What do you think?
Rate this book
Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State
Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.
Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state.
To see whiteness as learned is to recognize that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.
Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state.
To see whiteness as learned is to recognize that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published May 20, 2022
3 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 3, 2023
A brief, decent read on the specific and ongoing practices of colonial violence and racial injustice that forge and sustain systems of white domination
The book focuses on learning whiteness, defined as the structural formations of racial domination tied to European colonialism, which continue to be reinscribed across all aspects of social life, within Australia, although touches upon the workings of British settler colonialism as a globally enduring project
One highlight was the discussion of the logic of the white possessive that legitimises claims to enclose and appropriate "public" infrastructure for private gain, but in naming stolen land as "public", and obscures ongoing means of expropriation
This requires better accounting of the violence of "public" claims to knowledge, land and people and how these "public institutions" reinforce racial divisions even as they claim to broaden access to education
How this operates within the system of racial capitalism that requires dehumanisation since "capitalism cannot function if we are all allowed to become fully human", since the accumulation of wealth for some requires the exploitation of life for others
Arguably ideas of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and futures beyond whiteness incite backlash and fear because it is assumed such futures will invert racial domination rather than destroy it, thus it follows that the most important lesson for unlearning whiteness is that a future divested from racial domination is not a foreclosed future; but one open to the fullness of human dignity, flourishing and possibility
The book focuses on learning whiteness, defined as the structural formations of racial domination tied to European colonialism, which continue to be reinscribed across all aspects of social life, within Australia, although touches upon the workings of British settler colonialism as a globally enduring project
One highlight was the discussion of the logic of the white possessive that legitimises claims to enclose and appropriate "public" infrastructure for private gain, but in naming stolen land as "public", and obscures ongoing means of expropriation
This requires better accounting of the violence of "public" claims to knowledge, land and people and how these "public institutions" reinforce racial divisions even as they claim to broaden access to education
How this operates within the system of racial capitalism that requires dehumanisation since "capitalism cannot function if we are all allowed to become fully human", since the accumulation of wealth for some requires the exploitation of life for others
Arguably ideas of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and futures beyond whiteness incite backlash and fear because it is assumed such futures will invert racial domination rather than destroy it, thus it follows that the most important lesson for unlearning whiteness is that a future divested from racial domination is not a foreclosed future; but one open to the fullness of human dignity, flourishing and possibility
Displaying 1 of 1 review