the point of the white cancer that the symptomatic suffering might be lessened.

Whiteness and White Ethnicity

One of difficulties for Whites in talking about and reflecting upon their whiteness is that the very novelty of the concept for many of us is such that we don’t have a familiarity with an appropriate lexicon of race from which to draw in formulating even a sketch of what it is that the term ‘whiteness’ circumscribes. This is reflected in the inordinate amount of anxiety and struggle many Whites apparently experience in trying to describe themselves. Indeed, as one study demonstrated, the very experience of coming to see themselves as White was in itself a novelty for the participants (McIntyre 1997a, p. 657). . Some of the more recent scholarship in the area of whiteness studies has focussed on this self-definitional problematic Whites suffer. (Non-Whites, on the other hand, have little difficulty in either conceptualising or articulating what whiteness is (hooks 1990;hooks 1992;hooks 1997) ).

The irony of this White flailing about in search of the language of identity is that, more than any other group, Whites inhabit a powerful position of identity-naming and Outing: ‘white people have had so very much more control over the definition of themselves and indeed of others than have those Other’ (Dyer 1997, xiii). It is the centrality of White positioning within the spheres of production of image, identity and location that this capacity to name others while eschewing any responsibility to name self becomes self-alienating: the continual act of naming and re-naming the Other forces an outward fixation of the gaze to the effect that the self becomes unfamiliar, strange and almost unknowable.

It is important at this point to clarify the difference between what are often used as synonymous terms. As a form of identity, being tagged or labelled as ‘white’ carries an almost definitional objectivity with it. As much as one might be defined as a member of a particular gender group, age group or similar, white racial identity can be seen as purely a descriptor of a constellation of individual attributes. These include all of the phenotypical features (skin colour, eye shape, hair texture and body shapes, etc.) associated with the white race as well as those cultural aspects about which there might be an assumed commonality (epistemological orientations, language types, aesthetic senses, diet, etc.). Regardless of how one defines being white, essentially this is largely an individual project of identification and belonging. As such, it is possible for normative measures of being white to be applied. That is, it is possible to identify positive white identities and there are not-so-positive white identities. The ascription of such evaluations depends, obviously, on the moral and philosophical location of the judge.

Whiteness, however, is a quite different matter. This term is used here as a way of capturing a systematic form of embedded privilege for those sufficiently white to be admitted and at the same time systematically and structurally excluding those judged to be not white enough. Whiteness, as a political structure in contemporary society cannot be seen as anything but negative. This position is one that causes some writers – McLaren (1997, 1999b) for example – to advocate the elimination of whiteness as an essential step on the way to a more socially-just society. In this view, there is no such thing as a positive spin to whiteness. This matter is taken up later in this chapter, but it is important to state at this point that much of the focus of this dissertation is on the development of understandings of white racial identities by the participants in the study. In itself, this is interesting and powerful work. However, the ultimate purpose is to attempt to contribute to the emasculation of whiteness as a political structure for the organization and distribution of societal rewards and condemnations.

At times, the two terms – white identity and whiteness – seem to merge. This is, in my view, largely unavoidable at this point in time, since there is little evidence to suggest that many (most?) of those with white racial identity status are cognisant of the connection between these identities and the systemic mining of those individual characteristics for group advantage and

privilege. In other words, the two terms are often conflated – in both the literature broadly and in this report specifically – because it is often impossible to separate them. The reader should, however, bear in mind the point of essential difference that I have drawn between the terms. In order to further elaborate the contribution of whiteness studies to contemporary anti- discriminatory pedagogical projects, it is necessary to delve further into the question of what constitutes whiteness.

McIntyre defined whiteness as ‘a system and ideology of white dominance that marginalises and oppresses people of color, ensuring existing privileges for white people’ (1997, p. 3). Hollins identifies a number of core white cultural values that she sees being promoted in many school textbooks. These values include the Protestant work ethic, individualism and self- reliance, competition and materialism (Hollins 2000, p 223) and their elevation to the status of universals works to effectively maintain the status quo.

David Stowe maintains that ‘it may not be premature to speak of a new humanities subfield: whiteness studies’ (Stowe 1996,p. 68). As a relatively recent focus, the field has attracted a curiously wide range of interests and perspectives belying a considerable diversity of political location. It is possible to trace the development of this field through a selection of what have become quite seminal works, with the intention of covering the growth of the Whiteness studies “movement”, its basic tenets and the bifurcations within contemporary scholarship, being ever mindful of Giroux’s caution that ‘in some quarters, the call to study Whiteness provoked scorn and indignation’ (Giroux 1997,p. 299)

For some time, the forever morphing question of the nature of identity and culture in the late twentieth century has probed the heart of the process of identification, whether in race, ethnic, sexuality or class terms. Each of these explorations has led to the same concern to expose the transparency of hegemonic constructions of reality. In the case of race and cultural identity, explorers have attempted to expose ‘the hidden assumptions we make concerning racialised identities’ primarily because of their ‘far-reaching theoretical and pedagogical implications’ (Keating 1995,p. 901). Much of this work has centered on the explication of the construction of the Other -that is, that which is different from an invisible, unarticulated and submerged “norm”. This has meant that the concern for most theorists has been on the effects of Othering on those “Othered”, leading to an almost exclusive interrogation of the experience of marginalisation, alienation and disadvantage.

However, the gaze of the oppressor has been turned back upon itself. Kobena Mercer talks about whiteness’s ‘violent denial of difference’ (Mercer 1991, p.206) as a strategy whereby locations of privilege are sustained, leading him to call for the exposure of the exploitation embedded in a perpetuation of the myth of the invisibility of whiteness as a colour - in fact,

THE colour of privilege. bell hooks, as a further example, challenges white theorists to turn the critical gaze upon their own ethnicity:

One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. It would be just so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what’s going on with whiteness. (hooks 1990,p 54)

The end result of these types of concerns over the misdirected nature of critical interrogations of the relationship between race, ethnicity and advantage is captured in Keating’s summation of the effect of the unquestionable privileging of whiteness:

“Whiteness” serves a vital function in masking the social and economic inequalities in contemporary Western cultures. By negating those people - whatever the color of their skin - who do not measure up to “white” standards, “whiteness” has played a central role in maintaining and naturalising a hierarchical social system and a dominant / subordinate worldview (Keating 1995, p.902)

The essential scope of the field is captured in Giroux’s point that:

"whiteness", domination and invisibility are intimately related, [yet although] "whiteness" functions as a historical and social construction, the dominant culture’s inability or reluctance to see it as such is the source of its hidden authority; "whiteness" is an unrecognised and unacknowledged racial category that secures its power by refusing to identify itself (Giroux 1992, p.15, emphasis added).

Critical reflection on what it means to be white is by no means a recent phenomenon, however. Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No More explored the social and economic consequences of the elimination of the black race (through the application of a process of changing “Negroes” to whites) as a means to laying bare some of the threads of privilege that attached to whiteness (Schuyler 1931). Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man similarly presents a construction of white identity through the chronicling of aspects of the life of its main character, an African-American man (Ellison 1965). The main effect is to show that ‘whiteness is produced through the operation of marginalising blackness’ (Mullen 1994, p.74). As something of a parable of the production of whiteness, the narrator describes the secret of the Liberty Paint Company’s prime paint product, Optic White:

During his stint as a worker in the paint factory, the narrator must add ten drops of a “dead black” liquid into each bucket of “Optic White” paint, thus producing “the purest white that can be found,” a paint “as white as George Washington’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wig and as sound as the all-mighty dollar”

according to his white supervisor Kimbro, who adds, “That’s paint that’ll cover just about anything” (Mullen 1994, p.74)

To further elaborate the process of the production of whiteness, Mullen adds commentary to this extract: The American myth may rely for its potency on the interdependent myths of white purity and white superiority, but the invisible ones whose cultural and genetic contributions to the formation of American identity are covered up by Liberty White...know that no pure product of America, including the linguistic, cultural and genetic heritage of its people, has emerged without being influenced by over three hundred years of multiracial collaboration and conflict (Mullen 1994, p.74)

If, in this extract, one reads “white” for “American”, one gains a better appreciation of the interconnectedness of white / non-white construction: there, almost literally, cannot be one without the other.

What is both common throughout and striking about this historical body of literature that attempts to draw images of dominant white identity is that it does so from and through the perspective of those who are not-white - it is through encountering what it means to be not- white that one comes to see what it means to be white. In other words, images of whiteness to date have come largely from the margins of the Manichean duality that constrains predominant Western notions of difference. Said’s notion of the construction and rationalization of difference and Other (Said 1978; Said 1993), as but one influence, provides a useful means of viewing this identity of whiteness, but is not necessarily in itself sufficient. Diane Jeater, for example, in describing a set of images of whiteness from the perspective of non-whites in Britain maintains that

we need to rethink our metaphors if we are going to find a way to talk meaningfully about whiteness. 'Centre' and 'margin' are not useful metaphors to describe a 'Third Space'. Where there is a centre and a margin, there is a circle, or some kind of enclosed space. And in an enclosed space, there is no 'third space'; there is only the centre and the margin. (Jeater 1992, p.120).

What is basically lacking, from this perspective, is any real consideration by whites of what it means to be white, of what identity choices exist.

Toni Morrison’s 1992 work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, is often cited as a crucial point in the emergence of Whiteness studies, particularly in the United States of America, (although anchor points to the area were laid down during the previous thirty or so years. See Stowe, 1996). In this work, Morrison explains that

images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable - all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.(Morrison 1992, p.59)

Other scholars have tracked the meandering nature of the appellation “white” as it has criss- crossed racial, cultural, ethnic and economic groupings at various points in time. Amongst the many attempts to track what Mullen (1994) has called the “floating signifier” that is whiteness, Lopez (1996) has documented the legal construction of whiteness throughout the history of the United States of America, demonstrating that the question of ‘whether one was ‘white’...was often no easy question’ (p.1) He shows how, in the pursuit of the United States Congress’s 1790 dictate that naturalisation be restricted to “white persons” (Lopez, 1996 p.1), the legal system of the United States of America has had to grapple with defining this particular descriptor. At various times, for example, Syrians have been considered white (1909, 1910) then not white (1913, 1914), and then white again (1915) (Lopez 1996, pp.204-206) Similar experiences of legal classification have confronted Japanese, “Asian” and “Arabian” people, as well as the Irish. A similar situation has been evident in Australian history through the operation of the White Australia policy. This is taken up in more detail in the following chapter.

The point here is that, even in the more formalized legalistic social codes, “race”, ethnicity or colour is demonstrably a social rather than a biological construct, and, as such, presents as a point of socio-political analysis. At the more subtle hegemonic level, the ways in which race is constructed, signified and lived warrant serious interrogation.

Since the 1960’s, ‘ethnic fever’ (Steinberg 1989, p.3) has fuelled a sometimes intense reinvestigation of what it means to belong to, to identify with, to display particular racial / ethnic identifiers, and this has included a turn to the inclusion of White as one of these categories. This is the place of "Whiteness studies".

The pursuit of the interrogation of Whiteness is itself contested terrain. Keating for example, issues both a caution against an overemphasis on Whiteness while at the same time asserting its urgency: [E]ducators must be aware of the impact interrogations of "whiteness" can have on our students. Although self-identified students of colour find it satisfying to see the "white" gaze which has marked them as "Other" turned back on itself, I question the long term effectiveness of this reversal....[T]hese reversals trigger a variety of unwelcome reactions in self-identified "white" students, these reactions ranging from guilt to anger to withdrawal and despair. Instructors must be prepared to deal with these responses. The point is not to encourage feelings of personal responsibility for the slavery, decimation of indigenous peoples, land theft, and so on that occurred in the past. It is, rather, to enable students of all colors more fully to comprehend how these oppressive systems that began in the historical past continue misshaping contemporary conditions...When self-identified "white" students feel guilty, they become

paralyzed, deny any sense of agency and assume that their privileged positions in contemporary US culture automatically compel them to act as “the oppressor”…Because "whiteness" -whatever it is, and I would argue that at this point no one really knows - has functioned as an oppressive, mythical norm that negates peoples (whatever their skin colour) who do not conform to its standard - we need to understand and deconstruct it (Keating 1995,pp. 915- 916)

It is around the point about the importance of a sense of agency in the reconstruction of White identity and identification that the most significant work in the field of "Whiteness studies" has occurred, leading to a clear bifurcation of the field. One branch exhorts Whites to eliminate Whiteness as a socially-constructed category in order to overcome racially-coded systems of disadvantage. Stowe, for example, talks about ‘the race traitors of the Nineties [as]a small but growing vanguard resolved to battle racism in America by renouncing the privileges of whiteness’ (Stowe 1996, p.68). McLaren is another proponent of this approach to the problem of white racism, and in his call for “revolutionary multiculturalism” lays down the challenge:

To choose blackness or brownness as a way of politically disidentifying with white privilege and instead identifying with and participating in the social struggles of non-white peoples is, on the other hand, an act of transgression, a traitorous act that reveals a fidelity to the struggle for justice (McLaren 1997, p.31)

The starting point for an interrogation of what it means to be “white” must, of necessity, be that of what McLaren (McLaren 1997) calls, with a pungent dual meaning, “unthinking whiteness”. In a society where “only white people have the luxury of having no color” (p 25), McLaren maintains that “Whites need to ask themselves to what extent their identity is a function of their whiteness in the process of their ongoing daily lives and what choices they might make to escape whiteness” (p 25):

Whiteness is not a pre-given, unified ideological formation, but is a multi- faceted collective phenomenon resulting from the relationship between the self and the ideological discourses which are constructed out of the surrounding local and global terrain. Whiteness is fundamentally Euro- or Western-centric in its episteme, as it is articulated in complicity with the pervasively imperializing logic of empire (p 21).

Wolfenstein (1993) describes “the whiteness of domination as the one fixed point of America’s many racisms” and that whiteness “is a social designation and a history disguised as biology” (p 331). He links white racism to what he calls “epidermal fetishism”, that process that “reduces people to the color of their skins and renders them invisible” (cited in McLaren, 1997, p 23). Ian Lopez (1996) addresses the steps involved in “dismantling whiteness” and argues that:

First, Whites must overcome the omnipresent effects of transparency and of the naturalization of race in order to recognize the many racial aspects of their identity, paying particular attention to the daily acts that draw upon and in turn confirm their whiteness. Second, they must recognize and accept the personal and social consequences of breaking out of a White identity. Third, they must embark on a daily process of choosing against Whiteness. (p. 193, emphasis added).

The second main branch of "Whiteness" studies has led to the position of interrogating the nature and effects of Whiteness as a provocation to the reconstruction of a non-oppressive identity for Whites. David Roediger believes that the White signifier, though able to be self- consciously renounced, is too strongly embedded in systems of power and privilege to be ignored or shed: Whites cannot fully renounce whiteness even if they want to. Whites are, after all, still accorded the privileges of being white even as they ideologically renounce their whiteness, often with the best of intentions. Choosing not to be white is not an easy option for white people, as simple as deciding to make a change in one's wardrobe. To understand the processes involved in the radicalization of identity and to consistently choose nonwhiteness is a difficult act of apostasy, for it implies a heightened sense of social criticism and an unwavering commitment to social justice (Roediger 1994, p.16)

Henry Giroux sees the importance of this emerging field as a means of reinscribing a more sustainable cultural identity for Whites: The new scholarship on Whiteness focuses largely on the critical project of unveiling the rhetorical, political, cultural and social mechanisms through which Whiteness is both invented and used to mask its power and privilege...[C]entral to such an effort is the attempt to strip Whiteness of its historical and political power to produce, regulate, and constrain racialised others within the discursive and material relations of racial domination and subjugation (Giroux 1997, p.292)

Further, he sees as crucial the development of a pedagogy that will provide ‘students a possibility of rearticulating “Whiteness", rather than either simply accepting its dominant normative assumptions or rejecting it as a racist form of identity’ (Giroux 1997, p.293). In other words, he clearly differs from McLaren and others over the rehabilitative potential of White identity insofar as he maintains the primacy of the pedagogical project in the dismantling of structures and material instances of oppression and injustice in society. He utilizes the idea of trauma as a forceful event in the development of his pedagogy: As a potent pedagogical tool, trauma refers to the subjectively felt effects of classroom practices that baffle, reorient, and challenge students' commonsense assumptions about race....Trauma represents that pedagogical moment when identities become unsettled, provoking both anxiety and the opportunity to rethink the political nature and moral content of one's own racial identity (Giroux 1997, p.293)

In Australia, what has emerged as the field of whiteness studies in other parts of the world remains largely underdeveloped and undertheorised (Hage 1998,p.20), leading to a certain feeling that the area is typically, and restrictedly, a response to a collection of problems that arose from the peculiar history of the United States of America. This perspective misses entirely the critical relevance of this area of study for the contemporary Australian situation. As one commentator puts it: With the recent turn towards conservative forms of White cultural politics in Australia and the media focus on extreme-right forms of this cultural politics (particularly on the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party)…the importance of a social scientific interest in a White perspective on multiculturalism has become increasingly clear. (Hage 1998, p. 20)

It is easy to consider Whiteness as an integrated set of characteristics carving out a unified, seamless identity location. While it is not the intention of this study to delve into whiteness in its various forms, it is important to emphasise that the white identity contains gradations and flows. Perhaps the most obvious shade of white is that of that segment of the white population labelled white trash, where, in contradistinction to the white cultural aristocracy (Hage 1998, p.62), a substratum of whiteness exists as much as a disciplining device for would-be wayward whites as anything else. As a form of racial or ethnic excommunication, the threat of exile to the nether reaches of the white Centre has been seen as an effective means of constructing an example of the white Other: white trash lies simultaneously inside and outside whiteness , becoming the difference within, the white Other that inhabits the core of whiteness (Newitz & Wray 1997, p. 170).

Further, lest it be thought that whiteness inhabits an impregnable and unchallengeable space, it is also important to note that one response to the dissolution of social certainties has seen the emergence of white reactionary groups and movements. These have developed as a result of the construction of challenges to white dominance as reverse discrimination, or the oppression of the white, particularly the white male. Fernandez puts it thus:

As early as 1964, but especially in the past few years, THE central issue has been white males’ fear for their position in society. Collectively, these impressions suggest that white men believe that they are the disadvantaged group; that they are stereotyped and faced with tremendous amounts of discrimination because of their whiteness and maleness. As a result, many white men have become angry, defensive, stressed, and generally unhappy with their lot. (Fernandez 1996, pp.166-167, emphasis in the original).

Talkback radio hosts of the likes of Rush Limbaugh in the United States and, in Australia, John Laws and Howard Sattler, whose positions make them popular media personalities, champion the attack on ‘political correctness’ and at the same time attempt to claw back the ground they believe to have been lost by the white male cause.

While this feature of whiteness is not the focus of the current study, it is important to locate explorations of whiteness and white racial identity within a context of challenge, uncertainty and reformation as opposed to a view of it as untouchable or omnipotent. As with any form of identity, white racial identity is constantly changing and is, thereby, open to influence and pressure. This is significant for this study.

Whiteness and Nation: an Australian perspective

In an Australian context, and with a nod in the direction of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ghassan Hage (Hage 1998) has written about the ways in which whiteness plays itself out as a collection of fantasies of nation and self. It is worth following Hage’s argument here in some depth, particularly given the already acknowledged thinness of literature on matters of Australian whiteness and because of the ready slippage between whiteness and nationality that many (White) Australians seem to surf. Hage’s focus is on the internal orientalism (p.17) that constructs those who fall outside that group that constitutes itself as the ‘enactors of the Law of Australia’ into passive objects about which decisions are made. His argument is that this objectification of the Other is the essence of Said’s Orientalism, but that in looking at contemporary Australian society through a racial lens, it is necessary to recognise that the process of orientalising need not be restricted to the operation of a colonising nation attempting to rationalise and maintain its domination over the colonised. The orientalising process occurs in an intra-community as well as an inter-community sense, and leads Hage to reconceptualise racism and racist practices as nationalist acts: [racism is] better conceived as nationalist practices: practices which assume, first, an image of a national space; secondly, an image of the nationalist himself or herself as master of this nationalist space; and thirdly an image of the ‘ethnic/racial other’ as a mere object within this space.(p.28)

White nationals in Australia, whether ‘racists’ or ‘multiculturalists’, share a view of Australia as a national space centred on and structured around a White culture wherein they assume a right to legitimate governmental activity. This is what Hage calls the ‘White nation fantasy’ (p. 18) and it complements his view of Whiteness as a fantasy that grew out of European colonial expansion wherein it was assumed that whiteness was an essence, an inherent characteristic. In Hage’s view, the fantasy resides in the fact that, rather than being an essence, whiteness is an aspiration towards which people work by accumulating Whiteness (and Australianness): ‘How white they can be depends on the social attributes they possess’ (p.20).

The notion of Australia as a place of White belonging rests within the nationalist discourse of ‘home’. Here, the discourse implies a relationship of privilege and comfort: Whites belong here, this is their [largely imaginary] space which they inhabit as privileged members alongside non-privileged others.

There are two senses of belonging that Hage identifies and distinguishes between. All residents within a nation experience some degree of a passive ‘homely’ belonging. This is the varying degrees of feelings being part of the nation, of expecting to benefit from the resources it holds, of feeling ‘at home’ here. This is also the arena where most of the explicit forms of racist activity (Hage would see these as ‘forms of empowered practical prejudice’ (p. 36, emphasis in original) exist: the racialised ‘other’ is shown that she or he does not and should not feel comfortable in this national space, that this is not their home. Despite such messages about belonging, all people ‘legally’ within a national territory accumulate attributes that allow a relationship of domestic comfort to develop. These attributes include fluency in the official language, the adoption of certain allegiances (to country, sporting teams and world view) and cultural attitudes and social manners. This relationship is captured in the sense of ‘I belong to the nation’ (p. 45).

The second form of belonging is what Hage refers to as ‘governmental belonging’ (p. 46). Here, the ‘nation belongs to me’. The proprietary nature of this relationship implies more than a feeling of being part of a nation: here lies a claim to a right over the nation, a belief in one’s possession of the right to contribute (even if only by way of having a legitimate opinion with regard to the internal and external politics of the nation) to its management such that it remains ‘one’s home’ (p. 46). Hage distinguishes between his use of the term ‘governmental’ in the sense of a cultural dominance and the civic activity of governing. While the holding of formal civic State power is an effective structure of governmental belonging, it is the more pervasive, naturalised quality of the latter that makes it the aim of those in a nationally dominant position.

To belong governmentally to a space is to conflate ideas of a national will with one’s own. This is where, in a white dominated community, sectional interests, world views, attitudes and attributes morph into the general and assume the status of the universal: It is clearly this governmental belonging which is claimed by those who are in a dominant position. To inhabit the nation in this way is to inhabit what is often referred to as the national will. It is to perceive oneself as the enactor or the agent of this will, to the extent that one identifies with it precisely as one’s own will…It is also by inhabiting this will that the imaginary body of the nationalist assumes its gigantic size, for the latter is the size of those whose gaze has to be constantly policing and governing the nation. (p.46)

The importance of Hage’s work for the current study is in how he then analyses and describes the means whereby one assumes a place within the managerial space of governmental belonging. In ways similar to the invisible knapsack of privileges that Peggy McIntosh (1997; 1995; 1993; 1990) unpacked in her work on the unnoticed nature of the benefits of whiteness,

Hage exposes the processes whereby aspirants to whiteness accumulate the necessary social, cultural and personal attributes necessary to admit them to the national managerial space.

As a Lebanese-Australian, Hage is probably well-positioned to look at the techniques and strategies that whiteness in Australia employs to retain its omniscience. In many ways, these strategies are common to all dominant cultural groups, regardless of nation, time or geography.

One of the first attributes to be presented for examination for entry to whiteness is that of formal citizenship status. For those not born within the territory, the conferring of citizen status carries with it an assumption of acculturation -the person has been ‘naturalised’ - and yet, the mere fact of having proof of citizenship, while civically legitimating the holder, stigmatises at a practical, non-official level: real Australians don’t have such proof, they aren’t issued with papers declaring their civic status because it should be obvious that they belong here: …the very possession of these citizenship papers is stigmatising at a practical, non-official level since their possession and production is only required from those who have not acquired their citizenship by birth. Thus, what is the proof of national belonging to the state (citizenship) can, in a practical sense, operate as proof of national non-belonging to the dominant culture (Hage 1998,pp. 50- 51)

Thus is a major obstacle to developing governmental belonging in addition to homely belonging erected. It is the growing gap between formal civic recognition of new citizens by the State and their everyday acceptance by the dominant community that lies at the heart on much of the so-called racial tensions within contemporary Australia: [T]he acquisition of formal citizenship does not give any indication of the level of practical national belonging granted by the dominant cultural community. This is largely because the basis of communal acceptance remains determined by questions of cultural descent far more than by state acceptance. (Hage 1998, p50.)

It is in staking a claim to practical, governmental belonging that the subtleties of the construction and conferral of whiteness might be seen. In rejecting an in/out, either/or model of belonging (and thereby, whiteness), Hage looks at the ways in which the striving for nationality (which he uses to mean ‘practical-cultural acceptance at a communal, everyday level’) requires that people are ‘constantly converting some cultural achievements they have acquired or a personal characteristic they possess to make claims of being more of a national than, or at least as national as, others’ (p. 52). In other words, the assumption of a position increasingly on all fours with the dominant - white - position requires the accumulation of certain types of acceptable qualities, only some of which are phenotypical. Because the distribution of these requisite qualities of whiteness are unevenly and certainly unequally spread, it is obvious that whiteness exists in shades rather than as an essence. To a large measure, this helps to reconcile the partial admission of very non-white people to the edges of

white privilege, and at the same time explains the yellow card warning, the almost-expulsion from the whiteness club of others. (The perilous occupancy of the space of white privilege of those designated as ‘white trash’ is a major factor in the resurgence of working class racism in Australia, and has been discussed elsewhere in this thesis).

Drawing on the idea of cultural capital developed by Bourdieu (1986), Hage explores the idea of practical nationality - whiteness- as a form of national cultural capital: …practical nationality can be understood analytically as the sum of accumulated nationally sanctified and valued social and physical cultural styles and dispositions (national culture) adopted by individuals and groups, as well as valued characteristics (national types and national character) within a national field: looks, accent, demeanour, taste, nationally valued social and cultural preferences and behaviour, etc.(p. 53)

In Bourdieu’s scheme, accumulated cultural capital is converted into symbolic capital. For Hage, the purpose of the accumulative process is to convert in into a particular form of symbolic capital; namely that of national belonging: ‘to have your accumulated national capital recognised as legitimately national by the dominant cultural grouping within the field’ (p. 53).

In Australia, the dominant cultural group is white and the field of power is that of whiteness: The totality of such struggles to determine and accumulate what is ‘really’ Australian or what is ‘more’ Australian, gives the Australian field of national power its particular historical characteristics. It is this field that I propose to call the field of Whiteness and those who aspire to occupy it and assume a governmental position within it, and consequently within the nation, I will call White Australians (p. 57)

It is with such White Australians that I explored notions of racial identity. That they were all intending to become members of the teaching profession added a further dimension to the study

Teaching, teachers and whiteness

With pedagogical arenas being populated by increasingly diverse groups, the monocultural assumptions of times past no longer hold up under scrutiny - and, as a testament to the virulence of hegemonic processes, they probably never could. Yet, there still exists a hankering for the golden era, the good old days when culture was something that primitives and exotics had, or was spelt with a capital C or was something bred in a Petri dish. Faced with the increasing concern to link pedagogy to learner in more and more authentic ways, teachers need to deal with Difference and Otherness in ways previously not imagined.

The starting point for this type of work is with the Self. The Self as the most crucial package of knowledge in the professional development of effective reachers has long been proclaimed, with Henry Giroux presenting a powerful case for this (Giroux 1988b).

The increasing importance on the reflective process in stimulating renewed teacher professionalism has occurred in tandem with this focus on the Self. The professional and personal dimensions of teacher identity have been re-united in ways that mean that the interrogation of either draws up the need to necessarily consider the other.

McIntyre draws attention to the ‘changing demographics’ detailed in the United States National Education Association report (1992, p. 208) that calculated that white teachers made up 88% of the total teaching force in the United States of America. This situation has remained largely unchanged in the ensuing eight years (Futrell 1999; Nieto 2000) and McIntyre argues that: One way for… student teachers to teach more effectively is to develop a range of insights about their own socialisation processes and their own locations as white…student teachers. (McIntyre 1997b, p. 5)

And that, further, teachers need to be ‘intentional about being self-reformers - in other words, purposefully thinking through their own racial identities as salient aspects of their thinking through the racial identities of the students they teach.’ (McIntyre 1997b, p 5, emphasis in the original).

In following McIntyre’s argument, there is a progression towards a position within a genuinely anti-racist pedagogical project that is far-from-easy and by no means common to all teachers. In fact, it would seem, it is only those who are prepared to take the tentative steps into the inner self and investigate, critically, their own racial identities who might eventually find solace in that anti-racist project. The way McIntyre sees it, this move from acknowledging our white identities to locating ourselves within the system of whiteness to teaching multicultural anti-racist education was - and continues to be - a profoundly challenging experience. One needs a set of tools that allow white teachers to not only reflect on, but to reinvent, their notions about their racial identities.{McIntyre, 1997b #233p. 6, emphasis added}).

This thesis reports on the early stages of this process of a movement towards and an embrace of anti-racist pedagogical practices on the part of the participants. It is restricted to the plotting of the paths the participants took in coming to expose the racialised aspects of their identity – that is, those aspects of their identities that are connected to their membership of the white race (see the description of the essential difference between white racial identity and whiteness on pages 38-39).

Chapter 3 Cultural and Phenomenological Context

Introduction

A sense of identity, of belonging, needs to be examined within the multifarious conditions and influences that coalesce to give succour to that identity, that provide the anchor for belonging. In attempting to capture some of the crucial events and stages in the development of a white racialised identity that is the focus of this study, it is necessary to portray, briefly, some of these contextual facets. In this chapter, I will address two main cultural and phenomenological strands that are braided into contemporary Australian whiteness - viz. the White Australia policy and current re-formulations of White-Indigenous Australian relationships and the process of Reconciliation. Of necessity, these excursions into the socio-cultural context of racial identity must be truncated, but it is essential to understand something of the environment within which the participants engage their racial identities on a daily basis.

Australian whiteness

Australian whiteness is a different thing from that which has been the main focus of much of the work in whiteness studies in recent years. Most of the existing literature on whiteness comes from or draws upon experience of the United States of America where the paths of particular social and political events have crossed at various points to create a situation which is quite different from that of Australia. In summary, United States of American whiteness has developed within the hothouse of the civil rights movement accompanied by the presence, at times highly self-assertive, of a large number of non-white racial and ethnic groups that threaten in places to relegate the historically dominant Whites to minority status. Additionally, the effects of the various amendments to the (United States of ) American constitution has led to the legal entrenchment of certain rights which have provided protection for the promulgation of less-than-popular, non-mainstream, non-white ideas and activities that have in their turn shaken up the seemingly settled cultural norms of that society. Such constitutional protection has also allowed for the public promotion of racist White views and activities as well. Finally, with the United States of America as the world capitalist power par excellence, the extremes of wealth attendant upon the advanced stage of this economic order have led to the existence of very clear strata of systemic poverty. While the lower strata have been and to a large measure continue to be inhabited by those who are other than white, the vagaries of the capitalist system have meant that increasingly the economic and life security of large numbers

of whites have been undermined and threatened with dissolution. The United States of America has become the home of the wounded white male. All of these features have meant that whiteness has been a very visible racial location on the (United States of) American scene for some time.

By comparison, whiteness in an Australian context is still relatively under-exposed and unacknowledged. It is, consequently, far more robust by virtue of still being largely invisible. That an Australian sense and awareness of whiteness should be relatively underdeveloped presents as highly curious, given the fact that of all the (so-called) Western nations, Australia is one of the very few to have explicitly embraced a White national identity and to have legally enacted legislative measures to ensure the social policy objective of whiteness was achieved and sustained.

Bleaching the national identity : The White Australia policy

Since the first permanent English settlement in 1788, dominant Australia has seen itself as a white country. As an Asian outpost within the English colonial project of the 17th and 18th Centuries, it, of necessity, carried its heritage on its sleeve. Indeed, until it was overturned by the so-called Mabo native title decision in 1992, the legal fiction of terra nullius maintained that the country had no identity prior to the annexation of the east coast by the English in 1770, that it was an empty land.

The erasure of previous, non-white, cultures and histories provided a powerful force in the service of the whitening of Australia, although that process has been and continues to be far from smooth and unproblematic. It has only really been since the bi-centennial anniversary of permanent white settlement in Australia in 1988 that a concern to reverse the effects of popular social amnesia have had any real success. Historians of the likes of Henry Reynolds and the late Manning Clark have contributed to a broad community acknowledgment of the existence of submerged stories of nation and obscured corners of community histories and continue to expose and re-form national myths that relate to the racial bases of Australian social history (see, for example, Reynolds 1999; Clark and Cathcart 1993).

With the Indigenous Australian population effectively relegated to invisibility - and not resurrected civically until a Commonwealth referendum in 1967 conferred formal citizenship status on them - the first major racial concern for the new English colonies was the existence of a small but visible Chinese population. In the pre-Federation colonies, the existence of the Chinese allowed for the articulation of racist, exclusionary policies and practices at times

couched in terms of humanitarianism. The Chinese, it was argued, should not be encouraged to migrate to the new colonies and those already here - chiefly working the tailings of the gold fields, but also in market gardening and transportation industries - should be encouraged to leave. Various punitive measures in the guise of capitation taxes and levies were imposed as subtle persuasive tactics, and actual (e.g. the Lambing Flats riots∗) and threatened physical violence further sheeted home the message about whose country this was. The justification for these practices at the time was that the Chinese were undesirable because they were servile and unassimilable, because they degraded the nation and depressed wages (Johanson 1962, p 3); they were unclean; and would be exploited by the baser elements of the emerging capitalist class in the colonies. In other words, the arguments channeling towards the clear Othering of the Chinese in colonial Australia covered almost all bases, from the outright racist and uninformed to the most majestic of humanitarian, but still to the same end: the maintenance of the fiction of a white Australia with ‘an ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most [Australians]’ (Berry 1970, p 116). Stereotypes of difference born in the quest for territory and wealth have appeared to be remarkably resilient, and many persist, only slightly modified, in some of the current debates over immigration and national identity.

While never officially proclaimed as such, the provisions and effects of Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act (1901), the ‘first substantive law passed by the federal Parliament’ (Kelly 1992, pp 2-3), became popularly and internationally-known as the White Australia policy. This policy has perhaps more than any other social phenomenon brought to the forefront the link between race, construed in colour terms, and nation in the Australian context. It assumed such importance in the formation of the new nation that Clark described it as ‘the first tablet of Australian law’ (Clark & Cathcart) 1993, p 412). The policy, ‘clearly racially discriminatory’ (Hollinsworth 1998, p 3), was one of utilising procedures of selective and restricted immigration for the purposes of the maintaining a pretence of a homogenous - white, Anglo-Saxon - population in Australia in the face of a growing realisation of the reality of the country’s Asian geographic location. In the lead up to the coalescing of the individual Australian colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia, maintaining a racial homogeneity was a crucial negotiating point: between 1860 and 1900, there had been a ‘growing tendency of governments to impose discriminatory legislation on foreign-born “non-whites” ’ (Hollinsworth 1998, p 109) and this position regarding ‘foreigners’ was a non-negotiable point in the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia.

At the time of Australian Federation (in 1901), all three political parties vying for parliamentary control in the first federal election espoused the necessity of preserving ‘White Australia’ (Johanson 1962, p 13), and until the mid 1960s, a non-partisan view of immigration based upon

∗ Lambing Flat was the site of a violent anti-Chinese a riot by ‘white’ gold miners in 1861. 53

this sense of national identity prevailed (Hollinsworth 1998, p 103; London 1970, p 35). That view has been one of the desirability of whiteness and the need to secure the sustainability of the white population in the face of a geographic hostility and perceived threats of contamination from the non-white peoples of the region. It was this fantasy of creating and protecting a White Australia that formed one of the great foundational myths of post- Federation nationalism (Kelly 1992, p 3). So ingrained was the imperative of maintaining a racially-pure, or at least homogenous, white Australia that the first government of the Commonwealth of Australia, the Barton government, saw that the first principle by which the nation was to be administered and guided was that of a White Australia. This was a principle ‘from which they believed they should never make a concession’ (Clark & Cathcart) 1993, p. 411) and around which an almost national, bi-partisan security screen was thrown. The Australian Labor Party, for example, for many decades of the century held firmly and proudly to a view of the deserved whiteness of Australia. The Fighting Platform attached to the 1921 statement of aims of the party, for example, had as a primary objective:

The cultivation of an Australian sentiment, the maintenance of a White Australia, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community. (Fitzgerald 1994, p 149).

Even as the White Australia policy was coming to the end of its official political days, the underlying basis for it was still being articulated by many. For example, in 1961 Sir John Latham, a former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, described Australia’s immigration policy as:

[N]ot based on race or colour, but on difference. Ours is a European civilisation. Are we not entitled to keep it so if we wish - just as other countries are entitled to preserve their traditional and preferred civilisation? Colour and race are not tests of character and quality. But Oriental civilisations are very different to European civilisations. Asian countries differ from Australia not only in colour and race and language, but also in tradition and history and loyalties, in social and political outlook and organisation, in religion (except for minorities), in manner of living, and in standards of living (cited in Hollinsworth 1998, p p237-238).

With the invisibility and silence of the Indigenous Australian population secured, and resident non-whites encouraged to leave, the purification of the country might proceed. The mechanism whereby the preservation of such racial purity might best be effected was via close scrutiny of and restrictions on those who might be permitted to migrate to the country. This was the task that fell to the White Australia policy. A good example of the operation of the policy is to be found in the ways in which the post-World War Two ‘displaced persons’ program was conducted. Journalist John Pilger interviewed one of the immigration officers involved in the identification of ‘suitable’ applicants for migration to Australia :

I asked him what was meant by the White Australia Policy.

‘Well, there never was one,’ he replied. ‘What we had was something verbal called a Non-European Policy under which a person had to be 60 per cent European in appearance and outlook’.

‘What did that mean?’ I asked.

‘Mate’, he replied, ‘Christ only knows…no one ever told me. So you played God. I still have regrets about people I turned down. There was this one bloke I can never get out of my mind…I rejected him for two reasons...one, for Australia’s sake and the other for himself, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed and treated badly when he got here. (Pilger 1989, p 79).

The exclusivity of whiteness was easily able to be cloaked in a costume of humanitarian concern for the Other.

As a clear example of the non-biological nature of a status of whiteness and of the fluidity of the category, those who were and those who weren’t considered white changed over the period of operation of the policy. At various times, the Irish, Germans, Spanish, Greek and Italians were considered to be if not non-white, then at least not-quite-white-enough. They were treated ‘as separate “races”, whose linguistic, religious or cultural differences, inherent and fixed in their ancestry, were alien and inferior to British Australia’ (Hollinsworth 1998, p 96).

Not that the essential purpose and spirit of the White Australia policy has entirely disappeared from the national political scene even if the legislative mechanism for its enactment has. In 1988, the current Prime Minister but then Leader of the Opposition launched his party’s immigration policy. This policy, ‘One Australia’ effectively resurrected the old White Australia policy and brought it up to date (Pilger 1989, p 99). Recent (August 2000) images of riot troops attempting to quell a major eruption of violence and frustration at a detention centre for ‘illegal immigrants’ in South Australia presented a sharp reminder of the containment of racial /cultural difference in this country. The ‘illegals’ are exclusively non-European, non-whites. Within a public rhetoric of multiculturalism and humanitarian concern for refugees, the images are stark evidence that in White Australia, that which is different must still be restrained, contained and monitored. Non-whiteness is dangerous and must be treated as such.

In some ways, whiteness in an Australian context has been able to remain invisible for longer this century than United States of American whiteness because it has been a foundation of the nation since the nation was formed - whiteness was a national characteristic and recognised by all as such. The notion of a white nation here was not limited to a ‘redneck’, patroit reactionary constituency as perhaps has been more often the case in the United States. Australian Whiteness is not just natural, its is legislative, legal as well.

Reconciliation

For many Australians today, to think about race raises, often exclusively, images of Indigenous Australians. This is perhaps because of the lingering guilt and apprehension over the relationships between white and Indigenous Australians, the violence - actual and symbolic - that has been done to the indigenous cultures and people since the time of white settlement and the continuing evidence of policies and practices of marginalisation, genocide and discrimination. As a nation, Australia was ‘formed by invasion and colonisation’ (Stephenson 1997) and as such the discourse of racism was necessary in order to justify the deprivation of and the theft from the indigenous inhabitants by the colonisers. In an example of the process of ‘orientalism’ documented and developed by Edward Said (1978), the Aboriginal people needed to be constructed as naturally inferior to rationalise the economic appropriation process: ‘economic relations developed first, and then an ideology of racism was “thought of” to justify them’ (Bulbeck 1993, p 214).

Currently, a significant expression of concern over historical and present events with regard to the indigenous population of Australia has occurred. This has been touted as a part of a national - and for some, a very personal - reconciliation process, and has grown out of a number of formal acknowledgments of past injustices and discriminatory practices (e.g. the Stolen Generation report•) as well as the continuation of the effects of a process which has Othered indigenous Australians (e.g. Aboriginal Deaths in Custody).

•An estimated 100,000 children were taken from their parents over 60 years. 10 per cent of Aborigines over 25 were removed from their parents in childhood, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures in 1994. Other reports estimated the number at 47 per cent. NSW admitted in June 1997 that between 1940-1969 it separated at least 8,000 children, and said the real figure was likely to be much higher. In May 1997 the report ' Bringing Them Home' by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was published. It called for a Government apology, compensation and a national Sorry Day. It said the Government's policies had amounted to genocide. On October 8, 1996 Senator Herron, borrowing Lady Macbeth's line, told the Senate: "What's done cannot be undone." In July 1997 the Catholic and Anglican Churches apologised for their role in the stolen generation policy. (SMH August 14th, online)

Significant sections of White Australia have expressed their regret over events such as these in a number of ways, ranging from Sorry books# to mass walks for reconciliation. At the same time, the refusal of the current federal government to formally apologise on behalf of the rest of the nation to indigenous Australians for the events of the past has seen considerable political derision, exasperation and condemnation of that government, to the extent that a former prime minister from the same political party has publicly encouraged the electorate to vote for an alternative government. Indigenous - and White-Australian relationships are clearly highly emotive and of significant community concern in contemporary Australia.

This unease is further heightened by the fact that as ‘original’ inhabitants, Indigenous Australians shake the national myth of Australia as a white nation - the fantasy of white nationhood, as Ghassan Hage (1998) describes it - because they fit into neither category of settler (and thereby white) or immigrant (and thus having a lesser civic legitimacy). With contemporary historical hindsight, Aboriginal Australia has been reconstructed as ‘first’ people (Stephenson 1997), but the price of this acknowledgment for white Australia has been to know, almost officially, that a lie has been lived for over two hundred years. It might well be that the reconciliation movement will be seen as major step in the emersion of a local civil rights movement akin to that of the United States of America.

Australian whiteness has had to contend with ghosts in its closet over its attempts to secure its primacy of place in the national culture. In many cases, this has thrown up a concern to redress past injustices, to make up for dispossession of land and the marginalisation of its previous (original?) inhabitants. It has also had to contend with reactionary campaigns of sections of the white population who, in ways very much akin to the “wounded white” groups in the United States of America, have seen any attempt at compensation, affirmative action and the like as having gone too far in righting any wrongs. To this group, the pendulum has swung too far and the group now most in danger of being discriminated against is White Australians.

It is this view of the reconciliation and native land title processes that has given succour, if not birth, to the curious political amalgam that has been formalised as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. It is to this particular political party that must go, almost ironically, the credit for raising to popular visibility and acknowledgment the existence of white racial and ethnic

# Sorry books are collections of signatures, a register almost, attesting to the concern of individual Australians to apologise for practices, past and current, that have resulted in the decimation of the indigenous Australian population and the impoverishment - economically and spiritually - of surviving members of that population.

groups in Australia, although not in order to reflect on and re-formulate this feature of identity, but to protect and strengthen it.

As in the United States of America, it has been this section of the disaffected that has drawn an image of the besieging of whiteness as the crucial feature of contemporary times. This phenomenon has been typically couched in terms of the decay of the old morality, of settled standards for and expectations of the citizen. Whiteness has been elided into human nature and challenges to whiteness re-routed through the social maze to emerge as social dysfunctionality: things just aren’t right, they aren’t the way they used to and should continue to be, as the view from this position has it.

The personal-professional context: the university as a field of identity.

The university constitutes a significant point of community identity formation in contemporary society. As a major influence on the weltanschauung of graduates and staff, it is perhaps the only social point for large-scale, explicit self-reflection and contemplation for adults. Obviously, the school - and the associated broader social pedagogies of media and family - is a similarly significant field of identity formation for children: that is the point of this study - to identify ways in which those who ply the pedagogics trade in schools might be better able to assist in the development of more positive white identities.

Despite the lamentations of some social commentators that the university in western society has emasculated the role of the intellectual, tamed it in a way that lends itself more readily to the requirements of global capitalism (see, for example, Jacoby 2000) and their parallel decrying of the evaporation of the part played by the public intellectual in societal introspection, the university is still seen as a place wherein the futures of a nation - and the determination of what type of nation Australia will be - are to a certain extent conceived and considered.

This study focussed on a number of members of the Faculty of Education at a regional university- six students and a member of the academic staff. This university promotes itself as one wherein the multicultural mix of students and staff is such as to make it something of a microcosmic model of the multicultural society Australia might become. The Student Guild• recently endorsed the message ‘USQ: A Multicultural Campus’ as one of the bumper sticker messages distributed to its members and more broadly afield in the community.

Of its current enrolment of approximately 19, 900 students, approximately 75% study at the university in off-campus modes (either by external study or in on-line courses). At the time of writing, the university has just been awarded a State award for its commitment to multiculturalism and it also recently won a national award of recognition of its use of computer- and internet-based means of ‘delivering’ parts of its courses. The university has also been the recipient of an international award as the ‘World’s Best Dual Mode University’ for its development of both on- and off-campus modes of study

On the surface, the university presents a culturally-diverse visage, one that is reflected to a degree in the surface-level presence of cultural difference on the campus. Up until recently, the university had the highest percentage of its total enrolment as overseas students of any university in Australia, many of these overseas enrolments coming from the (so-called) Asian region.

