Responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary students

ABSTRACT

This article examines the attributions of responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary school students. It draws on focus groups with a cross section of students from different ethnic backgrounds in three, very different, secondary schools. In these focus groups, students deploy six different, sometimes contradictory, racialised discourses. Each discourse attributes responsibility for racism in very different ways that testify to the immanence of the past in the present and students’ positioning in specific social and political conditions. In all but one instance, these discourses work to dismiss, deny and/or deflect responsibility for racism by averting responsibility from the self to other individuals, groups or entities. The empirical data, it is argued, show that the individualisation of responsibility for racism has not seeped its way into students’ race-thinking. This testifies to the persistence of race-thinking, the difficult challenge of finding non-racist ways of being in the world, and cautions against assuming that responsibilisation is a universal descriptor of all contemporary social relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• race-thinking
• responsibility
• discourse
• students
• school

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article by Caroline Mahoney and Ruth Arber, and two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to express my appreciation to my colleagues involved in the research study, and in organising and conducting the focus groups: Ruth Arber, Claire Charles, Ann Cloonan, Catherine Hartung, Julianne Moss, Joanne O'Mara, and Sarah Ohi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The focus groups were part of larger, multi-method study: ‘Doing diversity: Intercultural understanding in primary and secondary schools’. The study was funded by the Australia Research Council [ARCLP 120200319] in partnership with the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET), the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), the Together for Humanity Foundation (THF) and Pukanui Technology.

2 Year 10 went on an excursion at short notice and the school could not find a suitable alternate time to reschedule the Year 9/10 focus group, so it was decided to progress the focus group with just Year 9 in this instance.