Stereotyping the Shire: Assigning White Privilege to Place and Identity

ABSTRACT

Through a focus on the media’s role in constructing and maintaining stereotypes of white privilege and racism, this paper investigates the stereotyping of the Sutherland Shire, Sydney, Australia, and its residents. Print media plays a significant role in constructing social identities, shaping public opinion and typecasting public perception. Using a media content analysis and surveys with residents and non-residents of the Sutherland Shire we (de)construct the area’s positioning in media discourse as white, insular and privileged. Pivotal to this investigation was the 2005 Cronulla riots and their influence on assertions of white privilege and racism, in the media and by non-Sutherland Shire residents. While not vindicating some resident’s roles in the riots, we reason that such typecasting provides an avenue for the predominately white media, and white Sydney to deflect responsibility for their own whiteness by attributing and spatializing racist sentiment to elsewhere in Sydney.

KEYWORDS:

• White privilege
• whiteness
• racism
• race riots
• Cronulla riots
• media representation
• place

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Christine Norquay, Jessica Baldwin, Jacqueline Howard, Rachel Schmid, Colleen Olmstead and Evan Olmstead for giving up their time to assist with our surveys.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Melinda Norquay is a University of New South Wales (Australia) graduate who completed a combined Bachelor of Law (Hons)/Science (Hons) degree, majoring in human geography. Her honours thesis explored media representation of place and identity, within the theme of whiteness.

Danielle Drozdzewski is a human geographer and senior lecturer at UNSW Australia. Her research focuses on cultural memories and the interlinkages of these with identity and place. She is interested in how memory is encountered in public spheres through monuments and public discourse, as well as in private spaces, between and within generations of families, in homes and with migrants in diaspora. Her research has looked at the outcomes of these encounters for national identities, especially within the context of multicultural societies and in post-war landscapes.

ORCID

Danielle Drozdzewski http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6802-0540

Notes

1. The breakdown of articles from each newspaper was: SMH 67 articles; Daily Telegraph 73 articles; The Australian 24 articles; and The Leader 60 articles.

2. SSD are defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2006) as ‘socially and economically homogeneous regions characterised by identifiable links between the inhabitants’.

3. Overall, there were 62.2 per cent females and 37.8 per cent males surveyed. In the Sutherland Shire 59.7 per cent of respondents were females and 40.3 per cent were males. Outside the Shire 63.4 per cent of respondents were females and 36.6 per cent were males.

4. The term ‘Shire’ is commonly used in both the United Kingdom and Australia, as a division of land. It can encompass an entire local government area, and is often applied to predominately rural or outer suburban areas. There are four other Shires in Sydney: the Hills Shire, Hornsby Shire, Wyong Shire and Wollondilly Shire.

5. Further research could be undertaken to better ascertain the geographical readership of the two papers, as the numbers analysed in this study are limited.