But this is a university set within and propagates a white cultural norm under the cloak of a cultural diversity that fits with a prevailing ideology of multiculturalism. This view of multiculturalism espouses tolerance and acceptance as remedies to the tensions created by the confrontation of difference. In this particular context, whiteness and white culture sculpt the university experience all the while evincing an embrace of cultural diversity under the mantle of multiculturalism.

Australian Indigenous Studies: a challenging unit

A point of common experience of the participants in this study was a unit of study offered by the Faculty of Education titled Australian Indigenous Studies (unit 80146), and it is important for the purposes of parts of this study to provide a brief description of the unit (see Appendix 1) and some personal views of the history and experience of the teaching of the unit over the past five years.

Prior to the recommendations regarding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Teacher Education (Board of Teacher Registration 1993) described above, the Faculty of Education had taken a position requiring all undergraduate level teacher education students to successfully complete a unit in Australian Indigenous Studies prior to graduation, and had set about developing a unit of study. This unit - Australian Indigenous Studies - formed a

• An association of students of the university that operates to provide facilities and activities for the student body and to act as advocates for student interests. In other universities, such associations are

compulsory part of the content strand of undergraduate teacher education courses offered by the Faculty, thereby reinforcing the Board of Teacher Registration’s conceptualization of the need in this area to be one largely addressed by the provision of greater knowledge of the cultures in focus - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

It was considered essential that the unit be taught by those with appropriate cultural experience, knowledge and understanding. Accordingly, an agreement was entered into with the support group for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students on-campus, staffed largely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to develop a unit proposal for consideration by the Faculty of Education. This process, outlined further below, resulted in the introduction of Australian Indigenous Studies to students in semester one, 1995.

It is crucial to understanding the dynamics of the interactions in the teaching of this unit to appreciate the nature of the student body. Over eighty-five per cent of the students who have taken this unit in the now six years of its offering have been female, the large majority of them being in their third semester of university study. Less than fifteen percent are mature age students, and a very small number are enrolled in faculties other than the Faculty of Education. Well over fifty percent of the students are drawn from rural areas of Queensland.

It is also important to understand something of the nature of the teaching staff. Almost exclusively, the teaching staff are members of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander cultures. Some have had experience with the provision of education services in Queensland, and all but one have had little previous experience in university teaching.

I, a White male academic with a thirteen years’ experience in the university system, am the unit team leader, serving a non-teaching function of academic co-ordination and unit development.

The design of the unit was based on the principle of the primacy of Indigenous community perspectives. A development team of eight Indigenous people and one non-Indigenous staff member was set up. The members came from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life and were not chosen, necessarily, for their involvement or experience in the field of education. Some members had extensive experience in education and some had none. The age range of the group was also extensive, providing a representative sample of opinions with differing perspectives. The group was given the task of defining the skills, knowledge and sensitivities that they would like teachers teaching their children to have. What was achieved was a series of content areas covering the anticipated issues of racism, history, anthropology, sociology, Government policies, colonization, Native Title and pedagogics.

known as Student Unions or Student Associations. 60

Each offering of the unit provided the opportunity to observe students engaging with some content that they find they are uncomfortable with. Each year, the staff of the unit are accused of making people ‘feel guilty’, in spite of the fact that particular care has been taken to emphasize from the very beginning and all the way through each unit offering that some content of the unit might well prove confronting and distressing. The position was taken from the initial offering of this unit in order to face the future we must confront the past.

From formal and informal feedback from students taking the unit, it appears that this unit is considerably different to all the others students have encountered. The unit is consistently described as ‘difficult’, ‘different to anything else’, ‘too much reading’ and ‘does not have any solutions’. What many of our students find is that the perspectives presented by and from the perspective of Indigenous Australians do not support their currently held attitudes and opinions and consequently they are forced to reconsider their position. This is not a comfortable exercise, especially when they realize that most of their established positions have been constructed on false, stereotypic or misinterpreted information provided by people whom they respect, such as parents and teachers. Even more confusing is the realization that many of these myths and stereotypes are publicly supported by the media. Confronting oneself is sometimes more comfortably dealt with by not confronting oneself.

Confronting self: Lessons from the unit

The presentation of an “awareness-raising” unit such as that on Australian Indigenous Studies, focused as it is primarily on content - a “topping up” of knowledge - in order to undermine the bases of stereotyping, effect attitudinal change and contribute to more inclusive curricula in schools is often seen as sufficient to achieve the aim of cultural sensitivity and social justice in education. Many other areas of academic endeavour dealing with matters of difference - from physical and intellectual through to sexuality - are “dealt with” by the same strategy: exposure to the issues, provision of “accurate” information and perspectives, and exhorting students to see things a little differently.

However, there is little evidence to suggest that, at least in the experience of those engaged in this Australian Indigenous Studies unit, a genuine commitment to engaging in anti-racist practices and pedagogies occurs merely as a result of increased exposure to information and perspectives on issues related to the topic. Many students indicate that they have developed more tolerant views of Indigenous Australians as a result of having taken the unit, but

tolerance is vastly different from acknowledging and celebrating difference, since the former implies a deviation from a norm that, while perhaps discomforting, is nevertheless able to be accommodated within the range of non-threatening meanderings.

What is apparent from this experience, though, is the almost ubiquitous experience of students feeling guilt. It seems that the journey to coming to understand something of the process of othering and Other requires the traveller to traverse the difficult terrain of cultural complicity in past atrocities, oppression and exploitation. A significant stage in the confrontation of indigenous-non-indigenous relations in Australia seems to be reached each time the Australian Indigenous Studies unit is taught wherein students react in one of three ways to the presentation of alternative histories, alternative explanations of the causes of current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander socio-economic and cultural situations and the like. A sizeable group of students resists the intrusion of discrepant realities and, in some crude way, adopts a position of (feigned) apathy which, it is arguable, masks a vigorous process of denial. For most of these students, it would seem that the unit is yet another part of their academic custodial sentence - something to be endured, time to be served with the promise of release in the future.

The majority of students, however, at some point in their engagement with the material and the people in the unit experience guilt and respond with either defensive / aggressive posturings (‘You can’t surely blame me for what happened two hundred years ago’) or apologetic, compensatory outpourings of shame and regret.

For the purposes of pursuing possibilities of the development of understandings as to how teacher education might contribute to a liberatory cultural globalisation, one based on the elimination of what Iris Marion Young (1990) has called the five faces of oppression, it is the defensive / aggressive response to being confronted with unpalatable images of the past that appears to offer valuable insight into ways whereby the root problem of racism might be both exposed and overcome. In Young’s view, oppression in fact names a family of conditions that includes exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence, and her very naming of these dimensions of oppression allows for more focused transformative pedagogical subject matter to be generated.

A person responding aggressively to guilt-inducing teaching material of the type in question here is probably in the process of undergoing essential confrontational experiences wherein her or his basic self-identity is being seriously drawn into question. This is a positive experience, since, given the binary nature of the terms, in order to come to understand the Other, one must simultaneously come to understand Self. It is the point of this thesis to argue that most units of study of Otherness - cultural, social, sexual, class-based, or whatever - advance only that aspect distant from a dominant reference point - the Otherness - at the expense of locating both Self

and Other as points connected in time and space in many ways. In the experience of those involved in the teaching of the Australian Indigenous Studies unit, the most powerful point for genuinely educative activity is that at which the role of Self is made apparent in the coming to know the Other. What this means here is that when, typically, students come to react aggressively to alternative views held up to them in the mirror provided by often their first real experience with Indigenous Australians, it is a sign that they are grappling with the questions of who and what they really are.

Taking heed of Leslie Roman’s declaration that ‘White is a Color’ and her analysis of white defensiveness in the face of ‘racial displacement’ (Roman 1993, p. 72), it is apparent that one of the first stages in the process of coming to understand the positive, emancipatory potentialities of difference is to acknowledge the existence of ethnicity resident within dominant white society. In the experience of the Australian Indigenous Studies unit, this ‘transparency’ of culture / ethnicity is clearly evident in this extract from an analysis and response to an article set for students:

After reading this article, I came to realize that I do not have a traditional culture as such that is filled with customs...People were punished severly (sic) by aboriginal (sic) law, which was not written text, whilst we have a standard justice system (student comment, review of set unit reading, semester 1, 1998).

The invisibility of culture and white ethnicity in a self-conscious sense is readily apparent in this extract, and is referable to the approach taken by many content-based approaches to experiences of Otherness. The students who seem to come to embrace a genuine understanding of the realities of the indigenous experience seem to be those dominant-culture students who have come to see themselves as inhabiting the cultural spaces typically rendered invisible by hegemonic devices. This presents as a point of potentially liberatory self- awareness. As students encounter more of the types of experiences designed to force them to confront their own identity - experiences, for example, where they are required to spend up to one week in contact with Indigenous Australians in fieldwork requirements for assessment purposes, as well as engaging Indigenous Australian teaching staff in the unit on a twice- weekly basis - they come to appreciate something of the nature of culture and power.

The experience of working with preservice teachers in this unit has led me to the conclusion that the most important focus in this type of endeavour is in fact that of the student her or himself. That is, it is only through the process of shaking off the invisibility of cultural location that dominant group members come to understand their daily involvement in the oppressive aspects of cultural difference and more productively envision and act upon a view of difference

as presenting opportunities for coming to excavate the roots of humanity - the global connections - within the local.

All of the student participants in this study took the Australian Indigenous Studies unit in semester 1, 1998. I was unit team leader of the unit that year, and it was to a meeting of all students enrolled in the unit that year that my call for volunteers for this study was made. The experience of having taken this unit was the one of the very few elements common to the lives of all the participants and forms an important backdrop to the exploration of their paths to self- awareness.

Chapter 4 The Inquiry Process: Literature and Engagement

I believe it no longer necessary to provide a justification for the conduct of a study within the (so-called) qualitative research paradigm, the battles for legitimacy in the coming-to-know stakes having been called even. With the truce between quantitative and qualitative approaches to research - or, as Wolcott calls them, ‘quantities- and qualities-oriented research’ (Wolcott 1990, p. 147) - having been negotiated somewhere in the 1970’s, qualitative research has demonstrated an increasingly powerful capacity to capture, portray and illuminate the human experience. Indeed, the methodological literature abounds with descriptions of a seemingly burgeoning number of “approaches” to qualitative inquiry, so much so that some writers have likened the rapidly expanding scope, type, substance and influence of qualitative research to the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe (Ely, Vinz, Downing et al. 1997, p. 5). Over a decade ago, Renate Tesch, as one example, identified in excess of forty different, yet related, qualitative research approaches (see figure 4.1).

One might comfortably add several more recently developed forms of qualitative research to this list, including forms of feminist research methodology and method (Hurtado & Stewart 1997) (Ribbens & Edwards 1998); critical social research (Kincheloe & McLaren 1998); and postmodern and postcolonial approaches (Fine 1998). Lincoln and Denzin refer to the development of these forms of and approaches to qualitative research as constituting Moments in research history, with the present Fifth and emerging Sixth moments being characterised by the work of the researcher being intimately and ineluctably woven into the social epistemologies of the postmodern era (Lincoln & Denzin 1998; Denzin & Lincoln 1998). However, because the research methods of previous socio-historical ‘moments’ are forever present, the researcher must both adopt a posture along this historical line and articulate, as best as is possible, this position within the research discourse (Wolcott 1992a).

Action research Ethnographic content Interpretive interactionism Case study analysis Interpretive human studies Clinical research Ethnography Life history study Cognitive anthropology Ethnography of Naturalistic inquiry Content analysis communication Oral history Conversation analysis Ethnomethodology Panel research Dialogical research Ethnoscience Participant observation Delphi study Experiential psychology Participative research Descriptive research Field study Phenomenography Direct research Focus group research Phenomenology Discourse analysis Grounded theory Qualitative evaluation Document study Hermeneutics Structural ethnography Ecological psychology Heuristic research Symbolic interactionism Educational connoisseurship & Holistic ethnography Transcendental realism criticism Imaginal psychology Transformative research Educational ethnography Intensive evaluation

Figure 4.1 Different approaches to qualitative research (Tesch 1990, 58.)

Qualitative sociological research

Based in a sociological more so than in a psychological frame, four critical elements (Metz 2000, p. 62) of qualitative research developed in large measure from the research work of early 20th century United States sociologists such as George Herbert Mead and others located at the University of Chicago School of sociology provided the methodological signposts for this study. In order, these elements and their incorporation into the study are:

1. There must be ‘a concerted effort to understand a worldview in its own terms. Deep understanding of insiders’ views is critical, including the tacit assumptions and patterns of which they may not be articulately aware.’ (Metz 2000,p. 62).

The study was aimed at drawing out the ways in which the participants both experienced and explained their racial positionings largely through engaging in a series of learning conversations (Thomas & Harri-Augstein 1985). The intention was to assist the participants to come to a deeper level of understanding about their own racial identity and the ways in which these had been constructed, developed, resisted and manipulated. It was considered essential that the participants direct the course of each of the conversations since each person’s path of exploration was unique (although certain commonalities or synchronicities seemed to exist). A

further rationale for the participants largely directing the course of the conversations was that there were often occasions when sensitive, possibly embarrassing, events or stories might arise. In keeping with a concern to act in a just fashion through the research process, it was essential that the participants be able to expose as much or as little as they felt comfortable in so doing.

As the series of conversations proceeded, many of the participants returned to events they had raised in earlier sessions but felt unwilling or unable to elaborate on at that time. Often, the return to these stories led to their deeper explication and interrogation as, presumably, the relationship of trust of and comfort with the researcher developed, and often the subject of these reflective returns was initially seen as some seemingly mundane, unremarkable aspect of the participant’s biography or lived experience. It was these types of discoveries that opened the window onto the participants’ racialised worlds.

2. The researcher attempts to ‘discover insider perspectives by spending a long time in contact with a group; participating in their lives with them, and seeking to understand mundane routines, special celebrations and rituals, and unplanned critical incidents’(Metz 2000,p.62)

A key procedural concept in the design and conduct of research, whether quantitative or qualitative, is that of ‘the field’. The term itself conveys an image of a clearly bounded, (intellectually and possibly physically) fenced parcel of something ready for entry, exploration and exiting, betraying a reified view of a reality awaiting discovery. The nature and purpose of the study at hand will determine whether the researcher needs to avoid trespassing by gaining approval for entry and if she or he needs to ensure the gates are closed upon departure. In many research studies, the nature of the field is considered to be so readily discernible as to require little by way of description, interrogation or justification.

However, what constitutes ‘the field’ is in itself highly problematic and yet crucially important in providing the contextual basis for the reading and evaluation of any research report (Ely et al. 1997, pp. 15-19). In many such reports, little attention seems to be given to defining what it is, for each study, that is the field. Research descriptions of ‘the field’ , when this aspect of research work is considered at all, typically fall into the conceptual category of the physical / territorial (the actual site of the particular study). While such a use of the term usually proceeds as if its meaning were ‘straightforward and readily evident’ (Ely, Vinz, Downing et al. 1997, p.15), it may well be that the use of this very non-problematised, commonsensical use of the term should give sufficient hint that it needs to be considered more carefully.

By way of example of the spatial sense with which the term ‘the field’ is usually embued, Schensul, et. al. (1999) define the field as ‘the natural, nonlaboratory setting or location where the activities in which a researcher is interested take place’; a ‘physical setting, the boundaries

of which are defined by the researcher in terms of institutions and people of interest, as well as their associated activities in geographic space’ (p.70, emphasis added). In a similar vein, Lincoln and Guba (1985) see ‘the field’ as a muddy and swampy place, often obscure and always complex. (Ely et al. 1997, p.15, emphasis added). The field, here, is an element external to the researcher, enveloping the substantive content of the research, a container requiring little more than a explanatory description. (Proponents of equating ‘the field’ exclusively with a physical construction of space and place will have increasing difficulty in reconciling this view with the expansions of cyberspatial locations, communities, identities, practices and languages.)

Typically, the field is seen as a place to which the researcher ‘goes’, physically, and it is frequently a place of unfamiliarity or at least partial strangeness. Indeed, in some views of the ethnographic process, it is investigating the unfamiliar that constitutes the central work of the practitioner. The current study differs markedly from this view insofar as it involves the exploration of the very familiar, the unremarkable, the mundane. The travelling involved to reach the field in this case is non-existent. The field is the daily existence of the researcher- participant and the other participants - we didn’t have to leave home in order to enter unfamiliar (intellectual) terrain.

Ely et.al. (1997) present an alternative view of ‘the field’ that fits neatly into the epistemological tenets that frame this study. It is worth following their notions of the field in some detail at this point. Far from being the almost ubiquitously straightforward term assumed by many researchers and methodologists, ‘the field’ in their view can be ‘rather slippery and complicated’ (Ely, Vinz, Downing et al. 1997, pp.15-16).

The field is constituted by a series of constructs, whereby the only reality to which a concept of ‘the field’ relates is that which is sketched by the transactions of the researcher and that which touches on or is touched by the point of her or his activity. Contrary to the absolutist, finite almost-geographical view of the field, these constructs are ‘shifting, extending, changing’ (p. 16), leading Ely and her colleagues to reconceptualize the field as consisting of an amalgam of internal and external constructions - that is, any attempt to describe the field of study must address and reconcile dilemmas of inside/outside, internal/external and subjective/objective representation (p. 16). It is these axes of complexity that ensure that the struggle for meaning- making is the essence of the ethnographic angst.

In further drawing out the transactional nature of this view of the field, Atkinson (1992) summarizes the essential relationships and negotiations involved:

…the field is produced (not discovered) through the social transactions engaged in by the ethnographer. The boundaries of the field are not ‘given’. They are the outcomes of what the ethnographer encompasses in

his or her gaze; what he or she may negotiate with hosts and informants; and what the ethnographer omits or overlooks as much as what he or she observes. Secondly, ‘the field’ is constructed by what the ethnographer writes. (p.9)

And, of course, the gaze, the negotiations, the observations and the writings are never innocent. Naïve, perhaps, but never innocent.

The actual periods of time spent with the participants in this study were not lengthy by standard anthropological ethnographic measures. In major branches of that discipline the whole matter of the validity or the veracity of truth claims asserted by the researcher is frequently dependent upon an acknowledgement by the audience of the appropriateness of the length of time spent in the field (see, for example, Spindler & Hammond 2000, pp.41-42). In some ways, this might be seen as an incarceration view of ethnography: one needs to serve one’s time.

It is very difficult to determine precisely when I entered and when I left the field, if in fact I have yet left it. If by the field of this study one means white culture, then I have spent a little over 46 years in that place, and at present I have little inclination to arrange an imminent departure. The field is where I live, and have lived for the whole of my life. It is what has formed and continues to form my individuality, my personality, my identity. One of the bonuses of inquiring into the mundane or the everyday is that when one starts to look with fresh eyes, one finds that one has been immersed in the subject matter for long periods of time and is so familiar with aspects of it that the subject matter in fact is largely invisible. The trick is to make explicit that which has been submerged into the implicit, experienced as the everyday and judged as the ordinary.

From a temporally closer perspective, I was fully immersed in the cultural milieu that constituted a major part of the daily life experiences of the participants - the university that is a point of common geography - for a lesser time than my life experience. I have been employed there for a little over thirteen years, and spent three years in fulltime undergraduate study and four years in part-time postgraduate study there prior to this employment period.

The most intense period of acute inquiry into the racialised identities of the white participants occurred over an eighteen month period. During this time, formal learning conversations were conducted and other evidence that would (possibly) assist in the inquiry was gathered. During this time, my own awareness, consciousness and understanding of what it means to be white in a white society grew dramatically as did my insight into the processes of coming to be racially self-aware. I see this now as a period of deep experience and understanding of self, identity and whiteness as opposed to my previous naïve everyday understanding of white ethnicity.

This period of acute understanding has led me to a much heightened understanding and awareness of the place I inhabit as a white in a predominantly white society. It has also led me to appreciate the possibilities raised by others (Giroux 1997; Jeater 1992; and McLaren 1999b in particular) of reformed, positive, white identities. As such, I don’t leave the field - I continue to live within it and to work on my understandings of it. I consider this ongoing flow of growth to constitute an enlightened unwhitened experience and understanding of the everyday. As with many examples of qualitative research, the project upon which this report is based is far from complete. Perhaps this report should be considered as but one of a number of articulations of thoughts about and insights into racialised identities and social betterment.

3. The researcher brings her or his personal-professional lens to the analysis and interpretation of the evidence. The researcher does not simply ‘describe what they see or become voices for insiders’ perspectives. Rather, they analyse the roots, patterns and consequences of those perspectives’ (Metz 2000, p.63).

In this study, I have been conscious of the very difficult question of how much to allow the participants’ words to carry the stories. The choice of verb - ‘allow’ - in the previous sentence is deliberate and provocative, because it has become apparent to me that the researcher role, and in particular that aspect of it that selects material for presentation, is very much a power- drenched one. The playing out of this role requires a commitment to principles of epistemology that bind the study together but which do not require the abdication of the responsibility of the researcher for answering the ‘so what?’ questions about the stories.

Some researchers see their role as little more than journalistic and try as much as is possible to limit their presence in the reporting process to formatting the participants’ words for inclusion verbatim. While this approach has much to commend it insofar as it aims at retaining the authenticity and integrity of the stories of the participants, I found it unsatisfying as a researcher/writer because it would have narrowed my voice and my thoughts in all of this almost to the point of exclusion. I operated on the basis that what the participants had to say was crucial in the project of coming to understand something of the processes and experiences through which they had come in developing a sense of their racialised identity but that the deep significance of this needed to be drawn out and laid bare. This was the researcher’s obligation.

In the realm of the personal, the laying bare process is uncomfortable and often impossible to achieve because of the confluence of factors of sensitivity, personal crisis, vulnerability and memory. It was this part of the recovery process that, it seemed to me that I, as researcher, could and needed to fill.

In the relevant sections, my own thoughts about and analyses of the stories of the other participants are presented where appropriate, and in the section on evidence interpretation later in this chapter I describe how I engaged the task of interpreting and analysing or making my sense of these stories.

4. The researcher demonstrates an appreciation of the social nature of the people or phenomena she or he is studying. They are ‘keenly aware that the groups they study both form social systems and cultural patterns of their own and accommodate their lives to the diverse groups around them and the larger societal systems of which all are a part’ (Metz 2000, p. 63)

The complex nature of identity is such that no one study could sustain a claim to capturing more than segments of it in toto, and part of this reason is that facets of the postmodern conception of what constitutes identity assume greater or lesser depending upon the particular socio-historical location of the individual. The power of the sociological lens in studies such as this one is that it recognises the significance of the social - that, after all, is the object of its gaze - and acknowledges that individuals wear membership of various groups at various times. Through shifting memberships, the individual constructs and utilises elements of identity that are at times in harmony with and at others in opposition to each other.

What is crucial is that the researcher acknowledge the multiple group memberships continually subscribed to by the participants, even if they don’t see all of these themselves. In this study, I have attempted to draw out the links between elements of identity that were my primary focus of interest and those other social locations that contributed to the complexity of each participant’s identity where it seemed to me that these links were significant. I selectively make these linkages where it seemed that the resolution of the questions driving the study might be advanced.

Critical social research

All research serves a purpose, and in the immediate case, the pursuit of doctoral qualifications is but one of these. A more outwardly-focussed purpose of this work is to contribute to a more equitable form of social relations, at least in the area of race. My approach to my work as an academic - the scholarship and research projects that channel passion into productive energies - is that research should serve social justice or social betterment ends. While this is perhaps not the place to delve too deeply into what constitutes social justice (see Young 1990; Sleeter 1996; Adams, Bell & Griffin 1997 for excursions into this topic), it is necessary to describe the main hopes of this work in terms of a contribution to social change.

This study falls largely into the field of critical social research, within which the primary goal is to engage in inquiry so as to contribute to social betterment (see, for example, Smith 1996). It is not sufficient to come to understand or know. Understanding is directed towards a social responsibility to assist in the alleviation of social injustice, disadvantage and oppression. Thomas (1993) argues that social research must grasp the opportunity resident within its scope for engaging critically with the world of the apparent so as to apply ‘a subversive worldview to the conventional logic of cultural inquiry’ (vii). Using ethnography as an example, Thomas argues for a form of research that is not content with describing what is, insisting instead upon pursuing the question of what could (should?) be:

Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purpose of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it. Conventional ethnographers recognize the impossibility, even undesirability, of research free of normative and other biases, but believe that these biases are to be repressed. Critical ethnographers instead celebrate their normative and political position as a means of invoking social consciousness and societal change (Thomas 1993, p.4).

For Thomas, the only genuinely justice-oriented forms of research are those that are imbued with the spirit of collaboration and participation. In this form of endeavour, the pursuit of both ‘truth’ and social problem-solving are merged:

participant researchers opt for relevance and identify closely with the needs and concerns of their subjects, using diverse perspectives that attempt to reconcile action with inquiry (Thomas, 1993, p 26, emphasis added)

The intention in this approach to research is to remove the barriers separating the researcher and the researched in order to draw upon the knowledge, the passion and the commitment to change of those most enveloped in the substance of the inquiry.

The researcher who adopts a critical stance operates under a number of assumptions: 1. that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are social and historically constituted; 2. that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription; 3. that the relationship between concept and object and between signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption; 4. that language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); 5. that certain groups in any society are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression that characterizes

contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as necessary, or inevitable; 6. that oppression has many faces and that focussing on only one at the expense of others (eg class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections among them; and 7. that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression (Kincheloe & McLaren 1998, p.263)

Critical approaches to research, then, offer ways to ‘redirect attention from those who wield power to those who bear its consequences’ (Thomas, 1993, p 27). On the surface, the current study might not seem to fit with this imperative: in fact, attention is very clearly being focussed on those who wield power. It is arguable that those most likely to benefit from the expose of and dismantling of almost-invisible structures of white racism would be non-whites. In Thomas’s view of critical research, if this were to be the case, participants in the study should have been drawn from this group of non-whites and their experiences of and with racism captured, interrogated and used as a basis for drawing conclusions about ways forward to a more racially-equitable society.

This wasn’t the case here. The participants were invited to participate on the basis of their very opposite positioning: that they were members of the privileged - in this case, white - group. How does this fit with Thomas’s point?

This study attempts to derive its justification and power from operating from within the master’s house, aiming indeed to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (with apologies to Audre Lord). I saw the work here as an attempt to meet the ‘critical postmodern challenge’ identified by Tierney: ‘to work from within not so that we hear what we want to hear, but that we hear what has not been heard’ (Tierney 2000, p. 111). Methodologically, I think that I followed similar paths to those trodden by Patti Lather when she explored ‘what it means to do empirical research in an unjust world (Lather 1986,p.257).

The location of this study within the criticalist tradition means that this report is but a partial one, a report-in-progress, since the end is not the understanding but the using illumination of verstehen in order to act. Later reports will, hopefully, address that part of the critical process.

Life history

Arguably, all research draws upon life history and autobiography: ‘There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography’ (Paul Valery, cited in Olney 1980,

preface). The researcher is always present, and her or his life experiences that have led her or him to particular philosophical locations, as brief as the domocility in those spaces might be, need to be accounted for in the research. Additionally, in this study, life history was a major research approach used to arrive at understandings about and illuminations of the development and awareness of white racial identity.

Life history embraces a range of phenomenologically-derived research approaches and writing genres including biography and autobiography, the testimonio, oral history, life stories, life writing, critical incidents, and autoenthnography (Tierney 2000, p. 307), case study, personal vignettes, and even forms of action research (Smith 1996, p. 216) and is a respected method in disciplines ranging from literature studies to anthropology and history to sociology and psychology. In this study, the main form of evidence collected has been derived from life history-type methods, in particular learning conversations (Thomas & Harri-Augstein 1985) and critical incidents (Tripp 1993; Tripp 1994) and one of the main means of reporting is the narrative form of vignette.

The meaning of the term ‘life history’ is semantically self-evident: it is research that tells the history of a person’s life. Ward (1999) describes life history as:

The history of an individual’s life given by the person living it and solicited by the researcher. It is a sociological autobiography obtained from solicited narratives and/or in-depth interviewing. It is an endeavour to acquire an account of a person’s life told in their own words. (p. 48).

To Becker (1966), life history is ‘a faithful rendering of the subject’s experience and interpretation of the world he [sic] lives in’ (pp. v-vi, cited in Ward 1999, p.49). Goodson maintains that life history’s greatest strength resides in its scope to allow the ‘subject to speak for herself or himself’ (Goodson 1980-81, pp 66-67), but always in the context of the social and cultural milieu.

Life history has come to be recognised as a means of not only eliciting the story of a person’s life, but more importantly, their interpretation and understanding of those experiences (Taylor & Bodgan 1984). Life history research takes personal and individual experience and locates and interrogates it within the context of the community. It is an ‘ever-emerging relativistic perspective’ and is consequently ‘inherently marginal and ambiguous’ (Ward 1999, p.56).

A central assumption in life history research is that there are certain events, experiences and people encountered through the course of the individual’s life that are crucial to the formation of facets of personality and identity. A further assumption is that while life stories are of

necessity and unavoidably ‘incessantly perspectival’ (Greene 1995) it is possible to re-present these perspectives in ways that will lead to understanding, connection and healing (Cary 1999).

I have rejected the totalising or universalising strand in life history research that attempts to utilise the stories of some to generalise to and about the life trajectories of others. In this, I have been influenced by notions such as that articulated from a feminist position ( and that description in itself assumes a capacity to generalise) by Carmen Luke:

Women’s complex and multiple identities experienced in and through the discourses that define feminine gender identity, sexuality, ethnicity, class, or culture suggest that an understanding of women and the concept of femininity cannot be articulated in universal principles, but must come from women’s individual voices articulated from specific social and cultural locations. (1996, p.290)

The purpose of life history research is to allow the subjects to speak, but the notion of voice is a problematic one. Considerable kudos is claimed for the recent turn in qualitative research in allowing so-called silent voices to be heard, for providing space for the marginalised to speak and the like. In itself, this aim is highly desirable and morally urgent. However, what is often masked by these types of statements and claims to authenticity is a normalising function and emasculation of the power of the research form to lead to social betterment. Often what is unacknowledged is that the voice/s that emerge are not unfettered or manipulated, but are those that have been ‘encouraged and granted’ (Cary 1999, accessed on-line, unpaginated). It is also crucial to recognise that people speak - they are not mute. It is not so much the speaking but the listening that is in need of rehabilitation.

In this study, I have drawn heavily upon the voices of the participants, but I have also recognised that my task is not to act as patronising door-opener, doing charity work among the less privileged. I don’t believe that the participants had stories they were desperate to tell but for which could find no-one to listen. This is not the way this study originated or developed. There is a type of life history work that opens those stories to broader audiences, as a way of allowing a healing process - both for the subject and the community within which she or he resides (see, for example, Cary 1999). Here, I was concerned to interrogate what in most ways was an unexamined, non-urgent facet of life for the participants - their white racial identity. There were no stories, no oppressions, no atrocities bursting to be told to and about the perpetrators. But there were stories of import for those who do suffer at the hands of white racism.

The place of memory is crucial in life history work. Edel (1984) equates biography with the ‘organisation of human memory’ (Smith 1998, pp.193-194). Studs Terkel describes his oral historical writings as ‘memory books’ (Terkel 1970, p. 17), and Tierney talks of memory in life

history as being little more than ‘a ghost telling half-lies’ (Tierney 1999, accessed electronically, unpaginated). The reliability of memory - and the attendant question of the credibility of the story told from the memories - is taken up in the section on truth following, but it must be acknowledged that life history and narrative work rests heavily, if at times uneasily, on the base of trust: trust that the participant is telling her or his life stories as she or he recalls them and trust that the researcher will re-present these stories with integrity and care.

The main challenge in biographical work is coming to know the ‘figure under the carpet’ (Edel 1979), that part of the subject of the research that is usually hidden. Given the fragmented nature of and the tectonic-like splits and movements that characterise the postmodern identities that reside within the subject, this figure is not so much found as constructed by the biographer in the almost voyeuristic endeavour that constitutes her or his craft and by the subject in the process of what Pritchett likens to a striptease:

In a sense, [the subject] is sort of stripper [sic]: the suspense of his story lies in guessing how far he will undress. Or, of course - if he is writing about his career - we see him putting more and more important clothes on. (Pritchett 1977, p. 3).

Tierney (1999, accessed electronically, unpaginated) has summarised five aspects of a ‘cartography of life history concerns’ that delineate the landscape of contemporary issues surrounding life history research :

1. Textual authority: in acknowledging the active participation of the author in the construction and excavation of the figure under the carpet and the generation of the biographical pieces that attempt to make that figure public, there is a need for greater creativity in representing the authorial voice. Tierney suggests looking to literature to broaden the narrative range of the authorial voice.

2. Fragmentation: In rejecting the notion of a unitary or unified subjectivity, the new life history work accepts the impossibility of capturing and re-presenting an integrated identity. In a world that is increasingly fragmented, any one person will carry ‘various complementary, contradictory and elusive selves’. The biographical challenge is not to attempt to seamlessly reintegrate these, but to ‘create the methodological and narrative strategies that will do justice to those multiple identities’ (Tierney 1999, accessed electronically, unpaginated).

3. Representation: The linear form of conventional life history, wherein the story is told in chronological order as the life moves from A to Z, obviously labours to effectively convey these fragmentations, and one of the most potent and urgent tasks for life historians is to

develop new ways of carrying the narratives of the subject. Tierney sees these experiments with alternative narratives as authors ‘struggling to get out of the representational straitjacket that social scientists have been in for most of this century’ (Tierney 1999, accessed electronically, unpaginated), and encourages such developments as ways out of the assumption that meaning making is solely a cognitive, rational process and into an acknowledgment that the affective is just as powerful in this regard.

4. Purpose: multiplicity of purpose has always attended the life history project, although more rarely were multiple agendas ever made explicit. There are at least three major points of purpose in any biographical piece: those of the author, the individual subject and the audience of such work. Each of these points contains multiple agendas as well, and the task is to attempt to display the complexity of identity rather than reduce difference to a unitary sense of the Human. The need for life history work to contribute to the formation of alliances across and beyond difference has never been more critical, and Tierney sees life history as a means of reconstructing difference as empowering rather than deviant.

5. Judgement: Truthfulness (or at least verisimilitude), precision and standards of trustworthiness are essential to the illuminative power of narrative forms of research, however, with the changes described in the previous four points impacting upon the research text, questions of how to judge the credibility of the report arise. These matters are considered in greater detail in a following section dealing with truth and validity issues more broadly, but it is important to note here that the old ways of judging the worth of a piece of research will no longer suffice. In many ways, this is the most critical of all issues facing the postmodern researcher, particularly one working within a life history or biographical approach, since the determination of worth or value in large part dictates the effect one’s research might have more broadly. This consideration is not insignificant when one works towards more socially-just forms of community.

All of these issues and concerns have confronted me in the design and conduct of this study. The reader should recognise where I have attempted to grapple with them and will, no doubt, draw their own conclusions as to how well I succeed in the context of this study in meeting their challenges.

Ward (1999), drawing on the work of Allport (1942), describes three forms of life history: the complete, the topical and the edited. The difference between these three is determined, ultimately, by ‘the aims of the research process; what the researcher is looking for and/or trying to illustrate; and the degree of intrusion made by the researcher in the creation of the final document.’(Ward 1999, p. 49). In brief, complete life histories attempt to cover the whole collection of life experiences of the subject; the topical focuses on a select part of the whole life

history and the edited mixes into the narrative of the ‘focal subject’ commentary and interrogatives by another party. Ward maintains that the power of life history work lies in its capacity to lead to theory building, and that that process of necessity requires the intrusion of the researcher into the subject’s life history.

In this study, the edited form of life history work is perhaps most apparent. In the role of editor, as the language of this approach would position me, I engaged in the types of activities Ward lists, but within the theoretical, epistemological and moral framework that borders this study:

Editing can range from minimal interpretation by the researcher, such as cutting out the verbal repetitions and the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, through to extensive cutting of the account and arrangement in chronological sequence, to ‘verification by anecdote’ (Plummer 1983, p.115) where the use of selected quotes from the informant’s interviews are used as examples to illustrate and accentuate the theoretical position being argued by the researcher. (Ward 1999, p. 51)

In eschewing the idea that one can hope to capture the totality of a person’s existence, contemporary life history approaches tend to focus more closely on particularities within individual biography: either temporal extracts from a life chronology or the pursuit of a narrower dimension of the personality under scrutiny. In this study, I have endeavoured to confine my inquiry to those aspects of the participants’ life histories to date that relate to their development and awareness of racial identity.

In representing or retelling these stories, Nietzsche’s conclusion that the difference between truth and fiction in matters of narrative is, finally, undecidable (1968, cited in Lather 2000, p. 155) is probably as clear an admonition as any. This matter is taken up later in this chapter.

Truth and its Representation

The ascension of the fifth and sixth moments of qualitative research (Denzin 1996;Lincoln & Denzin 1998) means that considerable unsettling in even the most stable aspects of qualitative research has occurred. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the matter of veracity or truth, accuracy, validity and reliability of the evidence or data collection and the interpretation and representation of that evidence. While for some, this state of affairs is frightening with its disintegrating certainties, there is much that is opened up by way of those previously ‘unacceptables’, ‘unspeakables’ and ‘unknowables’:

Qualitative research is at a crossroads. The promise of qualitative research, focused as it is in its more postmodern incarnations on stakeholder participation, stakeholder design of research and stakeholder decisions about how and when to use data collected and analysed, has never been more invitingly fruitful (Lincoln 2000, p.131).

In the pursuit of social justice goals, it becomes imperative that the research process in itself be socially just, that in the conduct of the inquiry and its subsequent reporting, dissemination and use, those who are intimately involved, the participant-informers, are accorded respect and protection and that their weltanschauung is recorded, interpreted and portrayed with integrity, honesty and compassion. The participants have recollected their thoughts on various aspects of their lives in ways which may in fact not hold up to close chronological scrutiny but which tell the broad-brush stories of their coming to racial awareness. Making white racial identities visible has the potential to lead to individual projects of understanding Self and Other in ways that might work to reduce the discriminatory effects of Difference. Whether this, in effect, occurs presents as a further stage of this study yet to be undertaken.

The form of reporting accepted in the research genre of the testimonio, as a related form of life history and narrative research, asks the reader to believe and to trust in the face of no other evidence of credibility than that the speaker / writer claims veracity. While the main form of evidence gathered in my study does not fall squarely into the bounds of the testimonio (‘If the testimonio is little more than an individual’s concerns, memories and ideas, then it is not testimonio, but autobiography’. Tierney 2000, p.105), there are some relevant points of comparison to be made between the two with regards to truth claims and ‘validity’. Lincoln captures one of these points:

Unfamiliar with the testimonio form, I take it to be “testimony”. Testimony, in turn, I take in the Eurocentric, legal sense: an eyewitness account. Upon finding it is not entirely an eyewitness account, or even a factual account, I am left wondering what is to be believed. (Lincoln 2000, p. 134)

When we are asked to accept as true that which someone else tells us is true, the logico- positivist remnants within stir to protest. To accept the veracity of the life stories and histories of the participants in this study requires a whole different set of ‘well, ok, but only if’ caveats. What are those ifs? On what epistemological and other grounds should I believe the stories the other participants told me? And then why should the reader believe my story and theirs? Of these latter two, utterly crucial questions, the first demands some means for determining the truthfulness of the participants’ stories. The second question requires that I demonstrate the ways in which I worked to ensure the highest standard of believability was present in this current (final?) draft of the manuscript.

In response to the first question, Patti Lather’s caution about witness testimony, autobiographical statements and the like is important:

No matter how much we think we are reading voice, we are reading a text. Acts of transcription have taken place. Editorial decisions have been made. The text is never free of the contamination of language. Given this, what is knowledge in the testimony? (Lather 2000, p.155.)

To further demoralise one in the process of trying to determine ways in which to ascertain the veracity of personal accounts and belief statements, Britten says:

The question of narrative truth…is perhaps irresolvable, for, as is generally accepted by most objective thinkers, truth is relative to experience, perception, imagination, and underlying motives of the person or persons claiming it….Readers’ ultimate acceptance or rejection of a given… claim to narrative truth is a highly personal matter involving their predisposition to believe what is written and the narrator’s ability to persuade them to accept what is written as fact. (Britten 1995, p.105, emphasis added).

Tierney (2000, p. 110) suggests that the determinant of the veracity or the validity of a story becomes not the documentary process or the text itself, but the reader. In keeping with what Britten has suggested, is the reader prepared to accept, or be ‘predisposed’ to believe? There is no room to ignore obvious inaccuracies or fabrications in the narrative form, and any such ‘contradictions between narrative and experience need to be explored’ , but truth in a postmodern world is a highly elusive concept, ‘contested, argued over and perspectival’ (Tierney 2000, p.110).

In answer to the second question (Why should the reader believe me or put faith in what I have to say?) I must enter - briefly - into the debate about validity in qualitative research. When one works within a qualitative research frame, particularly in that unswept corner where one finds evidence of more poststructuralist and postcolonial veneers slowly building up, considerable attention needs to be paid to explaining how one arrived at one’s conclusions and then in justifying the particular means adopted to ensure some sort of “validity” or credibility of those conclusions: ‘truth, of course, is always a central problematic’ (Lincoln 2000, p. 137).

Validity as a term in the education research lexicon derives from the area of testing and evaluation and has, therefore, a very strong postpositivist genealogy (Wolcott 1990). In the forms of qualitative research where validity is still considered to be a significant design feature, it has been seen more as a process of extracting accurate or acceptable meaning from the evidentiary base (Miles & Huberman 1984).

However, a number of researchers have either rejected calls to demonstrate the validity of their work, at least from the more traditional social science viewpoint (Scheurich 1997; Wolcott 1990;

Wolcott 1994), or have ‘[brushed] aside the concept of validity as though it were no more than a frail vine or a small cloud of gnats impeding [the] progress…like a backwoodsman in full stride’ (Jackson 1990, pp. 153-154). This study was conducted with Harry Wolcott’s explanation of the incongruence of the concept of validity with his ‘Brad’ trilogy in mind:

I do not go about trying to discover a ready-made world; rather, I seek to understand a social world we are continuously in the process of constructing…Validity stands to lure me from my purpose by inviting me to attend to facts capable of verification, ignoring the fact that for the most part the facts are already in. My present reality includes a case study in which any understanding I may achieve will occur largely in answer to questions that are not matters of fact. (Wolcott 1990, p.147)

From a more specifically anthropological perspective, but one that segues nicely here, Geertz (1973) captured one of, if not the, essential dilemmas for the researcher engaged in this type of work:

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. (p. 29)

I utilised Wolcott’s nine procedural points in order to ‘satisfy the implicit challenge of validity…[or] to keep the question from being raised at all’ (Wolcott 1990, p.127). This ‘constellation of activities’ that underpins Wolcott’s approach to questions of validity in his research are utilised in his work ‘ not only to help me get things right (or keep me from getting them all wrong) but to convey ideas in such a way that the reader, who is also not quite getting it all right, is not getting it all wrong either’.(p.133, emphasis in the original). These are the steps I took, the processes I invoked in order to produce an account that the reader would accept as credible, believable and in which the other participants in the study placed trust and faith. In summary, these points are:

1. Talk little, listen a lot: the purpose is to attempt to elicit as much of the story as the informant or participant is willing and / or able to tell. The crucial aspect of this point is to ensure that the part being told is as large as is possible. Listening also allows for the researcher to consider how much of the tale she or he is actually able to understand. The learning conversations in this study were based on typical conversations: there were no rigid schedules of questions to interject staccato-like and disrupt the flow of the participants’ stories.

I adopted the role of conversationalist but with a concern to ‘talk little, listen a lot’. The conversation transcripts, however, reveal more of me talking than I would have preferred,

particularly in the early sessions when I felt there was a need to keep the conversation between relative strangers (at that point) going. As the period of time with the participants grew, they inhabited more of the dialogic space. For some reason, however, periods of silence are still concerns of mine.

2. Record accurately: notes were made as soon as was possible after the event to which they referred, at times during conversations and observations but most often immediately after such events. Checks for accuracy, when needed, were conducted with the participants. In Wolcott’s view, early accurate recording minimises the ‘potential influence of some line of interpretation or analysis that might have me remembering and recording too selectively or reinterpreting behaviour prior to recording it.’(p. 128). This is perhaps the closest the whole research process here came to a level of objectivity or external validity.

3. Begin writing early: Wolcott advises the production of initial drafts, largely descriptive, of the report prior to engaging in fieldwork, and then the writing of further drafts as soon and as often as the emerging evidence allows and requires. Early writing carries two intents: to provide a ‘record of what one already knows or suspects and to identify obvious gaps where more information will be needed’ (p.129). Subsequent revisions and expansions enable the deeper contextualisation of the accounts and early drafts can be shared with those participants more knowledgable about the setting of the research, providing opportunities for feedback to the writer.

In this study, written accounts were made on an on-going basis, the early versions being returned to participants for their comments and amendments. These early pieces also enabled me to consider conversation points for following sessions.

4. Let readers ‘see’ for themselves: One way of demonstrating the path by which the researcher/writer came to the conclusions s/he has is by enabling the readers of the account to see for themselves the evidence or data from which the conclusions are drawn. While qualitative research typically generates large quantities of evidence, most of which cannot - and indeed, need not - be included in any report, Wolcott advises including as much ‘primary data’ as possible in the final report. Without eschewing the essential role of interpretation, he suggests erring on the side of too much detail and too little analysis of the evidence so as to expose the readers to the types of material he has collected in the research process. In giving the audience access to the evidentiary material so they might more readily see how he has arrived where he has, Wolcott also opens up alternative interpretations so as to create something of a dialogic relationship with the reader as well.

In the current study, I was concerned to maintain a balance between two features: allowing the participants to carry their stories and analyses of these as much as possible to the reader in their own words and providing a readable and concise account of my pursuit of the study’s central questions. These features are often (usually?) in opposition to each other. In this study, I have erred on the side of the former: that while interpretation is crucial, it doesn’t extend to every piece of evidence collected.

5. Report fully: Contradictions and inconsistencies abound in the social world, so any attempt to capture parts of that world will contain these as well. Rather than discard, obscure or manipulate pieces of evidence that don’t fit with final (or even emerging ) categories and themes, Wolcott advises the researcher to report fully enough to capture and portray the range of the informant’s ideas. Discrepant details are crucial to establish the credibility of the research process as well as in ‘[flagging] an issue that is not as well resolved as the prose implies or not developed more fully because my data are “thin” or certain events never occurred during the period of the fieldwork’ (p. 130).

