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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, Paperback
Published May 20, 2022
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July 22, 2022
It is increasingly accepted that settler colonialism is not, in Patrick Wolfe’s words, an event but a structure, and while we’re getting better at identifying the ways that structure is formed and operates in distinct ways in various settler colonial contexts one of the more interesting questions is how it reproduces itself. Drawing on evidence from one settler state, Australia, this impressive and essential analysis unpacks key aspects of that question: how in settler states do we learn whiteness.
Taking an expansive view of education to incorporate both the institutions we usually associate with it – schools and so forth – as well as wider public discourses, Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard explore this process of (re)production as material, ideological and emotional practice. A key component of the analysis is the idea that education is concurrently a site of violence and of hope – that is of the destruction and exclusion of some ways of knowing in favour of those ways legitimated by dominant systems of power, while at the same time asserting notions such a critical analysis suggesting ways of effecting change. This conjoining of violence and hope points to the complexities and the contradictory character of their vision education – all framed and constrained by a vision of pedagogies of the state as, in their words, a “continual project of defending and relaying the racist state” (p25). As a result, woven through the analysis is a view of settler colonialism as sustained by the accumulation and expansion of whiteness.
This is an evidence rich, theoretically sophisticated analysis that merits multiple visits. It weaves together the materialities of education – of dispossession and exclusion, of divisions of labour and of the extraction of value from both labour and place – as the basis of learning whiteness, invoking notions of white possession advanced by scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (her work is an important influence in this discussion). This question of the materiality of education in settler colonial states is vital and often overlooked, but it also reminds us that unsettling the settler state is as much as disruption of occupation and claims to possession as anything else.
The other components of the analysis may be more recognisable where they explore the ways that forms of knowledge are (re)produced. This is more common aspect of discussions of the politics and sociologies of education where for upwards of 50 years critical scholars of schooling have looked at the ways particular ideologies and ways of knowing are reproduced and legitimated. The key shift in this section of the analysis is to look not just at the legitimation of the ideas of the powerful – those that enhance and validate whiteness – but also at how that sustains what they call white ignorance which they link to the active process of forgetting, of forgetfulness both of other ways of knowing but also of the acts involved in state building. Here, although they don’t invoke it, it is almost as if Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard are invoking a version of Ernest Renan’s 1882 argument that nations rely as much on forgetting as they do memory to make themselves: this is not to undermine the power of their insight (adapted from Charles Mills) but not note that in making this case in respect of whiteness in education they are pointing to a deep element of state building and justification.
The third step brings to the fore how these materialities and epistemologies retain their power through emotion and feeling. Invoking the ways that notions of home and homeliness associated with place (and nation) suggest places of comfort and safety, Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard explore that dialectic of the image of the ‘happy benevolent state’ on the one hand – the inclusive, welcoming place of fun and enjoyment that is Australia’s image of itself (it’s not an image that is unique to settler Australia) – and the ‘wounded fragile state’ on the other. This is image of the state that brooks no criticism, of the ‘if you don’t like it here, go back to where you came from’ response. These two dynamics they show as building a powerful affective relation with the settler state.
It is the weaving together of materialities, ideologies and feelings that makes this analysis so compelling, along with the refusal to suggest a programme of action, other than being clear that the responsibility of education is “to create and hold open spaces for grappling with injustices…; to cultivate relations of collective solidarity; to … [reckon] with the past, present and futures of whiteness; and … to do so without expecting redemption or prefiguring reconciliation” (pp 86-7). This is a big ask, given the widespread attachments to notions of reconciliation in settler colonies and the depth of the liberal attachment to education as mechanism for change. As big an ask as it is, it’s also a call for the kind of openness we need as educators and as social beings to better unlearn white ignorance.
It’s a short book but it packs a lot in, builds a compelling analysis and argument, accentuates the importance of uncertainty and openness in pedagogy and political practice, and highlights the interrelated character of the systemic production of settler colonial power, of whiteness and its imbrication to racial capitalism. What’s more, it may be Australia focused in its evidence, but in my reading I kept asking myself how the analysis translated to other settler states I know and the model is compelling for places such as New Zealand and Canada.
