Making Whiteness and the Racialisation of Australian Youth Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Rather than apprehending race or ethnicity as a predetermined social fact that then informs young people’s experiences of engagement or inclusion, youth citizenship studies would benefit from more critical perspectives that enable investigation of the racialised construction of what is legible as civic participation or national belonging. Processes of racialisation operate in the production of youth as citizen-subjects in Australian nation-making through approaches in youth policy and research that simultaneously centre and invisibilise whiteness. This paper considers the role of racialisation in ways of knowing and regulating Australian youth as citizens through a critical review of the ways different groups of young people become meaningful and knowable as racialised citizens. It explores the representation and constitution of Indigenous, ethnic minority and white youth citizenship in youth research and policy as in turn non-existent/provisional, integrative/integratable, and vulnerable/healthy, to contribute to deepened understandings of the social construction of youth in the service of white nation-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• race
• racialisation
• citizenship
• whiteness
• Australia

The constitution of whiteness in Australian policy and research about young people has been an important nation-building and citizen-making practice since the establishment of the settler colony and through to the construction of the modern Australian multicultural state. However, as some scholars identify (Noble 2015, Zwangobani, 2016, Harris 2017, Butler 2020, Majavu 2020, and in particular Idriss 2022), there is a relative absence of race critical thinking in Australian youth studies. When race, ethnicity or culture is centred in youth citizenship studies, it is usually in order to empirically explore racially othered young people’s sense of national belonging. Further, these concepts tend to be understood as social identities and signifiers of community groups, and even when they are taken as socially constructed, research that addresses these issues almost exclusively attends to non-white youth as the holders of these racial or ethnic identities. Such youth research and policy then often focus on issues such as disadvantage, exclusion, belonging and cohesion, examined through empirical investigation and frequently drawing on ‘Eurocentric paradigms such as integration/resettlement’ (Majavu 2020, p. 28). In the process, what is highlighted are the effects rather than processes of racialisation. Less explored are the mechanisms by which race is made meaningful in the first place, as a way of knowing and regulating Australian youth as citizens, and within this, the production of hegemonic whiteness; a process for which knowledge structures about youth citizenship are frequently employed (Lesko, 2001/2012).

The value of focusing on racialisation is that it is, as Murji and Solomos (2005, p. 16) suggest, ‘a means of redirecting the conventional gaze of race relations sociology away from the characteristics and actions of those defined racially’, and instead towards processes of race thinking and race-making. To undertake this alternative analysis in Australian youth citizenship studies, it is helpful to bring youth studies and its sociological traditions into critical conversation with other disciplinary and sub-disciplinary approaches that have more deeply theorised race in Australia, such as anthropology, Indigenous studies, history, migration studies and cultural studies: a model proposed and operationalised by Butler and Ben (2020) in relation to advancing rural sociology. In this paper, I draw on these approaches to analyse how racialisation has operated as a way of knowing Australian youth in the service of the making of the white imaginary of the Australian nation and youth citizenship. I offer a critical and comparative investigation of the various racialised citizenship discourses that are mobilised to construct Indigenous youth, migrant and ethnic minority youth, and white youth, exploring analyses and literature on these three groups in existing Australian youth research, but also engaging with work from other fields.

In this undertaking, my object of inquiry is not young people, but youth; an approach established through the ground-breaking work of scholars such as Griffin (1993) and Lesko (2001/2012). There has been a renewed call within youth studies to move beyond the narrow study of the lived experiences of individual young people. What is proposed instead is what is deemed as an important but less common analytic focus on ‘the social construction of youth itself, whether as an identity, category or ideology’ (Sukarieh and Tannock 2016, p. 1284, see also Threadgold 2020, Brown, 2022); in order to understand how such constructions of youth are produced by particular interests and forces (Lesko, 2001/2012:2). Here I take up this analytic approach by ‘interrogating the knowledges that direct us to think about and act toward youth in particular ways’ (Talburt and Lesko 2012, p. 3), in this case, as racialised citizen-subjects in the service of the interests and forces of white nation-making.

I first illustrate how the categories of ‘Indigenous youth’ and ‘ethnic minority youth’ have been commonly constituted through the lens of citizenship, and consider how these approaches to knowing and researching ‘others’ are often less relevant for their insights into the cultural diversity of experiences of national belonging than they are for revealing processes of the racialised making of youth as citizen-subjects and the centring of whiteness through racialised epistemologies of youth. Indeed, the simultaneous centring and invisibilisation of whiteness has shaped these processes even when, and in fact precisely when, racialised ‘others’ are the subject of inquiry. I then turn to a smaller body of Australian research that has been explicitly undertaken on how white youth citizen-subjectivities are constructed. This is critical to address the problem that in youth studies and beyond, ‘studies on racialisation have … tended to omit or at least underplay the racialisation of ethnic majorities, especially those individuals deemed “white”’ (Nayak 2005, p. 147) and to demonstrate the historical and contemporary processes by which whiteness is produced as hegemonic not only through racial minoritisation, but through the majoritisation of the young white citizen.