I have included references to and examples of pieces of contradictory evidence that, after consideration, seem to indicate counter-themes within the flow of the major themes and meta- themes reported on. Walt Whitman’s words from his poem Song of Myself were very germane:

I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large - I contain multitudes)

6. Be candid: In research of this type, it is impossible to not convey the views, judgements or preferences of the researcher/writer in the report. While the days of lauding scientific detachment and objectivity are long gone, Wolcott argues it is still necessary to explicitly impose oneself in the social context being investigated and to report on that imposition. He opts for ‘subjectivity as a strength of qualitative approaches rather than attempt to establish a detached objectivity that I am not sure I want or need’(p.130). This requires the identification of bias, preference and judgement on the part of the researcher/writer since there is a definite line between research and reform.

Procedures for establishing the credibility or validity of the research process and the conclusions being drawn from them are not sufficient to ‘validate our personal or professional authority to offer pronouncement about what needs improving and how to go about it’(131). While the current study resides within the criticalist tradition, the points regarding the validity of the inquiry do not extend to the moral worth of the ultimate ends of that inquiry. In this report, I have positioned myself variously as observer, participant, confidante, witness, narrator and scribe, and from each of those positions comes particular perspectives that surface in the report. I am also present throughout as white, male academic. I have adopted Wolcott’s

advice to be candid about my subjectivity, but to ‘try to draw a distinction between revealing my feelings and imposing my judgements’ (p.131).

7. Seek feedback: There is possibly no more unassailable indicator of validity than that of the approval or imprimatur of those closest to the evidence. Such feedback on accuracy is crucial, and in this study each participant was given the opportunity to check transcripts and make amendments as necessary to correct inaccuracies, clarify ambiguities and delete material they felt, with hindsight, was better left unreported.

Feedback from those at a greater distance from the central activity of the study is also crucial and an often-overlooked aspect of qualitative research. Being removed from the production of the core evidence, the role of this second tier of feedback fitted with Wolcott’s point that ‘readers not so closely involved can be helpful in assessing the suitability of my analytical concepts, my sensitivity to the people involved, or the adequacy and appropriateness of interpretations made and lessons drawn’(p.132).

Two distinct groups of people assisted in enhancing the strength of the conclusions from this second tier: a peer review group and my doctoral supervisors. From previous experience researching, writing and presenting in the area of cultural identity, I was aware of the concern harboured by members of Indigenous Australian communities about the ways in which white research on Indigenous people might be (and frequently is) exploitative and disempowering. I was also aware of the sensitivity of drawing upon the experiences of participants, in part, in a formal unit of study of Indigenous Australians where suspicions, at the very least and hopefully at the most, of trespassing on (metaphorically as well as the historically on-going physical act) murri territory or appropriating murri knowledge would be raised. In order to avoid unintentional transgressions of cultural sensitivity, a peer review group of friends and colleagues knowledgeable in the area of the study was established to provide a feedback and verification forum. Included in this group was an Indigenous Australian elder who offered critique and alternative cultural explanations of some of the information and evidence I had gathered as well as ensuring my own whiteness did not intrude excessively into the constructions and descriptions of culturally and racially Other groups in the course of the study. This group provided feedback on the analysis and interpretation of aspects of the participants’ stories and offered alternative interpretations that were considered against my initial interpretations. This group also interrogated aspects of the methodology and research process more generally. My doctoral supervisors also provided critical feedback in ways that provoked a further tightening of the analysis and interpretation.

8. Try to achieve balance: Because of the nature of the interpretive process that lies at the heart of qualitative research, Wolcott advises periodic returns to the field setting or, at least,

a full re-reading of the casenotes so as to check for fit between the evidence and the representation of the events at hand. The purpose here is to satisfy the researcher/writer that ‘elusive criteria like balance, fairness, completeness, sensitivity’ (p.133) have been met. This is not an attempt to achieve objectivity but rather more rigorous subjectivity, to ensure that, while accurate in the events and impressions reported, the writer has presented a full account such that, as before, the reader might be left with a stronger sense of the reality portrayed as well as the opportunity to consider how the writer selected the focus of the report.

In this study, I have engaged in frequent re-readings of the primary evidence and have pondered the difficulty of ensuring that, in seeking to expose the ordinary or the mundane, a fuller balance in reporting might be achieved. The inquiry process did not attempt to address matters that seemed to me to lie outside the general parameters of racial awareness, and consequently I report on only a part of the struggles and processes of identity formation that the participants have undergone in their lives to date. I have not, for example, drawn out either in the inquiry process or in the interpretation of the results of that process anything of the development of gendered, sexual or class identities, although these are obviously impossible to disentangle from the racial identities of the participants and flavour the testimonies of the participants throughout.

By focussing almost exclusively on one aspect of the complex matter of identity formation I have limited the depth of depiction of the participants. However, while matters relating to other aspects of identity did arise in the conversations and they did impinge on the matter of primary interest of this study, to capture and include these elements would have diluted the work of uncovering racial identity issues with white participants. If anything, I considered the more usual phenomenon of the seeming invisibility of the racial facet of identity in Whites to be sufficient reason to cut or narrow the focus to that part of the individuality of each participant. By taking this decision, I hope that a larger balance might be achieved: the pasting of a usually- overlooked piece of identity onto the collage of white cultural identity .

9. Write accurately: The final process Wolcott suggests applying to shore up credibility in qualitative research studies is in many ways a technical one. He looks for what he calls a ‘coherence or internal consistency’(p.134) in the manuscript, not so much in the sense of internal validity in a postpositivistic sense but rather ensuring acceptable writing conventions - grammar, punctuation, etc. - are present and that the whole manuscript reads coherently. In keeping with the fifth point above, he is not suggesting that this part of the writing process should aim to remove contradictions :

[F]rankly, I regard consistency … as much an author’s trick as it is revealing of research acumen. That our studies are so free of inner contradiction ought

really to set us wondering how they can be describing human behaviour. (Wolcott, p.134).

In this study, rigorous re-reading and editing has been undertaken to try to ensure that what is presented for the reader’s consideration accurately captures what was said, seen and done by the participants and, just as importantly, accurately conveys the meaning of all of this constructed by the researcher/writer. Where possible, I have included examples of evidence that would reveal an inconsistency, a contradiction. Through the use of the peer review group, I have been able to check that the impressions conveyed by a reading of parts of the report by knowledgable outsiders fit with the evidence gathered.

I believe that where personal stance and interpretation of my own testimony have been foregrounded, those who know me personally, as well as professionally, would not be surprised by what they read, that they would see a congruence with my current view of the world.

While seemingly a more technical aspect to the research writing process, in many ways this final element of the raft of measures designed to develop a sense of confidence in the reader that what she or he is engaging with is to be believed and relied upon has been the most difficult to do and the most important of the lot. It is through this process that the veracity of this study has, hopefully, been established in such a way as to be able to present credibly some of the ‘particles of truth’ sieved from the ‘narratives of inaccuracies’ (Heinrich Boll cited in Lindsey 1993, p. 111) that constitutes individual biographies.

In the final analysis, all I can hope is, if asked, Does it create for you an experience of believing? (Clough 1999, p.442), the reader will answer, yes.

Evidence Gathering

Part of the difficulty of investigating the ordinary - and that, in large measure, is what this study was about - is that one can be too busy looking for and miss out on the value of looking at (Jackson 1990, p. 163). As Jackson puts it, ‘perhaps looking for encourages us to look past things rather than at them. Looking for constricts awareness; looking at expands it. What would it mean to look at a [setting] rather than looking for something that might be found there?’ (p. 163, emphasis in the original). Here, I tried to look at what constitutes the development and self-awareness of white racial identity.

Learning conversations

The main form of evidence gathering was the learning conversation. In many ways similar to the research interview, the use of the term ‘interview’ was eschewed because of the power relationships resident within it. I was concerned that volunteers, being accustomed to being interviewed for jobs, places in courses and the like, would not be forthcoming for a series of interviews. The sense of needing to ‘pass’ an interview, to perform well and to present the face that seemed to best fit with what the interviewer was after would have been fatally detrimental to the intention here.

Rather than needing to have the participants sculpt stories or ideas to fit a pre-conceived notion of worthwhile input that might have been drawn up by the use of the term ‘interview’, I needed to convey my genuine sense of ‘wanting to know’. I needed to assure potential participants that this was not a question-and-answer interview situation, that there were no right and wrong answers. I needed to convey in a simplistic way the epistemological basis of the study - that knowledge is constructed through the interaction of complex and uncertain agents - and the term ‘learning conversation’ (Thomas & Harri-Augstein 1985) seemed to meet this purpose.

Learning conversations ‘represent the process of “story telling” and as such contribute to the construction of knowledge in the participants and their constantly developing identity’ (Rossi 1999, p. 143)

Derived from the work of George Kelly in the use of repertory grid technique in the psycho- therapeutic area of personal construct theory (Kelly 1955; Kelly 1970), learning conversations have been viewed as crucial staging points in the journey to self-knowledge and understanding in life conjunction of life history research (Rossi 1999, p. 156). Kelly’s purpose was to help the individual heal him or herself by provoking an explicit confrontation with the realities s/he had constructed, and the learning conversation was a powerful tool in this project. In this activity, the therapist and the patient would discuss particular constructs of the patient’s social realities, with the conversation initiated by an analysis of a representation of the patient’s view of aspects of the world elicited by the repertory grid technique. This analysis would inevitably throw up contradictions in the world view of the patient, and it was these that led the conversation, therapeutically, to its conclusion. The interaction between the therapist and the patient was designed to be a non-threatening, open-ended conversation between two people about the ideas of one of them. The therapist’s role was not to challenge or interrogate, but to provoke these responses in the patient: the patient was led to interrogate her or his own world views and realities.

While the therapeutic gloss to the learning conversation is not relevant here - although there is probably much in the course of the conversations that ensued in this study that might well have led to some forms of reconciliation with and healings of self - the essential purpose was. This technique was utilised to assist participants draw up incidents from their past and to explore and interrogate these for the illuminations they might provide in coming to understand the racialised nature of identity that each participant carried within themselves.

My role was to engage in subtle provocation to memory work by the participants by using seeming contradictions contained within their stories and more typical elicitation and encouragement techniques. Additionally, I drew upon episodes from my own experiences that sometimes paralleled and at others stood in stark contrast to theirs.

Each participant was engaged in a series of conversations regarding their view of self as a racialised being. Each string of learning conversations was conducted over an eighteen month period with approximately ten hours of face-to-face ‘formal’ conversation time with each participant. As well as this time, numerous informal conversations with each of the primary participants occurred over this time, in face-to-face situations as well as by email, telephone and in writing.

The importance of seeing the sessions as learning conversations rather than strictly as interviews was borne out in these returns. In keeping with the concern to attempt to make more explicit the hidden, mundane aspects of life that conceal the effects of a particular racial identity, it was necessary for the participants to experience an ‘ah-ha’ moment. This is the power and the point of engaging in conversation, where the direction and outcomes are unknown until they occur, and where learning, self-knowledge for the participants and understanding (verstehen) for the researcher, is attendant upon the process.

No formal schedule of questions was developed for use in these conversations, although the temptation was strong and sense of confidence in the success of a more open-ended, free-form conversation somewhat weaker. I was concerned that without a clear path to follow, the conversations might end up meandering (which they did) and yield little relevant insight (which they didn’t). I decided to use a more formally structured approach in the first conversation with each participant and to then monitor each subsequent session and decide on whether I needed to maintain a more guided approach. The tensions between the reason for using a learning conversation approach and the possibility of a thin evidentiary base were very real.

The first conversation with each participant was structured around a set of topics and questions aimed at eliciting basic demographic and biographical data, setting the scope and expectations

of the study and establishing some level of understanding of the participants’ experience with a particular unit each had taken in their pre-service teacher education program.

My initial insecurity over the lack of formal structure for the conversations proved to be groundless as each session flowed freely, with my early directive and conversation-maintainer roles dwindling to vanishing by the final sessions. I entered each conversation with a few ideas I wanted to follow up from previous conversations, and the participants usually went with points and took the discussions on further, both in depth terms and by way of ground covered. For example, in one conversation with Michelle, she had talked about her suspicions about her family’s possible Indigenous heritage. In our next conversation, I returned to these suspicions of hers, and out of this came her recollection and telling of the ways in which her grandmother attempted to (almost literally) remove marks of indigeneity from her children: the scrubbing of the skin with lemon juice and the like.

It was apparent that as the length of time spent in the project grew, the researcher-participant relationship became more comfortable for all concerned, and events covered in earlier sessions were often re-visited at a greater depth and with more personal disclosures attending the process. These personal disclosures were made by both researcher and other participants, and fueled further familiarity and comfort in the research relationship.

With regard to the questions of how deep the data or evidence should be, of how exhaustive the search, of how wide the scope of the cases, I was heartened by a piece of advice: ‘it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something’ (Geertz 1973, p.20). In all twenty-eight separate conversations were conducted, each of a minimum of an hour’s duration and a number lasting considerably longer. Participants in the study further contributed to the evidentiary base of the project through memorandum and reflective writing, and these pieces have been drawn upon where relevant to the report.

Interpretation of Evidence and Data Analysis

I was conscious of the fact that, through being allowed into the lives of the participants in this study, I have assumed that ‘privileged position of naming and representing other people’s realities’ (Mauthner & Doucet 1998, p. 139). It was crucial, then, that the analytic and interpretive tasks be conducted with the greatest concern for accuracy, integrity and fairness.

In the qualitative research field, considerable attention is paid to the development and description of approaches to and techniques of evidence or data gathering and to processes of reporting outcomes and conclusions. Guidebooks and methods texts abound. However, by

comparison, until recently there has been a relative paucity of material in the literature, both research methods texts and in professional journals, on the interpretation of research evidence or data analysis as the activity is more frequently tagged (Ely et al. 1997,p.223; Mauthner & Doucet 1998, p.119). Qualitative researchers, in general, have been accused of being ‘cavalier’ in their attempts at presenting for scrutiny and explaining their professional modus operandi (Page 2000, p.25).

With a more self-conscious turn on the part of researchers and the recognition of the importance of accounting for the positioning of the researcher in every stage of the research process, this deficit is being repaired. The earlier (almost exclusive) focus on techniques of entering and leaving the field, data collection and recording, casenote management and analysis has been broadened by an increasing concern to ensure issues of interpretation, representation and writing and textual production are theorised and developed (Coffey 1999, p. 135).

Essentially, in analysing the evidence and data in this study, I followed the sequence of a ‘fairly classic set of analytic moves’ (Miles & Huberman 1994, p. 9) . This sequence, paraphrased, is:

1. Affixing codes to a set of field notes, interviews, etc. 2. Noting reflections 3. Sorting and sifting through the materials to identify similarities, relationships, patterns, themes, differences and common sequences 4. Isolating these and returning to the field for further data collection 5. Gradually elaborating a set of generalisations that cover consistencies uncovered in the data 6. Confronting these generalisations with a formalised body of knowledge in the form of constructs or theories. (Miles & Huberman 1994, p.9)

Transcription

Each learning conversation was audiotaped with the informed consent of the participant in each case. This was to enable a transcription of the sessions to be made for use in further analysis of the stories told and events described. The transcriptions were made by me as researcher/writer so that the experience I had of participating in the conversation could be brought to bear on the transcription of that session. It is necessary to delve a little into what happens in the transcription process.

To many a purely technical task, transcription is often almost glibly passed over in descriptions of research (Edwards 1993; Lapadat 1999; Ochs 1979; Poland 1995). For many researchers, the transcription process is one that requires little by way of theorising or considering, being seen as a transparent part of the task of creating a ‘hard’ copy record of an interview (Lapadat 1999, p.66). This view implies that the translation of the complex social interaction that constitutes an interview or a conversation is non-problematic and mechanical, that there is little possibility of influence, manipulation or contamination of the evidence by the “impartial” transcriber. This is particularly the case where the transcription is from an audiotape. Where the record is on videotape, there might well be more concession given to the interpretive gaze of the translator or transcriber.

It is a view that I rejected in this study. It seemed to me that the process of transcription, far from being an invisible, inert, neutral movement of evidence from one setting and form to another relied upon countless ‘decisive analytic actions’ (Miles & Huberman 1994, p. 110) that in the end render the transcription a version of the communicative event rather than a record of it. Certainly, it could not be seen as the record.

Some of the variations between such versions are accounted for by alterations of the data (Poland 1995, p. 6), either deliberate (as in a transcriber ‘tidying up’ the data, putting her or his hopefully synonymous words in the text in place of the speaker, etc.) or accidental (sentence structure, punctuation marks, omissions and mistaking words and phrases for others) changes made by the transcriber which render the transcript a variation on the event. The loss of any but the most obvious non-verbal components of the communicative event also effects changes to the record of the event:

Committing verbal exchanges to paper seems to result in their immediate deterioration: Context, empathy, and other emotional dynamics are often lost or diminished, and the language seems impoverished, incoherent, and ultimately embarrassing for those who may have cause to read back over their contributions (including the interviewer/researcher!). (Poland 1995, p.8)

Lapadat (1999) makes the point that if transcription is used, then attempts should be made to demonstrate that it was conducted with rigour and with an understanding of its representational character. This means that the act of transcription and the product of that act, the transcription, should be subject to the same standards of trustworthiness or credibility as any other interpretive process and record:

A transcript is an interpretation (Mishler 1991)that is constructed as a new, original text by the researcher (Denzin 1995). There is a need to examine empirically how researchers create or co-construct representations and how these representations follow from their purposes or working theories as well

as their positionality and ultimately constrain the kinds of interpretations that they can derive from their data. (Lapadat 1999, p.82)

If the transcription emerges as a form of evidence upon which the conclusions of the study are based, then it seems to follow that the processes whereby that form of evidence came into being be subject to the same standards of quality and trustworthiness as are the data or evidence gathering and analysis stages of the project. That transcription forms a bridge between the two does not exclude it from the gaze of the critical eye.

Acknowledging that no transcript can sustain a claim to being a verbatim record of an interview, the most one might claim is that the transcript is ‘a faithful reproduction of the aural record’ (Poland 1995, p.2). The difficulty with all of this arises when the unquestioned transcript assumes an authority as privileged text rather than as a perspectival treatise. If we are to assert the claims of ‘faithful reproduction’ and to endeavour to ensure rigour in the transcription process, we need to develop approaches to and procedures within the transcription process that will demonstrate to the audience of the text that we have taken the task of transcription as seriously as any other part of the inquiry process. In this particular instance, I adopted Poland’s ideas for establishing and ensuring the ‘trustworthiness of transcripts as research data’ (1995, p.5). In summary these are:

1. Ensure the quality of the original tape recording: I used a Sanyo Talkbook VAS tape recorder with an inbuilt microphone in conjunction with a Sanyo external lapel condenser microphone which each participant attached to her collar. At each session, a test recording was conducted to ensure appropriate recording levels were set. The conversations were conducted in my university office which is in a relatively out-of-the-way part of the faculty building. Interruptions were almost totally eliminated by telephone calls being diverted to other extensions and large signage attached to doors and hallways. It was not possible to eliminate the intrusion of environmental noise (lawn mowing, etc.), but this did not significantly effect the quality of the recordings.

2. Ensure the transcriber is prepared : Prior to embarking on the transcription of any of the audiotapes, I decided upon a series of abbreviations for ‘substantive’ words and phrases I expected to commonly encounter (for example: ‘wh’ = white; ‘r’ = racism; ‘rt’= racist;) as well as for common grammatical phrases (‘rt’ = rather than; ‘aot’ = as opposed to; ‘wo’ = without, etc.). I thought this system would assist in overcoming some of the shortfall in my capacity to transcribe as a two-fingered typist. As the transcription proceeded, other abbreviations were developed. I also decided that I would attempt to capture every word spoken, even if at the time they seemed irrelevant to the research requirements. I was aware of the danger of engaging in too much analysis during the early stages of evidence gathering and analysis, and decided that too much material was better than too little. I also

decided to transcribe the initial conversation with each participant as soon as was possible after the sessions so that the transcript could be returned to them for checking and confirmation and so they could decide if they wanted to continue in the project. At this point, I also decided that I would then delay transcriptions until I had a full series of conversations with a participant completed and then transcribe in chronological order with each person (That is, I transcribed all of Teresa’s conversations and then all of Felicity’s, and so on). I believe this gave me a better grasp on the development of each participant’s stories as well as enabling a better quality transcription since it was easier working with one voice, linguistic structure and use of idiomatic speech for a block of time than to be continually adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of the participants on an on-going basis.

3. Review several of the first transcripts: as the transcripts of each of the first conversations were completed, I read the written record against the audiotape of the session. Poland describes this as : ‘an assessment of the trustworthiness of the transcription, based on a review of selected transcripts in the context of an explicit acknowledgment of the interpretive nature of the transcription process’ (1995, p. 14). This was a valuable - and sobering - experience. Using a system of tallying minor (semantic) and major (meaning- reversing) errors suggested by Poland, I found that a typical one-hour conversation transcript of approximately fourteen pages of text would contain at least five errors on each page. Admittedly, the large majority of these errors were semantic or minor in nature (e.g. ‘home’ instead of ‘house’) that did little to change the meaning of the passage, but there were sufficient major errors (one transcript contained four of these, the others in the first round of transcripts held two or three each) to require a closer attention to the transcription process.

I had transcribed the initial tapes using the same machine with which I had recorded the conversations, using an earphone to provide better audibility of the playback. As a result of the accuracy check, I sought out a transcribing machine and completed the transcriptions using a Sanyo TRC-8080 Standard Cassette Transcribing System. This machine enabled greater manipulation of tone, speed of tape playback, and volume, all of which improved the accuracy of the transcripts to the point that, after three random checks, I was happy that the meanings resident within the conversations were being recorded accurately enough that another reader of the transcript would arrive at the same meanings that were articulated on the tapes. Given that I was not engaging in a linguistic or discourse analysis and that the main function of the transcriptions was to capture stories and the meaning of those for the participants, I adopted a measure of acceptable accuracy as no major errors. Minor errors, while declining considerably, were still evident, but I considered that they weren’t sufficient to effect the purpose of the transcription

process. This is an area that I believe warrants further development insofar as enhancing the credibility of interview-based research.

Transcription analysis

I returned the transcript of each of the participants’ first conversation to them for checking. I was conscious of the need to adhere to the principles of procedure that guided this project (see Appendix 2) but was also cognisant of the potential difficulty such a confirmatory process harbours.

Despite the many merits of checking back with respondents on either a routine or ad hoc basis (in terms of relations of participation, control, and power between researcher and researched), its use for the validation of the trustworthiness of transcription is potentially problematic because one typically receives not only corrections to (perceived) errors in transcribing, depending on the person's recollections of what was said, but also attempts to clarify (perhaps justify) aspects of what was said (Hoffart 1991 cited in Poland 1995, p.13.)

The essence of qualitative research analysis lies in comparing individual pieces of evidence or data and sorting these into categories for ease of manipulation. (Ely, Vinz, Downing et al. 1997). The ultimate purpose of the sifting and sorting activities is to enable the researcher to identify themes and meta-themes so as to be able to make her or his sense of the window onto the inner world of the participants.

In identifying themes and drawing conclusions from a large mass of textual records of conversations and other notetaking engaged in over the course of the study, I used a combination of the qualitative data analysis process developed by Dey (1993) and Mauthner and Doucet’s voice-centred relational method (Mauthner & Doucet 1998). The analysis was assisted by the use of NUD*IST 4 (Richards & Richards 1997), a computer-based qualitative data analysis software package.

Evidence Analysis: Deyʼs approach

Ian Dey (1993) describes an analytic process that has five basic stages: 1. Finding a focus 2. Managing data 3. Reading and annotating data 4. Categorising data 5. Connecting categories and corroborating evidence

Finding a focus: This is not a one-off task that once achieved is not to be re-visited or re- engaged, but is one that is continually evolving as evidence and data accumulate and suggest one or other changes in the route being taken by the analysis. At the initial stage, the point is to try to identify broad skeletal themes that might usefully support the flesh of the evidence and understanding, preliminary though this may be. Dey suggests that focus might be obtained through personal experience, general culture or the academic literature (Dey 1993, p. 69). In my case, personal experience was initially the driving force for focus setting, but this focus changed considerably from the point of submission of my dissertation proposal to the version of the report the reader holds.

Initially, I was concerned to try to capture the effects of trauma, in a racial sense, on university students. In my university teaching role, I had witnessed some of the difficulties many students evinced as they were confronted with discrepant identity images. While not a concept usually linked positively with sound educational practice, and certainly not assuming a place in the pedagogical bag of tricks that constitutes most instructional strategies-type units in teacher education courses, trauma has here been reconceptualised as a ‘potent pedagogical tool’ that refers to the subjectively felt effects of classroom practices that baffle, reorient, and challenge students' commonsense assumptions about race. ...Trauma represents that pedagogical moment when identities become unsettled, provoking both anxiety and the opportunity to rethink the political nature and moral content of one's own racial identity (Giroux 1997, p.293).

My initial focus was on the possibilities opened up for racial identity reconstruction and the development of anti-racist pedagogies by being ‘traumatised’ in the sense described by Giroux. I believed that such moments of unsettling occurred in the course of students taking a particular unit in a teacher education program within which I worked, and that this would provide a valuable opportunity to explore the ways out of the trauma into more positive, anti- racist identities for white teachers. Prior to engaging formally in this study, I had investigated aspects of this topic, and have reported on it elsewhere (Austin & McMaster 1999)

As the study proceeded, however, it seemed to me that, while valuable information about the anti-racist possibilities of Giroux’s idea of a pedagogy of trauma was likely to be uncovered, the dominant point of exploration with the participants centred on their coming to understand themselves as racial beings. As I read further into the existing conceptual literature, it seemed to me that the focus of the study was in fact better placed in looking at how these people came to understand themselves as racialised beings. This process of self-knowledge, when teamed with racially unsettling experiences, seemed to be a crucial intersection on the road to the reformation of positive white identities, and the primary focus I pursued in the interpretation

of the evidence and the analysis of the data was derived from the research questions presented in Chapter 1.

This focus, and these questions, while providing a set of handrails to support my stumbling, hesitant movement towards understanding allowed for sufficient meandering and independence to ensure that themes and ideas that arose were not discounted where it seemed they were likely to be informative in this broad social justice project.

Managing the data: In Dey’s view, ‘good analysis requires efficient management of one’s data’ (p.74). The evidentiary base of this project consisted of a total of twenty-eight separate transcriptions of learning conversations, three notebooks of my own reflections and comments, notes and email messages from the participants, and various other observation notes. Once an acceptable level of accuracy of transcription had been achieved (see above), I then saved two copies of the textual material formatted for incorporation into the rawfiles section of the NUD•IST4 qualitative data analysis software. One copy of the text data was maintained in secure storage. The second copy was my working file, and was stored on my personal computer. Weekly synchronisation of the two files was completed and hourly back-up of the working file to floppy disks was done during analysis sessions.

Each document incorporated into the analysis package (‘introduced’, in the language of the program) was set up with a document header containing basic reference data for ease of retrieval and analysis. The actual method of dealing with this data is discussed below.

The other text-based material - researcher reflections, etc. - was not incorporated into the NUD•IST program because of the difficulties of retaining the often non-linear, spontaneous and irregular formats that were used in the original. This material was labelled with relevant identificatory details (date, place, author, etc.) and kept as a secure folder in my home office. I admit to suffering some anxiety about this after having read researcher accounts of the loss of crucial research material in house fires (Wolcott 1990) and have kept a close eye on open flames ever since.

Reading and Annotating the Data: The purpose of this stage is to ‘prepare the ground for analysis’ (Dey 1993, p. 83). This means that the analyst needs to be very familiar with the data in order to be able to begin the sorting, sifting and categorising that constitutes the major part of the analysis process. In this study, I conducted the reading and annotating tasks associated with the text-based evidence using a blend of some reading techniques suggested by Dey and the Voice-Centred Relational Method of Mauthner and Doucet (1998). This latter method, derived from the work of Carole Gilligan and others, provides a means of interpreting narrative evidence in ways that retain the integrity of the participant while at the same time

acknowledging the fact of the relationship between the participant and the researcher as having unavoidable implications on this interpretive process. This method is described in more detail below.

I had already established what I believed was a strong familiarity with the conversation data: I had been involved in every session and I had personally transcribed the audiotapes of these. This was, in many ways, a passive form of familiarity. My next step was to read more actively, looking for ways in which I might be able to disassemble this evidence and recombine it in ways that would shed more light onto the focus of the study. Initially, I used Dey’s interrogative quintet -Who? What? When? Where? How? - and other ‘stock questions’ - So what? And What if? (Dey 1993, pp.83-84) in a chronological sequence through each participant’s conversations. Emerging ideas and questions were written as memos and were added to the study collection. I conducted some broad text searches of the conversation transcripts using the Find function of the Microsoft Word program as suggested by Dey in order to identify the more frequently occurring words and phrases. I conducted searches for terms such as race, white, whiteness, identity, racism and terms describing emotions that I felt had been aroused by experiences in the life stories and experiences presented. These latter words included anger, angry, guilt, guilty, scared, frightened and defensive. I also searched for the number of times personal pronouns - I and we - occurred to check on the degree of personalising that occurred in the conversations and in the stories. Frequency in itself denotes nothing necessarily of importance, but these searches did at least allow a picture of the clusters of topics covered or mentioned to emerge and pointed to topics that might admit of fuller discussion and analysis .

At this point, I utilised the ideas of Mauthner and Doucet (1998) for a deeper level of understanding of the text-based data. This method is described below. The results of this approach were then added in to the next stage of the analysis.

Categorising the data: After having developed some initial ideas about the ways in which aspects of the data might be grouped into categories that rendered the original data asunder, the next step was to adopt the ‘attentive and tentative’ approach to defining categories: ‘attentive to the data and tentative in our conceptualisations about them’ (Dey 1993, p.102).

The categorisation process is an evolutionary process that involves grouping like pieces of data together, distilling and naming the essentially defining characteristic and assigning category labels (‘coding’ in the language of NUD•IST). As the conceptual framework of the category system is found to be unable to incorporate discrepant data, re-naming or splitting of these categories into either new categories or into sub-categories becomes necessary until all data or evidence considered to be relevant are able to be included within the categorisation system.

The primary intellectual task here involves the development of descriptive criteria - definitions in a way - by which individual pieces of data are to evaluated and admitted to or excluded from particular categories.

This was a particularly taxing task, and the one of the real methodological and technical strengths of the use of the NUD•IST program was that it allowed for ongoing modification of written descriptions of the criteria or definition of each category name. This in itself presents a window onto the qualitative research process, and examples of the development of the category definitions are included (see Appendix 3). Further description of the role that the NUD•IST software played is presented in a following section.

The categories developed and applied ( and not all were - for example, I wasn’t able to assign any data to the category of alternative white identities I thought - hoped, in the early stages of the project - would be there) needed to be referable to the data, but not necessarily be explicitly present in them. That is, the ‘distinctions [I] have used are suggested by the data, but they are not [necessarily] drawn by the data. [E]mpirical grounding should not be taken to mean some slavish obligation to reproduce only those distinctions which are meaningful to actors as well as to analysts’ (Dey 1993, p. 136).

With the benefit of having read the transcriptions and identified some middle order categories (Dey 1993,p.104) in a way compatible with Mauthner and Doucet’s voice-centred relational method, I analysed each participant’s series of conversations as a sequence to attempt to capture the integrity of the stories.

Initially, I used Dey’s idea of using the basic questions driving the study as broad categories, and then further developed these by adopting some of the words used by the participants themselves in telling their stories. For example, where I had an initial category of childhood experiences with race, I split that category, creating a sub-category of school after readings of the transcripts for Teresa showed this to be a point of reference in her stories.

As the analysis developed, and it continues to develop as I understand perhaps not more but differently what these stories have to say, the category system developed accordingly. The list of categories is included (See Appendix 4).

Connecting categories and corroborating evidence: Each series of conversation transcripts was worked through in chronological sequence and categorised. Only at the conclusion of this stage did I conduct cross-participant searches (‘retrievals’ in the language of NUD•IST) for each of the categories. This then provided an opportunity to link categories across the

participant group and also enabled what Dey has termed splicing: ‘combining categories to provide a more integrated conceptualisation’ (Dey 1993, p.131). From here, I drew conclusions about the primary research questions and other matters that hadn’t initially been envisioned by these questions, but which arose and assumed significance as the study progressed.

Because of the interpretive nature - typically highly idiosyncratic - of qualitative analysis and interpretation, several possible and a smaller number of plausible explanations or accounts of any one event or case are resident within the data. In this final formal stage of data analysis, I constructed accounts of both the life stories told to me and my interpretation of them in such a way that I believed retained the integrity of the data or evidence considered in context. Obviously, alternative accounts exist - I considered a number of these at various times in the analytic process.

In the final account, I have attempted to provide a map of the path I took to arrive at the point I have. As Dey puts it, ‘if we can’t expect others to replicate our account, the best we can do is explain how we arrived at our results.’ (p.251).

The Voice-Centred Relational method

This method was braided into the reading of the data or evidence, and provided a conceptually-based approach to the process of initiating the movement of data from one place - the transcripts - to another - the classification and coding structure.

Working from within a feminist epistemological framework, Mauthner and Doucet (1998) developed an approach to reading and categorising data where the paramount importance was placed upon the maintenance of participant voice and relationships. Their research work was rooted in a consciousness of the power they hold as researchers as they go about the task of ‘transforming private lives and concerns into public theories and debates’ (p. 141) while at the same time recognising that in this delicate process, the stories they tell are not the stories of the participants or informants, but those stories ‘changed by and infused with our identity’ (p. 141). These concerns resonated perfectly with my views of the research process and the power dimensions attaching to that.

Mauthner and Doucet see the data analysis process as an ongoing one that needs to be more clearly and explicitly described in order to attempt to balance three very different, and at times contradictory, perspectives:

(1) the multiple and varying voices and stories of each of the individuals we interview; (2) the voice(s) of the researcher(s); and (3) the voices and

perspectives represented within the existing theories or frameworks in our research areas and which researchers bring to their studies (Mauthner & Doucet 1998, p. 140).

In a concern to minimise the violation of the participants’ voices through the data analysis process (‘ a deeply disempowering [stage] in which our respondents have little or no control’(p. 138) ), Mauthner and Doucet have developed a method for working with interview-based evidence or data that attempts to both retain the integrity of the participant’s stories and make explicit the influence on the collection and retelling of these stories by the researcher. In my study, I blended this method into Dey’s approach as described above.

Based on the work of Brown and Gilligan (Brown, Argyris, Attanucci et al. 1988; Brown & Gilligan 1992; and Brown & Gilligan 1993) the voice-centred relational method consists of four distinct, purposeful readings of the data or evidence:

• Reading 1: reading for the plot and for our responses to the narrative. This reading has two parts; the first being to read for the story being told by the participant - events, actors, plot and the like. The second part of this first reading requires the researcher to position her or himself - their history, background, experiences - within the story as s/he reads it in order to examine her or his response to the story and to the person telling it - the assumptions and views that are drawn up by the reading that (undoubtedly) will flavour any analysis, interpretation and representation. The point here is to ‘retain some grasp over the blurred boundaries between their narratives and our interpretations of those narratives’ (p. 127)

• Reading 2: reading for the voice of the ‘I’. This reading centres the attention of the researcher on the self-referential content of the material - how the participant refers to him or herself, and how s/he moves between various forms of inclusion and reference (e.g. the slippage into and out of the use of I, we and you). This reading is intended to convey a sense of the ways in which the participant refers to her or himself ‘before we speak of her’(Brown & Gilligan 1992, pp. 27-28).

• Reading 3: reading for relationships. Mauthner and Doucet use this reading to try to understand how the participant positions her or himself in relation to others. These relationships are multi-leveled and fluid, and need to be captured in the ways in which the participant sees them.

• Reading 4: placing people within cultural contexts and social structures. Here, the stories of the participants are placed into broader socio-cultural contexts, in keeping with the relational emphasis that pervades this method.

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This method differs in a fundamental way from many other approaches to data analysis, and that is in its deliberate delay of the ‘reductionistic stage of data analysis when transcripts are cut up into themes and aggregated’ with the added benefit for my study coming through the prospect that ‘tracing voices through individual interview transcripts, as opposed to linking themes across interviews, helps maintain differences between the respondents’ (Mauthner & Doucet 1998, p. 134)

NUD•IST 4

The analysis and to a lesser extent, the interpretation of the data and evidence in this study was facilitated by the use of the NUD•IST software program. Until the past five years or so, it was necessary to delve in great detail into the pros and cons of computer-aided data analysis, particularly in qualitative research. For some reason, there didn’t seem to be such a problem when the machine was dealing with essentially inanimate measures, records and impressions that constitute much of the numerical fodder of (so-called) quantitative research. The problems arose when a machine, assumed by many to be the tool of (hard) science was turned to the use of the (soft) sciences, and then appropriated by those who would eschew any link to (post)positivistic science in their research work.

Since the mid-1990’s, however, changes in the capacities and capabilities of computer-based technologies have opened up a whole new vista for the research analyst, and I no longer feel it necessary to justify the use of the computer in my research work. The roles of technologies like computers - or more correctly, the software packages that are mounted on them - have been discussed reasonably thoroughly (Miles and Huberman 1994; Weitzman & Miles 1995; Richards & Richards 1994; Tesch 1990; Fielding & Lee 1991; Coffey & Atkinson 1996)), but there are a few caveats that need to be issued regarding the use of computer-based data analysis tools.

One of the main concerns over the application of computer-based technologies to the qualitative research process has been that of limiting the richness, detail and depth of the data or evidence utilised in the study. In some cases, there has been a concern that the tail of the computer might indeed wag the dog of inquiry insofar as the point might be reached where only data amenable to computer manipulation might be collected (Dey 1993;Wolcott 1999, p. 216).

Another potential problem with the use of computer-based qualitative data analysis software is that, because of its capacity to deal with the smallest unit of meaning (the ‘text unit’ in the

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NUD•IST lexicon), it is possible that the researcher will be caught up in the technological wizardry and lose sight of the bigger picture painted within the data or evidence. This fragmentation of data to such an extent as to focus the view (and the interpretive work) of the researcher on the trivial means that potentially the illuminative power of qualitative research might be lost through the dissolution of the links between parts of the data. Dey (1995) sees the use of hypertext links to link pieces of data and other text as a way of using the potential of the technology to not only overcome the weaknesses of software use, but in fact to transform the representational prospects of qualitative research altogether. The hypermedia environment in general has been the subject of considerable attention for its potential to ‘support novel forms of representation’ (Coffey & Atkinson 1996, p.182).

A further caution about the use of computer-based data analysis software in qualitative research emanates from what might be seen as a mismatch between paradigm and tool. Mauthner and Doucet (1998) describe this sense of incompatibility:

In analysing data we are confronted with ourselves, and with our central role in shaping the outcome. Indeed, perhaps this is part of the reason why computer programs have become so popular: the use of technology confers an air of scientific objectivity onto what remains a fundamentally subjective, interpretative process. (p.122)

What I have considered important in this regard is that, as with Coffey and Atkinson (1996, p 187), the word aided is crucial in thinking about and using tools and techniques of computer- aided qualitative data analysis. The analytical role resides squarely with the analyst, the researcher. The software will not interpret, it will not bring the creativity, the background understanding and life experience or the passion and commitment to the research process that the human researcher will. It will only assist in those technical parts of the process of coming- to-know. This is how NUD•IST, by way of example, was viewed and used in this study. There were considerable quantities of evidence that I felt could not be handled by NUD•IST. I considered these important pieces of evidence for the study’s purposes, and they were incorporated and dealt with largely without computer-assistance. The imperatives of the study determined the use of particular software, the software did not delineate the forms of data or evidence collected or incorporated.

One of the more technically-sophisticated and useful tools in this regard is the NUD•IST4 software. This package enables the researcher to:

• Collect, compare and organise various types of documents; • Code and explore these, uncovering patterns; • Search for words, phrases, etc. in the text; • Explore individual cases;

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• Record emerging ideas and theories; • Relate theories to data; • Link with statistical records; and • Report results and produce evidence. (QSR 2000)

Another major strength of NUD•IST is its capacity to store, manage and operate on large quantities of text-based data. The evidentiary base of this study generated a large amount of material, much of which lent itself to NUD•IST storage and manipulation in ways that drew upon the list of capabilities of the program listed above.

In summary form, the use of NUD•IST 4 involved the following procedures and processes. Text-based data in the form of transcripts of the learning conversations were formatted for direct incorporation into NUD•IST using a Word 98 macro obtained through the software publisher’s webpage (WWW:http://www.qsr.com.au). Each transcript was then ‘introduced’ into the project and text units - the basic unit of meaning used for analysis in the project - delineated and numbered. Each transcript, once introduced, looked like the example in box 4-1 and when prepared for analysis each text unit was assigned a number for the purpose of addressing and categorising (see box 4-2).

Q.S.R. NUD*IST Power version, revision 4.0. Licensee: Jon Austin. PROJECT: ph d NUDIST, User Jon Austin, 11:02 am, May 18, 2000. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++ ON-LINE DOCUMENT: Teresa#4 +++ Document Header: *interview: Teresa #4 14/9/99 +++ Retrieval for this document: 147 units out of 147, = 100% ++ Text units 1-147:

Box 4-1: Document Details

The documents were then analysed by applying a coding system to the text units. Each text unit was read and considered in relation to the surrounding units and, if it appeared to me that some relevant link might be made between a text unit and a category, that text unit was coded accordingly. It was possible - and frequently it was the case - that individual text units would carry multiple category codings (e.g. a text unit might be coded for gender, participant, and childhood story).

Box 4-2: Text Units

Each category was considered a temporary description of an emerging conceptual sorting of the data involved, and as the analysis progressed, the meaning of each category changed. Definitional statements of what constituted the essence of each category were generated and used to decide on the inclusion or exclusion of any particular text unit in a category. NUD•IST allows these changing definitions to be saved, thus providing a record of the evolution of the conceptual thinking engaged in during the course of the analysis

The multiple coding, storage and retrieval possibilities, as well as the record-keeping functions described above demonstrate the benefits to analysis offered by a computer-based software package such as NUD•IST. I also used the package for searches for particular words and phrases and for highlighting the relative frequencies of these. In exploring and making links between categories and emerging ideas about what these stories were telling me, I utilised the interrogative functions of NUD•IST to search for and report on commonalities as well as mutual exclusions across and between categories. All such searches were saved and provided further evidence of the data analysis process and my thinking on the ideas that seemed to be emerging at any one time.

Selection and (Re)Presentation

I collected and wrote up detailed representations of all participant stories and ideas, but have chosen to concentrate in the presentation of the ideas I have derived from this study from one of the participants, Teresa . I have also drawn upon the stories of the other participants where they have been able to provide additional, supporting, contradictory or otherwise relevant comparisons with the primary stories. The reader will also notice that I am present explicitly on many of the pages, with my own thoughts and analyses being presented in commentary boxes at certain points.

The illuminative and explanatory power of concentrating on fewer rather than larger numbers of cases in research should not be underestimated. In this matter, I found Wolcott’s support of idiographic inquiry to be persuasive and comforting. (Wolcott 1992b). He maintains that increasing the number of cases or phenomena being studied far from increasing the power of the study in fact serves to undermine the richness of the data as each example would receive proportionately less attention. I was not looking to generalise from the experiences of the participants, but rather come to understand their particular path of coming to the point of

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racial self-understanding that they had - that is, I was acutely aware of my location within the idiographic rather than nomothetic (Crotty 1998, pp.67-68, 70-71).

I selected the participant for primary attention in this report on the basis of a number of criteria. First, she seemed to present a reasonably coherent narrative of her development in this area. Second, she was able to articulate her experiences, both in straight narrative terms as well as in more analytic and reflective ways. Third, I felt the rapport between us was stronger and the relationship more comfortable than with the other participants in the study. Because of this, I believe that we might have excavated more of the untold stories with Teresa than with the others, and that we probably delved into more of the life experiences relevant to this study. Fourth, Teresa’s stories attracted my interest, they were more engaging than perhaps the others were. While in most respects not being overly different from the others, with similar events and experiences occurring in their lives, the particular events presented by Teresa seemed open to more illustrative use and informative power. In some ways, Teresa’s stories might be seen as representative of the life experiences of all the participants in the study. The final reason for the selection of her stories as the primary vehicle for the carriage of the stories here was that I had amassed significantly larger amounts of information, evidence and other relevant case material about her life history than the others.

I have tried to retain the integrity of each participant’s narrative, although I have been tempted to play with the representational potential of collage and bricolage. At one stage, I thought the most effective way to use the evidence I had collected here might be in the construction of textual montage. It is still a possibility..

Concluding comments

What was I trying to achieve with all of this? Essentially I was trying to come to understand the ways in which a small group of Whites come to identify as white so that I might then be able to contribute, through my professional activity, to a re-conceptualisation, a re- identification of whiteness as a more positive, emancipatory and socially-just identity. This meant that I needed to make some sense for myself of what the participants shared with me before I could hope to provide something for third parties to engage. I was conscious of a statement - an accusation, almost - that kept emerging in the front in my head:

The search for sense is the symptom of the insecure academic wishing to claw everything back to the rational. (Fiske 1998b,p.171).

I was searching for sense and in this endeavour, I was certainly feeling insecure: how could one confidently and self-assuredly take snippets of what other people tell you about their lives and

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use that to make sense, particularly in a ‘rational’ way? Having put a pebble in my shoe, Fiske at least provided a salve for the irritation:

[There] is a need for academic modesty that acknowledges that the aim of analysis is not to reveal the truth but to contribute to a process of understanding, and to provoke other, probably contradictory, contributions (Fiske 1998a, p.370.)

The presentation of the stories that follow, the interrogation of these, the kneading of ideas and experiences, and my search for sense are offered to the reader with, I hope, the type and degree of academic modesty that Fiske envisions.

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Chapter 5 Teresa

Image 5-1 White skin, black heart∗ “This photo was taken at home with my her Aboriginality, someone first recognised that flatmates and some students and a Toowoomba I was white, in a house of blacks. psychiatrist doing a study into Aboriginality and motherhood (or something like that.) I lived This shot was significant because it was with Indigenous students so when everyone something that made me think of my perspective came over I was having a facial. The comment of who I am. I found this difficult, because I live was made, now that's white! Living in the with people who happen to be Indigenous, I see house there was never a mention about being them as my friends and to a degree my family, black or white it was more about normal things, for I have lived with them for 2-4 years. It’s like who’s cooking or washing up. With difficult to point to someone who is white and everyone coming over to ask my flatmate about say you’re white, what do you know about what our people went through. I don't, but a lot of

∗ permission to include this photograph was received May 15th, 2000.