This is an essential contribution to a growing body of literature and practice engaging and resisting the power of settler colonialism – and highly recommended
Taking an expansive view of education to incorporate both the institutions we usually associate with it – schools and so forth – as well as wider public discourses, Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard explore this process of (re)production as material, ideological and emotional practice. A key component of the analysis is the idea that education is concurrently a site of violence and of hope – that is of the destruction and exclusion of some ways of knowing in favour of those ways legitimated by dominant systems of power, while at the same time asserting notions such a critical analysis suggesting ways of effecting change. This conjoining of violence and hope points to the complexities and the contradictory character of their vision education – all framed and constrained by a vision of pedagogies of the state as, in their words, a “continual project of defending and relaying the racist state” (p25). As a result, woven through the analysis is a view of settler colonialism as sustained by the accumulation and expansion of whiteness.
This is an evidence rich, theoretically sophisticated analysis that merits multiple visits. It weaves together the materialities of education – of dispossession and exclusion, of divisions of labour and of the extraction of value from both labour and place – as the basis of learning whiteness, invoking notions of white possession advanced by scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (her work is an important influence in this discussion). This question of the materiality of education in settler colonial states is vital and often overlooked, but it also reminds us that unsettling the settler state is as much as disruption of occupation and claims to possession as anything else.
The other components of the analysis may be more recognisable where they explore the ways that forms of knowledge are (re)produced. This is more common aspect of discussions of the politics and sociologies of education where for upwards of 50 years critical scholars of schooling have looked at the ways particular ideologies and ways of knowing are reproduced and legitimated. The key shift in this section of the analysis is to look not just at the legitimation of the ideas of the powerful – those that enhance and validate whiteness – but also at how that sustains what they call white ignorance which they link to the active process of forgetting, of forgetfulness both of other ways of knowing but also of the acts involved in state building. Here, although they don’t invoke it, it is almost as if Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard are invoking a version of Ernest Renan’s 1882 argument that nations rely as much on forgetting as they do memory to make themselves: this is not to undermine the power of their insight (adapted from Charles Mills) but not note that in making this case in respect of whiteness in education they are pointing to a deep element of state building and justification.
The third step brings to the fore how these materialities and epistemologies retain their power through emotion and feeling. Invoking the ways that notions of home and homeliness associated with place (and nation) suggest places of comfort and safety, Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard explore that dialectic of the image of the ‘happy benevolent state’ on the one hand – the inclusive, welcoming place of fun and enjoyment that is Australia’s image of itself (it’s not an image that is unique to settler Australia) – and the ‘wounded fragile state’ on the other. This is image of the state that brooks no criticism, of the ‘if you don’t like it here, go back to where you came from’ response. These two dynamics they show as building a powerful affective relation with the settler state.
It is the weaving together of materialities, ideologies and feelings that makes this analysis so compelling, along with the refusal to suggest a programme of action, other than being clear that the responsibility of education is “to create and hold open spaces for grappling with injustices…; to cultivate relations of collective solidarity; to … [reckon] with the past, present and futures of whiteness; and … to do so without expecting redemption or prefiguring reconciliation” (pp 86-7). This is a big ask, given the widespread attachments to notions of reconciliation in settler colonies and the depth of the liberal attachment to education as mechanism for change. As big an ask as it is, it’s also a call for the kind of openness we need as educators and as social beings to better unlearn white ignorance.
It’s a short book but it packs a lot in, builds a compelling analysis and argument, accentuates the importance of uncertainty and openness in pedagogy and political practice, and highlights the interrelated character of the systemic production of settler colonial power, of whiteness and its imbrication to racial capitalism. What’s more, it may be Australia focused in its evidence, but in my reading I kept asking myself how the analysis translated to other settler states I know and the model is compelling for places such as New Zealand and Canada.
This is an essential contribution to a growing body of literature and practice engaging and resisting the power of settler colonialism – and highly recommended
August 18, 2022
Thoughtful and thought provoking text - highly recommend
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews