THE STIGMA OF WHITE PRIVILEGE

Abstract

Beginning in the 1970s, the efforts of the Australian settler state to help its Indigenous minority shifted away from ‘assimilation’ and embraced the principles of ‘self-determination’. According to the rhetoric of the self-determination era – explored in this article as the ‘liberal fantasy space’ – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians should be in control of efforts to improve their lives, ultimately making state intervention redundant. A by-product of this shift was to radically change the role of non-Indigenous people who sought to participate in Indigenous development. No longer in charge of Indigenous advancement, they were now cast as partners and supporters.

This article explores some of the complexities of White anti-racist subjectivities in the self-determination era. It draws on ethnographic research with a group of progressive Whites who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. A striking feature of contemporary White anti-racist discourse is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement. I argue that applying the concept of stigma to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding this desire for self-effacement. White stigma works in a parallel fashion to the case of liberal Germans who believe the German collective identity is irrevocably tainted by the Holocaust. In the Australian case, the negative characteristics associated with Whiteness act as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the ‘liberal fantasy space’ of post-colonial justice. In their attempts to overcome this barrier and transcend White stigma, White anti-racists mobilise the identity tropes of missionary, mother, and child. Ultimately, these efforts at self-fashioning point to the ultimate fantasy of decolonisation: the desire of White anti-racists to disappear.

Keywords:

• White
• anti-racist
• Australia
• post-colonial
• stigma
• Indigenous

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dirk Moses and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Research drawn on in this article was supported by a NHMRC Training Scholarship for Public Health Research (#236228) and a VicHealth PhD scholarship (#2002-0277).

Notes

1. My use of the word White draws on Whiteness studies. White is not a ‘natural’ category based on skin colour but, rather, is the structure through which White cultural dominance is naturalised and, thus, reproduced and maintained (Frankenberg 1993). Calling my research participants ‘White’ does not intimate that they all had White skin or identified as White (although both of these conditions apply to most of them). Rather, it implies that they willingly and unwillingly, knowingly and unknowingly, participate in the racialised societal structure that positions them as ‘White’ and accordingly grants them the privileges associated with the dominant Australian culture.

2. This is similar to the contemporaneous move against ‘top-down’ development and towards ‘participatory development’, whereby subaltern subjects are remade as the authors of their own improvement (Li 2007, Mosse 2005).

3. This ethnographic research consisted of 12 months of participant-observation with a research team of 18 people and interviews with 17 health researchers from inside and outside the Darwin Institute of Indigenous Health. The research was conducted with ethics approval from the Northern Territory Department of Health and Community Services Human Research Ethics Committee (03/28). The names of places and people in this paper are pseudonyms.

4. [Transcript 15:6]

5. [Fieldnotes 12 October 2004, 2:8]

6. A few examples include Bonnett (2006), Hartigan (2005, Chapter 9) and Lea (2008). The anthropology of development is another field where some scholarship of White anti-racists can be found.

7. As I worked in the field of Indigenous health as a doctor and researcher before beginning the ethnography (including work at the Institute), and thus conducted the study as a ‘native ethnographer’ (Lea 2008) I generally refer to research participants as ‘colleagues’. Similarly, I use the collective pronoun ‘we’ because I identify in most contexts as White, middle-class and politically progressive.

8. Remote communities are home to about 20 per cent of Australia's 500,000 Indigenous people. The 80 per cent of Indigenous people who live in cities and regional towns are likely to speak English at home, have a higher level of education and employment, and be more likely to have and/or be the product of mixed marriages with non-Indigenous people (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare & Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008).

9. The Indigenous people that White anti-racists sympathise with are clearly stigmatised in Australian society. In relation to Indigenous stigma, White anti-racists play the role of sympathetic ‘normal’, what Goffman calls the ‘wise’. Although beyond the scope of this paper, the set of behaviours associated with being ‘wise’ to Indigenous stigma would intersect and interact with the behaviours that are explained by White stigma (Goffman 1963, pp. 30–31).

10. [Transcript 11:16]

11. [Transcript 16:7]

12. [Transcript 8:2]

13. [Transcript 6:16]

14. [Transcript 4:5]

15. The empirical question of the impact of missions on Aboriginal lifeworlds naturally requires a more complex consideration. See Swain and Bird Rose (1988) for Australian anthropological and historical material, and Swain (1993) for an influential argument about the impact of missionaries (and other external influences) on Aboriginal religions.

16. [Transcript 15: 6]

17. [Transcript 15:14]

18. [Transcript 13:21]

19. [Transcript 5:13]

20. [Fieldnotes 6 April 2005, 4:7]

21. [Transcript 15:18]. This discourse has been around for decades (Cowlishaw 1999, Tatz 1972). Batty (2005) describes yet another strategy for dealing with White stigma, where a senior Aboriginal person ‘leases’ their Aboriginality to a non-Indigenous person in order to give them authority to speak.

22. [Fieldnotes 17 March 2005, 3:54]

23. [Fieldnotes 14 April 2006, 4:19]

24. [Fieldnotes 10 September 2004, 1:47]

25. The refusal of the label ‘expert’ is a recurring theme in White anti-racist discourse. For example, one non-Indigenous academic working in Indigenous studies tells how ‘I daily resist other white academics desire to call me an “expert”’, and berates some White academics who ‘argu[e] with Indigenous academics that their opinions were misinformed, and quoting from “good” white sources as their proof’. At the same time, she draws on the discourse within Whiteness studies discussed earlier where the very rejection of privilege (in this case, rejection of the label ‘expert’) is actually a manifestation of privilege: ‘It's very easy for me to smugly hide behind my role as an “expert” because even if I reject the label I acquire it from an academic institution that values and rewards “expertise”. I can become this “expert” in Indigenous issues just by saying that's what I am, or allowing other white people to say it for me. My academic qualifications are written on my white body – plain in the colour of my skin, which grants me authority before I open my mouth’ (Lampert 2003, pp. 17, 18).

26. Research underway explores ‘reflexive anti-racism’ as an alternative conceptualisation of anti-racism that addresses the challenges of anti-racism, such as white stigma, more consciously and constructively than current approaches.

27. [Transcript 17:20]; [Transcript 15:14]. Note that the recent Northern Territory Emergency Intervention which began in July 2007 signalled a paradigm shift away from self-determination and towards some new era that resolves the dilemmas of post-colonial intervention in another (equally contingent and provisional) way (Cowlishaw et al. 2006). Although there are important continuities between self-determination and the emerging era, the kind of White withdrawalism I have described here is now far less tenable.