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my friends are Indigenous and we get on joke was presented that I was whiter then usual without predjudice. I think this photo sums up when everyone popped over”. my home at the present, it is always got (email communication,25/6/00) someone popping around and staying over, it is just the way we live. I may not be Indigenous, and my flatmates are not white, but we can all have a laugh and a joke about who we are. The Teresa is a wanderer, a confident wanderer. She has lived in many parts of the country but it isn’t crossing State borders that marks her own personal diaspora as much as other forms of border crossing that etch their marks across her life. She is perhaps closest of all the participants in this study to this almost-mythical Third Space. Is she closer than me? Probably. She seems to have more courage that I have, but then, what would I do in her place today? I think of Midnight Oil. Emergency has gone, apathy rolling on, time to take a stand, redneck wonderland. -Redneck wonderland (1998) I remember once being told by a friend that a common friend of ours had described me as a redneck because she thought it meant a labor sympathiser (I don’t think that was true of me either). I wasn’t sure at the time which was worse, but now I think I know. Teresa lives a contradictory life -but then, who doesn’t? I initially thought of her as a modern-day hippie - maybe she is - and that struck some chords. Our talking was comfortable, more than with any of the other participants. I don’t know why.

Teresa was 27 years old at the time our conversations about racial identity and whiteness occurred. She presented as very confident and self-assured, a personal characteristic that might be explained, at least in part, by her growing up as a member of a defence force family. In Australia, members of the various branches of the defence force, in particular the Army and the Air Force (RAAF), are transferred to bases throughout Australia and, occasionally, overseas. These moves occur reasonably frequently, usually every three to five years. What this means for defence force personnel with families is that major disruptions and uprootings are an almost- cyclical feature of life. Adjustments to new physical and social surroundings seem to be constant, and this facet of life is no more apparent than in the schooling experiences of children of these families. Strategies for rapidly settling into new environments are survival mechanisms in many ways for these families, as is a certain capacity to be ‘self-contained’ and accepting others at face value - perhaps there was no time to get caught up in the minutiae of difference:

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[B]ecause we moved so often in my childhood my My best friend at primary school, experience was to make friends as quickly as possible Neil, was from an army family. His with whomever as possible because everybody's the father was Scottish but was a same, and that's what I was brought up member of the Australian army so I with.(conversation T1,text unit 56). guess he was an Australian citizen. Neil had lived in Singapore as well So a lot of the time I was the outer so I got to know as other parts of Australia, but spent everybody because everyone wanted to know who the eight years in Toowoomba during new girl was(conversation T2, text unit 157). our late primary and all of secondary school. He introduced me to Pink Floyd through a very un-Pink Floydish single he’s heard and bought in Singapore. See Emily Play. Mid-60’s and Singapore revealed itself to me as an outpost of English culture. I bought the single years later on an oddities and rarities album of theirs. He’d travelled, but he seemed to be more high English than anything else. He ended up teaching English in a private college at the north coast somewhere.

Teresa’s father was a member of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) until his recent retirement. Her biography up to the time she left home to attend university is probably typical of many defence force children: many schools and many friends, even if the friendships in most cases were fleeting and forgotten. A travel itinerary of places, people and provocations to identity development attests to her family’s mobility. Memories or recollections that remain are often those of particular potence and significance, but are often difficult to reconstruct precisely: memory becomes a pastiche of fragments from different places pasted together to form a forever-changing montage of life history. New towns and new experiences, all displaying the commonalities that community coherence and integrity require. These childhoods are ones of constant change and difference, and at the same time, ones of sameness and uniformity.

Teresa’s began in Ipswich in 1972 as the youngest of four children. Her father was assigned to the Amberley Air Force Base and her family lived ‘on the other side of town’ (conversation T1, text unit 4) until after the record floods in 1974. From there, the family relocated to Wagga

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Wagga (1975), Newcastle(1980), Canberra(1986) and back to Ipswich (1991). Her father is no longer in the RAAF: Dad retired…We moved here , he did out his term, his twenty years, he moved to Maryborough and we waved goodbye (conversation T1, text units 6 & 8).

Most of her schooling occurred in Catholic schools and colleges, the exception being her secondary schooling in Ipswich. The move from Newcastle to Ipswich presented the opportunity for Teresa to re-take the final two years of secondary schooling which she did at a local State High School. Spending these additional two years at school meant that she was 19 years old when she graduated, effectively 2 years older than many of the friends she had in her class.

An attempt to gain entry to university after graduation from High School was unsuccessful, and the next 7 years were spent working at a number of jobs:

I finished re-doing years 11 and 12 seven years ago and I worked for the government, I worked for a nursery, I worked for TAFE∗ - I was a student activities officer, and then I became a project officer doing a survey a national survey on student conferences to get students involved in the politics of TAFE( conversation T1, text unit 17)

In 1997 she re-applied for a university place, was successful in this and commenced a Bachelor of Education (Primary) course in 1998 at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ).

The Irish roots of her family are strongly positioned within Teresa’s perception of herself:

My grandmother on my father’s side is second generation Irish. My grandfather, who’s died, is also second generation Irish. My grandmother on my mother’s side - also dead - is first generation Irish and my grandfather is second generation Irish. Nothing else but Irish, but if you go back a bit further there's French and Italian, but that's too far back for me. (conversation T1, text units 81-84)

This genealogical connection re-surfaced a number of times in her discussion of the whiteness of the Irish people (see below). Was this foregrounding of her Irish-ness, in an ethnic rather than a nationality sense, evidence of Teresa’s heightened self-awareness in a way that was the opposite of Gallagher’s (1995) description of the effects of the decline of ethnicity and the

∗ TAFE stands for Technical and Further Education, a non-university component of the Australian post- compulsory education structure.

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retreat into race-based identities for contemporary white Americans? Teresa refers to her family’s background as ‘Irish-catholic’, although she is initially uncertain as to why she retains her attachment to the Catholic part of the description for herself:

Teresa: My parents are Irish-catholics - and I don't How does she know so much about know why I say Irish-catholics, but I do. this stuff? What provokes someone to embark on the search for family Jon: It does make an important distinction. history? I know it’s fairly fashionable now, but Teresa doesn’t seem to be the Teresa : I think it is too, but , see I'm not as fashion-conscious type. I don’t really practising as I should be and I also have some know anything much about my own problems with our current Pope so I'm not going to family history, except that there is a be hypocritical about it.(conversation T1, text fair swag of English in there. My only units 89-91) familial claim to fame is through one Thomas Austin who introduced rabbits to Australia for the hunting pleasure of the colonial gentry. I think he was a relative of mine, even though I’ve never shot a gun at anything more than sideshow targets.

The times of the first three conversations between Teresa and myself were particularly difficult ones personally for her, but explain to a degree why the Irish facet of her identity was at the forefront of her thinking at the time. Her mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer during this time, and many of her relatives from Ireland had travelled to Australia to visit with her before the cancer took its toll. Teresa: My mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer this year. Jon: This year? Since we talked last? Teresa: Yeah. We knew there was something wrong at Christmas time and anyway so she went through chemo[therapy] - a very religious family, [and I’m] a little bit on the outer with them since I found out the news, but like last week we found out she was in remission but the chemo's knocked her about so badly anyway and it was just amazing to see that it wasn't just the direct family, it was the extended family coming in - that's why everybody's over from Ireland - because, like, we just converged in Brisbane and it was amazing. You do get to know your family then, like your direct family more. (conversation T2, text units 252-259)s

One gets a sense of strong familial connection here, even if those connections are at times strained through distance, both geographical and intellectual.

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So matters of family, self, history, identity and belonging were very much at the front of Teresa’s mind during the period of the study. Joining this stream of personal location matters was another tributary that contributes currently to the flow that is Teresa’s fluid sense of self and identity. That second stream flows from her new ‘family’, the people with whom she now feels at home with and a part of:

When I go home I see my flatmates as my family (conversation T2, text unit 128) My family is really very different to the family I live with here.(conversation T2, text unit 215).

Old family, new family. In many ways, it is the act of living in both families that seems to have been the spur to Teresa’s development of self-awareness in racial terms.

Early experiences with race

Ipswich is a difficult place to try to understand. A satellite city of Brisbane, for much of its white history it has been largely a working class area, with coal mining, manufacturing and the air force base the main sources of employment. Along with its blue collar history went a connection to the Australian Labor Party in local, State and Commonwealth politics, with seats based on Ipswich yielding a (Labor) Leader of the Opposition in the Commonwealth Parliament (later to be appointed Governor-General of Australia), a strongly labour-oriented local council that was one of the first municipal councils in Australia to declare its area of responsibility to be a nuclear-free zone during the 1970’s, and yet more recently sending the first member of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party to the federal parliament. It is the latter event that perhaps best captures the schizophrenic nature of the Ipswich community and, as a microcosmic example, the Australian working class more broadly.

The causes and significance of the electoral visibility and success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, while now in a state of serious decline and fracture, has been discussed in a previous chapter. It is important, though, to reiterate the racial basis of much of that party’s policy rhetoric and to recognise that the socio-political environment of Ipswich was an important contributing factor in brewing this particular blend of fear, loathing and uncertainty into a populist politics of redemption. This was the city to which Teresa returned to complete her secondary schooling and from which she embarked on her university education. It is also a place to which she returns, even though the family connection to the place is no longer there. Frequently, Teresa used locales within this area as examples of points she was making, and it was apparent that she still has a presence in the area (for example, she attended a public meeting in the Woodridge electorate during a recent by-election campaign).

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What has made Teresa resistant to the seductions of naïve populism and its attendant white racism in this instance? Why has she not inhabited the racist, white superiority location of so many of her friends? What has enabled her to shed the inherent political conservatism that coats the culture of the Australian armed forces, with its racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia? This study is concerned with the racial aspects of this question, but undoubtedly some hints at the life experiences that have led Teresa to this position are to be found in the stories she tells.

The earliest memory Teresa has of a racialised existence comes from her time in Wagga Wagga. In many ways like Ipswich, Wagga is a military town but is more rural (‘regional’ in current poli-speak) in a geographic and lifestyle sense :

Where we lived in Ashmont it I don’t recall coming across any was colloquially called Coon Aboriginal people while I was at County and we lived just up the primary school. Where my family road from the pub - a 15 minute lived was, in a very imprecise walk - and I remember they put a description, an upper working class new housing estate in and area. It’s now been ‘gentrified’ as the because, my parents are One old Queenslander-style houses that I Nation voters to put it nicely, used to be embarrassed about living they feel if we were all one in have now become highly desirable Australia it shouldn't really items. Regardless, there were no matter and the Aboriginals got a Indigenous families that I can recall. new housing estate and they I don’t even recall any racial used to rip out the walls and references being made at home burn them, and no-one could although there must have been some. understand that, they had brand Race just didn’t exist as anything that new houses and they do that to we needed to do anything or think them. (conversation T1, text anything about. Except when there unit 36) was a cricket tour on, perhaps. We were aware of the Indians, the Pakistanis and the West Indians as sportspeople, but not as racialised people. Although, they were different and, exotically so. They bowled differently to us: with either life- threatening speed or with deceptive spin and turn. You were afraid of

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one and you just couldn’t trust the other. Teresa has a strong memory of this geographic carving out of difference. For me, there was no carving to be done: the world wasn’t a raced one - as I see it now, it was very much a white one.

Teresa returned to this story in a later conversation. In recalling where she first learned explicitly about race and whiteness, she further developed the story of Coon County: When I was little I did [learn about the difference between whiteness and others] because we lived in Ashmont which was nicknamed 'Coon County' because at the end of the hill they had a whole heap of housing commission houses and they were bought new - and we were in a RAAF house at the time, and these were all brand spanking new and the Aboriginal families that lived in there, because it didn't fit their cultural needs pulled down all the inside walls and burnt them. And like we were all, the white people were all "Oh, filthy, filthy, filthy".(conversation T3, text units 30-31)

There was a high crime rate at the time and it was all associated with the Aboriginals who'd moved into this new area and things like that and our families stayed at this end and they stayed at that end and never the twain shall meet.(conversation T3, text unit 40)

The explanation for the damage done to the houses in question has become, with the understanding of two more decades of thinking about and coming to know more about Indigenous Australians, couched in terms of re-modelling for specific cultural needs rather

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than the irrational destruction that was most likely the way Teresa had learned to see these acts in her infancy.

The initial telling of this story (conversation T1) reflects the sense of the irrationality of the destruction, the second version (conversation T3) shows two important developments in Teresa’s development of an understanding of her white racial identity. (The changes in the ways in which Teresa analysed and discussed these types of life events is perhaps one of the most powerful indicators of the value of the dialogic forms of engagement that were central to the inquiry process in this study. I address this aspect of the study in more detail in the final chapter). Firstly, she provides a more positive explanation or justification for the damage done to the houses. These acts were driven by a cultural necessity foreign (literally) to comprehension by the white community. While she doesn’t elaborate on what these ‘cultural needs’ were, it is safe to assume that she is referring to the incompatibility of two- and three- bedroom houses designed for white (nuclear) family structures and the greatly extended notion of family that Indigenous Australian cultures have, an understanding that she now has but didn’t at that time. An extended family living together requires more than a two- or three- bedroom house. The removal of walls to enlarge the sleeping space makes sense from that perspective; it doesn’t from a white perspective that sees new houses as objects to be looked after, maintained and adapted to rather than being re-modelled, especially by people unskilled in the ways of carpentry.

The language of race is present here. ‘Coon County’ is a term from her childhood, but I suspect ‘white’ is a more recent addition to the biographical lexicon for her. Another important aspect of these passages is the presence of the unnamed group, identified by the unspoken adjectives that are taken for granted in the text. The universalising of the dominant, white, group is apparent: the ‘no-one’ who couldn’t understand the actions of the Aboriginal people in dismantling parts of their houses presumably refers to, yet fails to name, the white community. This community doesn’t need naming, it exists universally, this is an economy of speech that submerges cultural specificity into the waters of ubiquity. Taken literally, the use of ‘no-one’ here is a nonsense: at least the Aboriginal people involved could ‘understand’. Teresa herself in retelling this story twenty years later also understands (‘it didn’t fit their cultural needs’). Maybe there were others at the time who also understood, but they were subsumed by a racialised Othering process and rendered invisible.

That this language of race is powerfully attached to notions of Home further embedded an association of whiteness with safety and security and non-whiteness with danger. This process of othering through constant comparison and judgement of difference against an invisible white norm has been a continual thread through Teresa’s life.

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The actions of these Aboriginal people stood as clear markers to a young child of the borders of acceptability, properness and right, and Teresa’s descriptions of her encounter with matters of race in these early years display images of Other being constructed for and by her. The text of this conversation contains, largely implicitly, a number of the binary oppositions that begin to mark out the space of the Other:

1. Rational / Irrational The actions of the Aboriginal people were incredible, ‘no-one could understand that’; 2. Clean / Dirty The actions of the Aboriginal people were construed as ‘filthy’ and thereby justifiably objectionable as opposed to the (unspoken) cleanliness of whites in their houses - the cleanliness of Whiteness and the whiteness of cleanliness merge here; 3. Victim / Criminal The crime wave is attached to the Aboriginal community, with the unnamed victims, presumably, the white community. Criminality adheres here to a community, a group social pathology butting up against its community of (white) victims. ‘They’ not only offend cultural mores - ‘they’ even smash up their own houses - but ‘they’ also offend the (blind, neutral) law of the land. ‘We’, on the other hand are law-abiding. 4. Disadvantaged / Advantaged In a precursory look into the threads that led to an affiliation, or at least empathy, of the disaffected white population with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and other far-right political groupings in more recent times, this passage speaks of the construction of the white community as disadvantaged: ‘They’ got a new housing estate; new houses were ‘bought’ for them. ‘We’ were in RAAF houses that, presumably, were far from new. ‘We’ looked after our houses, ‘they’ didn’t but, it would seem, ‘they’ didn’t have to suffer any official recriminations or penalties. 5. Here / There Racialised spaces allow for a demarcation of separation that constructs places of familiarity and difference : ‘our families stayed at this end and they stayed at that end and never the twain shall meet’. Such absolute descriptions of, literally, home turf represent in a very concrete way the dichotomous relationship between Self and Other.

The notion of space is important in Teresa’s stories, and in re-telling this part of her early childhood experiences with race she is stretching the space between herself and what she probably now sees as ill-founded and racist explanations of these experiences. She prefaces a telling of her parents’ position on the house issue by labelling them as One Nation voters ‘to put it nicely’, a coded tag for a minority group within contemporary Australian society as described in chapter 3 (see above). She isolates herself from this position by the linguistic device of sub-categorising - in a sense, she has Othered them.

She both positions herself as well as distances herself from this position by naming the white community: ‘And like we were all, the white people were all "Oh, filthy, filthy, filthy” ’. The universal ‘we’ is corrected here by the more specific ‘the white people’ in a way that suggests a

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fissure of distinction between those people (the ‘we’) and Teresa. By naming the group she has begun to finger them as the cultural culprits in this event.

Cartographies of race: the Cake Shop and the Milk Bar

Racialising space is an important part of the development of racial identity. In the previous section, the dichotomous here / there appeared from one of Teresa’s earliest memories of race. It re-appeared several times as she told her stories, and two of the more significant of these form the subject of this section.

There was a small shopping centre close to where Teresa’s family lived in Wagga. This became a place of racialised space, another location of dangerous territory for Teresa as she grew up. For (white) children in this neighbourhood, the cake shop was an attractive place. Not only did the cake shop operators sell cakes, bread, buns and other types of bakery goods typical of the time, it was also the nearest source of lollies. It was here that the constructions of Self and Other already put in place from the conceptions of Home as raced space were further reinforced:

We had a cake shop where you bought lollies, you'd have all the Aboriginals sitting in the middle of the shopping centre drunk because the pub was part of the shopping centre. (conversation T1, text unit 37).

It is interesting to note that it is only by reference to violations of White cultural mores that the presence of Indigenous Australians is noticed and registered. The only reference to Indigenous Australians in this part of Teresa’s childhood memories relates to (White) socially-shocking behaviour: in her construction of the past, being drunk in public was the only use these people made of the shopping centre. These people did nothing other than violate. There are no stories of other uses to which these people put the space, and yet, presumably in a small country town like Wagga at that time, a shopping centre would have housed a range of everyday activities, not the least being that of shopping. Where did the Indigenous Australians shop? Is this feature of Teresa’s recounting of her early experiences with racial difference indicative of the selective remembering and erasure that accompanies the formation of acceptable, justifiable and thereby comfortable images of the Other?

Not only was this racialised space in the making, the engagement with that space also led to a racialised time:

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Teresa: We weren't allowed down to the shops after 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We had a cake shop which sold lollies and things like that and we weren't allowed down there because after 2 o'clock they'd all come out of the pub and sit in the outside area and our families weren't allowed down there. Jon: Because of the possibility of danger for you? Teresa: Yep Jon: Physical danger or cultural danger? Teresa: I think a bit of both. (conversation T3, text units33-40)

In an interesting parallel to other White-Aboriginal struggles over land and place, the use of the shopping centre and cake shop space was a contested one. Teresa was allowed by her parents to use the space until a certain time of the day after which it was assumed it would no longer be a safe space for her and others like her - Whites. Her removal from the shopping centre during danger times was simple and effected without fuss and bother: I think I was so little that usually with mum, she'd just grab my hand and take me home. We'd all go down to the cake shop, but if I was there too long, they'd come down and get me. (conversation T1, text unit. 43-45)

Later in the series of conversations, Teresa again returned to this story, but with a different spin to it. In speaking of her present racial positioning and level of understanding of the ways in which she had been socialised, she further developed the point of the telling of the cake shop story: Once I left home and started doing my own things and started noticing what was going on I think well, I could really have gone to the cake shop at any time and I could have come home at any time, it didn't have to be that time and I suppose that's what I do now. I don't have to go home at 2 o'clock, I can hang out at Kumbari1 or I can go home and it's not a two o'clock curfew.(conversation T4, text units 120-121).

At this point in her life, Teresa has not only summoned up the courage to transgress the racialised borders that had operated with decreasing strength to contain her within safe white space, she is now actively dwelling within the space of the Other. I will return to this part of Teresa’s story later.

Shopping centres still figure in Teresa’s experience with race and her struggles to understand her own racial identity. In the city where she lives during semester, racial engagements of a

1 Kumbari Ngurpai Lag is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) student support centre on the university campus. Part of its role is to assist ATSI students cope with university life and work, and to promote general understanding of ATSI cultures on the campus. 118

more distant, impersonal, type are played out against the backdrop of another shopping centre.:

Teresa: …even when I'm down Margaret Street outside Silly Solly's outside KFC there, when someone wants to scab a cigarette, they go 'hey whitey' and I go 'nuh' [laughs] 'nuh, you missed it, sorry' [laughs] Jon: Are they calling you white or [...inaudible]? Teresa: No, they call me whitey to call me over to say 'can I have a smoke' and because I don't know them or anything else, I can quite easily go 'nuh' Jon: These would be Aboriginal people? Teresa: Yeah, young kids skipping school, but they're not all Aboriginal children sitting there, they've got their mates sitting there too, it's just that their mates don't call out Jon: How come white kids don't come up and say 'hey whitey'? Teresa: I think, to be honest, the black kids dominate the white kids in that situation. When they're sitting outside[the shopping centre] and they're not willing to talk to me and a young Aboriginal guy, when he said it one day I was just knew exactly what he wanted and I tossed him one and he caught it, went 'thanks'. Other ones get offensive, and I go ' if you spoke to me nicely, I probably would'. Jon: So you interpret whitey there to be a derogatory term? Teresa: Just the way they say it , the young boys say it. Jon: See, if I wanted something from somebody I'd probably be the other way, exceptionally nice rather than risk offence. Teresa: It's a toughie thing, isn't it, kids being tough. Jon: So again it gets back into that antagonistic, fear sort of thing? Teresa: I'll give them a smoke if they say 'excuse me'. If I'm smoking and I'm sitting there and they say 'excuse me' but if I'm walking past them and they say 'hey whitey' and I'll go 'I know what you want, you missed out'. [laughs] (conversation T3, text units 89-108)

Here again, space is contested, labelled and its use is being negotiated: the language of race frames the engagements and the explanations of the behaviours. It also depicts the development of racialised language and something of the way the Other sees Whites, and charts the development of the lexicon of racial derogation, where the dominant group finds offence in being labelled by others in colour terms. This might well be an example of the pathologisation of race and colour terms: to attach a colour label to Whites is to denigrate or insult. Even a self-identified non-racist as Teresa expects Others to braid their forms of engagement into accepted (equals White) cultural codes of exchange.

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Recollections of her family’s transfer to Newcastle led to a second example of racialised space from her later school years. This story related to the role of place in youth culture and shows how the earlier experience of Teresa’s mother taking her out of dangerous territory was repeated even as Teresa now had the freedom to roam across most spaces in the city and surrounds. In this case, it was the mother of her friend who assumed the border guard role:

Teresa: [When we moved to Newcastle], the school I went to was a very small school in the inner city and it only had less than 100 students and they were all mixed race and because I had been living in a motel for 6 months while they were fixing up our house, I think the cosmopolitan attitude of Newcastle at that time was that everybody just got together and mixed and we'd go to the beach or we'd go across to Stockton, and things like that and it was a bit eye-opening for me coming from a small (then) country town to this big place where you could catch a bus anywhere and be in a different environment. Jon: What about your family's reaction to that cultural change? Teresa: We moved out to another, we moved out to Raymond Terrace and that's a very Catholic little community as well. Jon: All I was thinking about was that in Wagga, if you went to the cake shop after 2, there was a possibility of physical or maybe cultural danger and then you moved to Newcastle and you're mixing with Indigenous Australians and probably other… Teresa: Not as many Indigenous Australians in the inner city - most of them were, we had a greater Asian, Greek, Italian, I'm just trying to think of races to go with the names - and it wasn't until we moved - I can't remember the name of the place - but on the other side of town, one of my friends lived, a big beach - Broadmeadows - we used to go to Broadmeadows and they had the old style milk bar and there it was the same sort of thing. At a certain time of day, the Indigenous Australians would come out and her mum would come and get us and take us home (conversation T3,text units 48-54).

This passage contains much that goes to the relationship between white and Indigenous Australians, and the ways in which that relationship is constructed through childhood. Teresa was one of the few participants who drew into the conversations about race and racism references to racial Others other than Indigenous Australians. For many participants, and I would guess the bulk of the white-Australian population as well, matters of race in the Australian context at the present time refer almost exclusively to the white-Aboriginal interface. There is very little inclusion of other non-white groups in this. Many of these groups are allocated a position closer to White than Indigenous Australians in the racialised hierarchies of the popular (dominant) imagination.

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In the milk bar story, Teresa tells of a ‘cosmopolitan’ mixture of several nationalities (which she equates with races) within her friendship group. This group seemingly presented lesser threats to her safety, since she was able to move with that group across the city and its environs with seeming ease. There is no reference to the need for parental protection or policing of time and space as there was in Wagga. Certainly, Teresa was older - into her teens by the time she left Newcastle - and was presumably developing a certain independence, but there is no hint in her telling of these stories of any parental worry, concern or disapproval of her mixing with the ethnically-different. This was a time when Australians of Greek and Italian origin and heritage were no longer suspect in terms of their racial connection to the dominant white group, so perhaps the lack of parental concern here is not surprising. This is even more understandable when one adds to the socio-cultural mix the matter of Teresa’s family’s adherence to Catholicism and the connections to that faith of significant numbers of Australians of Italian heritage and, to a lesser degree, of Greek heritage. What, however, is of interest is Teresa’s recollection of mixing with members of the Asian communities. At that time, this would have been quite unusual.

Through all of this, there is the continually looming presence of the Indigenous Other. This time, the Indigenous Australians were confined, at least in Teresa’s memory, to places other than where she lived: she lived in a Catholic community, and one can’t be both Catholic and Indigenous Australian: We didn't have any one except for white Europeans at church. I can't recall anyone of any other nationality there.(conversation T3, text units 18-19).

While Indigenous Others might have again been relegated to unknown domestic places, they still created spaces of racially-based fear. This time, her friend’s mother extracted Teresa and her friend(s?) when the time of danger arrived.

Gradations of Otherness were being sculpted from the broad multicultural milieu within which Teresa’s family operated:

Jon: So, from what I hear you saying, your family had a concern in Wagga where the difference was Aboriginal blackness but less concern in Newcastle where the difference wasn't as great because They weren't at the black end of the scale They were getting into the ‘yellows’ and ‘oranges’. Teresa: yeah! (conversation T1,text units 61-62)

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Encountering difference

Living with and authentically experiencing difference is something of a motif running through Teresa’s life. In her later years in Canberra, Teresa volunteered to work with a group of children labelled as intellectually disabled. This experience seems to have been a crucial one for her movement across boundaries of what constitutes normality and for her emerging understanding of the process of Othering, despite her possibly romanticised recall of the event:

I worked for the YMCA as a volunteer leader and I chose to work for an organisation called RAID (Recreation Activities for the Intellectually Disabled) and I found a lot of my friends couldn't understand why I'd give up my time to work with intellectually disabled people and they come down - I used to teach some basketball skills to get their motor skills up - and my friends would come down and sort of like sit there for five minutes, feel very uncomfortable and go. We'd discuss it at school and they'd say 'oh, I don't know why, it's not achieving anything, you're not doing anything. They're always going to be them' (conversation T1, text units 109-111)

With hindsight, Teresa is able to explain the reactions of her friends to her use of her recreation time - because they have no experience with these people or these types of human differences (conversation T1, text unit 112) - but she doesn’t open any windows onto her own motivation in taking on this work. Experience with difference seems to be critical to overcoming the binary- induced oppositional locations of Self and Other. Despite Teresa’s assumption of her friends’ lack of encounter with difference, her own childhood story tells of significant engagement with and developing constructions of the Other such that it is highly improbable that her friends had not lived similar experiences. As such, then, they would have had the world constructed for them in similar terms of normalcy and deviance. What is important about Teresa’s story here is that she unreservedly ascribes a factor of experiential ignorance to explain her friends’ reaction to the intellectually different children with whom she was working. This explanation is braided into her analysis of racist actions on the part of adult friends and colleagues later in her life, and pairs with the guilt factor she applies to her father’s reaction to these children discussed below.

In telling this part of her life story, Teresa identified two integral processes of Othering, although these were not apparent to her at the time. One was the rendering as invisible those who carry the stigma of difference:

When I was doing it [working with intellectually different children] I was in Canberra, I would have been 15 or 16 and they were either in institutions or they were

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in care houses, where they'd have 6 or 7 with 2 carers, and they were still not integrated like they are now, without people seeing them’ (conversation T1, text unit 115 )

The other process involved the construction and assignation of a group identity -‘or if they see them they see them in a group so it's a 'them’ thing. (conversation T1, text unit 116) - where the individual becomes submerged into a collective which makes judgement, containment and outcasting all the more easy. This is the essentialising of identity that the postmodern would eschew but which assumes a significance for the affirmation of senses of Self and Other here: if I can ascribe an essential identity of deviance to others who are different from me, then I am more able to assume one of normalcy.

The effects of difference on her immediate family provided a powerful lesson for Teresa regarding this outcasting of the different:

Jon: Why do you think your friends were uncomfortable watching the basketball game? Teresa: Because they have no experience. My dad couldn't come downstairs. When he grew up, they were put into institutions. If someone had an intellectually disabled child, they were taken from them, so it was bad thing so he didn't have a fear, but he felt so uncomfortable and so sorry that he felt like crying when he saw them so he didn't want to be exposed to that so he'd go and wait upstairs for me and I'd go search him out. My generation in their mid-twenties still feel the discomfort. I was talking to my boyfriend about how I'd like to do my specialisation in special education as well and he said 'I don't know how you could do it'. (conversation T1, text units 113-126).

It is but a short step from the feeling of ‘discomfort’ to the root cause of guilt. Parallels might be drawn to the emotions that underpin white motivations fuelling the current movement for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia: a sorrow and regret about past practices that to late 20th century hearts and eyes seem to be intolerable. Guilt features prominently in the emotional knapsack that participants in this study generally carry into the relatively unchartered terrain of racial identity.

That the articulation of the meaning of experiences such as this one bespeaks a difficult process of personal reflection and a certain naïve or superficial analysis is apparent in the extracts included here. The incomplete resolution of the intra- and interpersonal tensions that this event appears to have thrown up show through in contradictions and inconsistencies between the assertions and the linguistics of difference in Teresa’s account of the experience. On the one hand, she denies that the difference encountered drew up any reactions within her. She ‘never

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saw the difference’ although she now does and ‘I found them greater friends at times than the normal people’ (conversation T1, text unit 123). To the contrary, throughout the telling of this story, the language to describe ‘them’ resonates with a very clear sound of otherness.

The experience of witnessing the explicit delineation of difference and the cutting adrift of the Other from social acceptability continues for Teresa:

On the weekend I went down to the Sunday market and they had an intellectually disabled boy and something had upset him and you know they are very strong and they had five people holding him down and this woman was at the stall close to me and she turned around and said 'it's one of them' and I just felt sick inside.(conversation T1, text unit 111)

More recent experiences with race

Continuing the biographical motif, ‘raced places’ figure in Teresa’s present as well. In a major move from home, geographically and culturally, Teresa now inhabits space that is very much shared with Indigenous Australians. During the university semester, she shares a house with two other students, both of whom are Indigenous Australians. In the telling of the stories of this move, there is further insight into the development of racial awareness and identity. Teresa: Colleen's doing her nursing degree and she had herself and another girl and they both came to look at our house when we were living just down the road. And she knocked on the door and was very shy - which she's not now - and I sat down and had a coffee with her because the landlord hadn't shown up and she'd been sitting outside for like 15 minutes not willing to come and knock on the door so I sat and chatted with her and everything like that and she moved in…The two other European girls I was living with didn't get on. Jon: With her[Colleen]? Teresa: No, with each other, and there was always competing in the house and Colleen and I just went 'oh well, leave you to it' and we'd go to our rooms or up the pub and wait for it to be over. And then this year - because we moved out [ over the Christmas university recess period] - I rang her and said 'Are you coming back?’ and we moved in [together] again .(conversation T1, text units 61-66).

Colleen is studying nursing in a department that Teresa has judged to be one of the most difficult - racist - on the campus: nursing's really bad... really bad (conversation T2, text unit 120). Since then, Andrew, a Torres Strait Islander who is studying for an Arts degree, has also moved

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into the house. Reflecting on this move has forced Teresa to confront aspects of her identity with which she was far-from-happy, and further caused her to try to track through the events of her life that led to this position:

When I moved here, probably as an adult who won't just sit back and let things slide, the first day Colleen knocked on the door to move in with me, I thought 'oh no, I hope she doesn't want to move in here, and I suddenly realised what a bigoted little person I was and I said 'I don't even know this girl, she knows nothing about me, why am I doing this?’ And I remember speaking to my mum, and she said something like 'that's right, I know quite a few black people and they're not anything like that, Teresa, I don't know where that's come from’ and I sat back and I thought, 'yeah, I do, [laughs] because you told me in my childhood, blah, blah, blah.' (conversation T3, text units 66-67)

This connection has led to a major revision of Teresa’s views of self and otherness, largely through the experience of witnessing the effects of racism on the victims. And this has led to search for what it means to be White and ways of using that whiteness to work against embedded discrimination.

Witnessing racism

Sharing a house with Colleen and Andrew has positioned Teresa as witness to racist incursions into what she sees as positive racial relationships. One event in particular was of some significance in this process of witnessing:

[L]ast night she come home, and she was quite upset, a girl saw Colleen, there was only one chair left, the girl saw Colleen, and put her bag up on the chair and said 'someone's sitting there' so Colleen stood for a while and noticed there was no one there, so she picked up the bag and gave it to the girl and said 'well, now you're going to have to sit next to me’ (conversation T2, text unit 114)

In itself, the particular event might be taken at face value - a student saving a seat for a friend who fails to show up. The construction put upon it by Colleen and then Teresa is one of racism. There is no way from the evidence to decide which is the more correct in explaining the other student’s actions, but it is important here that the daily concrete experiences of racism were being experienced, vicariously albeit, by Teresa and the effects of those experiences were being turned into potential for positive action against racism:

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Jon: What would you do if you had been an observer of the event with Colleen? Teresa: I'd probably go down and say something or go down and sit next to Colleen, if Colleen had sat there or otherwise I would remove the bag and get Colleen to sit there and I'd sit next to her.(conversation T2, text units 124-126)

There is little here to indicate that racism was as yet seen as a function of membership of a broad social - in this case, White - group. It was still seen as the actions and attitudes of specific individuals and sections of the community. However, many of these experiences led Teresa to consider the situation she, as a White, was in here: living with three Indigenous Australians, her whiteness later became a matter of interest and concern for her. This is explored below.

Race and racism were topics that were always in the forefront of Teresa’s mind from the time of her moving in with Colleen and in some ways she had become an anti-racism crusader. No- one was safe from her exposure and interrogation of racist attitudes, comments and actions, as unthinking, unintentional and unconscious as they might be.

There are a few students, I don't know if they're provoking a situation or not just to see what people's views are, but sometimes some students have come out with something and I've just turned around and said 'well, tell me why you think that', or something like that because, I suppose it would offend me more because when I go home I see my flatmates as my family so they're not, even my friends in Brisbane I do it to.(conversation T2, text unit 128)

Teresa takes a very strong position on the intersection of racism and intending teachers:

There are some people I'm doing the course with who I truly believe shouldn't be teachers, but it's not for me to say - if that's what they want to do they can try and more than likely they'll try it, not like it and go.(conversation T1, text unit 181).

This extends to family as well:

I suppose even when mum and dad will make a comment that they haven't thought about and I'll look at them and I'll say 'that's not appropriate, that's offensive’. And I do that anywhere now, to anybody. ‘That's not how I see it, you tell me your view, I'll tell you mine and we'll see what we come up with’.(conversation T4, text units 125- 126),

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And like even the other day on the phone she [Teresa’s mother] turned around, and it's just a saying, she said - we had something happen in my family, I rang up my mother and said 'I've got a secret, they've told me, but I think you should know, and she said 'there's always a nigger in the firewood' and I said ‘now I'm pretty offended and I'm not going to talk to you’ and she said 'I didn't mean to say that' [laughs] (conversation T3, text units 70-71)

At times, though, this sense of wrongness is intuitive rather than conscious:

My brother, or either of my two brothers will say something to me and I get really, really offended and I don't know why.(conversation T3, text unit 192).

The attitudes and practices of friends from pre-university days - often living in other parts of the country - have also come under scrutiny: Like, they'll say, they'll make a racist comment and I'll stop and say [strongly] 'I find that offensive. You can make that comment while I'm not here but I'll tell you why that statement has offended me'. And they won't say things like that in front of me any more. (conversation T3, text units 215-216)

These types of stories locate Teresa’s view of racism within the individualist frame: racism attaches to and emanates from particular individuals. These attitudes and practices are seen as belonging to ‘bad whites’ while the role Teresa sees for herself separates her from these people: she is a ‘good white’ because she opposes the racism of others:

and I think if I don't say something it's just going to continue, if I keep on going 'ah, that's their opinion', then nothing's going to change and like even[Teresa’s brother] Mark says ' I love it when you come home' because he's good mates with Colleen, he says 'I love it when you come home because all these people say, let me think before I speak' [laughs] (conversation T3, text units 216-217) although sometimes there is a fall from non-racist grace:

I did something just the other day, too, and my friends just looked at me and said ‘ Oh, I don't believe that just came out of your mouth' and I've just gone 'Oh, I don't either now' [laughs] and I can't even remember it but they've all gone 'tsk,tsk,tsk,' at me. (conversation T3, text unit 73).

Good whiteness needs constant attention!

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Racialised identity and practices of racism aren’t seen as facets of group membership, but as highly individualistic and voluntary.

Learning to be the Other

The daily concrete experience of living with dimensions of Otherness has caused Teresa to come to develop a sense of compassion and sympathy for those who are the victims of racism, particularly those who are Indigenous Australians. It has also led her to inhabit some of the space of the Other. Her close association with and interjection into the racism of the campus have led to Teresa herself experiencing Othering in a way similar to Diane Jeater’s notion of the white identity she calls the black wannabe (Jeater 1992):

Teresa: I've suffered some disadvantage now because people see me constantly with Colleen and Karen and other Kumbari students and because I go an tutor down there, people see me entering there and sometimes I've had 'Oh, are you a Kumbari student?' and it's sort of like they'll look and then look away as if ' I'm not looking at you any more' and like lots, no, not lots, a few education students have said 'no, you can't talk to her’. Jon: They have actually said words to that effect? Teresa: Yep, ‘are you a Kumbari student?’ and walk away and I'll just go 'you can sit there’. Jon: Do you think it’s because you've crossed the boundary, you've gone to the cake shop after 2 o'clock and you've got those sort of things coming through where your allegiance to whiteness might be suspect? Teresa: That's right and I think my friends have said that to me, my Brisbane friends.(conversation T3, text units 204-214)

What Teresa doesn’t acknowledge or discuss is the view of her taken by the Indigenous people with and for whom she agitates against racism. This is where the hard part of excavating whiteness and identity possibilities arises.

Unsettling identities: the 80146 experience as racial identity trauma

A number of experiences caused by Teresa taking unit 80146 (Australian Indigenous Studies) in her pre-service teacher education program have had significant effects on her coming to see herself as a racialised individual. The year Teresa took the unit, the student body was both

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shocked and split over one community event that was used as lecture material by one of the Indigenous lecturers engaged in the unit:

I had a thing about the third lecture that [a member of the lecturing staff] gave. When she walked in I went 'Oh, no, please don't lecture'. I wrote about that in the evaluation - there was a structure, and I did my readings and everything, go in and it wasn't relevant and towards the end I started going 'something's going on in Kumbari'(conversation T1, text units 162-164)

[The] lecturer came in and I felt was accusing the student population and I found that offensive, because it didn't...no one was going to accept it because you just can't throw it at the student populace and say 'You're a part of the problem'...We had a lecture and something had happened with a court case and the [lecturer] came in and sort of went...she was very aggressive, very aggressive to the students and I just sat back and had a listen. And groups of people just got up and left and I thought, well, if you presented it in a different way and used your commonsense they would have listened. A girl had been raped or something, ummm, an Aboriginal girl and the white person who had done it had got off or something and she [the lecturer] was either representing or had something to do with the court case, and she just had a bad day and she was going to take it out on us..(conversation T2, text units 50-59)

The tenor and approach to this topic were at odds with what had previously occurred in the lecture program of the unit, and took many of the students, including Teresa, aback:

Well usually it was, at some stage, quite boisterous with discussions among people. When information was presented, they'd slow it down and people would discuss it and this time we were all supposed to be dead silent and not move and sit and listen and accept it and, I mean, as adults do, if we don't like it we get up and leave (conversation T2, text units 62-63).

In the reporting of this event there seems to be the start of the type of response Giroux (1997, p. 293) has called identity ‘trauma’. There is here a sense of outrage or at least indignation on Teresa’s part at being included in a group that had been labelled racist by a member of the victimised group. This presents as one of the unsettling moments that potentially leads to reflection on and perhaps a reformulation of self-identity, a discrepant event that could not find fit with existing structures of identity. In this unsettling moment, Teresa has tried to expose the racial basis of the accuser’s position while at the same time paint it with a veneer of inappropriateness and unfairness. Again, here racism is still understood as an individual rather than a systemic or cultural phenomenon. We have still not yet entered the terrain of

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problematising whiteness as the primary form of such systemic privileging and disadvantaging:

Jon: So was [the lecturer’s] point that as whites, we share the blame for what has happened? Teresa: That's what it felt like. It mightn't have been the way that she was trying to do it but that's how the student body around me felt and you could tell by their discussion - things like, 'this is ridiculous'- and her character assassination after that really, because she was presenting and a lot of people didn't stay long Jon: In your view, with the situation you've described - a violent crime against another person - there is obviously a gender dimension, is there or should there necessarily be a racial consideration there as well? Teresa: I suppose it depends on which particular perspective you take it from. I know [the lecturer] was an activist, and that was her goal to - I don't really know what her goal was -but it wasn't really a racial issue. If you thought about it as a white woman and a white man, it'd be the same thing and a black man and a black woman, it'd be the same thing, but the way she presented it was...it became a racial thing Jon: Was she saying the accused was freed because he was white or because the victim was black? Teresa: She mentioned it but I really can't recall, but she'd mentioned it and that's how it stuck in my mind. If you want us to listen, finger pointing doesn't do it.(conversation T2, text units 64-76)

Teresa did not recall understanding the event - the assault - as a racial issue. Perhaps another sliver of identity came to the fore here and she experienced this story from a gendered rather than a racialised position•. What she did see as racialised was the way in which the indigenous lecturer approached the matter.

In our conversations, Teresa and I discussed the role of events that occurred in one’s life that caused a re-think of what one had previously taken for granted and as given. In matters of identity, we talked about how certain events occur that, in effect, expose a charade that one has been engaged in. We called these events ‘shakes’ - comfort-disturbing events that might eventually lead to a reconsideration of who one is and what it means to be.

• I am indebted to Dr Tony Rossi for this thought.

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The lecture episode described above was one ‘shake’ for Teresa, as have been occasions when she has confronted her family over certain issues; another was her first trip to Cherbourg with Colleen. Cherbourg was a State government reserve for Indigenous people under the system of white protection of the Aboriginal people under its control. It is currently an autonomous municipality run by the local land council and is undergoing something of a transformation from its previous state to a vibrant, independent and optimistic community. The people of Cherbourg are actively involved in establishing an Indigenous-oriented economic base which will provide the means for the continued growth of the community and for the fighting of some of the more pressing health needs - alcoholism, as an example - of community members.

Teresa’s first trip to Cherbourg was, to her, a momentous event, one that has led her to understand the effects of white racism and the ways in which that racism works to maintain white superiority today.

My flatmate at the time invited me to go back to Cherbourg because I wanted to do my study [for unit 80146] on, not the stolen generation, the ummm effects of white colonisation to present day and through, and how it's continued through and her father ..ummm, I had an interview with him and he's, ohh, a really amazing man. He described how he was taken away and how he didn't know his family and things like that and how he was never paid money and everything else, like, and how today's youth in Aboriginal society don't have a clue. Jon: About that history? Teresa: About that history or about ..what...white people owe them.. Yeah, that happened to me but there is a lot more now that's providing them opportunities and a lot of them are just turning their back on it Jon: Is that opportunities through education and work schemes? Teresa: Everything, yeah, because he lives in Cherbourg, which was an eye-opener in itself. Ohh, it's GREAT! I've been following Mr Murray's progress. Like, he's now found his family and things like that and I look back, like Colleen might say something to me and I look back and think ‘I’ll never ever have to face that'. No-one in my society would ever have to face that, or if they did, there'd be current affairs programs, etc. all over the case, and he just goes, he just plods along day by day with it. He's now retired and he's got his farm - just a small farm- and his horses. And they actually did a documentary on him yesterday Jon: You did? Teresa: No, a TV station, so Colleen's getting a copy of that - the story of his life. (conversation T2, text units 78-101).

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This first exposure to and experience with a community of difference was not a totally positive one, and a number of the pre-conceived notions Teresa had of an Indigenous community - of its necessary difference from normalised imaginaries of community - were fulfilled:

When I first went there it was a bit - the concept I had when people said 'this is a community and they're working to do things' and I thought 'well, they've still got the typical things that I'd imagined - you've still got the police car blowing up’ - the week after I visited it blew up. The police station is just a big board basically, and I was talking to Sam and they're getting a pub and they're getting this and they're getting that and I went and spoke to the women who were looking after Colleen's son, Chrissy, and she was saying that the pub is going directly behind the medical centre and I said 'well, why?' and they said it's better than taking the money outside the town. If they keep it in the town and use it for other things, so ..(conversation T1, text units 72- 74).

Teresa’s first trip to Cherbourg was followed by others:

[Colleen’s] mum got sick at the end of last semester and we had a phone call that she'd had a heart attack and Colleen was just so stressed that we just hopped in the car and drove her back to Cherbourg. Like I've stayed at Cherbourg a couple of times now.(conversation T1, text units70-71)

The one trip to Cherbourg that provided a further spur to her reconceptualising her racial identity was that which she took as an optional component of the 80146 unit offering.

I think the most confronting part of the unit was when we took two busloads to Cherbourg and instead of whites looking out their windows at them, they all came out to the front porches and I'd already been there and met some of them and they waved to me and they thought 'we'll get you'[laughs] and they all come up and they sat across from the buses and watched us. Teresa: How did others on the bus react? Teresa: Some were quite afraid, literally afraid, and I thought that was quite funny and I didn't help matters by saying that the police car had been blown up the week before. Jon: Was John [a lecturer in the unit] on your bus? Teresa: yeah [laughs] I waited for him to get off and told them (conversation T1, text units 143-149)

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In this last extract, it seems that Teresa has adopted a “Middle Kingdom” position. As with the ancient Chinese who thought they inhabited a space closer to heaven and the Truth than other, heathen, peoples, Teresa locates herself as partial insider, closer to the centre of the culture of the Other than her colleagues. From the seeming safety afforded by the felt familiarity of her previous encounters with some of the residents and other aspects of the Cherbourg community, Teresa seems comfortable with the space of difference that exists between her fellow students - almost all of whom would have been white and of whom only a small proportion would have had any previous personal contact with Indigenous Australians - and the Cherbourg community. She is able to mould a mischievous joke out of the situation, yet still sees the whole event as ‘the most confrontational’ of all aspects of unit 80146. She doesn’t elaborate on precisely what was confrontational here, except that there appears to be some sense of role reversal: it is the gaze of the dominant that has been appropriated by the Other here, and the dispossessed Whites are very uncomfortable. Perhaps this is the same type of feeling that was generated by the use of the term ‘whitey’ as a term of challenge.

In Teresa’s view, the Indigenous studies unit led to sustained provocation and reflection on the part of many of her colleagues as well.

I noticed when I was doing the tutes - I went to nearly every tute - and the most offensive people got was when it was a thing on either how Aboriginal people were slaughtered or we were doing the basic history and how basic education, or basic primary school education doesn't include that, that's when defences rose more than anything else That was one place that I noticed that everyone was going 'but, but' and were all [leaning] forward in their chairs. It's easier to feel the guilt than it is to face the changes. (conversation T1, text units 157-159)

In situations such as the ones described here, the most graphic depictions of characteristics of identity most at odds with settled images of Self and kind cause noticeably aggressive- defensive reactions. What is interesting here is Teresa’s assertion that the assumption of feelings of guilt is an easier option for her colleagues (and herself?) than is the alternative of taking action to redress the wrongs. Perhaps it is through this acceptance - begrudgingly - of guilt that distance might be maintained between Self and Other. In the light of the current wave of expression of white sorrow and apology accompanying the white-Indigenous Australian Reconciliation movement, this possibility bears further inquiry.

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Whites, Whiteness and identity: a conceptual whirlpool

At this point, Teresa is in the process of removing herself, in identity terms, from the ‘us’ of her earlier life to the space that spans the gap to ‘them’. This is the place of the genesis of the Third Space (Bhabha 1990), but in Teresa’s experience, the development of the potential embedded here required a consideration of what it is that constitutes her basic racial identity - in other words, Teresa needed to address her identity as a white person. This was a complex and convoluted process, one that was commenced during the course of the conversations but that is still in the process of coming into being. The articulation of whiteness by Whites is not an easy task, and our conversations worked through the question of what it means to be white in a number of ways.

We talked through a list of nationalities and ethnic group descriptors as a stimulus to consideration of how Teresa was conceptualised whiteness. This was an activity we drew upon when skirting the boundaries of white ethnicity in order to uncover the cognitive schema of racial categorisation Teresa had constructed and applied. The prompts were nationality- based, which allowed for the inclusion (or exclusion) of a number of racial groups within the ambit of each. Her responses to the nationalities on the list were: Jon: Are these people white - Swedes? Teresa: Yes Jon: Congolese? Teresa: No idea Jon: Canadians? Teresa: Yes-ish. They're not all white - you have categories of Indian culture there as well. Jon: Icelanders? Teresa: Indian too Jon: Spaniards? Teresa: I'd go yes Jon: Belgians? Teresa: Closer to yes Jon: Dutch? Teresa: Yes Jon: Turks? Teresa: no Jon: Germans? Teresa: white supremacy - yes [laughs] Jon: Algerians - it's almost a geography test, isn't it? Teresa: not white

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Jon: Cubans? Teresa: Majority no Jon: Danes? Teresa: yes Jon: Israelis? Teresa: no Jon: Chileans? Teresa: [non-verbal: don't know] Jon: Ugandans? Teresa: no Jon: Scots? Teresa: no, aw, yes Jon: Americans? Teresa: no Jon: Japanese? Teresa: no Jon: Swiss? Teresa: yes Jon: Portuguese? Teresa: yes Jon: Poles? Teresa: yes Jon: Russians? Teresa: yep Jon: Mexicans? Teresa: no Jon: Arabs? Teresa: no Jon: Argentinians? Teresa: no Jon: Finns? Teresa: yes Jon: Bulgarians -central Europe? Teresa: aw, yes Jon: Norwegians? Teresa: yes Jon: Italians? Teresa: no Jon: Chinese?

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Teresa: no Jon: Moroccans? Teresa: no Jon: Egyptians? Teresa: no Jon: Iranians? Teresa: no Jon: Greeks? Teresa: yes-ish - no. Jon: Vietnamese? Teresa: no Jon: New Zealanders? Teresa: You can't go half-half can you?[laughs] Jon: Australians? Teresa: same Jon: Ukrainians? Teresa: a lot like Russia Jon: you said for Russia that they were white. Teresa: But they're not really, in the cultural aspect, they're not really. Jon: Ukrainians or Russians? Teresa: Ukrainians. I'll go no.(conversation T2 , text units 263-351)

The crucial point of this exercise was to try to elicit the criteria by which Teresa assigned the status of whiteness. Earlier, she had had difficulty in describing people like herself, and this manoeuvre operated to open up some possible systems of categorisation. In the discussion following this list activity, Teresa reflected on the ways in which she allocated nationalities or ethnic groups to the white or non-white category:

I didn't go white for skin, I was looking at my white culture and going towards how much, like I don't identify with being a white Australian, I identify with being an Australian. The Italians identify with "I'm Italian and this is how we work”. And like they have a set criteria for what they do, like the ad for pasta, how they make fresh pasta on Wednesday, that's how I see it. They have their set criteria for what it is to be an Italian.(conversation T2, text units 353-356) Jon: So when you were deciding are they or aren't they white, there were some areas that obviously you were saying ‘Hang on it's too hard to say Canadians are all the same’? Teresa: yep

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Jon: You said there are some first nations people in there as well, and the same for New Zealanders and Australians. So take those ones out, where you could make a definitive statement either yes they are or no they're not, you weren't looking at skin colour, you were looking at aspects of culture that, because you see yourself as white, aspects of culture, your culture that you would see as probably similar or the same as for those folks. Those aspects of culture that we tried to get at before Teresa: uh-huh Jon: That becomes the important question. You say, 'I don't know why I am but I am white and I'm ascribing whiteness to those people because they're like me'. The question becomes, what are the common elements, what is it about these people that is like me and what is it about me that is like them?(conversation T2, text units 361- 369).

Earlier, Teresa had identified herself as white, though she qualified this by adding the label ‘Irish’. We discussed the whiteness of the Irish in order to work through some seeming inconsistencies in Teresa’s categorising system:

Jon: For example there isn't any reference to the Irish[in the list we used] - let's throw it in now- Irish? Are the Irish white? Teresa: No, not white. (conversation T2, text units 258-260) Jon: Why wouldn't you see the Irish as being white? You identified as Irish early on. Teresa: Well, yes I think I do. I think the Irish history is one of suppression. And sometimes when I think of the Irish I think of them being suppressed for so long by another empire and it's only now that they're coming into their own. It's only now that they're having democratic elections, they've got their own president and things like that. I mean, it's a while, but not as long as their history and that's why I don't see them as White white. I could probably base white on England. If you want me to base it on something it would be English heritage. Jon: If we could, could we just follow that domination or oppression thing, is it the case that you see whiteness, that the groups you've identified as white are people who have not been to your knowledge, oppressed or suppressed or dominated but in fact are the dominators? Teresa: I'd have to change Scotland if you follow that. Jon: Scots you said no [not white] Teresa: It would have to be ‘no’. (conversation T2, text units370-382).

When placed in an abstract, disembodied context, whiteness for Teresa was resolvable to a question of whether the group to be identified was, in effect, a coloniser as she saw that. To her, the Irish were not white because they had not ever dominated or colonised another culture,

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country of group. The Scots fell into the same category. The English, clearly, were white. An equally clear problem for this classification system is the group described in the list simply as “Americans”. This nation (United States of America) could be acknowledged as the coloniser par excellence in the late 20th century, both in an actual physical sense and even more powerfully in cultural terms. Teresa saw “Americans” as not white:

Jon: You've said Americans are not white. Teresa: It's somewhat like Australia - it's very multicultural, so you've got aspects of their society that are and aspects that aren't and I think the aren't are more dominant than the are. Jon: The non-white parts? Are you able to give me an example of what sorts of things you mean there? Teresa: Well, if I went back in history, I'd look at the revolution and how they stopped slavery and that was a non-white thing. I mean the whites did it of course, but it was them saying no, this isn't right and that's why I'd see it more, and they're moving more towards it, I suppose. You've still got your little pockets, but you've pockets of both, but I think it'd be more non-white because you've got Latinos and everybody converging and making it...see, it's such a big place and it depends where I'm looking at. If I looked at inner city New York, it'd be a definite no, but if I looked at Wall Street, then I'd say it'd be yes. That's just one that's too big for me to comprehend [laughs] (conversation T2, text units 383-392).

What constitutes whiteness for Teresa, clearly, is a very complex matter even on a personal, concrete basis, and it is a topic of conversation that creeps into her domestic life as well:

Andrew, my other [Torres Strait Islander] flatmate, said something to me the other day. He's doing an assignment on multiculturalism and we couldn't find a term to categorise whiteness. He said what about 'anglo-celtic' and I said, 'no, that's a regional thing as well' and he said ' so's anglo-saxon', and we couldn't in dictionaries anywhere find a word instead of using white and he didn't want to use white people in his assignment or use black people, he wanted to use Indigenous and one that would incorporate whiteness, and we couldn't. It took us hours.(conversation T3, text units 75-78)

The fact that this question arises in a student setting at all is interesting, but there are a further two important points to be made about this extract. The first is that of the difficulty presented to these two students in finding a synonym for ‘white’ in racial terms. While Andrew could readily find a synonym for Torres Strait Islander or Australian Aborigine (‘Indigenous’), both he and Teresa were unable to locate a parallel term for white. This is not an uncommon

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phenomenon and is reported on frequently in the literature on whiteness (see Chapter 2). The second point here is that the term ‘white’ in itself is considered to be a perjorative descriptor by a non-white person. Teresa reported a further conversation she and Andrew had about the use of derivatives of ‘white’ as derogatory terms:

He [Andrew] comes out with funny things. He actually shocks me at times. He says ‘you know how we call ourselves black' and I said 'yes', he said ' you don't actually call yourself white. Do you get offended when I call you whitey?‘ and I went 'no' and he said 'would others?' and I said 'more than likely' and he's gone 'why? and I can't answer that.(conversation T3, text units 80-86).

Whiteness obviously is interrogated in many ways and in many places. For Teresa this environment of racialised awareness has led her to further analyse gradations of whiteness in comparison to the ways in which the English language accommodates varieties or gradations of blackness - or non-whiteness - yet endures a paucity of descriptors for whiteness and its shades. One term that did emerge was ‘white trash’ which we discussed as a way of saying, ‘yeah, well, you’re white, but only just’. The members of the white community who are tarred (with no pun but deliberate imaginary effect intended) with that label fall far short of the cultural aristocracy Hage (1998) describes. Teresa acknowledged the less-than-positive connotations of the use of the term through her almost-guilty admission to its use in a partial Othering of a family of fellow whites:

Well, see I've used that label. My old next door neighbours when I lived in Brisbane. See somebody asked me to describe them. I was just appalled by their behaviour and everything else and I just said, 'they're white trash'. Their children are well-fed and everything like that, but they weren't taught morals, things like that. The kids would, three year olds using foul language, 15 year old girlfriend sleeping with all the young boys in the neighbourhood and I could put no other term on them if someone asked to describe them, which a friend did, I'd say 'white trash'.(conversation T3, text units 110-114)

The irony of the current fashionable chic attaching to white trash did not escape Teresa, and we discussed the escape of white trash culture from the fissures of an insecure white majority identity, particularly in the United States of America, in such forms as grunge music (Pearl Jam and Silverchair), popular television sitcom-style programs (Married with Children, The Simpsons and Roseanne) and the circus that is the talk show (particularly the likes of The Jerry Springer Show) such that there now existed a certain hip coolness in this stratum of whiteness. This stratum also attracts the fascinated gaze of the rest of the white community, and while it is in many ways a championed sub-culture within the dominant white society, it is not seen that

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way by Teresa who, in the extract above, clearly excises into Otherness those who transgress those cultural niceties, moralities and practices - their communal obligations• - that should flag their membership of the white social club. Teresa concluded that :

We [whites] don't have Lillian, a 50-something year old Indigenous 27 terms for snow [as Australian woman, had introduced me to the idea the Inuit people that having such a close cultural awareness was often have], and we don't a nuisance, she talked of how it was often such an have many terms for intrusion into her private and social life to have to be white so it's either white continually on-show. She was, she asserted, or white trash and so for constantly expected to be able to reel off her cultural whites to describe and familial history, her dreaming and totem stories themselves is pretty for all those who would listen - and they were many, difficult. (conversation especially in white company. I can remember her T3, text unit 116). envying whiteness for the anonymity it offered and for the ignorance of self and identity it excused (in fact, the universalising tendencies of white identity is such that it probably expected and required such ignorance. Whiteness necessitates the erasure of memory).

Demonstrating the invisible nature of the creeping ubiquity of whiteness, the previous extract shows precisely how whiteness conflates itself with a universal humanity: it is not the case that it is ‘white’ or ‘white trash’ as the only descriptors available to describe those who fall into that racial/ cultural group, there is also a universally inclusive ‘we’.

While Teresa had difficulty in articulating specifically what whiteness was and meant, she expressed some views about the state of whiteness in Australia today: it is ‘robust’ (conversation T5, text unit 53) and in a far less perilous condition than United States whiteness:

Well it is the power base, it makes the decisions for more than the majority of people. I find, just watching the news recently that even in our politics that the whiteness shows by - what's the word - it goes against the majority. A small group of men, (primarily) who make the decisions. When I worked in TAFE I found the same thing, it was like an old boys’ club. You had to be in there and go to the right schools and things like that

• Again, I am indebted to Dr Tony Rossi for this description.

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and that's what I see the majority of whiteness is in society and in your, the university as well. If you look at the student association and you look at all the pictures there, they're young white men or recently more young white women who are running the student association but if you look at the broader aspect of the campus that isn't the majority of people who attend this university (conversation T5, text units 5 -10)

For Teresa, whiteness resides within a alliance of powerbrokers: big business, supported by the mass media and those whose class positions require allegiance to a white core culture: It's a very select group. It's like they program TV like Home and Away for certain sets of people (conversation T5, text units 60-61)

This group needs to allow for the appearance of oppositional views, but effectively emasculates their potentially transformative effect. In discussing this, Teresa dwelt at length on the current case of Stephen Hagen who has taken a number of forms of action to have certain usages of English, offensive to him as an Indigenous Australian, changed. Teresa has been friendly with Hagen’s wife, and shares his views on the derisory nature of the particular examples Hagen has highlighted, as well as articulating an understanding of the power of language to position, privilege and embed dominance and advantage: If you watch the media reports on it, they'll let Stephen say his piece, but then it will, just with the wording, they'll be putting it down and that's what surprises me and why I think it will be so difficult to change the political power because even someone like Stephen who's saying, throwing it in your face that they go 'no, he's off in fairy land' and it's just how the media reports it. The change to our top power - I don't, maybe in my lifetime, I'll see it, but just the way it's going, I don't think so.(conversation T5, text units 38-39)

Whiteness in Australia manifests itself in different ways than it does in other places, for example the United States. There the interracial relationship is in many parts not a novelty and being white, as a racial category, is perhaps more visible because of the political awareness of minority populations. Teresa gave examples : I watched something last week, it's a law show, family law and it had an interracial marriage and the children were fighting over it and all I could think of was wouldn't that be strange to happen in Australia : on the TV you'd see a white and black couple of affluence on the TV discussing their marriage. You'd just see everyone flick off to a different channel. It would be lucky to make it onto the programming of most of the commercial channels anyway , but because it was American it was on there and it was prime time. (conversation T5, text units 137-141)

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We discussed representations of Otherness on television, and by comparison with United States programming, Teresa saw Australian television centred unspokenly around an assumed core white culture. In implicitly equating whiteness with the terrorist position of hooks (1997) and with the oppressor persona of Jeater (1992), she searched for examples of the representation of other cultures and ethnicities:

There was one[Australian television program] - Breakers or something - it had a young black boy who got off the streets and started working in the restaurant and started moving up the ladder from there. Whites owned the restaurant and employed him or something like that and all the issues were black issues but they were very minute, not so significant in the show.(conversation T5, text units 67-68)

The privileging of whiteness in Australian society was most apparent to Teresa during a recent State by-election in an electorate close to her previous home in Ipswich. Because she still had connections to this area, she spent some time in the electorate during the campaign period and followed reports on television closely. It was in this context that she drew out another way in which whiteness privileges and alienates:

Like, what you saw in the by-elections aren't true representations of the people who are there. You see them more at the town meetings and things like that and you have - I thought it was so amusing - you have all the white people in the first 5 rows and then, I saw the Woodridge one, you have probably have 5 or 6 rows of Asian and then you have a scattering of Aboriginals down the back, and I thought 'aw yeah'. I suppose it's a whiteness thing. You have the whites straight in the front row and they swung the camera right and I thought, 'that says it doesn't it?' Even the language they spoke when they were talking - they spoke in an educated level of English, the language even if you're a new Australian your language isn't that profound you have to sit there and think really hard about what they've said and by that time it's gone to a different issue. and you're going to be subject to ridicule.(conversation T5, text units 102-113)

In this description there is contained many of the dynamics of the systemic enactment of whiteness and white privilege. First, there is the front row positioning of Whites with a further gradation of difference as we pan towards the back of the room: after the Whites come Asian and then at the rear the Indigenous Australians. The racialised cartography of a white society modelled within the confines of one room with rings of closeness to white privilege and white cultural nobility clearly delineated. This sieving and ordering does not necessarily occur as a deliberate act on the part of the white community: the feeling of being Outsider, of transgressing and being found deficient in crucial forms of dominant cultural capital often

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leads to a physical marginalisation that parallels the metaphorical effected by a conscious positioning away from the front.

Second, one form of language - ‘standard’ English - constitutes the privileged form of communication. Those without fluency in that particular language are either effectively excluded from participation in the political process that is the electoral campaign or are subject to derision and consequent devaluing of their views as a result of their efforts to operate within the structure of a second (or later) language. In effect, those without recourse to the greatest range of dominant -white- cultural capital are relegated to the spectatorial bleachers of the political arena. In not understanding and being competent in the application of the intricacies and assumptions of white protocols and courtesies, many of those who are non-whites here effectively inhabit foreign territory.

Third, there is an expectation that those different from the unspoken universal - the white - citizen will work to overcome their deficiencies in order to qualify for admission to the decision-making processes. Given that no allowances seem to have been made for those without primacy in the English language, these people were expected to assimilate, to take on the characteristics and qualities of white society in order to participate. Whiteness is the pinnacle, the desired, the only acceptable and ‘natural’ cultural position.

Finally, the structure of privilege and legitimacy modelled in that room was captured and conveyed unthinkingly and unquestioned by the mass media. The imagery of dominance and subordination powerfully caught by the television cameras carried the front row image of white culture far beyond the confines of the immediate event and in so doing, reinforced the universalisation of white dominance. At the same time, a picture of white paternalism was also painted: the front row positioning of whites strengthens the assumption that ‘we’ will look after ‘them’, that ‘we’ know what is best for the community. It is obvious where - and more importantly, why - decision-making competence, legitimacy and power reside.

To further complete the encapsulation of whiteness in the Australian context, the informal conflating of whiteness with Australianness was carried through Teresa’s retelling of an incident regarding the then forthcoming Olympic Games in Sydney:

Teresa: You've got the Asian population in Sydney. They've just kicked up a fuss over the Olympic Games. Most of the new centres are in one of the women's electorates. Jon: Helen Lo Po? Teresa: Yeah and they didn't even invite her to the celebration for the opening and it was mainly in her area and she got on TV and said ' well, what does that say about

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Australian society when it's in my electorate and I'm not allowed to go. It must be because I'm not Australian (conversation T5, text units 83-89)

ʻI know Iʼm white but I donʼt know what that meansʼ: Identity and

uncertainty

Having examined and described her experiences with coming to firstly see and then trying to understand the operation of whiteness in a societal or systemic way, Teresa found considerable difficulty in coming to terms with her individual white identity.

In our first conversation, Teresa declared herself to be white and Irish, a combination that was reiterated over the following conversations with the addition of the appellation “Catholic” further specifying her self-perceived identity. Whiteness is something Teresa both takes for granted as well as resisting. When we talked about how she knew she was white, she commenced with a phenotypical set of criteria and then brought the scope of the problem into a more personalised, familial, ambit by applying a more cultural view :

Teresa: Well, you've got your basic skin colour [laughs] which is more pink than white but it's lighter, but that's why I think it's associated with white. Also my cultural background would make me more likely to do things in a European way. Jon: Can you give me some examples of that ? Teresa: Well, [long pause] I really can't. My family, like most families, I guess, get together and things like that (conversation T3, text units 10-15).

It was impossible at this point for Teresa to identify what it was that Whites did that constituted their whiteness. She just knew she was white, and this self-knowledge came about via the operation of the comparative binarisms established in her very early infancy:

Jon: With your experiences of growing up and race and ethnicity and whiteness you don’t seem to have thought of yourself as white. Teresa: No, I don't think so. Jon: Was it more knowing that you're not black, identifying the Other? Teresa: Yes, it was what was different I suppose. (conversation T3, text units 56- 60)

So how did Teresa see herself? How and with whom did she identify? In her mind, the influences on her sense of identity were largely proximal ones: the closer the experience with

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aspects of the complexity of her identity, the more that part was foregrounded in the pastiche out of which she emerged as an individual:

I'd have say Irish, because all my Irish relatives have just been visiting, so I'm still in that frame, but I'm identifying more with the Aboriginal culture because I live with them. (conversation T2,text unit 23)

The task of self-description was extremely difficult: Jon: You said earlier that you associated most with black Irish cultures and ethnicity, and increasingly Australian Aboriginal ethnicities, so is it possible to identify or name some characteristics of people who are culturally most like you? Teresa: I suppose I'd have say open - and open in the terms of don't accept what is given to you but look further, I can see that in both cultures really. [long pause] I really don't know.

Further discussion of this revealed little more by way of a sense of self, but a lot about the articulation process:

Teresa: If you picked a person, if you said ' what people are more like you?' I would say my flatmate. Jon: What are her characteristics, then? Teresa: She's open, she's warm, [long pause] I can't even tell you that [laughs]. (conversation T2, text units 221-224)

We talked about Teresa’s view of the so-called ‘typical Australian’ as a way of trying to draw up to consciousness what it was that constituted at least the language of identity:

Jon: How do you see this "typical" member of this national community? Teresa: Actually, my view's changed. If you'd asked me that about two years ago I would have done a typical male who would spout something from his mouth and have no understanding of what he was saying, went with the flow and have his beer and his b-b-q and things like that, but today I really don't think there is a typical Australian because I've met so many Australians and no-one fits into the typical mask. Jon: Is it possible to identify some groupings or types of Australians, not necessarily their characteristics, but is it possible? Before you were talking about your college in Canberra and you were able to identify various groups. Some of them were obviously clearly nationally or ethnically based, like Croatians, but you also talked about mods, for example. Is it possible - it might not be - to do the same thing with types of

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Australians? You've possibly in some ways have identified one type- the beer-swilling, bbq-going male whatever. Teresa: I don't think so in my life - I know I've changed since I've started uni. I've moved away from my friends to do that. Jon: Deliberately? Teresa: Deliberately. Like if I go back to Brisbane I don't have time to do anything because so many people are coming so I had to move away so I could study. I suppose all my friends are different from what they were even from high school and I can't label as well. When I was younger, I was able to label somebody - oh, she's wearing that so she's that - and I just don't seem to be able to do it. The only people I label is my family. Jon: Is that because you know them better or because you can get away with the labelling? Teresa: Because I can get away with it [prolonged laughter] (conversation T2, text units 228-248).

The difficulty Teresa describes in labelling others could be partially explained by the postmodern fracturing of once-stable identities and the resultant constant morphing of those slivers: no one set of descriptors can attach securely to the shifting terrain. Another part of the explanation of this problem possibly resides in the lack of experience most whites have in considering themselves in identity terms - particularly in the language and concepts of race and culture. This phenomenon was one of the few common elements across all participants in the study.

Teresa did see herself a evincing a positive white identity, despite being unable to flesh out what that might actually be. She contrasted this positive identity with more racist whites in a way that further exposed and reinforced the ‘good white-bad white’ dichotomy described earlier.

Identity was something that was both given and asserted, but that identity was contingent upon the recognition of it by others, particularly white others and on the environment within which that identity was located and forged: I think I see myself more as catholic than white because the families I went to church with were all white.(conversation T3, text unit 15)

Here, whiteness was a subset characteristic of a stronger element of identity, that of (Christian) religion. The enduring nature of this influence is important, particularly in view of Teresa’s earlier admission of an increasing distance between herself and the dictates and practices of Catholicism. Nevertheless, in terms of self-identification, white Catholicism is significant here

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as is the Indigenous Australian environments Teresa is finding herself traversing more and more: I'm identifying more with the Aboriginal culture because I live with them.. I live with three Aboriginal students.(conversation T2, text units 23-24).

Does this meandering across ‘identiscapes’ mean the emergence of a hybrid form of identity, neither white nor non-white? Is this the place where the Third Space of Homi Bhabha resides? Teresa doesn’t see herself as a positive white identity in the sense of being powerful and aggressive in a quest for overcoming racism. During one of our conversations, the talk got around to bell hooks’ view of whiteness as terrorism and her plea for Whites to work to construct more positive racial identities. I asked Teresa to consider what the view of whiteness as terrorism might mean and what her experience of living with racism meant for the emergence of positive white identities in hooks’ (1997) sense:

Jon: Do you see yourself as a white terrorist? Teresa: No, unless the house isn't clean, but then Colleen is more frantic than I am. I don't know that I see myself as a positive white identity either, because a lot of people I used to speak with before they knew [where] I lived and I used to hang down at Kumbari more now. People used to speak to me a lot more often than they do now so. Jon: So your influence has declined? Teresa: Oh, yeah.(conversation T4, text units 96-103).

Following on from this, we talked about Jeater’s (1992) idea of the two types of white identities (wannabes and racist oppressors) and the similar call for whites to develop non-intimidatory, non-appropriating white identities:

Jon: Do your white friends see you as the black wannabe? Teresa: Not really, how do you put it? I think I hang out there[Kumbari] because I study with Karen [another Indigenous friend and fellow pre-service teacher], I tutor there so I'm seen more there, but even if they see me in the library, there isn't a great number of people who know me and I know many of their views and I disassociated myself a bit and once they… Karen’s a very confronting person and once she's confronted somebody it's like 'She's scary, I'm moving away’. I see it in lectures and I cringe at times, but she's up front and she's either been influenced, or they've been influenced by something Karen's done and they've thought[about me] 'Oh, no'. Tarred with the same brush. Jon: Now there's a good example of Karen being a non-stereotypical black identity because she's prepared to put up, explain and confront, but that's a different black

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identity, and the challenge is to look at how we can help, through education, construct positive white identities. Teresa: Yeah, yeah I agree with that. (conversation T4, text units 105-113).

Teresa’s view of a positive white identity revolves around an activist axis - consequently her regret that her influence has waned among the student body. While not being able to capture her own racial identity in clear terms, Teresa was at least able to recognise what membership of that group brought with it: I have more privileges because of my skin colour (conversation T3, text unit 121) and the examples of this weren’t difficult for her to find:

If Colleen and I walk into a shop I'll be the first attended, even to buy food. And sometimes I feel that even the people I live with do that. If I'm walking towards the front door they'll let me in first. When I go into the kitchen, they'll let me do what I want to do first, and sometimes I don't think and I just do it and I think 'oh, no, you go, you don't have to wait for me' and things like that (conversation T3, text units 124-128).

The ingrained nature of the deference accorded to whiteness by, and its everyday effects on those who are outed by it are clearly evident in this passage - even racially and politically aware Others give unthinking priority to Whites and whiteness. I wondered whether Teresa’s experiences of being accorded privileged positions at home might well have been the result of centuries of lived experience of white colonial domination by Indigenous Australians.

Rather than any particular sense of the position of whiteness, was this deference actually an example of Henry Reynolds’ descriptions of the ways in which the terror of white dominance led to the widespread understanding, perpetuated through Aboriginal oral traditions, that it was ‘dangerous to backchat a white man’ thereby embedding an understanding of ‘the need for a show of subordination’ (Reynolds 1999, pp 121-122) ?

In response, Teresa located these personal domestic experiences within a larger context of white dominance, one of the few times she jettisoned the individual perspective on race and racism and re-viewed these as group or systemically rooted (and routed?). At this time, white privilege existed for Teresa as a systemic dimension of an accident of birth:

but you don't even have to do anything [to earn this privileged position]. And that's what I think shocks me, because before I'd just trundle on my way and accept it.(conversation T3, text units 197-198).

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Awareness of one’s benefiting or taking from a communal pool of rewards without contributing or working to add to the treasure trove can be disturbing, but by the same token, Teresa spoke to perhaps the most difficult dilemma in reconstructing whiteness:

but you don't want to give up your privilege either in a certain sense (conversation T3, text unit 203)

There was still confusion about what actually constituted white privilege, and Teresa seemed in many ways to merge this position of privilege and power with her activist anti-racist stance:

But back to white privilege, I was in Brisbane on the weekend and I've noticed that before my boyfriend's flatmate would make racist jokes and I'd go 'go on, sit down and explain it to me' and confront it and he'd make excuses and that and just recently he'll stop and say to me 'what do Aboriginals do if they're doing dah dah dah dah dah' and I said 'well, I don't know. I'm not a traditional Aboriginal and the guys I live with don't discuss that'. And he's stopped the racial jokes, instead of throwing a racial joke at me he'll now ask questions and if I can't answer them, and usually I can't, he hasn't used jokes like, ohh... Jon: So do you see that as an example of white privilege in a way having achieved a positive end? Teresa: Yes, because he's not so quick for the words to run off his tongue. I don't know what he's like when I'm not there, but when I'm there he doesn't run people down.(conversation T4, text units 9-15)

Given her concern to resist racism and to work for a change in the social construction of privilege and disadvantage, what prospects for the dismantling of unearned white privilege did Teresa see? She essentially adopted a very pessimistic position here:

It's because of the thing in society today- we're less likely to be proactive in our, we might disagree with it but we're less likely to put our foot forward and put up our hand and say 'let's do something about it'. We're all sitting back and going 'yeah, it will change, eventually it will change' but deep down we know it's not going to.(conversation T5,text units 13-14). (Refer also to conversation T5, text unit 39, cited on page 50 supra.)

She placed all hope for change in the hands of those most disadvantaged for the reason that No one's going to say anything while they're at the top.(conversation T5, text unit 93). While providing evidence of her appreciation of the pervasiveness of whiteness and the elusive nature of its power and effects, Teresa’s conversations on this topic of undoing these effects shows that she

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fails to locate solutions to racist-based disadvantage in the white community. As has been the case with many anti-racist movements, campaigns and social support programs, it is the victim that remains the focus of activity and action. In Teresa’s mind, it is not apparent that she thinks that this locus of responsibility is an inherent one, but rather that it seems to her that the edifice of whiteness is too strong and impregnable to fracture and fissure sufficiently to allow the escape of alternative, positive, forms of white identity. In the end, she suggests, education - expansively construed - will provide some hope of broader social awareness and understanding, but for the foreseeable future at least, the work of undoing racism will be done by those most visibly affected. In this, she doesn’t demonstrate any awareness of the ways in which those most advantaged by racist practices, structures and ideologies are also victims. In the following excerpts from a conversation about the prospects for the dismantling of oppressive whiteness, Teresa outlines her ideas:

Jon: How then do you change, or what avenues exist for changing white dominance in that way, or should we just start to make the best of what we've got here? Teresa: I think up north you hear it, the Indigenous people being more proactive up north than down here and they're also cut down by the media a lot more, which, if you're supported by the media you're more likely to go through but once you're cut down by the media, the rest of the population goes 'oh there's that guy again' same as like Stephen, oh, what's Rhonda's husband's name, Hagen.(conversation T5, text units 27-29) Teresa: There are pockets of very strong protest - what's a better word than protest - active groups who now and again pop their heads up to cut things down a bit and open people’s eyes but I think they're also not as widely publicised. I mean you can watch SBS and watch a few shows where it actually explores different issues, but it's not on mainstream TV. Mainstream is another codeword for white, isn't it? It assumes it includes everyone but it really doesn't. It's a very select group.(conversation T5, text units 56-60)

That she envisions a raft of broad social pedagogical fronts in this educative process is apparent. She identifies the mass media as powerful socialisation and change agents, although she is not blind to the power of the controllers of those media to maintain and support those perspectives that sustain their positions: Jon: So you think that a positive spin on whiteness may come through the media? Teresa: I think it will come through, I think if more people tuned into what 's going on around them and tune into the ABC and SBS instead of commercial channels, their little eyes would start opening.

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The role of schools and the pedagogy of teachers committed to socially-just ends of their work is also important here, particularly when linked with the potential for the democratisation of knowledge that new forms of communication technologies contain: Jon: Is that a role for schooling, for teachers to play? Teresa: I think so. I think that as well as multimedia - there's so much out in multimedia now. There are so many CD-ROMs coming - I mean they’re the cheapest form now - I see so many things on Indigenous heritage, things on history of particular groups of people and if you wanted to do a study it wouldn't be a boring thing it would be an interactive thing, that's how I think it's going to change but you'd have to change the teachers' views as well, and that's the hard part.(conversation T5, text units 143-152).

In the end, Teresa conceded that the increasing contact with and understanding of the global community might well effect a shift in dominant white attitudes, with the Olympic Games presenting as a major point of optimism: Teresa: I think it might be changing. I don't think Brisbane is the base. If you wanted to look at the change you'd be looking at places that are saturated. Jon: Melbourne? Teresa: Sydney because we're going to have everybody coming there and I think a few things will come out after the Olympics that we'll say 'umm, that's interesting. These foreigners weren't too bad after all’. So I just think the changes are happening but I think they're just a little slower than you'd see elsewhere.(conversation T5, text units 158-165)

Witnessing racism, building resistance, forging pedagogic imperatives

One part of Teresa’s interrogation of her own racial identity has led to a certain resistance to professional socialisation in matters of race, culture and school achievement. In her practicum sessions, she has witnessed events that have caused her concern both personal and professional, if such a clear separation is possible or meaningful. One instance she recounted displayed an emerging understanding of the erasure of cultural difference and the effect of a paucity of dominant cultural capital I’ve seen it in too many places. I've seen it in a year 2 class and there was one Indigenous child and she was placed at the back of the room and she was eventually placed by herself because she used to talk and the teacher was standing beside her one day showing me her work and she said 'that's ok, I don't expect much from her anyway. She's not that bright and you know what the families are like.’ And in the

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situation that I was, I was unable to turn around and say 'well you're a bigoted bitch aren't you’ and walk away. (conversation T4, text units 47-49)

In reflecting on this incident further, we came back to Teresa’s own experience of racially-based separation - the cake shop story - and the parallels of the intersection of dominance, power and racialising in both stories are clear: Jon: This was a prac situation - so that's giving messages to that student? Teresa: and the class, the rest of the class heard that. Jon: That gives them a measure of what they're not - by virtue of being physically separated - it's a bit like your cake shop example isn't it? Teresa: Yeah, that's dumb space and that's smart space. It was the values of the teacher and also she was a very old teacher and she wasn't in my classroom, I was just visiting her classroom for the day and it wasn't like I would spend a lot of time visiting her classroom. Jon: Is it a matter of her trying to shed some guilt. Saying, 'look this kid can't read, but it's her fault, not mine?’ Teresa: I'd assume so and not that I was going to question her about it - it was a CFS prac• and I wasn't going to enlighten her in any way either, but I think that started me [on the path to developing a genuine concern for resisting racism], because I hadn't done Indigenous studies or anything by then and I was already living with Colleen and it enlightened me to the fact that sometimes you just can't do anything, but in other situations you can and in my classroom I would.(conversation T4, text units 61-67, emphasis in original)

The experience of being disturbed by the explicit racism of the teacher described in the previous passage was unsettling for Teresa, and she spoke at some length of how, at this point in her development as a teacher, she was struggling with the pedagogical means to bring about the type of anti-racist (or, minimally, non-racist) practices in her own classroom:

Jon: Do you have any idea of how you might use that insight [into racial identity] and that white privilege in the classroom? Teresa: One of the things I, more than anything else, is to stop in schools - I've seen teachers do - the racial, this child's no good, will never learn it .. Jon: The stereotyping? Teresa: The stereotyping and so show empowerment and to use my studies in Indigenous studies and my experience with my friends to empower them, show them

• Community Field Studies, a non-teaching practicum experience

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idols to look at. There's so many of them out there now, there's Charles Perkins, Cathy Freeman. There are so many out there children can aspire to that if you look at the history of some of the Indigenous political figures even, the Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, even Asian, any cultural race, if you're examining each separately they're able to see what they can do and not be limited by the stereotype. Jon: What about working with white kids.? Teresa: I think you'd have to deal with the[white] parents first to find out what the views are first before stepping on toes and then graduate it even if the parents come in and help with projects. With SOSE [Studies of Society and Environment, a key learning area in the current Queensland primary school curriculum] you need to do a range of different areas to educate students and you need to do it very carefully these days. Jon: Knowing what you know about whiteness, how would you go about teaching that? Would your understanding of white privilege find its way through to your teaching? Teresa: Well I assume it would but I think it would be more a discovery thing more than anything else. It wouldn't be a direct teaching method. It would be if the situation arose or there was something in the classroom that drew my attention to whiteness or racial prejudice or things like that I'd then examine, but otherwise I think through my own attitude my class would pick it up.(conversation T4, text units 16-36).

That the space between philosophy and practice is a wide one to bridge is apparent in Teresa’s story, and exposes the essential question for the development of a genuinely socially- transformative pedagogy: How does a teacher committed to using her or his practice for social betterment actually go about this? Even at the point of conjecture over this, Teresa found it difficult to envision the concrete manifestation of a critical pedagogy of anti-racism:

Jon: Where do you reckon we start as teachers with this sort of stuff? [long pause] Or how do they start? Teresa: I assume we'd be starting....I have no idea really. I feel that because of my experiences that I would pick it[racism] up early and if it offended me then I'd state it and say 'that behaviour offends me'. But as a student teacher, I think it starts with your own experiences and once you see it, and you only have to see it once or twice before, I suppose, if you're conscious of it - and I suppose a lot of people aren't. (conversation T4, text units 61-67)

This is the challenge for teacher education: to open up spaces for the investigation, interrogation and transformation of the gloss of folkloric wisdom (Darling-Hammond 2000) that has aided and abetted the perpetuation of processes of Othering, assimilation and injustice

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behind the face of ‘objective’, disinterested and beneficent educational and social universals. Teresa seems to be on the way to this location - she has the content knowledge, the experiential base and the commitment. All that remains is some form of intellectual companion for the pedagogic journey.

Critical paths to racial awareness: a platform for white identity

reconstruction

Teresa’s stories expose a number of what would seem to be critical experiences and events in her life that have led her to a position of extreme racial self-awareness and an at least partial understanding of the ways in which Whites occupy privileged space within contemporary society. From within this location, she has in many ways begun to develop an alternative white identity, one that is based neither in the oppressive nor in the imitative, but is authentically positive while retaining its core whiteness. This might well be a knock on the door of the Third Space.

These life experiences yield a collection of powerful events through which Teresa has moved on the way to her current white identity : 1. An early immersion in the language and effects of racialised identities; 2. Frequent and powerful positive engagement with Difference across a number of axes, often in the context of family connections; 3. Being Othered and an Outsider; 4. Periods of rupture of or challenge to settled identities; 5. Working towards the reduction or elimination of disadvantage derived from Difference; and 6. Realising the ideological knife-edge position of teachers and the potential for either hegemonic or transformative practice.

These features of Teresa’s life appear in similar ways in the parallel stories of the other participants in the study, and it is to the stories of their paths to whiteness racial awareness that the next chapter turns.

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Chapter 6 Fellow Travellers

We are full of anarchy Michael Ondaatje Anil’s Ghost

In this chapter, elements of the life stories of the other participants in the study that touch and meander around those of Teresa’s are presented and discussed. This is not necessarily by way of any sort of attempt to generalise about racial awareness, but to draw out commonalities and types of experiences that seem to have been influential in this regard. Whether these experiential types are unavoidable on this journey to white identity self-awareness and possible re-construction is another matter that this study is not able to - or desirous of - attempting to conclude or assert.

Introducing the other participants.

Michelle

The eldest of five children, Michelle was 30 years of age when we commenced our conversations about racial identity. She had been born in Toowoomba, and had gone to primary school in Toowoomba and Helidon when her family moved to a farm in the Lockyer Valley. From there she went on to Lockyer State High School. She left school at the end of year 10 with ideas of becoming a vet or working with animals in some capacity and commenced an animal husbandry course at Gatton College. After a period of time working as the manager of a piggery, Michelle travelled overseas for 18 months. Basing herself in England, she established an employment base in pub work which enabled her to travel, backpacker-style, for extended periods of time into various parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East:

I based myself in England - Guilford - and went off from there. I did pub work there and they let me come back and forth all the time and I went off to Israel and did a kibbutz there for a while and then on to Egypt. It was excellent. I went to Egypt for about three weeks. I travelled with a girl from Denmark. We just did everything. (conversation M1, text units 18-23).

In 1996 Michelle returned to Australia:

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My wisdom teeth were coming through and they said, we can take them out in Israel but our hospital's not that good or you can go back to England and I had to wait another 9 months in England so I thought I'll have to come out to Australia. (conversation M1, text unit 63)

She continued working in the hospitality industry, but eventually decided that teaching was probably what she wanted to and entered a teacher preparation program at USQ in 1997: I looked for a job - I didn't I know exactly what I wanted to do, but I had in my mind that, because hospitality was really good to me over in England, I thought it would be the same over in Australia, but it wasn't exactly as friendly. So I did that for a while in Brisbane - Coffee Club stuff - so I thought "no" so I came from that into the teaching course. I thought maybe that really is what I really want to do. Jon: Do you think it is? Michelle: So far, I think it is. (conversation M1, text units 67, 70-74)

Felicity

Felicity was one of the youngest of the participants in the study, her entry into teacher education in 1996 following a six-month stint at the Central Queensland Conservatory of Music in Mackay after completing high school. The third of four children, she was born in Murgon, very close to the indigenous community of Cherbourg. Her early years were spent in a number of different towns in south-east Queensland as her father, a primary school principal with the then Queensland Department of Education, followed the promotion and transfer routes common to the experiences of many teacher families. Her own schooling followed her father’s career, attending Hatton Vale and then Laidley North State Primary schools (her father was principal of both schools while she was enrolled) and then on to Laidley State High School. Her mother, formerly an occupational therapist, taught in the religious education programs at these schools on a volunteer basis, and the deep religious base to the family led eventually to Felicity’s parents returning to college to complete their Bachelor of Theology degrees and both are now reverends in the Uniting Church.

After taking a heavily arts-oriented track through secondary school, Felicity entered the music theatre program at the Central Queensland conservatory I was doing music theatre which involves singing, acting and dancing as well as all the behind the scenes stuff (conversation F1, text unit 27) but decided my ego wasn't big enough and moved away, came home and spent six months looking for a job and then I decided to come up here. I started with Early Childhood

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Studies and lasted in there for a year and a half and moved into primary teaching.(conversation F1, text unit 24)

The motivation for entering teaching was to fulfill a desire to work with and help children and adolescents: I always wanted to work with kids in kids camp, counselling types of situations and early childhood isn't really the best angle for it so I thought I'd pick up on primary education which means I can do psychology as an option.(conversation F1, text unit 48)

Given the family environment in which she grew up, with a sense of duty and care for others in the community carried into formal (religious-mediated action), this motivation is perhaps not surprising.

Serenity

Frequent moves interstate and regular travel to Vanuatu are features of Serenity’s biography. Up until she finished primary school, she lived in Penrith, Darwin, Penrith again, Sydney, and Browns Plains near Brisbane. She has spent much of her school and university vacation times out of the country (I've not spent Christmas with my parents for the last 7 years. Conversation S1, text unit 34), initially as a tourist / vacationeer but more recently as a foreign worker: I've been overseas 14 times as well. I started when I was 11 - only Vanuatu- I went over when I was 11. My uncle moved over, the uncle we were living with in Brisbane. Just after we moved into the house, he got a job over there for 6 weeks and he kept getting it extended and extended for 3 months and he's been there 9 years, 10 years now. From 11 to 13 I didn't sort of do a lot over there, sort of holidays but pretty much from 15, 16 he'd go away- I've got full authorisation over his business, sign cheques, everything. Jon: So, you look after his business - that's what takes you to Vanuatu, it's work? Serenity: Yep and I've done a lot of it since I was 17, like gone back, even weekends - it's only like 2 1/2 hours Jon: What sort of business do you look after? Serenity: He owns a dive business. If he's there, I look after the shop side of things, do all the paperwork, but he lives in the capital, Port Vila, and he's just bought another business on another island on Vanuatu so he's constantly back and forwards.(conversation Serenity 1, text units 19-28)

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Teaching was not something that appealed to Serenity in career terms, and after completing high school she applied for entry to a number of university business-based courses: My uncle asked me to do business at uni and I put it on my preferences then I got my first preference and I ditched it - he was going to pay for it all. I think the deal was I run his business for 6 months and then go travelling. I would have jumped at it but mum was really...like when I made my preferences she played a major part in it.(conversation S1, text units 49-52)

Picking education and a lot of my preferences was really pushed by my mother. She rang me, I was in Vanuatu and said "all of your things have come through and you've got into education" and I, she was crying she was so happy, and I was like "see you I've got customers, I've got to go". But I decided then I wasn't taking it, it wasn't for me, it wasn't what I wanted to do, but I thought about it for a couple of days and I rang her up and "o.k. change this to this”, and it was changing it to Toowoomba education, and I got it of course. I think particularly more so at the beginning of the year and last year I thought, you know urrrr.[clenches fists] I think now I'm beginning to maybe - like I decided no matter what I may as well finish it, I've always got something. (conversation S1, text units 137-142)

Serenity enrolled in an early childhood course and having passed the half-way point in her program at the time of our conversations, she wasn’t about to withdraw or drop out: there's no way I'm quitting now [laughs] (conversation S1, text unit 169), although it is not apparent that this resolve has anything more to do with a desire to teach than with a determination not to waste the two years already spent in the program.