Australian youth studies, including studies of citizenship, have had limited engagement with sociological traditions where race identities and racialising processes are more explicitly debated, claimed and named, such as in the UK and North America; nor with non-Eurocentric intellectual traditions, or disciplinary or intellectual approaches within local scholarship that has critically interrogated the presence of race thinking and what we might call race ‘work’ in Australia (Butler 2020 Majavu 2020, Idriss et al. 2021, Idriss 2022 Brown, 2022). Pioneering Australian work on racialised constructions of youth, such as that of Mariko Matthews (1997), Youdell (2006) and Collins (2000), has been more often located in other fields (such as education or cultural studies). There is not a strong tradition of scholarship in Australian youth studies that investigates racialisation and racism, or even that uses the term ‘race’. A common explanation for this absence is that in Australian demography and policy, the lexicons of ethnicity and culture replaced race as forms of classification through the mid to late twentieth century (for example, the census deleted the ‘racial origin’ question in 1976) (see Biddle et al. 2015, for an overview). ‘Race’ is associated with racist nineteenth-century ideology and policy based on biological essentialism and especially phenotype thinking.

There are justifiable concerns that to engage with race scholarship risks reifying race itself. However, a failure to address race because of its distasteful associations is at the same time a refusal to acknowledge the ongoing work that the idea of race and processes of racialisation do in young people’s lives, including the endurance of these associations in Australian national culture; evident even at the most everyday level in the circulation of common stereotypes of ‘dangerous African youth gangs’, ‘high-achieving Asian students’ and ‘at-risk Indigenous youth’. As Ang and Stratton (1998, p. 38) argue, there is little benefit in ‘repressing the discourse of “race” rather than acknowledging its power in the Australian cultural imaginary, and dealing with its ideological implications’, especially in the context of a ‘“mainstream culture” whose whiteness is unspoken but undeniable’.

In line with this approach, in this paper I focus on processes of racialisation; not the rehabilitation of race as a descriptive term. This is particularly important in the context of an analysis of whiteness, which requires a race lens to become visible. I follow Nayak (2005, p. 144) in defining racialisation as the ways that racial categories are constructed, and as he suggests, use it as an analytical frame to reveal the historical socio-political making of these categories (see also Omi and Winant 1994), and extend this by drawing on Ngo’s (2017:xiii) work, which brings together the processual character of racialisation with its racist, white-centring purpose. As she explains,

‘racialization’ designates the process by which one is deemed to have ‘race.’ In the context of the West, this invariably means the process by which people of color are assigned a racial identity, whereas people of Caucasian description are not; racialization is about the production of a racialized ‘other’ and a concurrent non-naming, normalizing, and centering of the white ‘I’ … Racialization, then, is almost always a form of racism.

Finally, I utilise theories of whiteness (Frankenberg 1993), especially Australian whiteness studies (Ang and Stratton 1998, Hage 2000, Anderson 2002, Moreton-Robinson 2004, 2015, Moreton-Robinson et al. 2008), to understand how whiteness becomes a location of power and privilege (Haggis 2004a, p. 52) simultaneously situated atop, and producing of, a system of racialised hierarchy. Lentin (2022:486) clearly connects the work of racialisation with hegemonic whiteness in this way; describing it as a ‘technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction and maintenance of white supremacy’.

Youth citizenship studies, taken to be scholarship that addresses young people’s formal relationship to, as well as substantive membership in, the state, political community and civic life, has focused primarily on questions of participation, recognition and belonging (Harris 2015). As noted, extant Australian research in this area, when it considers race, ethnicity or culture, tends to empirically address participatory practices or experiences of exclusion on the part of non-white youth. But there is less work on racialised constructions of youth citizenship that can address what Harries (2016, p. 179) argue is a critical need in youth studies: to investigate ‘how youth is used as a key site for the racializing technologies of the state’. By focusing on processes of racialisation in the constitution of youth as legible citizen-subjects in Australian nation-making, I consider how different groups of young people become meaningful and knowable as racialised citizens through approaches in youth policy and research that simultaneously centre and invisibilise whiteness, rather than treat youth racial, ethnic or cultural identities as pre-existent demographic characteristics that then shape their citizenship experiences. Because of this attention to what Lesko (2001/2012:7) calls ‘processes of reasoning’ about youth, the analysis is undertaken through a critical review of the existing literature addressed towards the field of Australian youth citizenship studies, rather than an empirical study of young people themselves.

The Multicultural Settler-colonial Context and White Australia

The condition of multicultural settler-colonialism is still infrequently acknowledged in Australian youth studies (Harris and Idriss 2020); and yet it is critical to understand how young people are produced as members of a nation ‘which has been built through colonisation and immigration over the last two centuries’ (Castles and Miller 2003, p. 198). It is well acknowledged in other fields that the Australian nation has been made through engendered racial hierarchies and categories designed to mainstream, protect and privilege whiteness, but how this has been enabled through the production and regulation of youth citizenship has been less explored. European colonisers first arrived as permanent settlers in Australia in 1788. Over the next decades and until the early twentieth century they initiated violent frontier wars to appropriate Indigenous land and eradicate Indigenous people, whose occupation extends back tens of thousands of years. As many have demonstrated (Ang and Stratton 1998, Stratton 1998, Hage 2000, 2003, Moreton-Robinson 2004, 2015 Connell 2007, Huggins 2022), culturally and racially, Australia’s national imaginary is attached to Anglo whiteness and the myth of terra nullius (the legal principle that the land was determined to have been insufficiently appropriated by Indigenous people at the time of European arrival and was thus claimable by others). The establishment of the settler-colony was not simply an historical event, but remains a continuous process (Wolfe 1999). Unlike post-colonial nations that have regained independence, Australia is a settler-colonial state where the ‘colonials did not go home’, and their occupation continues to entrench Indigenous disenfranchisement (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 10).

Processes of immigration and its regulation have intersected with colonisation in ways that further illustrate efforts to embed white colonial power. As Jakubowicz (2002, p. 107) writes, ‘“White” plays a central part in the historic mythology of Australia’, particularly in regard to the management of immigration. The White Australia Policy (officially the Immigration Restriction Act of 1902), which limited immigration to white Europeans only, was established soon after Australia’s federation in 1901 as one of the first legislative decisions of the new parliament. This reflected both the desire for Australia to be ‘a projection of a White racial identity … and an example of what the White British race could achieve’ but also a fear ‘that this constitutive Whiteness was under threat and needed to be protected by a stringent racial policy’ (Hage 2003, pp. 52–3). Indeed, this is evident in a 1903 campaign speech by one of its most ardent advocates and architects, Prime-Minister-to-be Alfred Deakin (after whom a leading Australian university is named), in which he stated ‘You probably believe that a white Australia is secure. I hope it is, but it won’t be secure unless a vigilant watch is kept upon proposals to tamper with it’. (https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903-alfred-deakin). Questions about race and racial origin were included in the Australian census from 1911 until 1976, and were primarily intended to sort whites from the ‘coloured’ population; with those of ‘mixed race’ obliged to quantify racial proportions, such as half Aboriginal, half Chinese (Stevens et al. 2015, p. 25).

The White Australia Policy attempted to make Australia more homogeneously white than it had been prior to Federation, and was only abandoned in the early 1970s, to be replaced by an official policy of multiculturalism. This was driven more by economic than social imperatives, and specifically labour demands that were addressed through the post-World-War-Two expansion of British and European immigration schemes. Young people were an important cohort amongst these immigrants, and continued to make up significant numbers of immigrant populations thereafter. The 1966 census showed that nearly one-sixth of 15–19 year olds and over one-fifth of 20–24 year olds were overseas-born (Sherington 1995, p. 27). More than half of the young immigrants who came to Australia before 1971 were from English-speaking countries; however, by the 1991 census, nearly one million young people aged 12–24 were classified as of non-English-speaking background (Zelinka 1995, p. 18), as immigration programs expanded and the policy of multiculturalism became entrenched.

Australia has experienced particularly rapid population growth since the 1990s, mainly owing to immigration. 51.5% of the current Australian population was born overseas or has one parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022), and pandemic-related border closures notwithstanding, population growth is still driven primarily by overseas migration (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). Just under half of those aged 12–24 are either first- or second-generation migrants (VicHealth et al. 2017); 25% of youth in this age group are from what is described as a culturally and linguistically diverse background, and this population is growing at a faster rate than the total population (Hugo 2014). Moreover, 5% of the Australian youth population (aged 10–24), or about 1 in every 20 young people, is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2018, p. 3).

Theorists such as Moreton-Robinson (2015), Povinelli (2002); Hage (2000, 2003), Jakubowicz (2002) and others have demonstrated the ways settler-colonialism and multiculturalism have worked as mutually reinforcing governance systems that construct and position Indigenous and ethnicised others as members of groups that can be ‘worried over’, disciplined, celebrated, included, recognised and otherwise managed by the white state in order to legitimise itself. Moreton-Robinson (2015:xii) theorises these practices as constituting a mode of rationalisation undertaken through the frame of ‘white possessive logics’. Additionally, all of these scholars highlight the defensive nature of Australian whiteness that these systems express, and the work that is done through its agencies, institutions, and ways of knowing and regulating populations, as well as in the structuring of everyday relations, to establish its legitimacy. As Ang (2001, p. 189) notes, ‘the precariousness and fragility of this antipodean whiteness, so different from (post) imperial British whiteness or messianic, superpower American whiteness, inscribes and affects the way in which white Australia relates to its non-white “others”’.

Much of this precariousness is attributable to an enduring condition of unsettled relations between coloniser and colonised. There is still no treaty or other formal pact between the Australian state and Indigenous people, generating both ongoing political struggles on the part of Indigenous Australians and an enduring state of nationally felt ‘unfinished business’, leading to what Hage (2003, p. 48) calls ‘White colonial paranoia’ about threats to its power and claims of entitlement, or what Cowlishaw (2004, p. 6) describes as ‘a chronic source of insecurity’, engendered by ‘the indisputably superior claims’ of Indigenous people to legitimate belonging. Indeed, the project of white hegemony has sometimes attempted to destabilise sovereignty by creating an equivalence of otherness between Indigenous people and migrants through the multicultural settler colonial system.

Drawing on these Australian theorisations of whiteness, and remaining cognisant of the potential problems of centring whiteness that are well-canvassed in the scholarship, my interest is in how whiteness (including anxieties about its very fragility) is expressed, produced, exercised, sought, and also concealed, through research and policy about youth citizenship in Australia. This is particularly relevant to the development of critical youth citizenship studies. As Idriss (2022, p. 285) has argued, while there is a body of work exploring the lived experiences of racialised youth, ‘a critical youth studies informed by postcolonial and/or race critical theory has yet to receive enough traction among youth researchers working in the Australian context’. And many of the studies of youth citizenship that do exist tend to locate young people as members of somewhat fixed groups, apprehending race or ethnicity as a predetermined social fact that then shapes their experiences of civic participation or capacity for national belonging, as I have argued elsewhere (Harris 2017, p. 229, see also Khan 2021, Noble 2015, p. 68). Against this, more race critical perspectives can investigate the racialised construction of what is legible as civic participation or national belonging that informs the constitution of group identity. And what these approaches reveal, as Moreton-Robinson (2015:xvii) writes, is that ‘the production of knowledge about cultural specificity is complicit with state requirements for manageable forms of difference that are racially configured through whiteness’.

I next analyse some of the ways this unfolds through the historical making of Indigenous youth and ethnic minority youth citizenship as, at different times, non-existent, provisional, integrative and integratable. They are constructed as meaningful, racialised categories of Australian young people through interrogation of their capacity for citizenship. I then consider some Australian studies that explore how whiteness has been actively produced and worried over through the constitution of white youth as healthy citizens who can be cultivated to uphold white Anglo values. By looking at these illustrative examples, I demonstrate how racialisation works in understandings about youth citizenship, and how the racialised young person can come to ‘figure as a dense site of investment … in debates about the national culture’ (Fortier 2008, p. 40).

Making Indigenous Youth as Non- and Provisional Citizens

The regulation of Indigenous youth and their construction as non-citizens and then provisional citizens has long been central to colonial assertions of control and practices of settler citizenship- and nation-making. The Aboriginal Protection Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ensured governments controlled every aspect of Indigenous people’s lives and formal citizenship rights were not gained until the 1960s (Moreton-Robinson, 2021). During this time of non-citizenship, there was widespread reliance on Indigenous youth labour in the establishment and development of the colony’s institutions, social order and land appropriation. Indigenous young people were integral to the economic growth of the colony and then the federated nation, but had their lives controlled through protectionist rather than rights-based laws and policies, and an adulthood that equated with citizenship could not be achieved. They were systemically subject to practices of being taken to and then deployed from institutions such as missions to perform domestic and farming work; and policy regimes that instituted the removal of ‘half caste’ and other children from their Indigenous families in order to assimilate them into whiteness and ‘breed out’ blackness via placement in white families, religious institutions and state care (Moreton-Robinson 2021, Huggins 2022). Indigenous youth could only be imagined as possible future citizens if they ceased to be Indigenous.

As Nakata (2017, p. 398) argues, ‘The task of making the nation here relies upon interventions into childhood as a direct and effective means to impact upon the next generation of future adult citizens’. Indigenous children and youth, in their very existence as the next generation of survivors and as present and prospective political actors, threatened the mythology of a ‘dying race’, which drove ideologies and policies integral to the establishment and maintenance of the white settler state. Interventions to bring them under state control, and especially initiatives to remove them from communities, families and land that took hold in the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, can be understood primarily as efforts at disenfranchisement and denial of present and future agency, if not existence. As Brown (2019:1) argues, ‘The primary aim of coercive policies of the twentieth century was to disconnect Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal children and young people from their families, communities and land, compromising the futurity of Indigenous people’. Although these efforts to deny agency, rights and inclusion in full citizenship ultimately failed, Indigenous youth then became constructed as provisional citizens: a population that needed to be regulated, assimilated and/or improved in order to prove worthiness and earn membership in the nation.

It is important to note that historically, research on Australian youth citizenship has been both complicit and critical in relation to these processes. On the one hand, there is a notable absence or silence regarding Indigenous young people in early work on Australian youth. For example, Wyn (2020) notes that it is very difficult to find any broadly ‘youth studies’ writing from the 1920s to the 1960s that is specifically about, or even that takes into account, Indigenous young people. And yet during this period, there is a flourishing of work preoccupied with the future of ‘Australian youth’, the role of young people in Australia’s national culture and prospects, and the importance of institutions and associational life, such as schools, civic organisations and so on, in guiding young people towards productive citizenship (Harris et al. 2021). In the exclusion of Indigenous youth from this imagining of citizen futures, colonial whiteness becomes mainstreamed and normalised as an attribute of ‘Australian’ youth. Not only does this practice of excision enable whiteness to prevail, but it relegates Indigenous youth to a population that belongs to history, or one that can only endure in the present or future as a problem.

Thus while constituting an absence in one body of scholarship, Indigenous youth are conversely well-represented in a separate set of policies, official documentation and debate, as subjects of the past rather than the future, whose capacity to contribute to the nation is tied to their ability to ‘assimilate’; that is, to lose their identities and distinctiveness, concede their sovereignty, and merge with the white colonial vision. This is particularly evident in writing and discussion about education, which is one domain of Australia’s proto-youth citizenship studies that explicitly centres Indigenous youth& nbsp;(see Brown, 2022). For example, Rudolph (2019, p. 163) highlights how education debates of the 1960s, which focused on ‘lifting up’ Indigenous youth to the standards of the whites, produce frameworks of deficit and assimilation. She writes that these debates.

frame the ‘problem’ of Indigenous inequality in relation to deficits that must be addressed in the Indigenous population to raise their standards of education and bring them into line with the ‘majority’ community. This conceptual framing relies on assimilation and what settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe has asserted is a ‘logic of elimination’. The logic of elimination, which is the settler colonial impulse to remove ‘the native’ and thus conquer the lands invaded, is predicated on race logics that create binaries, hierarchies, and ladders of development and capacity … 

These race logics first attributed inferiority and then more recently ‘disadvantage’ to Indigenous youth, crucially often divorced from questions of cause or responsibility, and instead located as a quality inhering in Indigeneity. As Brown (2019:3) argues,

Within Indigenous-focused education policy in Australia, educational inequality has been normalised through the strategic severance from the ‘colonial’ process as enabled by representations which position disadvantage as an inherent part of Aboriginality. ‘Disadvantage’ is thus figured in a way to disconnect it from its historical inception, working to situate it as not only external to the social universe of non-Indigenous Australians, but also as wholly the burden and problem of Indigenous people.

Brown (2019, 2022:6) argues that Indigenous young people are still overwhelmingly framed across scholarly literature, media and policy as problems. As she documents, when commonly represented in terms of risk, disadvantage, gaps, underachievement and disorder, they can be simultaneously produced as lacking the capacity for citizenship or needing white guidance towards appropriate forms of citizenship, including white-serving notions of self-governance. As she demonstrates, in the post 1960s era, as Indigenous demands for self-determination intensified, Indigenous youth became increasingly positioned as 'a convergence point where the utilitarian purpose of education for employment and the solution to the problem of poverty and disadvantage collide in a way that enables a depoliticized state version of self-determination' (Brown, 2022, p.275). Similarly, Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 155) argues that ‘patriarchal white sovereignty as a regime of power deploys a discourse of pathology as a means to subjugate and discipline Indigenous people to be good citizens’. Education is one of the many domains where this occurs in both policy and research that is particular to youth. Much contemporary Eurocentric educational research that measures school engagement and achievement for Indigenous youth starts with, and inevitably reproduces, a deficit model in its frequent use of what Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson (2016, p. 792) describe as ‘culturally incomplete Western-based perspectives’ that still demand that Indigenous youth ‘come up’ to white standards (see also Kickett-Tucker 2009). This is evident in the use of uncritically applied Western normative indicators (such as ‘self-esteem’, ‘self-concept’ and ‘at-risk’), which are rarely acknowledged as such, and yet have already constructed Indigenous youth in terms of pathology.

This is evident throughout key areas of focus for youth citizenship studies: not only in education, but across health, employment, criminal justice and so on. Indigenous youth rarely appear as civic and political agents, in spite of research that shows them at the forefront of new cultures of participation and activism, for example in the use of digital media (Carlson and Frazer 2018). Common representations of risk and problems are reproduced and routinised in everyday life. For example, Cowlishaw’s (2004, p. 148) ethnographic research shows how ‘epithets such as “Aboriginal youth” and “unsupervised children” function to flag a “social problem” that is defined as the basis of crime.’ Her study shows how young people’s expressions of autonomy and communities’ trust in their capacity to take responsibility for their social interactions are not read as forms of citizenship, but conversely, recast as juvenile delinquency and as lack of care and responsibility on the part of families.

In many cases, the overwhelming message of risk and disadvantage has served to construct Indigenous youth as facing intractable problems, at the mercy of the state or in need of other potential saviours, and as passive victims, denying their agency, complexity and flourishing, and concealing the structural and specifically colonial forces that actively create disadvantage and socioeconomic inequality, as well as co-opt the meaning of self-determination (Brown, 2022). Indeed, the technique of ‘closing the gap’-based discourse, which has long dominated bipartisan Indigenous policy and mainstream research in Australia, has been often criticised on these grounds (Kowal 2015, Bond and Singh 2020, Brown, 2022). Cast as at risk and in need, Indigenous youth thus become unimaginable as citizens without remediation or intervention.

Making Ethnic Minority Youth as Integrative and Integratable Citizens

The constitution of so-called ‘ethnic minority’ youth has also been central to white nation- and citizenship-making practices in Australia. Research and policy that has produced this category of youth has emerged out of the domains of migration, multiculturalism and settlement, where young people typically figure as the second generation of migrants. Such approaches, which started to solidify around policy portfolios and research agendas in the early 1970s, have tended to be concerned with the capacity of such young people to assimilate into the nation, conceived as a priori white, and in doing so, to resolve their split cultural identities and become successful adult citizens who can integrate into this white national imaginary. As (Harris 2017, p. 224) argues, in such imaginings,

younger or future generations hold the key to integration. Youth are positioned as needing particular attention and management because they are ‘torn between two cultures’ and their paths can go either towards successfully regulated assimilation or (self-)exclusion and even deviance. An integrated cultural identity is imagined as the ideal, and migrant background youth are constructed as vulnerable, at risk, or alternatively, as those best able to achieve this integration and manage the balance, because of their generational position.

Youth research in the 1970s tended to (re)produce this concern with adaptation and integration into the Australian nation as the key ‘task’ of migrant background youth. An example of this is the pioneering research project 12–20: Studies of City Youth (Connell 1975), which includes a chapter on ‘Migrant Youth’ that analyses second-generation experiences of education, family and peer groups. It argues that such youth are ‘faced with the problem of acculturation along two dimensions’; that is, into both (white) Australian culture and the social institution of adulthood (Connell 1975, p. 243), which is described as a condition of ‘double jeopardy’. This was not just perceived as a potential problem for personal identity resolution and individual wellbeing, but rather, migrant-background youth were seen as having a key role to play as exemplars of ‘integrative citizenship’ (Cahill 1995, p. 47) that would underscore the legitimacy of the white nation and its capacity to first construct and exceptionalise ethnic difference, and then absorb and diminish it.

However, through the 1980s, changing social and especially economic conditions, including the youth unemployment crisis, saw a shift in focus from split identities as the key concern for migrant-background youth to skills acquisition and labour force participation. Such youth were now represented as an under-utilised national resource (as citizen workers) rather than as primarily suffering from culture conflict (as vulnerable but integratable white Australians-in-the-making; see, for example, Sherington 1995, p. 29). This aligned with a move in settlement policy and ideology from assimilationism to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism enabled a different citizen-subject position for ‘ethnic youth’ than assimilation, in particular by supporting some aspects of heritage culture identification and the recognition of migrant rights. And yet multiculturalism also reinscribed the function of this categorisation of youth, now often celebrated as ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’, to continue to legitimise what Hage (2000, p. 18) famously describes as the ‘White nation fantasy’. As he argues, white multiculturalism shares with white racism the effort to maintain whiteness at the centre of the national space by positioning whites as its managers and occupiers. White multiculturalists do so through a welcoming rather than rejecting framework, whereby they can appreciate, be enriched by, and extend recognition to cultural others, albeit always on white terms.

Yet another shift occurred in the 1990s, as debates about social cohesion and the purported failures of multiculturalism started to feature ‘ethnic youth’ once again as a key category of concern, now often cast as deviant and delinquent and outside the space of good citizenship. As argued by Tabar et al. (2010), social issues such as crime, violence, gangs, and terrorism became increasingly explained through the lens of youth, masculinity and ethnicity. The new conservative policy agenda of the Howard Government (1996–2007) that was deployed across the domains of youth, settlement, border control, education and civics, saw a shift in focus to integration, civic loyalties and values, and national security. This generated a new concern about ethnic youth as a threat to social harmony, intercultural relations, civic values and indeed the project of a white national imaginary (Harris 2013). In particular, ‘Muslim youth’ became produced as a racialised category, constantly reified as a population, and regularly invoked as a suspect group that needed to be watched, managed, disciplined, and educated; always already outside the limits of citizenship and constantly required to perform their desire and suitability for inclusion and participation (Abdel-Fattah 2020). Other ethnic youth ‘figures’ were also produced through the 1990s and into the 2000s, most notably the out-of-control African youth gang (Majavu 2020) and its convenient counterpoint: the over-achieving, over-tutored Asian student (Ho 2019). Both of these categorisations served to enable a white debate about the appropriate contours of ethnic youth citizenship and the limits of the multicultural compact. Such discussion circled around demands for signs of gratitude to the Australian state, questions of ‘taking advantage’, and the need to re-centre the rights of white youth.

Youth research and policy have both critically drawn upon and challenged these representations and their deployment in the regulation of Indigenous and ethnic minority young people, but in Australian youth citizenship studies there has been less attention to analysing how these processes are central to the production of whiteness as mainstream, privileged and unremarkable. The brief review offered above of the construction of Indigenous and ethnic minority youth as variously non-, provisional, integrative and integratable citizens provides an entree to opportunities to more closely consider how multicultural settler-colonial knowledge-making practices about youth not only construct racially minoritised youth, but also function to produce the category of white youth as its necessary, if invisibilised, corollary in the service of nation-making. In the next section, I look more closely at how whiteness has been actively constituted and explicitly worried over in debates about white youth as citizens.

Making White Youth as Healthy and Racially Fit Citizens

One of the most important ways of knowing in youth research and policy that does this whiteness work is the framework of youth development, which underpins concepts of good citizenship. Lesko (2001/2012:11) analyses the Western twentieth-century discourse of adolescence, focusing on ‘the structure of meaning-making’ by which the fashioning of ‘strong, disciplined, white’ boys into young adults and citizen leaders was dependent on the constitution of racial, gendered and classed others in inferior terms. Indeed, efforts to produce this adolescence were founded in larger anxieties about the maintenance of empire and colonial (and other kinds of) white domination, and thus necessitated and relied upon situating these others down the developmental and social order. While not necessarily focusing specifically on whiteness, Australian youth researchers undertaking histories of delinquency, juvenile justice, reform, education, work and subcultures have demonstrated how young women and the young working classes have been produced and regulated by dominant discourses about adolescent development since the late nineteenth century, and how policies and institutions have been established to maintain a gendered and classed social order and imperial and emerging national imaginary, especially in key historical moments in the twentieth century (see Bessant 1991, Johnson 1993).

While some of this kind of scholarship attends to the exclusion of racially minoritised youth from these projects of citizen-making or their subjection to other regimes of control, it less often takes the simultaneous production of youthful whiteness as the focus of the inquiry. It is helpful then to bring this work into relation with other fields, such as cultural history or medical anthropology, that develop an alternative race analysis not so much by looking for the role and treatment of racialised others, thus potentially leaving whiteness as the unnamed mainstream, but by exploring the very process and techniques in youth policy, programmes and dominant discourses of making whiteness hegemonic. How then has Australian whiteness been produced through the regulation of development and citizenship of white youth?

Historically, this has been connected to ideas of moral and physical health and the management of risk and criminality. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, a range of institutions, organisations, legislative acts and official programmes for white children and youth, including sporting and leisure associations, reformatory schools and juvenile justice systems, were established throughout the colony. These were designed to produce the right kinds of future Australians – white, male and respectable – by managing and reprogramming dangerous and criminal boys of the white underclasses. Robinson and Wilson (2008, p. 173) demonstrate how ‘discussions of the importance of youth and national character to the future of the white race’ were firmly established by the early twentieth century in government and the press. Taking the example of Queensland, where, owing to its climate and natural environment, there were particular hopes and fears about the creation of a new race of healthy white youth (2008, p. 179), they document an array of strategies, such as the expansion of state control of neglected and criminal children and young people; state interventions in socialisation and street activity; eugenics-influenced health and hygiene debates and programmes focused on young women and mothers; military training and physical education for boys to counter racial degeneration; school medical inspections to ensure racial fitness; the introduction of children’s columns in newspapers with regular stories about racial difference and the importance of belonging to the British Empire; and much public debate about the effects of the tropical climate on the character and future of the white race as represented by youth.

As Carden (2018, p. 544) argues, early juvenile justice in particular ‘was designed to promote the continuation of practices and ways of being associated with British Whiteness … as both an ideal and a pathologised and fragile state of being’. As she and others demonstrate (Bashford 2000, Anderson 2002, Robinson and Wilson 2008), white settlements in Australia were especially precarious and experimental because of the unique physical environment. This was an environment that was perceived to be especially challenging for whites to thrive in and where whiteness was constructed by tropical medicine as at risk and potentially degenerating. White children were very closely managed in the tropical and subtropical north because of their role in white nation building. For example, as Carden (2018, p. 548) writes in relation to the mid-nineteenth century establishment of reformatory schools for delinquent white boys,

White children in Queensland as a whole were seen as vital to the future of their race … The settlement of tropical – and to a lesser extent subtropical – geographical locales by a White population was viewed as an experiment. The [reformatory] school was an important space in which White children, considered so vital to the success of the Queensland experiment, could be trained, monitored and shaped into the kind of citizens who would be able to survive and prosper in the Queensland climate.

She demonstrates (2018, p. 548) how programmes of educational reform engendered and protected whiteness through ‘civilising’ lessons in civics, morals, reading, gardening and other ‘practices seeking to inculcate health and hygiene’; all of which ‘sought to inculcate a moral, British and White identity’ (2018, p. 549).

These are just two snapshots of cultural histories of youth, whiteness and the racially fit young citizen in Australia, reflective of a larger body of scholarship situated in these disciplinary traditions. They demonstrate that whiteness is not merely a silent and fixed benchmark against which racialised others are measured, but that it is always in process, a precarious production, and moreover, one that has been explicitly debated and scrutinised in Australian scholarship about youth and citizenship since the establishment of the settler-colony.

Conclusion

There is a strong tradition of historical research into the racialised processes by which the Australian colony, and then the federated Australian nation, came to be made. Much of this implicitly centres youth and demonstrates the importance of managing the youthful population in the construction of citizenship and the production of the white national imaginary, but the scholarship has predominantly issued from cultural history rather than youth studies. The contemporary production of knowledge about cultural difference and racial configurations is an area ripe for greater exploration in Australian youth citizenship studies. This is a sub-field of youth studies that has produced important advances in conceptualising the changing nature of young people’s participatory practices and developing more substantive or ‘thick’ models that are more theoretically nuanced. However, when issues of culture, race and ethnicity in relation to youth citizenship are tackled, these are usually framed in fairly limited terms of how those who are othered engage in participation and/or experience belonging or non-belonging to the nation. Racism and discrimination (as experiences or practices) are often addressed, but racialisation (as a process and a structure) less so.

There is a growing cluster of scholars applying critical race theory, settler-colonial and postcolonial perspectives, and whiteness studies approaches to bring greater theoretical sophistication to contemporary Australian youth studies (see Johns 2015, Zwangobani, 2016 Walton 2017, Butler 2018, Majavu 2020, Khan 2021, Idriss 2022, Brown, 2022). However, it remains that most theorisation of racialisation, whiteness, race and related concepts such as ethnicity and culture is undertaken in the separate fields of migration studies, cultural studies and Indigenous studies. Here, scholarly debates about these concepts, processes and experiences are lively and advanced, and yet the conceptualisation of youth as a social category is often less strongly rendered (Harris 2017), suggesting that greater theoretical cross-fertilisation is needed. A productive approach for the development of such links is to ‘examine the causal stories and conceptual categories through which “youth” have been constructed, represented and understood’ (Griffin 1993, p. 2) in relation to racialised knowledge production (including the analysis of racialised groups in relation to one another, and not just to whiteness, to capture the relational and co-productive character of racialisation [Molina et al. 2019]). This requires a movement beyond studying young people to instead interrogating the ‘systems of ideas’ that make them knowable as categories of youth (Lesko, 2001/2012:8).

In this paper, I have thus drawn on racialisation theory and whiteness studies to open up ways to consider how racialised knowledge-making about youth citizenship constructs Indigenous, ethnic minority, and white youth as legible citizen-subjects and establishes white hegemony in the process, thereby considering how such knowledge is put to work to constitute young people in Australia as raced subjects, as proposed by Youdell (2006). I have explored here how racialised figures of youth are created through this production of knowledge about their citizenship as variously non-existent, provisional, integrative, integratable, healthy and racially fit. And I have analysed these examples of how racialisation operates within youth research and policy in relation to citizenship and nation-making in order to investigate whiteness as an under-explored force in the making and knowing of Australian youth.

As Haggis (2004b, p. 2) suggests,

What a focus on whiteness brings to this is the ability to name what is so invisible to contemporary “white” majority societies, the racialised nature of power and privilege, including that of the (white) sociologist and her structures of knowing.

Haggis’ provocation suggests that a focus on whiteness brings to light the racialised ways that not only the state but youth studies itself has come to ‘know’ youth. Citizenship is an important example of just one such racialised structure of knowing through which young people are constituted, apprehended and researched, but the task of addressing the multicultural settler colonial context of Australian youth studies invites greater interrogation of the many processes of racialisation that are enacted in youth research and policy to produce social constructions of youth, both for and beyond the purposes of nation-making.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP170100180].

Notes on contributors

Anita Harris

Anita Harris is a youth sociologist specialising in citizenship, mobilities and new forms of participation in a globalised world. Her recent research has investigated youth transitions in the context of transnational mobility; young people's practices of digital citizenship; and young people and social inclusion in the multicultural city. She is the author of many works in youth studies, including Thinking About Belonging in Youth Studies (with Cuervo & Wyn; 2022); Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism (2013), Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (ed) (2008), Young Femininities (with Aapola & Gonick) (2005); Future Girl (2004), and All About the Girl (ed) (2004).