Her introduction to university life was a little more demanding than she had expected, and some of these demands meant changing her living arrangements for a period of time: At the beginning of last year I came up for O week*∗ for uni and I didn't know anybody and I got my timetable and I went "Oh dear, I have to be here on Monday and I have to be here four or five days a week” so I went back and forward to the Student Association and kept meeting these same two guys and we ended up getting this house together and we lived together all year and then this year I moved into the same house with one of the same guys and got this other guy in and then 7 weeks ago I moved back into my parents' place and I'm driving back and forth.(conversation S1, text unit 14)

∗ Orientation Week, the week before the commencement of formal classes each academic year.

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Returning home does not seem easy or happy for Serenity: I had a real adjustment moving back to my parents' place. Like, living up here for 2 years. Even every time I came back from Vanuatu and moving back into where I had, you know, pretty strict guidelines on me - like, nothing compared to my younger brother and sister, like they get away with murder. They re-did my room for me. I've got 2 walls of desk space, so I put my computer and everything in there now. We used to just have the four computers in the study. But it's just so - it's unbelievable, just the difference and like I can't just sit in there and study because I'm just constantly interrupted. I'm often putting signs on my door saying "I'm not home" and they go " we know you're home" and they come in anyway.(conversation S1, text units 176- 183).

Vanuatu seems more and more Home for Serenity .

Emma

Emma was born and has lived locally for most of her life: I was born in Toowoomba and I've lived in Oakey virtually my entire life. I've had a few occasions where I've moved down to Brisbane, I came back, I moved into Toowoomba, I moved back to Oakey, and so I've sort of been around here all my life.(conversation E1, text units 4-5).

Given her, choice, she would prefer to move elsewhere:

I'm a coast person, I'd like to move up to the north coast. I'm not a city person, you know somewhere like Mooloolabah, Noosa, Caloundra. I don't tend to drift away from family too far because I am close to my family.(conversation E1, text units 144-146)

Her family is a blended one, with her father about to re-marry:

I've got two brothers and our soon-to-be step family, we've inherited another two brothers and two sisters, a big family [laughs] Jon: Where do you fit into this? Emma: I'll be the second eldest. I've got an older brother. He's 26 and then there's me. It sort of goes 26, 24, 22, 21, 18, 14 and then a big drop down to 8.(conversation E1, text units 147-153)

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And she has a son of her own: I'm a single mother and my son is actually, his father is from an aboriginal background, but that's off the track (conversation E1, text unit 111).

Her primary and secondary schooling were completed at Oakey, although her final year was traumatic: I left a couple of weeks into year 12 - I went through one of those teenage crisis things [laughs]. (conversation E1, text unit 21). We didn’t ever return to the nature of the crisis, but it was sufficient to send Emma on a path through the workforce and into teacher education: I worked in a number of places worked the most…the main occupation was working in a bar and I decided that I didn't want to work in a bar. It's not the most attractive work, or enjoyable work. Jon: In Oakey? Emma: Most of it was in Oakey. I worked in the Norville Hotel in Toowoomba and it was just...I just didn't enjoy it and I thought I don't want to spend my life doing something I hate.(conversation E1, text units 25 - 31)

Working in a bar with people who are in there drunk and I usually worked night shift because it was more easier, it's easier for me to work nights, better money, it was hard work but, I think putting up with everything. I mean you know how people get after a few drinks. It was that, I didn't enjoy that. I worked in a few things like supermarkets and that and it got to 'oohh, I've got to go to work today' that sort of attitude[laughs], basically doing it for the money, not the enjoyment.(conversation E1, text units 66- 69) I worked up until 1995. I decided I wanted to come back to uni so I enrolled in the prep course∗, and I put my forms in too late so I had another year off and then I'm here and this is my second year.(conversation E1, text unit 21)

Her particular interest is in the very early childhood area, and she enrolled in a Bachelor of Education (Child Care) program initially with a view to future entrepreneurial activity: I really wanted to open a centre of my own, but I'd rather work as a director , maybe pre-school teacher. I'm not so interested in the younger children - I enjoy working with them, but I get more out of the pre-schoolers, I think, I enjoy working with them.(conversation E1, text units 50-51) Her experiences of the reality of childcare centre work have been important for her sense of what she wants to do professionally. The effects of these practicum experiences have been intensified by her own family situation:

∗This is a course for students who do not have full prerequisite tertiary education entry qualifications. The course covers language, mathematics and study skills areas considered necessary for success in tertiary education. 160

I'm sort of having an overload of kids. I have a child myself and I work with them, and study them, sort of get a bit sick of them after a while. I do enjoy, I do enjoy it, I do like kids, but by the end of the year you're sort of thinking “ooohhh I want to get out of here” [laughs] (conversation E1, text units 39-41)

I did some [practicum experience] in the toddlers room, and it was good, I enjoyed it, but then I did the pre school room and loved it and so I've just decided, and the last lot of prac I did was at St Monica's preschool and in my block prac I did 4 days of kindy, but I still prefer preschool.(conversation E1, text unit 58)

At the time of our conversation, Emma was re-considering her future and course of study: Jon: Would you look at transferring into one of the four-year[B.Ed] courses? Emma: I was looking at that but what I've done is I've gone over to see psychology. I really wanted to do that but I didn't think I could hack 5 or 6 years in university, but it's something I've always wanted to do so I went over and saw a man in psychology and I've picked up units - that's why I'm studying over summer term - I'm picking up education units from first semester - there was only one, OBM∗ I think it was, and I’m doing that in summer term and doing Data Analysis because I have to have 4 units completed to apply to get into, it'll be two years, to do my Bachelor of Education(Graduate entry) and my Bachelor of Psychology and depending on my marks, I'll go on and do my Honours in that, but still in the same area. Child psychology I'm interested in, so it's something that'll give me a wider field as well. (conversation E1, text units 166-171).

Five other people whose racial self-awareness and sense of white identity were opened up for scrutiny and understanding. Five people who had arrived at individual personal-political positions via highly idiosyncratic life routes. Initially, it seemed that they shared but a few characteristics: they were all involved in initial teacher education programs, they were all female, they seemed aware of the racial dimension of and in their identity and life, and they had volunteered for participation in a project that was focussing specifically on white racial identity. Their individual views of whiteness and their location within a dominant white culture were far from uniform, but what was certain is that they each saw themselves as White, that the invisibility of whiteness had been made apparent to them through the experiences they had had over the course of their lives. It is this aspect of the stories that offers the window onto the question of how whites come to know themselves qua white and as Whites. Drawing upon the more chronologically-linear narrative of Teresa’s life story as presented in the previous

∗ Organisational Behaviour and Management

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chapter, commonalities and similarities within and between the other stories are what the remainder of this chapter will attempt to expose and discuss.

What I am attempting here is an examination of steps that seem to me to be racially critical ones in the meandering life paths of these people that have led eventually to a meeting point, an intersection and confluence that is the common experience of unit 80146 (Australian Indigenous Studies). These steps and events are significant because they have been memorable to the participants, parts of their life stories that they have selected and volunteered as recollections of how they have come to understand their white racial identity and whiteness broadly. It has been my role here to map the overlappings, commonalities and differences of and between these.

This mapping will touch the types of experiences identified in Teresa’s story and which my analysis of her story has categorised as:

1. An early immersion in the language and effects of racialised identities; 2. Frequent and powerful positive engagement with Difference across a number of axes, often in the context of family connections; 3. Being Othered and an Outsider; 4. Periods of rupture of or challenge to settled identities; 5. Developing a secure sense of personal identity; 6. Developing an understanding of whiteness and white racial identity; 7. Working towards the reduction or elimination of disadvantage derived from Difference; and 8. Realising the ideological knife-edge position of teachers and the potential for either hegemonic or transformative practice.

Not all of the participants have had experiences that they chose or remembered to tell about across every one of these dimensions, but all had sufficient congruence with the full range to be important for the purposes of coming to plot their paths to racial awareness. The purpose here is to articulate the linkages between six quite different life stories in a way that might illuminate the types of experience that has led these people to a view of themselves as white. It is also the intention here to draw the lives of the participants together, since they do share a number of points of commonality. This is important, since any attempt to explore issues of identity must, of necessity, be rooted in a certain cultural temporality. It is this temporality that an attempt to braid these life stories together should capture.

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An early immersion in the language and effects of racialised identities

This category of experience refers to a recollection of the lexicon of race as forming a part of early childhood life of the participants. Here, clear induction into racialised perspectives on life through the use of the language of racial difference seems to be an important factor in at least opening the potential for the existence of white racial identities to be unsurprising.

Michelle

In Michelle’s case, as will become apparent in a later section of this chapter, her immersion in a highly racialised environment was guaranteed at birth. Her own conscious memories, however, go back to her early primary school years when, within the context of a culturally / racially diverse environment she was involved in an altercation only too-familiar to those who work with young children: I was exposed to everything when I went to school. At the first school, there was Asian∗, and there was an aboriginal girl and I remember she had long fingernails and she scratched me. Jon: Why did she do that ? Michelle: I don't know. I told her to shut up or something [laughs]. Jon: How old were you at that time? Michelle: Grade 2 Jon: Which school was this at? Michelle: Rangeville. Her name was Angela. That's all I remember, long fingernails. It would have been about grade 3, I think it was. Jon: Were there any other aboriginal kids in your class ? Michelle: She was the only one in my class, all the rest I don't really remember. Probably because she had a fight with me, that's why I remember her the most. I just thought of her then as a cow because she scratched me [laughs] (conversation M3, text units 26-48)

In the course of ‘typical’ schoolyard encounters between children, this event in itself might easily have been submerged into the forgotten. The fact that it has stuck in Michelle’s memory , though, conveys something of its importance for her. As with Teresa, this story circumscribes the boundaries of racial experiences that negatively figured the cartography of Difference and Otherness. A particular personal characteristic of Angela’s - her long fingernails - figures

∗ The terms “Asia” and “Asian” are used throughout this chapter where the participants have used them to describe people whose cultural origins are rooted in the geographic region so-named. I acknowledge that this is a geographic and political fiction inasmuch as no such cultural, racial or ethnic group exists. 163

prominently in the recollection of this encounter, but it was another skin-level feature that provided the immediate target of taunt and derision in the post-scrap verbiage: Well, I'm a kid and the other people are saying “Her skin'll wipe off and it's white underneath”, that's what other kids were saying about her. Jon: So the other kids were saying that that'll come off Angela, the colour will come off? Michelle: Yeah, yeah. I didn't really think much of it. I suppose that's where I, I don't know, I saw her as a person rather than someone different. (conversation M3, text units 51-65)

This experience with what Michelle constructed, probably unknowingly, as racial Others was also a part of her home life:

I know it now, one of my Dad's drinking buddies, because my Dad's a bit of a drinker, was an aboriginal because he [Dad] hung around the aboriginals anyway, so they classed him as a part of them because he was pretty dark. Jon: So, your childhood involved you having experiences with, mixing with or having contact with aboriginal people in a positive sense? Michelle: Positive, except when Dad's drinking, yes.(conversation M3, text units 64-76).

Felicity

Race was an explicit dimension of and influence on Felicity’s childhood, through both familial and community experiences. Racialised disruptions of the rhythms of rural Queensland life were recalled in racial terms, not dissimilar to those of suspicion and denunciation of Teresa’s experience:

We had certainly indigenous people there, not a great deal, but they were certainly known in the town. They were actually known as the troublemakers which I suppose is typical, but in the same way, I don't suppose you could call them half-castes because I don't believe there's any such thing, but they were known for the things they did, particularly one family and they were all sort of interbred, all related to each other. As soon as someone mentioned their last name it was 'whooa, everyone back off' and they're still known as that, but not really because the town's changed a lot since and anybody who was in trouble was always connected with them which was a bit weird I suppose.(conversation F1, text units97; 104-105).

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There were also memories of non-indigenous, non-white cultures:

We had a few, I suppose you'd call them Asian-looking because they certainly weren't the typical Asian everyone thinks of but they certainly had the looks. It wasn't too many but there was a lot of German background kids - it's a German settled area.(conversation Felicity1, text units 98-99).

Even with closer proximity, in contact terms, racially-based difference, constructed as Asiatic, was significant and the way in which Felicity tells the story, the racial axis of difference was clearly operational during her early childhood years:

There was one particular friend of mine in pre-school, she went to a different primary school but I knew her. She was Asian looking but never really, like, I never really knew her as an Asian. It was just the way she looked. She was probably more Indonesian but I called them Asian because of the way they looked. So her eyes were a bit different from everyone else's.(conversation F1, text units 163-168)

The most powerful way in which race played itself into Felicity’s early consciousness was through her family. She has a very strong grasp of her family history and was the most knowledgable of all the participants in this regard. In many ways, it was through her familial history that she has found a secure identity (this is discussed further below). While her mother’s side of the family has its roots in England (they're just English through and through, conversation F2, text unit 72) and some connection to (white) Canada, her father’s side contains a genealogy that is far more exotic and interesting for Felicity. With a family name deriving from the French language, this familial tributary contains Scottish, English, and a powerful link to these very people Felicity found to be different as a young child.

Her paternal grandmother was a Singaporean Chinese who met and married Felicity’s grandfather during the Second World War and then migrated to Australia:

Well my dad's side, his mum was from Singapore, a Chinese Singaporean. She spoke mandarin, but she never taught her kids mandarin. They were born Australian and that was what they were going to stay. She married my grandfather during the war overseas and she came over and then he came over in a pigboat. He's Australian. He must have been in Singapore when he met her, married her there and then he escaped. He went sort of AWOL and caught a pigboat back to Australia and they lived over here for a while. Since then my grandmother's sisters and I suppose relatives have come over and gone back .(conversation F1, text units 178-185)

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The influence of her grandmother on Felicity has been significant, so much so that Felicity identified on a number of occasions during the course of our conversations as Asian: I definitely, even though it's not a strong, strong background, I definitely identify myself as Asian (conversation F1, text unit 322). She has many memories of her grandmother that raised the issues of race and difference for her in her childhood years, although to some extent the significance of those has only become apparent to her in more recent times:

Yeah, you'd just walk into her house and you'd just think 'ohh, which part of Asia did you come from?’ sort of thing. Everything about her was just so Asian, but her house wasn't. She was very Australian in her house apart from some of the designs of around the place. She was the best Chinese cook. The best food everytime we went there. (conversation F1, text units 211-218)

While her grandmother died twelve years ago when Felicity was nine years old, certain practices and other reminders of her grandmother and her culture live on in the life of her family: Our family has a Chinese curry on Christmas morning every year. That's breakfast.(conversation F1, text units 224-225). We still have some things around the house. A wooden calendar with twist turns and we found that in the house when she died.(conversation F1, text units 250-251)

A further dimension to the racialised childhood Felicity experienced, although she wasn’t to discover it until very recently, was a connection to indigenous Australian cultures through an uncle (her father’s elder sister’s husband): I found out that my uncle has an aboriginal background, he's not a blood uncle, but that surprised me (conversation F1, text unit 289) but I don't think he knew until he sort of realised it in the last few years (conversation F1, text unit 294). The closeness of Felicity’s family meant that her uncle was a presence in her life as she was growing up, and certainly his way of injecting the race factor into his stories contributed further to the racial mixture that fed into Felicity’s early socialisation into views of racial otherness:

I've always grown up with him saying 'blackfella' and all this sort of thing about the aboriginals, because he's an honorary ranger at Carnarvon Gorge. He could tell you more of the aboriginal background that the aboriginals in the area. He could tell you that those claiming rights in that area were actually from northern Queensland, that sort of thing and I think that sort of annoys them. I've just always grown with him, not hating the aboriginals but certainly setting them straight saying 'look, this doesn't add up' type thing and he's written a few books as well - one about Carnarvon Gorge and one about the area from Roma to Carnarvon.(conversation F1, text units 295- 298).

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A particularly powerful memory of race and racialised identities and an important step in the process of the development of racialised dichotomies experienced and described by Felicity surrounds the experience of being a member of a children’s choir during the late 1980’s:

I remember when Kamahl∗ came to our town in 83, 85 and we sang as a choir for his[song] 100 Children or whatever, some songs we sang with him, my dad conducted that and I remember that because myself and my friend amber were picked out to give flowers to Kamahl and this lady Tracey who was another singer and Amber opted and said 'I want to give them to Tracey' and I went 'no no' and we had a big fight and I had to give them to him and he wanted to give me a big kiss and I'm going 'I don't think so, this guy hasn't washed for week'. Because he was so dark, I didn't want him to come near me, like 'You haven't washed'. Jon: Why did you think that ? Felicity: It was just an assumption because I had never seen anyone so dark and all the women in the audience were going 'let him do it, let him do it’ and I thought 'Never, this guy's really dark, he hasn't washed’. Jon: How old were you at that time? Felicity: I think I was 10 , maybe 9 1/2, it was about 87-88, because we sang with him again at Expo during Children's Week and Christmas and all that sort of stuff. Jon: Did you have to give him flowers again? Felicity: No, no he sort of knew me from then on and had a laugh about it but I was quite afraid of this fellow who wanted to give me a kiss. And the worst thing is they've got photos of it [laughs] because he's got my hand because I wouldn't let him kiss my cheek so he grabbed my hand to kiss it and I'm like 'nooo' (conversation F4, text units 66-73)

Emma

Despite her evaluation that ‘it's not that multicultural around Oakey. It's really multicultural in here [Toowoomba], but out there it's mainly your Caucasian people from whatever background and then your aboriginal people’ (conversation E1, text units 95-96), Emma’s recollection of her school days displays a range of cultural types :

∗ Kamahl is an Australian singer who was born in Sri Lanka.

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I actually had some friends who were twins who were aboriginals, they were lovely girls in high school. It was mainly Caucasian in primary school. In high school there were cultures from here there and everywhere and I never had any problems, they were just one of the group. People were aware of it though. It's the same old stereotype. They were worried that they were the rough ones and you don't cross them or you get your head beaten in kind of thing. Jon: But you survived relatively unscarred? Emma: Yeah, certainly.(conversation E1, text units 74-81).

Frequent and powerful positive engagement with Difference across a

number of axes, often in the context of family connections

Following on from the first category of life experience presented above, this category draws out the ways in which a language of racial existence and difference reflects a part of a broader encounter with groups and individuals different from the participants and their families. In these cases, the encounter with difference has not been solely along the racial axis of identity but has been more broadly based. From the extracts from the stories presented in this section, I have endeavoured to articulate both the interconnectedness of all axes of identity as well as the ways in which the participants seem to have added layers of increasing complexity to their understanding of Self as a measure of Other.

Michelle

Since discovering her Torres Strait Islander roots, Michelle has realised that she has lived with Difference all her life. The reluctance (refusal?) of the local Helidon community to admit the family to community membership, her father being the subject of aggression and ridicule in the local pub and the taunting of her brother are all explicable by reference to a racial dimension to the family’s past and present.

Jon: I recall you mentioning that your brother suffered more racial taunts than you. Michelle: Because he had slightly darker skin, yeah.(conversation M3, text units 15- 16) Yeah, my brother is a little bit darker than me and he has had some discrimination in some ways. Jon: Has he ever said to you, "it's easy for you?” Michelle: Yeah he has, in some ways it does, but I just laugh it off - he's my brother.(conversation M1, text units 220-223)

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Michelle’s current social group displays a cultural diversity not unlike Teresa’s, and in this type of setting, Otherness seems to cease to exist. It might well be that this generation of Australian youth is growing a new sense of fraternity that might offer a good chance at ousting exclusionary and discriminatory practices rooted in racial homogeneity: Jon: Your friends, not necessarily those on campus, but friends generally, are they all white? Michelle: No, I've got one girl she's [long pause] African Korean - don't know what you'd call her. Jon: A real global citizen? Michelle: Yeah, there's a Chinese guy I know. It hard to say now….Oh, there's a Maori friend and an Italian. Jon: What attracts you to that group of people? Michelle: I don't know. I suppose they like to talk, they're confident within themselves.(conversation M4, text units 256-167).

Felicity

Felicity’s engagement with difference was and continues to be a significant provocation to identity formation for her, although she bespeaks a curious ambivalence towards axes of difference. From her early recollections of the ‘asianness’∗ of her friends and her grandmother to the white aboriginality of her uncle, she has been aware that she inhabits a complex environment of racial mixture in ways similar to Michelle and Emma. In Felicity’s case, the space of racial Othernesss has been embraced by her as a way of maintaining her familial connection to her grandmother in particular. However, when other dimensions of difference are involved, acceptance of the Other seems to rest much less easily with her. In one illustrative case, she described a sexuality dimension to difference from her teenage years that seems to have caused her an understated revulsion:

A guy in my brother's year, well, he's not a guy anyone, we found him quite interesting. He had an operation. He's Ellie now but he was Allan. He was in my brother's year but everyone knew him, he was either Bert or Allan, he had a couple of names, usually Bert, but his real name was Allan. He was never actually in trouble. He used to do silly things but he was never really a trouble maker. I remember book day when him and this other girl wore skirts and frilly knickers underneath and flashed to everyone on parade but I suppose then we didn't really think anything of it until my

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friends told me they were walking down the street wolf whistling at this female and realised who it was and it was Bert and he was still a male at that stage. It wasn't really accepted. People would cross the street. People would see him and cross the street and walk up the other side. He was different. I think he did it purposely just to get a reaction and the reaction he got he wanted. He would dress as a woman and walk up the street and people would wolf whistle at him, realise who he was and cross the street and think 'yes, well'. Jon: He would have been considered something as a point of fun? Felicity: Yeah, sort of. When he had the operation he was a bit more accepted. He sort of grew his hair really long and hung around his family a bit more and they sort of stuck up for him. You'd see him at the pool and you'd think 'ohh, yuck' and then you'd realise that if you said anything or did anything that you'd be the one in trouble. Jon: So his family was fairly protective of him? Felicity: The females were, definitely. I never saw him hang around the guys after the operation. I don't know what his brothers think of him. Jon: What about you personally. How did you react to it? Felicity: I didn't really believe it until I saw him at the pool and I went 'that's a new chick in town' and then I realised and I went 'wow, something different'. There was guy at the bus terminal yesterday like that [laughs] conversation F1, text units 113- 161).

In this instance of Felicity’s engagement with Difference where Otherness is not personalised to herself, deviation becomes exoticised, an object of curiosity, interest and ridicule. At the same time, the existence of such representations of what it was that she was not probably provided a measure of her own security within an emerging adolescent and late-teenage sense of sexuality. When Allan’s expressions of sexuality became less discrepant with settled images of male and female sexuality (that is, after the surgical narrowing of difference) Felicity (and the local community more widely, it would seem) were more able to accept this perceived deviation. Difference in this case probably served a positive self-identification purpose for her along an axis with which she possibly felt and feels less comfortable with excavating than she does with the racial dimension of her identity.

At the same time as Felicity was grappling with Allan’s transgressions of gender-based boundaries, she was experiencing a fascination with the dressing up of identity, quite literally, in ways that she was able to put a far more positive spin on in our conversations:

∗ I will use this term because this was how Felicity described people whose background would suggest some connection to that part of the world that many in the (so-called) West think of as Asia. I acknowledge that no such cultural entity exists. 170

In year 10 when I was doing work experience in a childcare centre, a little boy was wearing the little girls’ high heels and they were plastic things and he just looked wonderful and he had a twin brother, this little one was a white skinny thing and his twin brother was dark, very dark, twins but I couldn't just believe it, twins and very boyish, and the one dressed up like a girl, he never acted, he never did everything like a girl except at dress-up corner, so it's not like 'he must be gay' or anything, it was just his choice of what he was going to wear. He put on a dress, he put on high heels, put on a hat and his bag and he carried it around and he was going to play mummy that day because he wanted to and he made one of the girls play daddy. They still had the roles, ok male and female had to be mummy and daddy but they just swapped the names. I thought it was wonderful. (conversation F2, text units 159-162)

As long as expressions of difference in this area are cloaked in play or seemingly acted out in only superficial ways, there is little challenge to settled images of identity. For Felicity, difference served to fill out and make more interesting a location, but that environment of novelty still needed to be linked explicitly with a white Christian cultural base. For example, in our conversations, she was at pains to ensure that her grandmother’s asianness was seen and understood as adding to and embellishing rather than substituting for and erasing a deeply entrenched religious-based weltanschauung:

We had the laughing god [from Grandma’s house] which has disappeared in the last few years because it's very, it's from the Buddhist religion rather than the Christian religion that we are. But grandma was a Christian too, so it sort of , still follows that the Christian religion is still in the line of the family but because Chinese culture is based on religion, bits and pieces are just hard to pick up on, so that's another reason she didn't teach them Chinese mandarin so they couldn't understand it.(conversation F2, text units 7-9).

Emma

Apart from her involvement with a small section of the local indigenous community, Emma also experiences difference in her daily social life. One particular instance relates to a close friendship with an Indian-Fijian family and their son with whom Emma’s son plays. The encounter with this family further demonstrated to Emma the culturally-specific nature of her way of living and relationships with others:

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I knew some Fijian Indian people in Oakey too, and they're the most friendly people I've ever met. They would offer a complete stranger a meal. “Come in, come for dinner.” Things that I couldn't imagine myself doing, you know someone knocks on the door and it's "come in, stay for dinner'. They're very sharing too. They'll give money to anyone if they're in trouble, you know friend of a friend of a friend. It was really nice, but, I'll share with my family and my close friends, maybe a friend of a friend if I can really trust this other friend, whereas they're just more open and lay back and friendly people.(conversation E1, text units 202-207, 210).

Being Othered and an Outsider

From analysing the conversations with the participants, it seems that one of the most powerful provocations to an understanding of the relational dimensions of identity is that of finding oneself in a situation of minority or Other. In the examples that follow, experiences similar to those of Teresa in this regard carry testimony of the power of this experience. In many ways, these experiences provide concrete examples of the ‘moments of bafflement’ Spivak (1990) suggests are crucial to any serious interrogation of Self and the relationship with Other/s. It is likely that it is only by virtue of having elements of one’s identity clearly marked out as Different or, in some cases, deviant from a dominant norm that one can come to suspect the transparency of ‘naturalness’ or commonsensical in matters of identity and belonging.

Michelle

With Michelle’s experiences here, the outsider role was forced upon her family when they moved to the Helidon region. While she constructed this exclusion and distancing initially as a function of recent arrival and the solidity of established social patterns in the region that made breaking into the group difficult, she revised and expanded the range of causes of this process of exclusion over the course of our conversations and eventually raised the race issue:

Helidon, yes, it's, like a really cliquey type of town, and, I don't know, as we were growing up, our family didn't really accept that well into the town. They sort of kept us as outsiders. I don't know that it was because we moved there later. I think it was more to do with who my father was, because my father - he did drink a little bit, too, but he just told them what was on his mind and they really didn't like that.(conversation M1, text units 91-94).

The extent of being Outsider in this community was most forcefully sheeted home to Michelle when her father was involved in a serious car accident in the town. As she tells this story, it is

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apparent that to Michelle her family’s location as Other/Outsider effectively meant that basic human consideration, care and concerns for them evaporated:

I don't really talk to anyone in the town much any more. When Dad had his accident, he had it in Helidon - he had a car accident - and everyone I went to school with, they all stood around the car and watched him get cut out but they didn't ring us up until 6 hours later and the girl who rang me up was really drunk and just sort of laughed about it because she didn't realise he was my father. Laughing like "Ha,ha,ha, Lindsay Greer's getting cut out of a car" and I'm thinking like "OK, like you know, he's my father" and she sobered up quickly. Jon: Why wouldn't she know that, if it was Lindsay Greer that he was your father? Michelle: She was a backward girl, that girl, but a lot of the other people did know, because I went to school with their kids.. They knew who I was and who Dad was. Jon: Maybe everyone assumed that someone else had rung up. Michelle: Maybe, but my best friend was working in the pub, I thought she might have rung up straight away, but she didn't.(conversation M1, text units 144-152).

While these early experiences of being left on the outside were obviously deeply felt, other more recent episodes in Michelle’s life provided further experiences of being the Other. These experiences came about while she was travelling. An illustrative example is that of her time living and working as a volunteer on a kibbutz: I just wanted to see a different culture, see what it was like. I don't know, I just wanted to get some, not really Third World stuff, because I was used to having all the cities - I had been in London, Paris and that and I thought, I could find this anywhere I'll just go to a place like a kibbutz in Israel. I worked there. It was hospitality stuff I did, like, what would you call it, like a servo but I worked in the back in the kitchen and they didn't speak English. One lady, she spoke French and Hebrew and I learnt a few words of Hebrew to get me by and I just basically made sandwiches and cleared tables. Jon: How did you find the experience of being different, the odd one out? Michelle: At first it was little bit daunting only because I couldn't speak the language, some of their culture things were a little bit different. Like trying to get past them when they're carrying their guns and you say "Excuse me, or "Sleeha" in Hebrew and they just ignore you and so you just grab hold of the gun and push them out of the road and then they move. I don't know - it takes a bit to get used to. The younger ones spoke really good English and they pounced on the opportunity to speak English to someone and every now and then you got tourists who come in and one day there was a busload of - you know Magic Johnson, the basketball player? His team came in and so I had to go out and serve them because I was the only one who could speak English (laughs).

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Jon: Did you experience any discrimination as a result of being different? Michelle: Not really, because kibbutz are based on volunteers. Jon: Would you go back tomorrow? Michelle: Probably not because I'm sort of past that and the only discrimination you get is based on gender. Girls aren't allowed to- I mean guys are allowed to do that. Jon: What were women allowed to do? Michelle: Mainly hospitality and you can go into the factory and make the bombs but you couldn't go out and do fruit picking - that's boy's work. Jon: What was the basis for the discrimination? Michelle: Girls were better at doing the fiddly stuff and the boys can do the heavy. (conversation M1, text units 27-52)

Othered through language, through gender and (presumably) through religion, this was a powerful experience in Michelle’s life, and the immersion in something akin to a total sense in a culture other than her own here strikes chords with Teresa’s experience of living with otherness on a daily basis.

Felicity

As did Teresa, Felicity was often treated as an Outsider, an intruder in her younger days and for the same reasons: the itinerant nature of her father’s work. Frequent transfers to new schools meant having to break into existing friendship groups and social arrangements. The almost-diasporic nature of the teaching profession in Queensland during her childhood and teenage years played a significant role in casting Felicity as an outsider, and her relationship to a significant authority figure in the form of her father as teacher and/ or school principal further built resistance to her acceptance in her new school communities.

When we first moved into Laidley, even though my best friend went to the school and everything - I'd known her for 5 years before I went to school in Laidley - it's a hard time fitting in anytime when you're the new kid. I knew a few kids but it's almost as if to say, 'Because you're the new kid, I'm not going to hang around with you’ so I sort of hung out by myself for a while. I tried to hang out with my brother because his friends are a bit more accepting, so I used to walk around behind them and do nothing.(conversation F1, text units 90- 92)

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Emma

Emma’s most powerful experience of being relegated to something akin to the status of an Outsider, an Other came about through transgressing religious codes and dictates. In telling this story, she expressly excludes the racial dimension of the situation, although one suspects that she mentions this in order to bring that very issue to the table: The only thing is I'm a single mother and my son is actually, his father is from an aboriginal background, but that's off the track, I'm a Catholic and I know when I went to church after that I always felt funny without anyone having to say anything because I was a single mother. It's not the right thing by the religion to have sex out of marriage and be a sole parent and I did feel funny. That's the only time that I felt out, and it still sticks in my mind that I still sometimes feel. It doesn't bother me so much any more, there's an underlying thing. Jon: No one ever said anything? Emma: No, no one ever said anything. Jon: Where did the vibes come from? Emma: I don't know. I just, when it first happened, people would just sort of look and I had a complex. I thought they were talking about me. [laughs] Jon: The source is in you? Emma: Yeah, it's probably in me. They may not have said anything. The priest I didn't have a problem with, he was great. "Oh, you're welcome as always", but some other people very strong religious people I felt funny around so I just don't go to church any more.(conversation E1, text units 111-128).

Periods of rupture of or challenge to settled identities

A couple of the participants revealed unsettling moments of identity tremor, or ‘shakes’ as we termed it in our conversations. These experiences present as the consequences of the previous categories of life experience, in particular as the traumatic responses (Giroux, 1997) to the moments of bafflement (Spivak 1990) occasioned by being forced as a white person, in this instance, to consider oneself as raced. These experiences have been of the type that have caused otherwise non-contentious or invisible aspects of personal (and group?) identity to be thrown up for interrogation.

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Michelle

Michelle talked about how, as a twenty-year-old, she found out that her paternal grandmother was of indigenous origin, possibly Torres Strait Islander or South Sea Islander: We found out about 10 years ago that my grandmother is Torres Strait Islander and not much of it was mentioned in those days because it was just forbidden.(conversation M1, text units 86)

In a story not unfamiliar to any who read contemporary histories of colonial Australia, Michelle’s great-grandmother became pregnant to a white station owner, and a path of deception and desperation was trodden by her descendants in trying to make a better claim at entry into white society: Well, her mother was originally from up north - I'm not sure of the town, maybe Mackay - and she was working on a big property and then the, what do you call the owners of the property, the big guys, his son got her pregnant and that's sort of how my grandmother come about. And they weren't married or anything like that in the eyes of the towns and his father and that.(conversation M1, text units 99-100)

The story of her grandmother’s struggle to erase her own connections with indigenous Australian cultures and to ensure that she and her children could pass as white resonates with the experiences and stories of many other non-white minorities in white-dominated societies, and the power of that story seems to have been very strong - Michelle returned to it on a number of occasions in our conversations - and it provides a concrete example of white epidermal fetishism:

Apparently she used to put lemon juice all over her skin so she could go out in public so the township would accept her- to lighten her skin because they didn't really accept her. My father is really quite dark and the town still doesn't really accept him.(conversation M1, text units 87-88) She kept telling them [her children] everyday before they went to school ‘you're white, you're white, you're white’. Yeah, she rubbed lemon juice all over her skin to make herself white. Jon: Did it work? Michelle: It did, except in that community it was not full, it was only partial. Jon: Can you remember her telling her kids that they were white? Michelle: No, she died, but we were told about it.(conversation M3, text units 112- 123). She did it to her daughters and her sons. Before they went to school, she'd put the lemon juice over their skins.(conversation M4, text unit 45).

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The central actor in the story had died, but as seems to be the case in many tales of passing, history and memory remain to threaten present charades.

The sudden rupture and re-formation of her racial identity seems to have been nothing but a positive experience for Michelle:

I just thought, wow! It didn't really faze me at all really. (conversation M1, text unit 115) I was like "ohh wow! (conversation M3, text unit 115). I haven't really been going around saying 'Who am I? What am I supposed to be doing?’ I don't know. It's hard to describe.(conversation M3, text units 139-142).

The effects of such a rupturing of settled and concealed histories, memories and identities didn’t sit as comfortably with other members of her immediate family:

Jon: What about other members of your family - your father, for example, he didn't know he was Torres Strait Islander? Michelle: Oh, he did, but he'd been brought up to deny it because his mother had always said to him "you're not black, you're not black" and that's how she's treated all her kids so, like, say someone called him a blackfella in a pub, he almost starts a fight, it's just the way it was. Jon: Has he come to accept it, is he happier with it now? Michelle: I don't know now, because my father, he's brain damaged now[as a result of his car accident] ten years ago, but his brother and sisters, his sisters don't really accept it, but his brother does. (conversation M1, text units 116-123)

Having lived some 20 years with and as a white identity, the addition of aspects of components of Otherness was not easy to reconcile on a daily basis: Jon: If you had to fill out a census form tomorrow, how would you describe yourself? Michelle: I know, it's confusing, I'd like to know my heritage but I don't know it all and it's really hard, it's like you’re caught in the middle. I think I would class myself as a Torres Strait Islander because I'm proud of that part of the heritage.

In a later conversation, she again struggled to describe a cultural location and admitted to the confusion, the unsettling that this complexity of identity created for her:

Jon: At this point, what cultural, racial or ethnic background do you identify with? Michelle: [very long pause] I'd have to say first up it'd have to be the Australian thing, but I can't not acknowledge the Torres Strait Islander that's there. Jon: Primarily, you'd say white Australian, but..

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Michelle: but I've got to acknowledge that the Torres Strait Islander is there.(conversation M2, text units 22-27)

It might well be that the novelty, the newness of the Torres Strait Islander or Kanak dimension to self adds to the attractiveness of that component of her identity, particularly given the fact that she admits to very little knowledge of that culture. Regardless, during our conversations, Michelle exuded more a sense of cultural excitement than cultural confusion.

At one point in our conversation, Michelle offered a glimpse of what holds the attraction and as with Teresa, there seems to be an embrace of that which makes her Different and a desire to challenge - to dare in a way - exclusionary social forces up front: Jon: The Torres Strait Islander part obviously assumes a greater importance than the other part of your heritage - why is that? Michelle: I don't know - maybe because we're shunned in the towns, not really shunned - that's not the right word is it? (conversation M1, text units 134-140)

Emma

Identity is something Emma has taken a lot of time to think about, no so much because of her own situation, but because of her son. With her own genealogy rooted firmly in English heritage, and able to trace her family through colonial administrators to widespread family settlements in the Toowoomba-Ipswich area, she seems to understand something of the tensions that might exist within an individual cut adrift from part of her or his culture-base and living with concealed histories and identity , a situation that Michelle is now having to deal with personally as a 27-year-old (see above). Emma has decided that it is crucial for her son’s well-being that he grow up realising his bi-culturality and she makes every effort to have him both realise and learn about the indigenous side of his personality:

Well, in the last year, his father sort of disappeared for four years and he's come back on the scene and I'm still fairly close with his family and his mother is full aboriginal and his father is white so he's half. Because I don't know a lot about, I've met a lot of the family now and it's very extended family and they're all very very friendly and they're very accepting. They take Tyler. You get the cousins, all that kind of thing [laughs], they sort of deal with that side. I don't know much about their background. Because he's only five years old, I suppose he's not going to learn much about it at the moment. But I want him to know about his culture from their side because he's part of that culture.

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Jon: How do you think you might ensure that he knows about that part of his culture? Emma: Family contact, a lot of that. The hardest part is that the majority of his other family are around Orange and Sydney and that area which is, really, I can't with the workload I'm doing at the moment I can't, and plus financially, I can't afford to be running back and forth and I'm not going to put him in a bus or a plane at this age. They tend to mix with him a fair bit. They come up here and, I don't know, it'd be just play it by ear sort of thing.(conversation E1, text units 239-251)

Her concern to ensure her son knows of his indigenous lineage is a statement of her personal beliefs about the importance of knowing self, There is no colour or other visible sign that Tyler has indigenous connections : He's as white as me. He wouldn't even be able to tell.(conversation E1, text units 254-255) and consequently Emma’s determination that he come to know something of the indigenous cultural aspects of himself doesn’t stem from his need understand his own difference:

He hasn't been questioning. The colour thing hasn't, probably because I also, he's been around, I've got friends who are Fijian with little children who are really dark and they're just another friend to him. And so I think, he's never said why is your skin darker than mine or anything like that.(conversation E1, text units 258-261).

Bordering on another identity reformation, Emma described how life at university, in particular in her childcare course, had caused her to re-think matters of identity, in this instance located in the gender domain. In talking about the other students involved in the course, she bemoaned the fact that there were no males enrolled and how she had come to see a male presence as important in the early childhood area. This was an unsettling experience for her because when I was brought up it was, women should be teachers or secretaries and go and do this, but it's good that it's sort of [changing], there's not many[men] in childcare though.(conversation E1, text unit 177).

She also admitted to an appreciation of the difficulties living atypical, non-standard identities creates. Perhaps because of her own experience as a single mother described earlier, she understood the suspicion with which male childcare workers might be greeted: A friend of a friend worked in childcare and he said that many parents would rather leave their children in the care of a female. They felt uncomfortable with a male looking after their children. It doesn't really bother me as long as they're responsible, but there are suspicions. (conversation E1, text units 178-180).

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A secure sense of personal identity

For many of the participants in this study, the journey to a sense of security with their personal identities has yet to occur: indeed, that journey may never be completed for any of us. What does seem to be apparent in some of these stories, though, is that as understanding and awareness of aspects, dimensions and elements of identity proceed, a certain sense of security accompanies the process. Whether this is because of a broadening of a field of commonality with (O)/others or as a result of emerging cognisance of the terrain of identity politics is unclear in these stories. However, as the extracts below show, the process of identity trauma (Giroux, 1997) seems to lead to an understanding and acceptance of self in ways that open up possibilities of minimising the negative and advancing the positive elements of Difference.

Michelle

Two crucial experiences intersect to enable Michelle to see herself racially: Her recently- discovered Torres Strait Islander heritage and travel into and among people different from herself. As a result of this, she seems to locate herself as something akin to a cosmopolitan identity, or at least, admits of the notion of multiple selves: Jon: Where would you see yourself on the racial scale? Michelle: In the middle Jon: Because of which of those characteristics [we’ve just discussed] - skin colour, attitude? Michelle: Skin colour and because I don't see myself as white or black, but a mixture of both. Jon: Is that because of your Torres Strait Islander background? Michelle: That, and because I think I've become more culturally aware and appreciate other cultures (conversation M2, text units 282-290)

This cosmopolitan image is further strengthened by Michelle’s olive complexion. She has been assumed to be of a number of different nationalities and ethnicities:

When I was travelling I was always taken for Italian because of my skin colour. Even a Greek person thought I was Greek once. I was working making coffee and I knew one Greek word and there was this Greek woman and her English was not very good so I was just trying to make her feel good - hospitality, you'd got to do that - and she says 'Ohh, you're Greek!’ and I went 'uhh,uhh, I'm true Australian'. (conversation M2, text units 30-32) Again, it is not possible to be both of Greek background and be a true Australian.

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Felicity

Felicity exuded a very strong sense of comfort with and within the identity she had claimed for herself. As with all of the other participants in this study, she had disrupted an ascribed identity - that of her whiteness - by claiming and asserting the presence of another. In Felicity’s case, this was her asianness and it provided a vehicle for the expression of her difference from the white mainstream as well as providing a vantage point from which to comment on what identity means:

Jon: What does it mean to you to have an identity? Felicity: I think it gives me confidence, like if I didn't know where I was from I wouldn't know, like a lot of people sort of ask questions 'Oh, where is your heritage from?’ and you wouldn't be able to answer them.. I guess it gives you a place, a sense of belonging somewhere.(conversation F2, text units 25-27).

It is this social dimension to identity that is uppermost in Felicity’s mind when she talks about her own identity: I think it takes a community to make you aware of who you are.(conversation F2, text unit 155) and she further hooks identity formation into the cultural realm: I think it's pride in culture, too.(conversation F2, text unit 54).

The importance of a sense of belonging to a place carries through into Felicity’s reading of the situation of contemporary indigenous Australians:

I suppose with the indigenous Australians, I suppose they need a place in society. It's very hard for them , I think it's very hard for them in Australian society for them to even fit in. Like, this is basically their home, this is what they started but we've sort of taken it over so for them to now identify as indigenous people and put themselves in society and to make up a part of society and their culture, it's the same with us with the white culture that's our place in society. Jon: So that's a shared place? Felicity: Yep. (conversation F2, text units 30-34)

Despite her seeming comfort in talking about the claimed parts of her identity, Felicity seems reluctant to more generally or openly disclose this. I haven't said directly that I identify as Asian but when people talk about things like Romper Stomper, like I had a friend in year 10 that was against the gooks and I said 'You must be against me too’. But I have this fellow I'm seeing at the moment and he said something about he was sick of talking to people from Singapore on the internet. I said 'You'd better not speak to me any more' and he got a bit uptight about it but, I

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don't say 'I’m Asian’. I identify as but I don't take offence to, but I jokingly do take offence to, comments like that, like against Asians. They sort of look at me and go 'you're joking, right?’ I go like 'Yeah, I seriously am [Asian]’.(conversation F2, text units 39-47).

When pushed to describe a multicultural identity, something she maintained was acritical feature of what it means to be Australian, Felicity drew on a cultural grab bag approach to culture: Someone who doesn't place all of themselves into one complete culture, doesn't immerse themselves in just one culture, immerses themselves in different aspects of different cultures even if they may not be their heritage. (conversation F3, text unit 10).

The culturally-diverse nature of the influences upon which she draws in articulating her own personal identity are projected onto an idealised perception of Australian culture and identity broadly. For Felicity, as for Michelle and to a lesser extent Teresa, there are no ‘pure’ identities, only hybrids that are signified by the appellation ‘Australian’: I think it's[the Australian identity] multicultural, I don't think anybody in Australia, I don't think even the aboriginals have a straight aboriginal background. Everyone in Australia has some types of different multicultural aspect. But even if you did have this straight Greek or Italian background, if you were born in Australia, you're an Australian. (conversation F3, text units 30, 34).

And for Felicity, as with most things, the historical dimension to identity cannot be overstated: All the things that happened in your past get you to who you are and to know who you are, you've got to know where you've come from.(conversation F3, text unit 44).

Developing an understanding of whiteness and white racial identity

As indicated earlier in this dissertation, whiteness and white racial identity are very different things. What is apparent from the stories of the participants in this study is that once the dimension of race enters considerations of personal identity, the existence of ‘white’ as a category of race becomes less controversial or surprising. This is not, however, to be taken to mean that recognising oneself as a racialised being is not unsettling: as the previous section demonstrates, it is quite the opposite. What the participants in this study seem to be have encountered, though, is the image of themselves as members of the white race, although this is compounded in some instances (for example Felicity and Michelle). Once one commences to see race as something everyone ‘has’ or is, then it becomes possible to explore the ways in

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which racial location admits of privilege or disadvantage. This is the terrain of whiteness: the systemic privileging of one racial group over all others in all aspects of social and community life. This latter component of white self-awareness seems to be a far more difficult thing to imagine or accept in the case of the participants here. The extracts that follow go towards elucidating the difference between these two dimensions of white identity.

Michelle

The ascription of racial identity was something Michelle found difficult, although, like Teresa, she used familiarity and personal encounter with individuals from each nation to allocate white status. For Michelle, deciding whether one was white or not depended upon her personal encounter with individuals. It doesn’t seem that such mobility across categories is a feature of shifting identities as much as strategic realignment and disclosure. Ascription of racial categories ‘came from my perspective of living there, not living there, travelling there, from me actually seeing and talking’ (conversation M2, text units 249-251). By way of amplification of this process, her explanation of how she came to classify the Welsh as white is useful:

When I was there I was speaking to a lot of the locals who live in Wales, and the actual local locals are all classical white, and the other non-whites don't live there.(conversation M2, text unit 246).

The transitory and impermanent nature of her system of categorisation was acknowledged by Michelle (that's continually evolving anyway conversation M2, text unit 194). As did Teresa, Michelle conflated whiteness with Australianness (I'd probably put it [her personal identity] down in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander one because I've acknowledged it. But I'm Australian too, so…. Conversation M3, text units 176-177). However, earlier she had described a school experience where the intersection of non-whiteness and Australianness were made clear to her:

When I was in primary school I went to this dance, and the band, his background was Fijian and by the questions he asked you could win a Mintie* or whatever if you could tell him where he was born, and everyone put their hands up saying all these other countries and no one said a town in Australia and he was born in Sydney, so no one won. We could easily stand up on stage with that fellow and ask 'guess where was I born?’, and most people would think it was a trick question but would start to guess white cities.(conversation M3, text units 179-180

* A chewy peppermint lolly

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Michelle used this (naïve) conflation to explain what she saw as the reason for current immigration pressures and the motivation for other endeavours to acquire more of the vestiges of Hage’s sense of national cultural capital by non-white Australians:

Lots of privilege - that's why people want to migrate here and why people who aren't white try to lighten their skin to pass as white, like my grandma did with the lemon juice, and the stories of drinking bleach and stuff like that. (conversation M2, text units 335-337).

Through her personal interest in and study of art history, Michelle had formed an understanding of some of the ways in which difference is both captured and portrayed. In particular, she talked of how this occurred in ancient Egyptian art and in the process provided an example of the transitory and recent dominance of whiteness as a measure of social worth : It's status, how they were done from big to small and how the men were painted darker and the women were painted paler because the men are superior. They showed the men were more superior to the females. The position of the eyes was very important there too. More to the front and larger, the men had the larger eyes and the women's were a tiny bit back and they were still large, but.(conversation M2, text units 143-147).

Through studying art history, Michelle realised that the representation of the world through white lenses in effect was what constituted the “Great Works” canon:

You look at those paintings and they've classically got the guy in the big garment and big haloes - stained glass windows and things - but they're all painted by the great "white” artists. None of them are really considered as dark. (conversation M4, text units 275-282).

She had also noticed aspects of contemporary representational practices engaged in and through forms of popular media, in this case newspapers:

I've noticed that looking at the birth notices and looking at people who've had babies, they're all white. There are only two people who were aboriginal and one who might have been Sri Lankan. Jon: Did you work that out from the names in the birth announcements column ? Michelle: No, I mean the photographs of mums and their babies Jon: How do you read that ? Michelle: I don't know. Maybe it's because they don't like showing their announcement or I don't know because the photographers get permission to go into those rooms and maybe they don't want to show. I just found it interesting. See, I've

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looked at it for the past three years and it's always been like that. It and a lot of the wedding photos are white. There might be a few that aren't white. (conversation M2, text units 339-352).

As with the other participants, Michelle was aware that whiteness in and of itself in some way conveyed certain privileges to its wearers, privileges that she with a foot in both camps of privilege and disadvantage might perhaps more than any of the others in this study choose to accept or reject. As with most of the others, however, a focussed understanding of the subtleties of the flow of white-based privilege was elusive:

Jon: Have you had any experiences where whiteness has been an advantage to you or where passing as white has been an advantage to you? Michelle: I don't know, that's really hard to answer because I haven't really had the disadvantages to say that I've had advantages. (conversation M4, text units 15-16) She recognises that, racially, she has a choice of which part or parts of her identity she might foreground or submerge at any one time, and that the decision about this flows from the particular situation with which she is faced at any one time:

Jon: Have you ever had to pull the white part of your identity up and submerge the Torres Strait Islander part? Michelle: Yes. There was a party I went to and the lady there was really racial. I didn't really submerge it, I just didn't mention it. I just sat there and just, listened to what she was saying and she was just bagging everything and she was friends with my other friends and they didn't want to disassociate from her because they were getting a good job or something like that so I had to remain calm and all that and once she'd left, my friends just apologised nonstop because they knew.(conversation M4, text units 46-51).

She is still passable enough as a white for this to be possible, an advantage that her father and brother, being considerably darker in skin tone, don’t have: I suppose I did compared to my father who was darker in colour and he probably got banned from a lot of pubs because of his colour, they'd pick fights with him and that and I don't get that.(conversation M4, text unit 14).

And yet, she understands the reason for the attempts of non-whites to pass as white, for attempting to adopt the phenotypical characteristics of whiteness :

Jon: Can you understand why people would attempt to whiten or attempt to appear whiteness?

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Michelle: They think it's superior, I suppose, from social benefits. (conversation M4, text units 53-55).

In the end, whiteness is a very substantial down payment for a security of life in contemporary (Western) society, an entre to a form of social engagement that means life is just that much easier, even if individuals like Michelle find the prospect unacceptable and attempt to distance themselves from such a position. Changing the racial wardrobe, as Giroux suggests, is impossible for whites. For Michelle, with a more complex identity , this becomes a little more feasible:

Jon: What does it mean to be white today? Michelle: I suppose, looking at it from society you do have advantages. You're not looked at as you might steal the thing, oh, this is going to sound really awful but it's not my thinking though. (conversation M4, text units 179-182).

Michelle seems happy straddling white and Torres Strait Islander cultures, even if she doesn’t have to live with the daily experience of appearing to do so:

Jon: How does it feel to be bi-cultural? Michelle: Special I suppose,...[very long pause ] best of both worlds [laughs]. Jon: What are the best bits of the Torres Strait Islander world? Michelle: You've got an interesting culture, that you can say you're part of, and I think there's more a close knit family situation if you compare it with white society. Their family situation is probably more standard, even though I am from a close knit family. Jon: What about the best bits of the white part? Michelle: The white part?[long pause] I suppose they might say you might get that job. It depends where you are. If you say wanted a job in a particular area, you might get accepted in that particular area, depending if it's just on looks and stuff.(conversation M4, text units 198-210)

With the comment about her family in this extract, I wonder whether she really has sorted out in her own mind what the Torres Strait Islander link really means in concrete terms. Is she truly aware of the two aspects to her identity, or is there a more romantic attachment to the exoticism of parts her background - a yearning rather than an immersion?

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Felicity

Whiteness is that cultural position that one arrives at through mixing diverse cultures together:

Basically,[whiteness is] multicultural. I don't think any Australian could say they were purely Australian, not any white Australian anyway. Just to be multicultural is a big thing. So whiteness is something... Australian whiteness is more like light refracting in a rainbow, like all the colours come through and then it makes a white light. Jon: You're saying, then, that Australian whiteness is really a mix of a whole lot of other racial bits and pieces. Felicity: Yeah, yeah. (conversation F2, text units 139-144)

To a large measure this position exposes the ‘whiteness as universal’ perspective the seems to flow unexamined throughout much of white culture. The difference in Felicity’s case is that she has been able to articulate its presence and explain its origins: whiteness, for Felicity, has no essential originative point of its own, but relies for its existence on the commingling of other cultures.

That the equation of whiteness with universal is embedded in Felicity’s understanding of culture is demonstrated by comments such as the following:

Growing up my oldest brother is a lot darker than us in skin tones and looking at him you wouldn't necessarily think he was [pause] natural [laughs].(conversation F4, text unit 4).

Whiteness as the universal standard, the ‘natural’ skin tone of those inhabiting the space of white privilege seems to be the underpinning of this evaluation of her brother’s difference, and indicates the way in which Felicity assigns people to racial or cultural categories. In explaining how she racially categorised various national and ethnic groups, Felicity drew upon skin colour and a naïve logic that connected skin colour and geographic location:

With the Scandinavian countries, I thought snow, they must be white because they can't get a tan. And a lot of it does have to do with geography, a lot of the Asian countries including the Egyptians are yellow so they can't be white. The blond hair, I mean you don't get a dark pigmentation with blond hair unless somebody's dyed it. Jon: You said the Italians and the Greeks weren't white. Felicity: No, see I think of them as tanned, that tall dark and handsome type of thing I suppose. You can tell a little bit from facial features. I don't know what it is about a

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white American but by looking I can tell they are a white American rather than an Australian. I don't know what it is, it's just some look that distinguishes them from Australians. (conversation F3, text units 110-117).

In trying to encapsulate what it is that comprises whiteness, Felicity struggled, as did all of the other participants to identify the essential pieces. In the end, she distilled the answer down to two crucial points: I think it has a lot to do with white history, like where you can place yourself in white history, it means generally Christian or atheist background, like you can't say Christian anymore because times have changed and not every white person is a Christian. And I suppose English language is definitely white culture in many ways (conversation F2, text units 129-130).

For Felicity, whiteness comes down to seeing oneself as white, with English as one’s first (only?) language, and with a white history that will in times past have carried with it an assumption of Christianity but that in the uncertainty of the postmodern era may have given way to atheism (that other religious possibilities for whites exist seems not to be countenanced by Felicity’s view of whiteness).

That Whiteness attracts some advantages was not denied by Felicity, although she was unable to specify how this has occurred in her own life. She did understand how having connections to whiteness in a white dominant society was important for those who were Outsiders. In the case of her own grandmother, life as a phenotypically-different person in 1960’s Brisbane and beyond was difficult:

I knew that she did have it tough over here until the eighties, half-way through the seventies and the eighties, and I just knew that because the that she lived in Brisbane, in Strathpine, she was sort of on the outskirts of Brisbane for a reason I think.(conversation F1, text unit 276)

One tactic of survival for her grandmother was to draw upon the alliance with her brother- and sister-in-law - Felicity’s mother’s parents - and to use the national cultural capital as an entrée to acceptance. It helps to have friends on the Inside:

I think the connections of my grandparents on the other side with mum and dad, them being sort of white English background was very helpful to her because she knew them, she was able to talk to them and even another of mine, her grandmother found out that she knew them.(conversation F1, 277).

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While the advantages of whiteness were not apparently foremost in Felicity’s thoughts during our conversations, she was more able to describe examples of the disadvantages, as she both saw and experienced them, of being white in a white dominant society:

Jon: Are there disadvantages of being white? Felicity: There are when you can't read any of the signs in the shops [at the Gold Coast]. [laughs]. (conversation F4, text units 43-44)

While this might appear a somewhat trivial example, it captures the sense of exasperation heard increasingly from those whites who see their way of life under threat. More significantly for Felicity, the problem of not being able to stand out in a crowd, of not being able to be seen, is for her the prime disadvantage of being white: Sometimes people don't take any interest in you or your ideas because you're the same as everyone else. People at parties, it's a great party trick to be able to speak with an accent [laughs]. If you don't stand out, you're not of interest unless you've got something that makes you stand out from everyone else.(conversation F4, text units 45-46)

Working towards the reduction or elimination of disadvantage derived

from Difference

One of the hopes of mine in pursuing the ideas and experiences that form the basis of this study has been to contribute to the pedagogies of social justice. One way that I hoped this might come about was through coming to understand the relationship between knowledge and action, between awareness of identity as a complex and at times contradictory amalgam of dimensions and an orientation to seeing difference differently. The following extracts from some of the participants’ stories goes towards this connection. Here, I have selected extracts from both the stories and my analysis of these to expose the ways in which awareness of their racial identity on the part of this group of white pre-service teachers connected with a concern to utilise their pedagogical authority to work for socially-just ends. Obviously, in a context framed by whiteness, such a commitment inevitably means overcoming privilege as well as confronting disadvantage.

Michelle

Michelle doesn’t seem to have the same urgency for effecting or contributing to change that some of the other participants - Teresa and Felicity, in particular - exude. She does, however, use her biculturality to attempt to dispel some of the more widespread and enduring myths that surround indigeneity in contemporary Australia.

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Jon: Have you shared that information about grandmother with any other people in the unit? Michelle: Yeah, I did. A couple of them think it's "Oh, wow!” Another couple think "You should bludge off the system and rake in all the money you can get"- like they reckon you get more money on Abstudy∗ than you do on Austudy sort of in a tute one day and I made it clear that you don't and you have exactly the same means test too and they go "bull" and I go "no, I'm not pulling your leg".(conversation M1, text units 128-133)

It seems that she sees less an activist role for herself as a carrier of a white-Torres Strait Islander hybridity that as an advocacy one. She exposed little of her thoughts on how to overcome the disadvantage suffered by members of her non-white culture, and seemed to believe that racism in Australia was largely eradicated:

Jon: If you were applying for a job tomorrow and you had to fill out a form, would you personally include anything of your Torres Strait Islander background? Michelle: In your letter? Jon: Yes. Michelle: I don't know how to . Jon: Would you say "I am part Torres Strait Islander', would you put that in? Michelle: Torres Strait Islander descendant, yeah I probably would. Jon: Before you got interviewed? Michelle: I don't know, I'd have to figure out the letter. I don't know how you'd write it in a letter. Would it be appropriate to write it in a letter anyway? Jon: Would you add it into your c-v? Michelle: Yeah, that's fine. Jon: Do you think you'd be disadvantaged in getting to the next stage of the selection process? Michelle: umm, I can always try again. I've done it on other jobs, and it didn't seem to, even on the interview. I know it was only hospitality, but still. One of the jobs, I had an interview with his wife and I told his wife and I didn't know that he is a bit racist himself and I told him and he didn't seem to care. Jon: Are you saying that by-and-large people are colour blind and that race doesn't matter these days? Michelle: I think so.. (conversation M4, text units 211-238)

∗ Abstudy and Austudy are forms of Federal government support for Australian university students. Abstudy applies to indigenous Australians and Austudy to non-indigenous students. There is a

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There seems to be an underlying belief that education - the removal of ignorance and the germination of understanding- will in and of itself be sufficient to overcome racism. This predication carries through into the way in which Michelle saw her own role in this through teaching.

Felicity

Felicity’s sense of social justice and the need for those with some sway and influence to work towards the reduction of social inequality is apparent. She sees the need to acknowledge past racial injustices but to get on with building a fairer society. :

I was in year 5 in the bi-centennial year∗ ,[and I was astounded that] white heritage could have such absolutely horrible people,[but] it's not right that the tutors[in unit 80146] got very angry almost at us, just the way they spoke to us, they need to be more gentle with us. We didn't go out and do this stuff. We can make a difference, we can say sorry and whatever but when I hear that ‘My great great great great auntie was bashed to death by these people’, I mean I didn't know my grandfather ,I didn't know what his parents were like in England. I have an interest in it, but it doesn't directly effect me, it doesn't like 'oh he was such a terrible person, that makes me feel bad’ (conversation F3, text units 84-87)

While she could acknowledge the necessity of the white community generally and teachers specifically complementing their existing knowledge base with views from the other side of the so-called race debate - a concern with more accurate histories in her view - Felicity’s own engagement with such contrary histories was not a positive experience for her:

We had a lot of guest speakers and everyone who spoke except John McMaster was black. That was a big put off, like 'When are they going to shut up, all they ever do is complain, complain, complain' and I think I honestly didn't go to every lecture because I didn't write down any notes from it. (conversation F3, text unit 79).

It might well be that the discomfort of alternative histories and realities has caused Felicity and her friends to assuage any such feelings by relegating the experience to the category of

widespread, yet erroneous, belief that the Abstudy allowance is much greater than that available under Austudy and is more easily available. ∗ 1998 was the200th anniversary of the first permanent European settlement in Australia.

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irritating, repetitive whining and whingeing. It is probably far easier in the short term to swat the mosquito of complaint than to deal with the infestation of racial exploitation and disadvantage.

In many ways, Felicity’s is a social justice rooted in providing a level playing field, the removal of obstacles to individual material achievement rather than the dismantling of systemic structures of disadvantage. To her, many of the axes of disadvantage have been dealt with such that they no longer really present as problem areas for social reform. Significantly for this study, the racial dimension to difference and disadvantage doesn’t figure at all prominently in Felicity’s evaluation of social ills. The single most important area still to be reformed is that of the economic distribution of social resources:

Jon: is it possible to say that, while they all have an effect, one area of difference is more significant than the others? Felicity: I'd say probably class because it's an issue we're not addressing. All these others have been addressed in some way or another. Like the able versus disabled, men versus women, homosexual versus heterosexual, they've all been dealt with in some way or another, whether it was the right way of going about it, I don't know but they've have their time in the spotlight and certainly the social issues have had their time in the spotlight but I don't think it has resolved, like nothing has been completely resolved, but issues like homosexuality have been resolved more in the past few years (conversation F3, text units 90-93).

The connection between class and education was also something Felicity touched on, although her analysis of this juncture didn’t extend beyond the assertion:

I think the different types of schools, In Toowoomba we have so many private schools , and some of them are like, 'We're so much better than you because we've had our education paid for’. It's still women versus men, it's still class, upper versus lower type of thing.(conversation F3, text units 88-89).

Realising the ideological knife-edge position of teachers and the potential

for either hegemonic or transformative practice.

As intending teachers, the participants here straddle positions of novice (teachers) and expert (white racialised being). While they have all shown awareness, to varying degrees admittedly, of their racial identities, there is little to suggest that these insights translate automatically into a

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component of their developing professional personae. The idea that they, as teachers, occupy an ambivalent space in social justice terms does not seem to be yet apparent tot hem. While Teresa talked of ways in which she was likely to use her positional authority as a teacher to further her anti-racist project, the other participants were less able to articulate a connection between the two. The extracts below exemplify this uncertainty.

Michelle

Teaching is not the site of transformative practice for Michelle as it was for Teresa and Felicity (to a certain extent). For Michelle, teaching is about developing knowledge, eradicating misconceptions, misapprehensions and ignorance. Teachers fill a vital role in easing the acceptance of those Othered by dominant white society, and the primary route to this is by looking to the welfare of these people and ensuring that other teachers are similarly concerned and aware. The goal, it would seem, is assimilation and teaching is one way of removing obstacles to this process: I was just thinking that when I was in prac, this little girl came in from Victoria, and she's aboriginal, a mixture, probably her mother or her father was aboriginal, I'm not sure, but her mother had taken off and her father has got her and she's got problems with her academic skills. A grade 5 but mentality of a grade 1 because she's been moving around so much. I was looking in her ears and they were all filled with wax and I asked the other teachers if she could have [inaudible] . No one else knew what it was about until another teacher came in and she knew what it was all about.(conversation M2, text units 307-311)

A part of the awareness process resided in coming to understand the curriculum as a white construct, designed to shore up and maintain the centrality - and invisibility - of white culture. Michelle recognised this and in keeping with her view of teaching as largely information- giving, soughtt to establish some balance in what it was she taught or would teach: Jon: Were you conscious in your prac teaching that you were teaching white culture? Michelle: Yes I was. I was saying that I should throw some indigenous factors in here, but I wasn't sure how to approach it, because there was no indigenous people there[in the class or school] that I was aware of, because none of the teachers were aware of any, and I found out later that there was one girl, I knew one did come in, but she was moving around a lot and they weren't sure whether she was going to stay, but another girl, none of the teachers or principals were aware that she had any aboriginal blood in her. Jon: How did you find out? Michelle: She told me.

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Jon: Why do you think she would tell you and yet the teachers who work with her on a continuing basis didn't know? Michelle : I don't know, and they were also doing the Grade 5 test thing and one of the questions was ‘Do you have any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander… Jon: And so you had to ask the kids that ? Michelle: No, they had to do it and she said 'what if you've got part?’ and I said 'You put yes’. 'Oh, o.k.' (conversation M3, text units 148-162).

From Michelle’s point of view, one can’t teach about race and racism without the presence of the victims or of those most effected, and yet in describing this situation Michelle clearly overlooked - intentionally or not is uncertain - her own indigeneity. In pursuing this point a little in our conversation, Michelle thought through her position on personal disclosure: Jon: What would you be prepared to share with kids in your class of your particular identity? Michelle: I would tell them about my background and give them some cultural aspects about what's there and they can, might look into their background and they might have more pride, whereas before they may have looked down upon it.(conversation M4, text units 84-86)

Here is a germ of an idea of teaching as contributing to the resolution of inner personal conflicts and enhancing self-image for individuals. Michelle seems yet to see teaching and racism as anything other than individually-oriented.

Felicity

Teaching provides an opportunity - although not an obligation in Felicity’s view - to balance prevailing social views about life: it's important to see the other side of things, like you get so much through the media and it's[the real situation] so opposite to what the media has told us.(conversation F3, text unit 75). That a crucial part of the school curriculum should be history is not surprising, given Felicity’s own passion for the area. The effective teacher is one who will delve into her or his own history and bring the student’s interest in their own past to the pedagogical fore:

Jon: What makes history important to you? Felicity: I don't know, I suppose it's a search for identity but I've never like interested in school history. I been very interested in racial history, like when I had to do modern history in school because it was the only thing I could take on that line, when it came to like the first world war, the second world war, it was a bit boring but

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when you get to things like the nitty gritty bits of the Nazis and the Jewish and that just intrigued me and this racial war, these people who've lived in the same country for years just go 'Well, we don't like you' and they go 'We don't like you either' so.(conversation F2, text units 81-83)

(Tellingly, the parallels between ‘racial wars’ fought out in Europe with those in Australia didn’t seem apparent to Felicity, or if they were, she chose not to draw them out.)

A familiarity with one’s personal history is the starting point for identity -formation: Jon: What do you think people who don't have knowledge of their history or an appreciation of their history, what are they missing? Felicity: In some cases, it can have a huge impact, if there is a problem you can't deal with , you know like a genetic problem or a psychological problem that you can't deal with, somewhere along the line it's important to know your family history, it means you can know who you are. (conversation F3, text units 49-50). and presents opportunities to overcome perceptions of others that may be impossible to substantiate and to resist the tendency to romanticise images and evaluations of self: knowing about your history helps fill out images of others that you've had, none of us are as perfect as our images suggest we are.(conversation F3, text unit 63).

For Felicity, the teacher’s position is indeed knife-edge - she or he can engage in practices that perpetuate these unthinking, unexamined images of she or he can encourage students to delve into and construct ‘real’ histories.

Chapters 5 and 6: Conclusions from the stories

When one considers the selections from the participants’ stories presented in Chapters five and six of this thesis in the light of the questions that have guided this study, it is possible to move to some conclusions regarding the first level of question outlined in Chapter one: What life experiences dot he participants perceive as having been influential in shaping their identity? This layer of understanding derives directly from a consideration of the narratives intertwined and presented in this and the previous chapter and is necessary to work through before moving to a consideration of the implications for more theoretical dimensions of this project which I will address in the next chapter.

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Level One: Conclusions from the evidence

There was one feature of the evidence that was striking because of its consistency throughout the participants’ stories and because it was so unexpected. This was the degree of racial self- consciousness held by the participants: they were all far more aware of their racialised identities than I would have thought was likely to be the case throughout the community, both the University community and more broadly. I was surprised that the participants, to a person, were able to articulate their sense of identity in many ways and across many axes, but especially along racial lines.

This did not conform to existing literature on whiteness at all and was a feature of the group that I needed to account for. I believe that the fact of having had the specific experience of a race relations type unit of study (unit 80146 Australian Indigenous Studies) has been a prime, but not sole or even seminal, cause of this awareness. While the focus of that unit was ostensibly on indigenous Australians and their cultures both pre- and post-European contact, given the current climate of Reconciliation, the reviewing of histories and past practices such as highlighted by exposure of the (so-called) Stolen Generation and the disputed effects and likely outcomes of various pieces of land rights (Native Title) legislation, the socio-historical role of a specific, identifiable group - Whites - has been foregrounded as well. In this unit, it would seem, the duality of the Centre-Margin relationship of the white-indigenous Australian axis of identity may well have served to raise the self-consciousness of the participants with regard to their own race.

Further reinforcing this spur to Whites seeing themselves as a specific racial group has been an increased visible presence of the Other within Australian society. There are probably a number of contributing factors here: an increasing visibility of non-European migrants, at times accompanied by physical confrontation and conflict; the effects of globalisation that bring cultural disjunctures to the fore while at the same time cementing other, paradoxical, multicultural harmonies; the application of new forms of communication technologies and mass media that increasingly juxtaposition the Exotic with the Familiar; and a heightened sense of societal anxiety about the dissolution of the old certainties that has tended to spark a greater degree of national (and personal ?) introspection. The cumulative effect of these trends and processes has been to sharpen the lines of focus on Difference, and when one comes to notice Difference, the question becomes, ‘Difference from what?’. In answering that question, white Australians are left with the obvious answer: different from me, from Us. This, then, is followed by the question ‘And who are We?’

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The participants had all taken the indigenous studies unit and none was immune from effects of the social, cultural and technological environment described in the previous paragraph. Was it this combination that led to what I encountered as a totally unexpected degree of racial self- awareness, or have those recent events and changes in Australia and abroad worked to heightened the general community consciousness of this aspect of dominant culture? The literature would suggest that the experience of whiteness is a largely unconscious and unthinking one, with crucial feature of white ethnicity being its invisibility even to those tagged as White. Much of this literature reports on or is derived from considerations of the (United States) American situation and to a lesser extent that of the United Kingdom. It might well be that, with a strong thread of legally entrenched whiteness through the promulgation of the White Australia Policy, the fact of White Australian identity has not been such a closely- guarded secret here that it has been in other places. The degree of community-wide racial self- awareness in Australia presents as a further topic to be investigated at some later point.

It is, of course, possible that the fact of all participants evincing a strong sense of racial identity cannot be taken as indicative of anything beyond the borders of this group. Of over three hundred students enrolled in the unit in question, only two percent participated in the study. It might well be that a personal interest in and desire to further understand the racial aspects of their own identity was what prompted these people to volunteer for the project in the first place. Looking at this from another perspective, that the large percentage of students taking the indigenous studies unit did not choose to participate may be indicative of a much less certain view of their racial identities and of a dismissal of identity work as being of any relevance to teacher education and the profession of teaching. It may further suggest that the racial self-knowledge of the participant group was not indicative of a broader sense of white identity in this student body. Regardless, this feature of the participant group was such a striking - and unexpected - one that, while not the subject of a specific research question, this feature warrants mention.

What do the stories from the participants’ lives tell us about the emergence of an awareness of self, particularly in racial terms, when the raced nature of that identity is possibly for many of their friends and peers invisible or non-existent? In sorting through and extracting pieces of the life stories that might shed some light on this experience, the first two research questions provide anchor points for the analysis of the evidence:

1. What types of life experiences do the participants perceive as having been influential in shaping their identity? and 2. What do pre-service teacher education students perceive to be the impact of concerted programmatic experiences of cultural consciousness-raising on their sense of self and

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identity?

In considering the first of these questions, it is apparent from the evidence that the participants were all able to recall and articulate a number of specific experiences in their lives that have led them to glimpse and understand their particular identities. These experiences have invariably been ones of encountering and working with difference and of experiencing departure from dominant cultural positions and groups. That the participants re-told such events in the context of narrating their biographies is perhaps in itself important: for them all, these types of experiences were of such significance that they formed the skeletal-like structures for mounting of fuller life stories.

It is possible to conceptualise the types of life experiences reported by the participants as being of three distinct types: experiences that were explicitly racial; ones that enveloped or touched on difference in some way and those that led to the ‘Outsidering’ of the participants.

All of the participants related numerous accounts of race-based life experiences. From Teresa’s cake shop and milk bar stories to Michelle’s recent discovery of previously hidden strands of her family history to Felicity’s family’s continuing celebration of her Chinese grandmother’s Christmas customs, race has been an explicit part of the explanatory framework within which the participants have come to understand the world. Their socialisation into the lifeworld has contained a focus on aspects of race that seems to have led them to at least recognise the existence of this dimension. This is not to suggest a necessary primacy for race in identity construction terms, but to suggest that in the telling of their life stories, these people remember the background experiences such as to be able to draft the race chapter.

These racial experiences have not been unproblematic for the participants as they reflect on them now. In many instances, they have come to see these as overtly racist and unattractive to them: Teresa knows that she doesn’t now have to go home at two o’clock, that the cake shop isn’t such dangerous territory after all, for example. Felicity doesn’t recoil from her long-term identification with Chinese culture, but she does have difficulty in reconciling the reactions of friends to her claim of ‘Asianness’.

Regardless of the nature, focus or intent of specific experiences, the important point here is that the participants recall race as a feature of their lives, they have lived a racialised existence.

This is not to suggest that other features and facets of their life stories are not also significant, perhaps at various times much more significant than the racial component. It has been this part of their identities that has been the focus of this study and each one of the participants has discussed racial experiences as formative memories.

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The second type of experience the participants report in common is that of encounters with Difference. In each of the life stories, there is a clear recounting of memorable points of contact with Otherness. These experiences were not solely with racial Otherness, although many of the stories told had that dimension to them. Much of Serenity’s life has been spent moving into and out of sites of difference (her periods of residence in Vanuatu particularly). Michelle experienced this across a number of periods of her life from her travels into the exotic to her grandmother’s attempts to whiten her skin and pass as White to her pursuit of her family history. Emma’s life butts up against difference on an almost daily basis through her concern to ensure her son knows of and is ‘educated’ in the indigenous culture of his father. Teresa’s volunteer work with intellectually impaired youth was an early experience of this type for her.

The importance of this type of experience seems to reside in the evaporation of the mystique, the anxiety and the fear (in some cases) attaching to the uncertainty of the ways of that with which I (Self) am (is) unfamiliar. In many ways, the effect of such experiences with the Different for the participants here seems to be one of personal assertiveness, a demonstration of a certain determination to free oneself from a (constraining?) normality of existence. All of the participants wear their excursions into the Exotic as badges of honour, or at least as the markings of personal growth. None of them is ashamed or regretful of these experiences, but then, these were the experiences they chose to relate for the purposes of this study, and their reactions to them, their recollection of the anxieties and fears may well have receded with the passage of time and the romanticising reformulation of particular events. Regardless, the point here seems to be that they all view their contact with and engagement of Difference now as both positive and inspiring as well as major steps on their path to a more secure sense of self.

The third type of experience that seems to have been significant in shaping the identities of the participants is that of being Othered themselves, of being seen and constructed as Outsider. From the previous type of experience of association with the Other - racial, intellectual or cultural - to being seen by self and others as different, the participants seem to have moved from a comfortable location within the normal to a far more marginalised position. Teresa’s story presents as the most obvious example here, but Michelle and Emma have very powerful life stories that similarly contain episodes of being marginalised (as a kibbutz worker and Torres Strait Islander in Michelle’s case and as a transgressor against religious and cultural tenets and mores in Emma’s). Felicity, while more ambivalent about forms of Difference, seems only-too-happy to proclaim her Outsiderness in racial and cultural terms (but derides such positions in sexual contexts). Serenity’ s stories of being Different are at odds with the types of experiences described by the other participants insofar as her Difference, like my own in China, was in large measure seen as attractive and desirable by the Nivans.

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Despite such variety, the commonality here is that all participants have had experiences throughout their lives where they have not been able to shelter under the umbrella of anonymity and invisibility. At certain times in their lives, each has been in a situation where there have been marked as Different and their presence, their existence has thereby become exposed. This, perhaps of all the types of events in the life stories recounted in the course of this study, presents as a crucial type of experience in the development of a sense of self that acknowledges the complexity and denseness of identity generally and, for the purposes here, the racialised nature of those identities.

From one perspective, these three types of experiences could be seen as forming a rough sequence of identity metamorphosis. Early experiences raised race as a feature of identity in ways that contributed to the construction of and later strengthened the Self-Other divide and (potentially) reinforced other binary dimensions of identity. The exclusion of the Other required by such categorisation and separation presented certain obstacles to understanding of Self which were overcome, in part at least, by more deliberate and personal (positive) encounters with Difference. Such encounters were influential in the development of a sense of identity because the association led in many cases to identification with the exotic, the different in such ways that the participants came to see themselves as Outsiders in a social context where they had in many ways been very much Insiders.

To see and feel the mobility and fluidity of location and the effect of that on identity perhaps generates a stronger imperative to consider how one’s existence impacts upon that of others in ways that might eventually lead to a reconsideration of the nature of identity -in the focus of this study, of the nature of whiteness and White identity. The fact that all of the participants, who seem to be highly racially self-conscious, relate experiences of the three types described here would seem to suggest a certain necessity of this sequence.

The second question , What do pre-service teacher education students perceive to be the impact of concerted programmatic experiences of cultural consciousness-raising on their sense of self? requires a consideration of the effects of the Indigenous Studies unit on the identity development process for the participants. To some extent, the function of this unit and the experiences with it described by the participants has been woven into a number of the other sections of this concluding chapter, but it is important to draw out some specific points here.

There seems to be a potentially important - perhaps crucial - contribution to the process of unsettling White identity to be made by deliberate pedagogical strategies, in particular by way of throwing up those moments of bafflement that force awareness and re-consideration of White identity. Unit 80146 (Australian Indigenous Studies) presents as one of the very few

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points in the initial teacher education programs at the University of Southern Queensland where that pedagogical intrusion occurs intentionally, and indeed is one of the very few places where the notion of race and culture, as defining identity axes , appears to arise.

Participants reported a very scant experience with racial and cultural matters in most of their course work. With the exception of the core (compulsory) sociology and social education units, such matters were touched on only in sections of one of the language and literacy units and very briefly in a special needs pedagogical unit. In all of these instances, race and culture were construed as going to carving out sites of difference rather than as constituting essential dimensions of each individual. That is, the focus was on the racial Other and the pedagogical implications and consequences of this difference as opposed to contributing to students’ racial self-consciousness. The effect of this treatment of race is, presumably, to maintain a sense of White racial invisibility and a continued focus on the difficulties, deficits and deficiencies of those who are visibly and ‘obviously’ raced. Whether this is common to initial teacher education programs more generally I am unable to say, but this is another matter that deserves further investigation.

Because of its almost intellectually-schizophrenic nature, unit 80146 stood out from the rest of their unit offerings very clearly in the memory of the participants. While its ostensible purpose was to provide opportunities for pre-service student teachers to come to more complex knowledge and understandings of indigenous Australian cultures, histories and issues, the unit seems as much to effect the self-interrogation of these students’ identities. Participants recalled little specific ‘official’ content but most vividly recalled the self- confrontational nature of many of the experiences of the unit - the anger of indigenous academic staff over perceived legal injustices, the exposure to contemporary indigenous issues firsthand through field work and interviews and the reactions of their friends and colleagues to the unit. Most significantly, they could trace their own emotional and cognitive path through the unit in terms of how they personally came to deal with and reconcile the moral turmoil considerations of matters to do with Australian race relations and community and personal responsibility threw up.

They also came to see something of themselves as White Australians, an experience not uncommon in the experience of the students who have taken this unit over the past five years. For perhaps the first time ‘officially’, these Whites are described as Whites - they have been given a reference point for the racial dimension of their identity. For the participants in this study, having had prior life experiences that led to the excavation of this component of self, the power of this unit is not perhaps to be found in the birth of racial self-awareness but in the provocation to further interrogation of this as a particular form of White racial identity.

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The participants all rated the experience of this unit as crucial in their teacher education program, and while individuals reported many life events or experiences that paralleled or were similar in effect to those of this unit, it seems to be crucial that pre-service teachers encounter this type of experience as a stimulus to considerations of self. While this study drew upon the experiences and thoughts of a small number of students who had taken the unit in question, one might presume that most of the students taking this unit encounter a number of significant pedagogical features that contribute to a similar feeling of disorientation, of dissonance of some kind. One of these is the knowledge content of the unit: it is uncomfortable to have a settled community narrative disrupted by having to knead in seemingly discrepant events. Another is the power relationships in the unit: it is a very unfamiliar experience for most, if not all, students taking this unit to find the positions of power expected and lived in the broader community reversed. Here, it is indigenous Australians, the teaching staff, who are in positions of explicit power and Whites who are significantly less powerful, at least in a pedagogical sense. The teaching staff determine content, set assessment pieces and mark and grade these. To them falls the academic and pedagogical authority White students experience daily in all of their other units as residing in the hands of White academics without ever considering the racialised aspect of this relationship. In this unit, however, the racial aspect of the locus of power is very clearly visible and the experience is not one that some students take easily. These two aspects of the unit both distinguish it from other units and in many ways set it up for the types of criticism that elude those other units.

It seems that Giroux’s notion of identity trauma is very much a feature attendant upon the experience of this unit: participants described the emotional reactions they and others had to various lecturers and tutors in the unit, to some of the ideas raised and histories juxtapositioned against the received settlement-based wisdom, and to its pedagogy. Many of these reactions fell into the anger-guilt-shame category.

In the current Australian context, it is through considerations of indigenous - non-indigenous Australian relations that race has been made most visibly entered the social vista. It seems that it is through a focus on Australian indigeneity in the way that the Australian Indigenous Studies unit here approaches this that a small group of (almost exclusively) White Australian pre-service teachers come to see something of alternative histories and the effects of white racism and its implications for their professional practice. From the perspective of this study, it is also a major vehicle for the exposure of their own racialised identity.

The reactions to and effects of the Australian Indigenous Studies unit reported by the participants in this study suggest that educational experiences of this type are important as an initial spur to considerations of the types of issues that relate to race, racism and whiteness. At

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the very least, such experiences need to be built in as a form of safety-net pedagogy such that if the moments of bafflement and trauma that seem to be features of the lives of the participants here are absent from the lives of others, then at least the provocation to self-reflection might be encountered.

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Chapter 7 Conclusions.

Having talked with and listened to the participants tell stories of their emergence as racially- aware individuals, I believe I am able to draw out a number of commonalities and parallelisms which I consider to be important. There are also a number of points and lessons about the research process and the experience of working with people on sensitive matters that I also feel confident in presenting and analysing, and there is the effect on my own self-understanding of having been part of this project. As described in the first chapter, the claim to know is a perplexing one, filled with the sound of authority yet, if we were honest, it is a claim built upon particularly idiosyncratic foundations of interpretation and the claim of epistemic privilege by virtue of authorship and / or membership.

Notwithstanding this, however, I believe I have come to understand something of the ways in which these participants have come to see and conceptualise whiteness in the contemporary Australian context. This chapter opens with some discussion of the ways in which these people view whiteness and a presentation of some themes that traverse these views; in other words, what images of whiteness have been exposed in the course of this study?

The way in which I have considered the evidence collected in this study leads to a picture of complex interactions between two criss-crossing tributaries of consciousness. These have been instrumental in contributing to various levels of awareness, as incomplete in any one participant’s life as this may be, of the ways in white racial identity and whiteness in the Australian context are experienced, lived, exposed, constructed and, potentially, reconstructed. These tributaries are an emerging self-awareness of racial identity and a number of triggers of and provocations to white self-awareness.

The first of these contributing factors in the analysis of the participants’ stories has been discussed in the previous chapter where the particular life experiences and the effects of certain programmatic features of their initial teacher education course on the participants’ path to racial self-awareness have been drawn out and discussed. The contribution of this part of the development of white racial identity in itself seems to be a significant and necessary first step towards the reconstruction of positive white identities, but it is the enhancement of these experiences through triggers or provocations to a deeper questioning and understanding of these experiences that is crucial in this process. The role of trauma (Giroux 1997), dialogic engagement and deliberate pedagogical strategies in promoting this deeper level of analysis is the second of the contributing factors to be considered here, and forms one of the points of focus of this chapter.

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In the final section of this chapter, I draw some conclusions from the study for initial teacher education that might have as an imperative the preparation of teachers to meet the demands of deepening cultural diversity in classrooms in non-racist ways.

Living and Imagining Whiteness

For Whites, considering identity in racial terms seems to be a necessary prerequisite step in reformulating whiteness, but in itself does not of necessity lead to such a position. A consideration of the stories of the participants in this study provides evidence that the fact of interrogation of identity, white identity in particular, is by no means a guarantee of anything other than self-awareness. There is no necessary progression between seeing Whiteness and committing to its reconstruction. But at least the existence of a lifeline back to the heart of privilege encourages some to leave the security of the Centre and this seems to be what almost all of the participants in this study have done or are attempting to do.

It seems that Whites must go through a process of seeing and understanding the racialised facet to their individual and group identity before embarking on the project of re-inventing or reformulating whiteness in more positive forms. The point here is that unless provoked in some way, it seems unlikely that Whites come to see and understand the effects of their whiteness. The conversations that we had during the course of this project were both avenues for the raising of issues of racialised identities generally and for the participants to engage in the memory work necessary to support an analysis of their individual life path to their current point of practice and self-awareness in a racialised sense. There is little point, and even less chance of success, in considering seriously possible alternative forms of white racial identity without first having an awareness of the ubiquity of racial identity markers.

In this study, the participants had all, to greater and lesser extents, arrived at a position of realising the raced nature of their own identity and locations. Some - Michelle and Teresa, in particular - were actively moving into other forms of whiteness, although not in any necessarily deliberate or pre-determined way. What has led Teresa and to a certain extent Michelle to conceptualise whiteness in more sophisticated ways than the other participants? While this was not the focus of the study, it is possible to engage in some conjecture that the extent and intensity of experiences each of these people has had with the disadvantage associated with being tagged as non-white in contemporary Australian society might be a critical factor here. For Teresa in particular and for Michelle to a lesser and more recent extent, significant parts of their lives and the ways in which they have come to presently identify are intricately and deeply personally bound up in their engagement with Australian indigeneity. The other

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participants have had considerably less extensive and immediate experiences in this regard and might not, as a consequence, have had to consider the daily concrete implications of their relationship with racial difference. While they were able to articulate aspects of racial identity and their whiteness, they have not necessarily felt the crush of having to negotiate a relationship with indigenous friends and family that has caused - perhaps forced - them to excavate their whiteness beyond a surface level. The experiences of Teresa and Michelle approach those of Diane Jeater’s which led her to seriously consider the options available to her as a White person (Jeater 1992). Proximity to non-whiteness on a personal and frequent basis may be the crucial differentiating factor here.

The drawing together of the life stories of the participants in Chapters 5 and 6 of this thesis shows white racial identity as complex and inconsistent and manifesting in a myriad of ways and forms. The analysis in chapter 6 has allowed me to distil a number of themes or meanings of white racial identity from the participants’ stories. It should be emphasised at this point that no one participant evinced a single coherent, consistent conceptualisation of whiteness. Perhaps this is not possible at any time by anyone. In attempting to portray some of the views of whiteness resident within the evidence, I am aware of the potential danger of imputing a complete and consistent view of whiteness and white racial identity to any of the participants. Consequently, in the discussion that follows, some of the participants’ views appear in a number of categories. This should not be construed as evidence of any lack of academic rigour or general conceptual sloppiness, but rather as a reflection of the ambiguity and uncertainty that attach to considerations of identity in the postmodern era generally, and to the more complex task of isolating whiteness within this.

Images of whiteness

From the experience of having spoken at length with the participants about their senses of racial identity and of having analysed these conversations, I categorised their views of whiteness as follows:

1. Whiteness as a transitory element in identity 2. Whiteness as fashionable or as an expediency 3. Whiteness as a cosmetic identity feature and 4. Whiteness as a safe haven

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Whiteness as transitory

One conceptualisation of whiteness that seems to be evident from the study is that of whiteness as a transitory, disposable almost, marker of privilege. This appears to be the way in which Teresa sees whiteness. Whiteness here is indeed a characteristic of dominance and advantage, but in her view this is a position that is able to be surrendered or erased in ways similar to those espoused by the Race Traitor movement (Ignatiev & Garvey 1996). This conceptualisation of whiteness tends to equate white identity with oppression in such a way that regardless of intent, the only good White is a non-White. This carries with it the implication that whiteness is able to be discarded but only by those who so choose. Whiteness, then, exists and persists as a feature of identity at the behest of the carrier, and as such is in a forever tenuous state.

Whiteness as fashion / expediency

To some extent, Michelle’s articulations of her thoughts on whiteness seem to locate her conceptualisation of whiteness in the category of transitoriness , although she seems to see this as existing in a complex relationship with non-whiteness. Whiteness for her is a manipulable feature of identity that, like any other racial set of characteristics, could be foregrounded or pushed to the background depending on the circumstances at the time. Michelle currently sees more advantage to her accruing by way of asserting her whiteness, although she seems to suggest that where it was appropriate, she would willingly jettison this persona to take on non-White facades. The expediency or convenience offered by a bi-racial identity has influenced the ways in which Michelle obviously configures the White component.

Felicity’s ideas of whiteness to this point suggest that it is something of an anachronistic category, one that fails to reflect contemporary Australianeity. In this view, whiteness is subsumed as a racial category into the multicultural melange that constitutes the Australian population. For her, ethnicity or race are superseded by nationality - if Australia, then not Greek, Chinese or Aboriginal. Felicity was the participant who most talked of whiteness and identity in terms broadly encompassing more than indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Her position seems to submerge racial differences into a colourless category of identity via an invisible process of assimilation. She sees the process of identifying as Australian as requiring the surrender of non-Australian characteristics, features and practices in order to embrace something of a racially-devoid multiculturalism while still retaining certain cultural ‘flavours’. This conceptualisation of whiteness as an almost-irrelevance perhaps best shows the potence of invisibility of the link to dominance. It is arguable that Felicity fails to see and understand the effects of hegemonic White processes that result in the obfuscation of the

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position of dominance assumed by whiteness, but that she displays her own self-proclaimed racial difference as something of a fashion accessory. Similarly, Australianeity emerges as a similar ‘flavour of the month’ gloss of identity.

Whiteness as cosmetic

For some (Serenity and Emma), whiteness was a marker of nothing much more than a benign difference from non-whiteness. From this perspective, whiteness presents as little more than a cosmetic characteristic that one can do little about and seems not to warrant much by way of analysis or attention. Whiteness in this schema seems not to be attached to privilege or dominance in any causal or necessary way and fits comfortably into a ‘colourblindness’ approach to race and difference. White here is just another colour and it is the individuals who inhabit the space of whiteness who are privileged or disadvantaged as individuals, and then largely as a result of their own actions and personal characteristics. For Emma, whiteness seems not to be anything more than a happenstance personal characteristic, perhaps similar in a way to a person’s hair colour or height. She seems not to evince a view of whiteness as a point of accumulation of privilege or advantage.

Serenity had probably experienced the desirability of being White far more frequently than had Emma yet seemed to be much less aware of this racial attractiveness to the non-Whites in her life experiences. In fact, when she talked about whiteness as representative of wealth in the Vanuatuan situation, she constructed the possessors of whiteness as lucrative targets for exploitation and fraud. The notion of whiteness as marker of the newly disadvantaged contained in much of the recent literature on whiteness is not evident in any of the participants’ stories, but perhaps comes closest in this view of Serenity’s.

Whiteness as a safe haven

Whiteness can be denied - or at least its Aladdin’s cave of the treasures of privilege can be - but it can’t be shed: for example, even as Teresa associates and identifies more and more with indigenous Australian cultures, she is still accorded the priority and centrality that attaches to her whiteness, even by her non-White flatmates. Michelle is able to avoid the awkwardness of racial conflict by ‘passing’, by drawing on her whiteness when the need arises. Felicity surprises many of her friends when she declares her embrace of Chinese culture and identity because it is her whiteness that most powerfully describes her in all of the most visible ways and which, when combined with her religious convictions, enables her to participate more

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easily in her chosen lifestyle. For all of these people, whiteness constitutes a state - a guarantee almost - of safety and security that a phenotypical non-White identity doesn’t and can’t.

While this location obviously admits of the possibility of manipulation in the pursuit of narrow self-interested ends, it seems to me to also provide the best point of departure for the construction of alternative modes of white identity and of whiteness. As with many aspects of life, growth and development, the likelihood of taking risks increases with the knowledge that there is something of a safe haven to which to return or a safety net to catch those who trip and stumble. The exploration of alternative forms of White identity is probably given greater impetus by the knowledge that one is unlikely to fall far before being caught in the secure web of whiteness. This seems to be how Teresa in particular is spending her time.

Themes across the spectrum of whiteness

From the previous section, it is apparent that white identity presents and is experienced as fluid, uncertain and extremely variegated and yet crossing all of the stories of the participants were a number of features which, for want of a more appropriate term, I have called themes of whiteness. By this, I mean certain commonalities in thinking about, being aware of and utilising white racial identities. In talking with and listening to the participants, there seem to be four such themes:

1. A continuum of white racial self-consciousness 2. Ebbs and flows in the acknowledgment and application of whiteness 3. A strategic filtering of whiteness in various teaching contexts and 4. A growing robustness in acknowledging whiteness in the Australian context

A continuum of white racial self-consciousness

Thinking about white racial identity and the implications of whiteness ranged across a continuum from negligible to acute consciousness. This movement occurred within as well as among the individual members of the participant group. That is, at times individuals reflected upon their life experiences in ways that displayed little awareness of the function of whiteness while at other times this reflection seemed to draw upon a much more focussed sense of whiteness. Within the group of participants, there was also a range of degrees of sophistication and awareness of this particular element of identity. Neither of these forms of differing understanding of whiteness should perhaps surprise or seem to be of any great significance, except to point to the elusiveness of conceptualisations of white racial identity.

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The variations within any one individual participant’s engagement with whiteness perhaps indicates an uneven pervasion of understanding and consciousness of whiteness as it touches different parts of one’s life story. The racial dynamics and dimensions of some life experiences were far more clearly apparent to the participants than they were when they reflected on other parts of their stories and there didn’t seem to be any particular type of experience that was more likely to provoke a whiteness connection than the others. In other words, there seems to be no one category of life experience that is more likely to prove useful in developing a sense of white racial understanding. Racial awareness in Whites strikes chords in some parts of our consciousness while seemingly leaving other parts largely untouched.

Across the group, varying degrees of white awareness were also apparent with some participants (Teresa and Michelle in particular) evincing a much sharper racial focus than the others. It is possible that the more sustained experiences with racial Otherness that feature in the lives of Teresa and Michelle might well be a significant factor in their relatively more heightened racial awareness.

Ebbs and flows in the acknowledgment and application of whiteness

For each of the participants, the acknowledgment of the impact of their whiteness seemed to ebb and flow. At times, there was a strong desire to admit to being privileged and relatively powerful as a result of a cultural/racial happenstance. Teresa, for example, used her central positioning to attempt to bridge gaps between her white colleagues and her Indigenous Australian friends and acquaintances. She was not afraid to stand up, as a White person, to displays of white racism. Michelle drew upon her whiteness when particular employment situations might have suggested it prudent to do so. Serenity utilised the power attaching to her white status (and that of her uncle) in dealing with commercial propositions in Vanuatuan situations where she was in a numerically minority position and yet chose not to acknowledge the specificity of this location and its power in situations where she was a member of a majority group. In this last case, where departure from white cultural norms was apparent (for example, where customers from non-English speaking backgrounds presented at her checkout) she constructed this as deficiency and made the bearer of it an object of ridicule.

This leads me to suggest that a combination of an uncertainty of what whiteness is and of how it impacts and shapes the participants’ lives and the lives of those denied membership of this group and a zero-sum model of privilege is at work here. At times, whiteness resumes its position of invisibility and normalcy. At other times, the prospect of giving ground to positions of difference is rejected because of a perceived threat to the privilege attaching to the White

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Centre. Where there is little threat to acknowledging the legitimacy, if not acceptability, of positions other than White, whiteness becomes visible. Thus is constituted the ebb and flow of whiteness.

A strategic filtering of whiteness in various teaching contexts

Almost all of the participants told of times when they were aware of the negative impact of whiteness and White centrality in a teaching context but where they chose to say and do nothing to remedy or avoid the consequences for students affected. The participants who told stories of this type seem to be aware of the need for strategic forays into the territory of whiteness and were prepared to sacrifice comment or action in some settings - the most commonly reported that of practicum experiences - in order to be able to make later, more sustained action - most often in their own classrooms upon graduation. There was a sense of a gatekeeping role filled by (White) teachers in (largely White) schools where the centrality of whiteness was to be safeguarded. To construct alternative roles - most predominantly transformative, change-oriented roles - meant surviving within a system whose effect was largely to support and sustain an educational and social status quo and to secure a loyalty to largely unacknowledged White hegemonic forms of knowledge and community. This led the participants to develop strategies for filtering their responses to oppressive forms and instances of whiteness through a sieve of possibility. Decisions about when to speak out seem to have been made on the basis of the likely consequences for their immediate goal: to graduate from their teacher preparation program and secure teaching positions. Once secure within their own classrooms where they might exert greater personal influence over both curriculum and pedagogy, these participants expressed an intention to develop anti- and non-racist professional practices that would be built upon their understanding of the operation of whiteness in the school. The extent to which these intentions are realised warrants further investigation once the participants enter the teaching force.

A growing robustness in acknowledging whiteness in the Australian

context

At the time of the commencement of this study, it would seem that, by comparison with the situation in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, the level of community racial consciousness was at a much lower level than when we had finished our conversations. A number of factors already described in Chapter 3 are likely to have been responsible for this change. There is now a seeming explosion in the analyses of whiteness in the Australian context, with the popular media carrying seemingly endless stories and op-ed pieces about this

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matter. There seems to be a much less obvious cringing at the use of the term ‘White Australia’, particularly in reference to Indigenous Australia and Australians. The use of a racial epithet - ‘White’ - to describe people previously presumed to be ‘real’, typical’ or just ‘Australians’ no longer seems to raise the hackles of as large a percentage of the population as it once would have.

The participants in this study similarly seemed to be far more racially self-aware than might have been the case a few years earlier. Certainly their levels of understanding of this aspect of identity grew considerably over the course of the learning conversations and their preparedness to explore this area of their self- and national-identity was apparent from the beginning of the study. Whether this interest is sustained once the stimulus afforded by the formal dialogue sessions entered into about matters of race and identity are less frequent remains to be seen. My feeling at this time is that these people have reached levels of self- consciousness that it would be impossible for them to remove the racial from their considerations of their daily experiences.

The robustness of Australian whiteness needs, however, to be placed within a context of what that recognition means for reconstructed views of the culturally or racially Other. In large measure, it seems to me, the acknowledgment that White is a colour (Roman 1993) does not remove the onus on the culturally Other to adapt to the particular ways of a White culture. In culturally diverse communities and nations like Australia, self-proclaimed Whites still seem to be unaware of the need for them to change and adapt. Within the participant group, in all but the case of Teresa, there was a similar sense of relief that the secret of White racial identity was now out, but little acknowledgment that this was but a first step in a process of reconstruction. Reconciliation is one thing, reconstruction an entirely different matter.

From the experience of this study, it seems to me that the unquestioned and unthinking assumption of white racial identities and the subsequent equation of Australian and whiteness no longer occurs as unproblematically as it might have in the past. The participants here have demonstrated a racial consciousness that bespeaks a disrupted socialisation and enculturation process that has allowed the escape of the genie of agency from the seamless bottle of identity. The implications for considerations of Australian multiculturalism and future notions of community and national identity become significant if one extends the levels of self-knowledge from this group of participants to the younger segments of Australian society. Certainly, there are major issues and possibilities there for teaching and teachers committed to critical pedagogical approaches to and outcomes of their personal/professional practice.

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Theorising whiteness

There is one contribution to the theorising of whiteness that I feel confident in making at this point. If, as has been described in some of the literature and as, to a certain extent, the participants in this study have demonstrated, whiteness can’t be shed but only denied (temporarily at least) or its privileges eschewed, then what really needs to happen in the reformulation of whiteness and white identity is a consideration not so much of the privileges of whiteness but of its obligations, its responsibilities. If whiteness be can’t erased, diluted or revoked, then it must become more sustainable as an identity location. It is in the consideration of what a sustainable white identities might look like or develop that the most productive and imperative work on whiteness and anti-racism would seem to me to now reside. Sustainable identities, to my way of thinking, are those that enable the on-going development of themselves as well as of those Others they touch upon without either drawing its own sustenance for growth on the (metaphorical) malnutrition of the other. The questions to be answered are : ‘What forms of whiteness are possible?’ and ‘Which of those are most likely to encourage and sustain mutually-productive relationships with non-Whites?’

Lest it be thought that the change and re-constructive process is a Whites Only project, I should state that at this point in my thinking I see a commensurate need for the re-construction of non- White identities. The relationship between sustainable White and non-White identities is largely symbiotic with each feeding and sustaining the other. The important point here, though, is that re-constructed non-White identities can only come into existence in tandem with new White identities. The Centre still constructs and locates the Margin, but as the Centre is re- configured, perhaps the Margin shrinks. When there is no longer a centre stage where Whiteness might bask in the spotlight of the Universal, when Whiteness is no longer attached to a dualistic schema of human worth , then Homi Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space (Bhabha 1990) becomes feasible.

Triggers and Provocations: processes and strategies for racial

consciousness-raising

Most of the preceding sections of this chapter have addressed issues of how whiteness has been conceptualised in the Australian context. This next section draws some conclusions about the effectiveness of particular strategies and processes designed to stimulate deeper levels of thinking, reflection and reconstruction. As such, this material addresses the second level of questions guiding this study: What conclusions might be drawn about key procedural concepts?

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Bafflement and Trauma

A critical part of the inquiry was directed towards looking for evidence of the interplay of Spivak’s moments of bafflement and Giroux’s notion of identity trauma in the development of racialised identity awareness on the part of the participants. This group of research questions was framed to attempt to answer the question:

What is the relevance of Giroux’s notion of identity trauma and Spivak’s idea of moments of bafflement in providing an explanatory framework within which to locate a sense of racial identity in Australian pre-service teachers?

Racialised identity trauma, as Giroux uses the term, is present in all participants’ life stories, but appears to be aggregate and cumulative rather than a one-hit experience. Giroux sees one answer to the question of how to develop genuinely anti- and non-racist approaches to teaching (I’m not sure which he sees as most urgent, I suspect the former since it is a more active position) residing in ensuring that (white) teachers are forced to see or become aware of and reconsider the racialised components of their identities (Giroux 1997, p 293). In his view, this requires that they experience events that traumatise them, not in the psycho-therapy sense of the word, but by way of having them encounter moments of bafflement (Spivak 1990, p 137) that result in gut-churning tensions and inconsistencies with if not settled, then at least comfortable identities.

In the rupturing or, at least, the shaking up of the sediment of white identities, opportunities arise for the development of more positive forms of white identity, although the orientation to such desirable positions is by no means automatic or guaranteed. It is here that certain moments of self-enlightenment might be had and when these intersect with social conscience - a commitment to the betterment of society - then the need and opportunity for adopting different ways of relating, racially in this case, to the Other arise.

Events and experiences that I believe fall into the category of Giroux refers to as identity trauma are present in the lives of all of the participants. Where for Michelle it consisted in part in the discovery of her grandmother’s Torres Strait Islander background, for Felicity it resided in her grandmother’s ‘Chineseness’. Serenity has had significant contact with the native Vanuatans, the Nivans, since her early teen years and Teresa has experienced racism by association. For Emma, having a bi-cultural son has provoked the identity shake-up that Giroux envisions as the measure of trauma.

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In all of the participants’ stories, there is clear evidence of such unsettling experiences, often but not always linked to an exposure of white privilege, leading to self-reflection. In all cases, these experiences have led to a more-developed sense of self, usually with a stronger understanding of the place of whiteness in their identities.

These experiences of identity trauma, again unlike the psycho-therapeutic sense of trauma, have not led to serious distress, breakdown and incapacitation. In these instances, it seems, this has been a largely positive experience, unsettling at times but positive from a reflexive point of view. None of the participants seems to have been psychologically scarred by the experiences they related, and in almost all cases, they seem to have thrived as a result of having travelled these paths.

This is not to deny the anger and discomfiture that at times accompanied the exposure of a comfortable, settled world to disruption, nor am I suggesting that the process through which these people went was untouched by anxiety, distress or uncertainty. What I am saying, however, is that the whole experience seems to have led to very positive outcomes in a very short time. There was no long recovery or rehabilitation period. There seems to have been a reasonably rapid incorporation of the provocative experience into each person’s view of self.

In a very obvious way, this whole phenomenon highlighted for me the malleable nature of identity and its formation. As such, the purpose of traumatising settled identities that Giroux foresees appears to follow. The opening of the individual’s identity to the possibility of reformulation, development and reconstruction through the experience of moments of bafflement and of the imperative to knead in seemingly discrepant aspects of self would seem to attend the process of identity trauma. Consequently, a reflective disposition needs to be nurtured and supported for the opportunity for the re-definition of self to proceed.

An important concomitant of the desired effects on identity achieved through this process of traumatising through bafflement seems to be that of a supportive environment within which to think and talk through the implications for the individual of the reconciliation of the existing and the traumatising shards of identity. In this study, each of the participants engaged much of the difficulty that attended the process in the company of and often through engagement and dialogue with trusted others: often family members but not exclusively (Teresa, for example, has a close-knit friendship / domestic circle with whom she discusses matters of identity). Regardless of the composition of this environment, the crucial point is the seeming necessity of working through bafflement in a semi-public way. Perhaps that is why the trauma Giroux describes and that I believe has occurred in the lives of the participants here has not led to the forms of psychological distress that typically attends the experience of trauma in other situations: the inclusion of others in the process may well short-circuit such detrimental

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possibilities and enable the articulation of commonly-held fears and uncertainties such that the experience becomes a social rather than a purely individual one. That is, there is a likelihood of the recognition of the social-structural nature of particular forms of identity that will diminish any sense of individual pathology here.

Perhaps the most obvious form of supportive environment experienced by each of the participants was the tutorial session associated with the Australian Indigenous Studies unit common to all of them. There is much to consider in the ways in which these sessions were conducted and the role of the tutor and the other members of each tutorial group in opening up spaces for, initially, the articulation of fears and concerns, the expression of feelings of guilt and outrage, and the investigation of the intersection of alternative histories and individual responses to these. While the actual conduct of the tutorial sessions has not been the focus of this study, the experience of these by the participants and their comments regarding this raises for me the importance of further investigation of the pedagogical approaches and processes that have been in action here.

The cumulative nature of the traumatising process as envisioned by Giroux seems to have occurred cumulatively rather than as a single ‘earth-shaking’ event. That is, in the experience of the participants, moments of bafflement seem to have been encountered over a number of years and in a number of contexts. The aggregate experience of these has led to the identity shake-up envisioned by Giroux as attending racial identity trauma. In the course of the conversations, the terms ‘identity shake’ and ‘identity tremor’ were used to tag these experiences that were provoked by discrepant perspectives or information and resulted in the worldview, the sense of self and the markers of identity that had previously anchored the participants in particular locations.

Specific experiences of being Othered, of seeing oneself against ‘normal’ constitute significant triggers to identity tremor. One common, powerful, experience present in all participants’ stories was that of being Othered, of being located on the margin of the Centre-Periphery (Self- Other) dichotomy. This Othering was usually but not always experienced in racial terms: Teresa’s experiences with intellectually disabled children and with being associated with indigenous Australians; Felicity’s strong association with Chinese culture and her defence of it in the face of anti-Asian comments from her boyfriend; Emma’s transgression of the Catholic Church’s dictates on premarital sex and of society’s broader miscegenation taboos and Serenity’s position of racial minority group member in Vanuatu are all examples of these experiences.

Being seen as Other, as being different from dominant social and cultural mores and models of ‘proper’ living seems to have heightened the participants’ awareness of the fact of existence of

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hegemonic forces and focussed their attention on what it means to deviate from a position of ‘normalcy’. In racial terms, this consciousness seems to have led in almost all cases to a more acute awareness of race as a significant characteristic separating sections of society while at the same time exposing them to the possibility of reconstructing race-based relationships. This seems to be a sound base from which to commence the consideration and potential reformulation of white racial identity.

A caveat must be issued here. In all of this, the experience of being other than ‘normal’, of inhabiting a space that serves to strengthen the self-assuredness of the Centre, each and every one of the participants potentially acts and operates as something of a racial thrill-seeker, touching the Profane and spending time in the theme park of the Exotic. At any time, each person could (almost literally) walk away from the Different and come Home, tired and self- satisfied after a walk on the wild side (Reed 1972). This is both the power and the problematic that envelops whiteness: it provides an opportunity for those who possess it to work to expose it but always with the safety net of being able to reclaim its protection and its privilege when necessary.

The importance of traumatic experiences is considerably enhanced when the initial reactions to them are interrogated or form the focus of deliberate reflection. It seems to be not sufficient to only experience an unsettling of identity. In order to move towards deeper levels of understanding, stronger commitment to re-formulating more positive white identities and enhanced senses of Self and Other, there is a need to engage in deliberate interrogation of those experiences and tremors. For most of the participants, including myself, this occurred as a function of the learning conversations, and demonstrated first-hand to me the power of dialogic forms of engagement with this type of material. That the participants were clearly aware of the racialised nature of their identities as we commenced the formal part of this study is evidence of their having worked through some of the types of issues, questions and emotions in prior experiences with difference and race, and, as mentioned above, this engagement has occurred with members of family and with friends. The common point is the need for a laying bare of the issues and a determination to deal with these. The most effective means to this end seems to be via a dialogic form of engagement.

The experiences of the participants in the Australian Indigenous Studies unit also point in this direction. For most, if not all, of them the most valuable part of the unit was the opportunity for tutorial session interrogation and discussion of the personal, often highly emotional, responses and reactions that attended the presentation of views, perspectives and accusations that upset largely settled, unproblematic understandings of race relations in this country.

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In all of this, the importance of attempting to unravel the threads and rejoin them in new ways within a supportive environment is impossible to understate. In the course of the learning conversations, the difficulty of grappling with some of the issues was apparent, and perhaps doesn’t clearly translate into a written transcript format. That the participants felt comfortable enough to explore some of the more-dimly-lit corners of their identity during these sessions perhaps attests to the importance of familiarity and comfort with their conversation partner. It certainly was the case for me, since it was only when it seemed to me that I was on a certain wavelength with each of the participants that I could divulge some of what I was thinking, both about myself and their stories. The spur to personal development and understanding that flowed from the type of dialogic engagement that occurred here was of the utmost importance to my own process of refining ideas and feelings about the question of white racial identity. It would seem from the richness of the dialogue captured and included as evidence of similar processes undergone by the other participants that they found it similarly invaluable.

Dialogic Forms of Engagement

Dialogic forms of engagement, particularly with regard to matters touching upon identity, have proven in this study to be particularly potent and productive. Here, the consciousness-raising effects of spending time talking and conversing about race and identity has yielded rich and complex notions of what it means to come to be a self-aware racialised individual in contemporary Australian society. This was not a one-way process. As we talked over a series of conversations, stories or events recounted earlier would be re-visited and re-analysed in a more sophisticated manner. Sometimes I would raise these earlier-recalled events, sometimes the other participant would.

Unlike the more typical research interview where information flows are largely uni-directional and the interrogatory similarly moving one-way, the conversational nature of the dialogic learning conversations engaged in here meant that a sense of inquiry and conjecture rather than interrogation pervaded the research sessions. It is highly likely that this feature encouraged a sense of comfort and confidence in all of the participants early in the life of the study such that personal, sensitive issues might be broached with greater ease and depth of detail and analysis than might otherwise have been the case.

The importance of conversational engagement in dealing with moments of bafflement in an identity sense was also reflected in the participants’ recollections of the value of the approach taken in the Australian Indigenous Studies unit tutorial sessions. In fact, the structure of that unit perhaps provides something of a microcosmic model of the bafflement-trauma-identity reconstruction process through which the participants seem to have gone in the course of their

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lives. In the Australian Indigenous Studies unit, baffling and at times highly confrontational material was presented by powerful Others (something in itself not frequently experienced by many Whites, I suspect) in the course of the lecture program. This material frequently caused affront and trauma in Giroux’s sense of the word. It was then the dialogic nature of the following tutorial sessions with indigenous Australians that allowed for the anger, guilt and remorse and other emotions to be talked through such that a re-consideration of self might occur for the participants here at least. Perhaps the oral nature of Australian Indigenous cultures (inadvertently ?) presented a way for the participants to work through the trauma. Regardless, it would seem crucial that conversation as a pedagogical strategy be developed in this type of work.

In the experience of this research study, it is apparent that the participants came to understand more about themselves as a result of the inquiry process itself. This applies at least as much to my own situation as to any of the other participants. Throughout the course of the conversation sessions, I wrote notes to myself about memories of my own experiences with the matters being raised by the other participant. One of the effects of engaging dialogically with the others in this study was to decentre the power/control focus. While I was more often the question asker and the others the story tellers, these roles were by no means fixed, and the transcripts show lengthy segments where I am telling stories of my own, sometimes in response to questions from the other participant. This was initially unnerving for me, having been well-schooled in the idea of the research interview as a forum for the elicitation of the interviewee’s ideas and within which the aim of the interviewer was to take up as little of the talking time as possible. Anything else was seen as jeopardising the integrity of the interview through the interviewer leading the interviewee to certain ideas and conclusions.

In this study, overcoming the concern that I was much too present in the conversations was difficult to achieve. It was only as I started to relate my own thoughts and (long-forgotten) stories to those of the other participants and finding that they fed off those stories in digging deeper into their own biographies that the value of assuming a visibility, a presence in the interaction became apparent to me.

This type of engagement is not without its problems and potential pitfalls. Possibly the most significant of these is that unless the researcher/participant clearly has a personal interest and involvement in the topic at hand, the power of the learning conversation is at risk of evaporating. I would find it very difficult to engage in this type of methodology in a ‘hired- hand’ type study, where the evidence- or data-gathering is conducted by research assistants or otherwise by at-arms-length researchers. It seems to me that there must a demonstrated personal investment in the outcomes of the study for the requisite climate and relationships of honesty and openness to develop. It seems to me that a participant is less likely to dig deeply

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into her or his life and expose aspects of self when the researcher/participant is not similarly sharing of her or his experiences.

The utilisation of this type of methodology also assuaged early concerns of mine about the trustworthiness of the evidence or data that would flow from the interactions with the participants. I am much more confident that the participants have provided trustworthy information than I might have been in a more typical research interview situation. While I didn’t ever really consider that the participants would lie to me, I was concerned that they might not share all that they thought and knew, and that they would tend to filter their contributions through a gauze of what they assumed I was seeking. I still cannot deny this possibility, even at this stage of the study, but I am very confident that, having shared stories and experiences from our lives that what I have collected here is as close to accurate recollections - a truth, perhaps - as the human mind is capable of achieving.

Lessons about identity: what the stories hold for emancipatory pedagogy

in teacher education

Perhaps the most important aspect of this study that I can address in this concluding section is what I take from these conversations that seems to offer hope and possibility for my own work as a teacher educator. What I have come to see as crucial steps, stages and experiences in the development of white racial awareness on the part of each of the participants offer points of possibility for a re-constructed pedagogy of teacher development for anti-racist educative work. If, as I believe, the first step in dismantling the oppressive facet of whiteness lies in seeing oneself as White, as having a racial identity as opposed to being non-raced, then the stories of the participants in this study are full of important examples and ideas of how this process of self-knowing might be stimulated or provoked.

Manifesting in a highly concrete way Reynold’s point of the burden of knowing raising the much more awkward question of what it is we are now to do (Reynolds 1999, p 257), such racial self-awareness potentially leads on to the next step of re-constructing this element of identity so as to move to a space - the Third Space in Bhabha’s conceptualisation (Bhabha 1990) - that exists outside of the dualism of Centre-Margin relationships. While my early hopes for this project were that I might come to understand something more of this second stage in the development of positive white identity, those hopes have not been fulfilled at this point. What I have come to see is that the nature of identity is so complex and dense and that the notion of whiteness as an ethnic or cultural category is so novel for the majority of Whites that none of the participants seem to have yet emerged from the relationships of Otherness constituted through the binary oppositions of the Manichean duality of race.

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Initially, I was disappointed at not being able to effectively draw upon the stories of those involved in this study in order to throw some light on what such positive alternative white identities might look like. This seemed to mark the study as falling short of my original intentions. However, when I began reading and re-reading the conversation transcripts and listening and re-listening to tapes of conversations and working through other forms of evidence that I had collected in the course of the inquiry process, I realised that there was much of significance to me in these stories. My hope - and belief - is that there is also much of interest and value to others who, similarly to me, see their work in education as offering a way to contribute to the construction of a more just society.

Accordingly, with the caution of a position that can at best claim partial certainty of knowing, I believe that there are a number of lessons to be drawn from and points to be made of the experience I have had of engaging with the topic of white racial identity with the other participants in this project. In essence, what I can conclude from my work in this project is that the racial dimension to identity needs to be talked about and seen as a ubiquitous aspect of personality, and that this needs to be engaged in by Whites as much as by any other group. In more detail, what I believe I can conclude about race and identity, particularly white identity, is that:

1. There is a need to articulate the racial dimensions of everyday life, curriculum and pedagogy, especially from the perspective of whiteness.

Essentially, when working with pre-service teachers who are almost exclusively white, there is a need to bring race matters to the fore. By this, I mean that the invisibility of race in the daily lives of white students needs to be exposed and foregrounded so that what has been seen as universally-human, natural, and commonsensical might more easily be seen as the product of sectional interests and culturally-specific epistemologies, assumptions and filters. In order to feel more aware of and comfortable with the racial dimension to their lives, pre-service teachers need to experience discussions about race matters as ‘normal’ and as including them more often as the prime point of focus.

At present, discussions of race in teacher education programs are limited to units specifically devoted to studies of the Other. In the particular case of the university at which this study was conducted, race is almost exclusively contained within the Australian Indigenous Studies unit. With occasional references in a small number of other units - social education and language and literacy units particularly - race is packaged as that which requires a study of the exotic rather than as a feature of teacher identity that needs to be interrogated as much as any other factor of the professional persona. Matters of race, that is, are seen as touching on specific,

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discrete areas of the teacher education curriculum and such topics are therefore contained in segments of study devoted to the Other. Race is not seen as a persisting factor or feature of the lives of all people, and consequently does not present or is engaged as a dimension to all aspects of the teacher education curriculum.

Once the nature of, for example, teaching and learning and the construction of curriculum are understood to be racially- or culturally-based, the space for exposing the link between whiteness and school success opens up. This should then admit of the possibility - and the imperative - of the development of forms of pedagogy and curriculum that more genuinely fall into the precincts of the social transformative ends of critical pedagogy .

2. Notions of difference and how it is constructed should be central to the teacher education process and a vital plank in teacher education pedagogy.

Difference should a central organising concept of teacher education programs and requires the exposure and dismantling of the invisible norms from which much current teacher education activity derives. In coming to understand particularity and the chauvinism of the Centre, teacher education students should come to understand the politics of sectionalism and selection in matters such as curriculum, pedagogy and indicators of success in the schooling and broader educational settings. A concomitant to this focus on difference is the imperative of coming to know self as occupying but one place amongst many, not, if one is White, to transcend particularity and to inhabit the universal.

3. Dialogic forms of engagement, particularly with regard to identity, are essential.

It is crucial to the success of a reconstructed pedagogy in teacher education to utilise forms of dialogic engagement as a major teaching approach. There would seem to be much in the conscientization work of Paulo Freire that is relevant here.

4. White pre-service teachers need to spend time in situations where they are and come to recognise themselves as minority group members.

In coming to know something of self, particularly when that self admits of a White racial dimension, the experience of being Othered in some way needs to be lived through. In suggesting this, I am not limiting this to the ‘Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes’ type experiences whereby arbitrary indicators of discrimination - for example, blue eyes - are selected as markers of Difference and disadvantage for short-term experiential and de-briefing sessions. These types of activities and experiences are likely to provide some form of safety for the initial explorations of identity and difference, but to come to more fully understand what these concepts involve

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and mean for the individual requires immersion in situations where genuine Otherness might be lived. That is, teacher education students need to be involved in situations where they live (and work?) in situations where they are clearly constructed as minority group members. This might, for example, involve periods of time in countries and cultures other than their own. In might happen through extended practicum experiences within cultural settings different from theirs.

It seems that encounters with difference teamed with dialogic engagement in the interrogation of these experiences may well provide the strongest possibility for the development of a teaching force genuinely committed to socially-just outcomes from their professional and personal activities.

Concluding personal thoughts (a work-always-in-progress)

Having been involved with the other participants in a process of recovery of personal stories and a consideration of what importance resides within these, I have come to understand something further of my own development in this way as well as my own involvement in the replication of forms of whiteness that might not be as desirable as I might have once thought.

Born in the mid-1950’s and growing up during the 1960’s and 1970’s, much of my own early experience with matters of race came from forms of popular culture, in particular the emerging musical press. Television, which was introduced into Australia in 1959, was perhaps exclusively white territory. This was the time of Annette Funicello and the Mickey Mouse Club. If there was a non-white member of this group, he or she failed to register in my memories. I certainly don’t recall much evidence of racial Otherness in the early days of television in this country except for the inevitable badness and treachery of the Native American (even Tonto’s loyalty to the ways of the white man was just a little tenuous). One particularly enduring memory is of a Sunday evening program from the mid-sixties where white Australian performers openly lip-synced current Top 40 hits. In the era long before the videoclip, any real idea of who or what a performer looked like was effectively masked by the appropriation of their voice and their musical artistry and its repackaging through white bodies and forms of movement. In ways eerily similar to the performances of psychic mediums over centuries, white bodies were the conduits for sounds from the Other side to cross over . A

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program populated with a number of 18 to twenty-something year old Doris Stokeses∗ channeling music from racially Others.

As pop music came to assume a more visible presence in and effect on youth culture, the music press grew in importance as well. In Australia, the weekly newspaper-form Go-set! was perhaps the most significant, but there were other music newspapers and magazines of note imported into Australia at this time as well: Rolling Stone and NME (the New Musical Express) carried music news and criticism and associated youth cultural items from the United States of American and United Kingdom respectively. While I’m sure now that there would have been considerable whiting-out of many of the racial, sexual and drug-related aspects of the 1960’s and 1970’s music scene, these publications, carrying almost as much photographic as they did textual material, were not able to mask the racial aspects as early music television had done. It was from these newspapers and magazines that I recall becoming aware of ‘black music’ and the blues. What is intriguing to me now is the realisation that the very naming process at work here was carving out the normal from the different for a whole generation of Australian youth in ways unchanged to date. There was no ‘white’ music. There was only music that wasn’t white and that thereby needed naming.

With hindsight, again, that music which was not white and which could not be erased was vilified, censored and derided - until white musicians could effectively appropriate and sanitise its various forms and elements. The tactic of pathologising that which is not white has been utilised in popular music over the course of most of my life. From the moral outrage accompanying the spread of early rock and roll - derived almost entirely from African- American roots - through to the nationalistic opposition to the anger of seventies and early eighties black US music (Sly and the Family Stone, Gil Scott-Heron and Marvin Gaye, as examples) to the demonising of rap and its various derivatives (especially gangsta rap) in the eighties and nineties, non-white music has been constructed as a threat to social stability, moral righteousness and rational, peaceful means of civic engagement. Until the Elvis Presleys and the Jerry Lee Lewisses and groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Animals could take much (although by no means all) of the edge of Otherness off these musical forms. Perhaps the most useful example of this is the white rapper, the very aptly-named Vanilla Ice who took the musical elements of the rap genre and the name of one of the arch-villains of the rap scene at the time, Ice Cube, and whitened both.

∗ Doris Stokes is a British woman who claims to be able to channel the voices of dead people to live audiences. She regularly toured Australia, appearing on talkshows and in concert-type venues demonstrating her psychic powers 224

Experiences and cultural contexts of these types pervaded my own journey to self- and particularly racial awareness, a journey that has followed many of the same paths as the other participants in this study: periods of time living in culturally- and racially-Other environments, extensive and on-going contact with Indigenous Australians and their daily struggles with racism, my daughter’s physical Difference, and participation in the Indigenous Studies Unit for six years.

But in the process of discovering that I share these types of experiences with the others in this study, I have come to see whiteness as a far more complex form of discipline (in a Foucaultian sense of the word) and as a more tenacious bulldog of control: once its teeth are embedded, it is almost impossible to disengage from its grip against its will. The ways in which whiteness pervades the concrete practices of daily life have become much more apparent to me, partly as a result of talking with and listening the participants in this study, partly because of the serendipity of coming to know and work with people gestating similar ideas about social justice and disadvantage and partly as the outcome of what some might term a ‘mid-life crisis’: a time of often intense self-reflection and contemplation. This last contributing factor constitutes my own set of ‘moments of bafflement’ and identity tremors, and I can appreciate firsthand the discomfort, anxiety and other emotions that accompany the encounter with these that the others have had.

I look at the university at which I spend large chunks of my life and see the valorising of Whiteness and the proscription of Otherness proceeding with little corporate or communal awareness that this is happening, all under the mantle of a ‘Multicultural Campus’ slogan. At the same time as the university is recognised for its multicultural initiatives by the conferring of a prestigious State award, English is the only language apparent in written form around the campus. While a row of twenty-odd flagpoles, each carrying the symbol of various nationalities represented in the student body on-campus, lines the central quadrangle, other cultural aspects of the nationalities behind the flags are marginalised, both figuratively and physically. As cars in the parking areas display the ‘USQ: a multicultural campus’ bumper stickers, many of the ‘multicultural’ spaces are constructed as dangerous territory: the Muslim Prayer Room is housed in what presents as a wire-enclosed underground bunker While pre- service teachers in the Faculty of Education are being prepared to teach increasingly diverse groups of children, the faculty itself suppresses any image of such diversity: the walls of the faculty building are covered with images that maintain the fiction that teaching is white business. Sometimes seeing things in this way is a curse: it is easy to be overwhelmed by the obviousness of it all as well as by the immensity of the task of genuine multicultural reconstruction. This is the place of whiteness studies and for the crucial identity developmental work that accompanies and provokes them.

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The experience of participating in this study has led me to not only understand more about the substantive topic, but also about various dimensions of my own identity. As a teacher educator, I have come to appreciate the value of the spaces, the gaps in what I know and of the importance of O/others in helping to fill out those spaces. While over many years I have found great inspiration and encouragement in the ideas and exhortations of Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux about transformative teaching, the nature of intellectual practice and the teacher-learner divide, it has been through my engagement with the other participants here that I have come more clearly understand the implications of this for my own practice. I have been able to present and discuss the theoretical and philosophical, even the political dimensions to all of these topics in the past, but in this study it feels like I have actually experienced the power of dialogue and conscientisation, of learning from and with the learner-teacher.

I have also come to realise the importance of narratives, of stories in the excavation of identity and to see the role such ‘talking cures’ (Edgerton 1996, p 75) have in my own processes of self- awareness. While I still acknowledge the possibility resident within Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘the subject can never grasp its own act of grasping’ (Taylor 1987, p. 204) and the poststructuralist position that, because of the absence of an unitary self, it is impossible for the Self to know itself (Edgerton 1996, p 45), it seems to me that the narrative construction and storytelling - whether private or public - is at least crucial to any attempt to come to even- partially understand oneself. The pedagogical power of dialectial/dialogical paths to such self- knowledge has become clearly apparent to me: stories are, indeed, ‘survival material’ (Edgerton 1996, p. 75).

Further, in the process of the storytelling I came to admire the courage of the participants in exposing parts of their lives, their personal spaces and their thoughts. In many ways, this was a potentially dangerous activity for them, and their concern to help in the pursuit of the aims of this study was obvious and welcomed with gratitude. All of them were aware of my multiple purposes or hopes involved here: to come to understand in order to contribute to stronger social justice orientations and outcomes in my own teaching as well as in the pre-service teacher with whom I work; to add to the growing understanding of and theorising about whiteness, particularly in an Australian context; and the completion of a Ph.D. These were initially my goals, my hopes, but with the likely exception of the last of these, to a certain extent they became the goals of the others as well. Perhaps this is another reason why the participants returned to stories and further picked them over, hoping to retrieve the specks of paydirt missed in the initial working of the veins of life history.

What made the research process that much more engaging, though, is that most of the other participants came to see something intrinsically in the project for themselves. As well as

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working towards realising the hopes I had for the study, these people also seemed to find something deeply personal coming out of the work for themselves. Whether it was the fact that someone was interested in their life paths, in their views and ideas or that there was a certain sense of recognition of themselves and their stories as significant attaching to their involvement in the project is difficult to determine. The point for me is that the participants seemed to find value in the processes. When we came across each other around campus - in one instance, in a local supermarket checkout line - they would ask how the work was proceeding and when our next session would be. I also cannot discount the likelihood - probability in fact - that such processes of retrieving, constructing and reflecting on one’s life path is an inherently healthy and health-giving activity. That is, in the course of the involvement with a particular methodology, a psychic reconsideration and affirmation of life choices might have occurred which in and of itself contains an intrinsic attraction. Regardless, most of the other participants seemed to need to complete this project almost as much as I did.

I have developed a greater sense of optimism and purpose as a result of this study. The act of engaging with the participants here has allowed me to take up a position of ‘making hope realisable and despair unconvincing’ (Giroux 1988b, p. 109). This has come about because it has enabled me to find a next step, a focus for further activity in my personal/professional practices: identity work with pre-service teachers presents as a concrete avenue to socially transformative pedagogies. Concomitantly, the ways in which the participants view themselves and their purpose as teachers has reinvigorated a flagging sense of optimism and personal efficacy on my part that genuinely socially-just outcomes can be achieved through educative means.

It also seems to me that seemingly small, one-off events almost such as the type of experiences had through the Australian Indigenous Studies unit here can lead to much broader applications and effects. It is not necessary to re-work whole programs of teacher education, in this instance, to achieve the type of critical self-reflection that socially transformative teaching requires. In the past, I had been concerned - exasperated perhaps - at what seemed the impossible task of working with a small minority of like-minded colleagues to re-invigorate our teacher education offerings and to imbue them with a sense of social justice. I had hoped that what we individually and collectively were doing in our own areas of specialisation within these offerings was at least contributing something to this goal, but the stories about and the reflection on the experiences of the participants with the Indigenous Studies unit has led me to feel more optimistic about these smaller-scale endeavours. It seems that these people have transferred their race-based understandings of self and others into broader pedagogical philosophies. This is both heartening and relieving.

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I have to come to truly see myself as a white male, not in any guilt-ridden or shameful way, but almost as a matter-of-fact. But this also allows me to see my relationships with those who do not share my identity locations in new ways. Thus far, this has been a humbling experience insofar as my own (often unconscious) position of primacy and privilege, my ‘rightness’, has less epistemic legitimacy. For an academic, this has not been an easy position to move away from.

Finally, I think I have come to welcome and need others in maintaining a sense of personal identity. Once, I would have proudly thought of and proclaimed myself to be a tolerant person. Now this position cannot sit beside my understandings of identity, whiteness and Third Spaces. The challenge for me is to maintain the breath, the buzz that comes from permeating the membrane separating myself from others on a daily basis.

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References

Note: a number of the journal references in this list have been accessed by way of electronic databases which allow for the downloading of full text versions of the articles concerned. The nature of this facility, however, means that page references in in-text citations are approximate and not necessarily precise.

Adams, M., Bell, L. A. & Griffin, P. (eds.) 1997, Teaching for Social Justice and Diversity: A Sourcebook, Routledge, New York.

Adams, P. 1999, 'Racist Waves for Net Surfers', In The Weekend Australian, pp. Review 32.

Agard, J. 1983, I Din Do Nuttin and Other Poems, Methuen Children's Books, London.

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Appendix 1:Australian Indigenous Studies (Unit 80146) Unit Specification

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Appendix 2: Principles of Procedure

Principles of Procedure

The following principles will guide the conduct of the project.

A. INDEPENDENCE

1. No participant in the project will have privileged access to the data. 2. No participant will have a unilateral right of power of veto over the content of the final report.

B. DISINTEREST

1. The investigator will attempt to represent, as widely as possible, the range of viewpoints encountered in the investigation.

C. RESEARCHER PERSPECTIVES

1. The researcher in and of himself is part of the study, and will make clear his own background,views, perspectives and other inputs.

D. NEGOTIATED ACCESS

1. The investigation will seek only reasonable access to relevant data / evidence sources. 2. The investigator will assume he can freely approach any participant to collect data. 3. All discussions will be treated as privileged and confidential by the investigator. 4. The investigator will portray the investigation and the issues its raises, but the release of specific information likely to identify informants will be subject to negotiation with those informants.

E. NEGOTIATION OF BOUNDARIES

1. The investigation will be issues-oriented.

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2. The principles for inclusion of perspectives, concerns or information in the study or its reports are that these contribute to understanding the project. Therefore, the perspectives of all participants have a right to be considered. 3. The principles for exclusion of concerns, perspectives or information is that they can be shown to be false or unfounded, irrelevant to the investigation, or to unfairly disadvantage individuals or groups involved in the investigation.

F. NEGOTIATION OF ACCOUNTS

1. The criteria of fairness, accuracy and relevance form the basis for negotiation between investigator and participants. 2. Where accounts can be shown to be unfair, irrelevant or inaccurate, the report will be amended. 3. Once draft reports have been negotiated with participants on the basis of these criteria, they will be regarded as having the endorsement of those involved in the negotiations. 4. Parts of a report may first be negotiated with relevant individuals who could be disadvantaged if the report were negotiated as a whole with all participants.

F. NEGOTIATION OF RELEASE

1. There will be no secret reporting. 2. Reports will be made available first to those whose work they represent. 3. The release of reports for circulation beyond the community of interests formed by members of the primary audience and the investigators is a matter of negotiation and decision within this community of interests.

G. PUBLICATION

1. Reports will be released for wider circulation only in the form established by the procedure of negotiation of accounts; that is, they must be endorsed by the members of the primary and other audiences as fair, accurate and relevant. Any published report must first of all meet this criterion. 2. The investigator reserves the right to disavow any incomplete or summary version of the report which purports to be a report of this investigation. 3. Any report to be published should have been produced according to these principles of procedure.

H. CONFIDENTIALITY

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1. The investigator will not investigate files, correspondence or other documentation without explicit authorization and will not copy from those sources without permission. 2. Interviews, meetings, and written exchanges will not be considered “off-the-record”, but those involved are free, both before and after, to restrict aspects or parts of such exchanges, or to correct or improve their statement. 3. Where any information is used in such a way as to identify its source, such information will be used in reports only with the authorization of the informant. Where information is general or where the sources are sufficiently obscured so as to defy identification of specific individuals, no clearance will be sought. 4. The investigator is responsible for the confidentiality of the data collected by him in the course of the investigation. 5. These confidentiality rules and principles cannot be used to withdraw reports from general view: once fair, relevant and accurate accounts have been released and when they are presented in ways which do not unnecessarily expose or embarrass participants, such reports should no longer be sheltered by the prohibitions of confidentiality

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Appendix 3: Category Definitions

Q.S.R. NUD*IST Power version, revision 4.0. Licensee: Jon Austin.

PROJECT: ph d NUDIST, User Jon Austin, 1:22 pm, Jul 23, 2000.

********************************************************************** ********** (1) /Participant *** No Definition This node codes 0 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1) /Participant/Teresa *** Any comment made by Teresa This node codes 1 document. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 1) /Participant/Teresa/Biography *** Definition: life history, experiences, movement This node codes 3 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 1 1) /Participant/Teresa/Biography/family history *** Definition: information about family genealogy This node codes 4 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 2) /Participant/Teresa/Teaching *** Definition: motivations for entering teaching, experiences in schools, practicum; philosophy. This node codes 1 document. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 2 1) /Participant/Teresa/Teaching/university life *** Definition: aspects of usq experiences This node codes 5 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 2 1 1) /Participant/Teresa/Teaching/university life/80146 *** Definition: comments relating to 80146 This node codes 4 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 2 2) /Participant/Teresa/Teaching/views of teaching and teacher *** Definition: philosophy of teaching, views of teacher

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This node codes 3 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 3) /Participant/Teresa/Race *** Definition: experiences with racial others; racism; worries, etc. This node codes 2 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 3 1) /Participant/Teresa/Race/whiteness *** Definition: aspects attaching to being white This node codes 4 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 3 2) /Participant/Teresa/Race/non-white race matters *** Definition: aspects of race other than whiteness; indigenous matters This node codes 5 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 4) /Participant/Teresa/difference *** Definition: aspects of difference generally, and non-racial. This node codes 4 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 5) /Participant/Teresa/identity *** Definition: how participant sees self and identifies with and in contradistinction to others This node codes 5 documents. ********************************************************************** ********** (1 1 6) /Participant/Teresa/influences *** Definition: things that have influenced the way the participant sees life This node codes 2 documents.

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Appendix 4: Category List

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