Racism, identity, and education: Bhaskar's report on the PhD thesis ‘Strong and Smart’ by Chris Sarra

ABSTRACT

In 2005, Ram Roy Bhaskar was the examiner for a PhD thesis by Dr. Chris Sarra entitled Strong and Smart: Reinforcing Aboriginal Perceptions of Being Aboriginal at Cherbourg State School. Bhaskar described the thesis as ‘an exemplary paradigm of how research should be conducted’ and suggested that it would be ‘invaluable for all future studies of indigenous people in Australia and indeed to educationalists and social theorists throughout the world’. With thanks to Chris Sarra, we are delighted to be able to publish this examiner's report, which illustrates educational themes in Bhaskar's work and provides Bhaskar's response to Sarra's critique of his idea that there is a ‘common core humanity’. In its practical consideration of the question of human identity – a question currently much debated – this report is an excellent and timely complement to Bhaskar’s (2020) article Critical Realism and the Ontology of Persons. It also showcases Bhaskar's concepts of Power₁/Power₂ and concrete universality/singularity. We hope that publishing this report will draw attention to Sarra's exceptional work which, according to Bhaskar, ‘may well come to take on the role of a paradigm for multi-ethnic and similarly divided and contested communities’.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal education, emancipation, racism, identity, power, stereotypes, master/slave relations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Chris Sarra and Mervyn Harwig for allowing us to publish this report, Gary MacLennan for facilitating the process, and Leigh Price for writing the abstract.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Editor notes: Bhaskar (2016, 19) differentiates Power₂ from Power₁, where Power₂ is relations of power or power-over and Power₁ is transformative capacity.

2 These are expressed in the formal objectives of his school, described in its 2003 annual report as to: ‘generate good academic outcomes that are comparable to other schools around Queensland, and nurture a strong and positive sense of what it means to be aboriginal in today's society’ (p.275).

3 The thesis is also occasionally amusingly written. Thus Sarra remarks that "to deny the possibility of truth one has to be, I am inclined to think, a tenured academic" (p.35).

4 Here, as I intimated earlier, one could perhaps argue that some part of them must already be shown for their subsequent development. An alternative would be to regard these as emergent powers of aboriginal identity, consequent upon the developments of late twentieth and early twenty-first century society in which Sarra is a part.

5 Sarra astutely remarks that ‘the crucial point … is that while aboriginal people can access a white world and white ways of being, this level of access can never be entirely reciprocated. In a very real sense we have an acting out of the dialectic of the master and slave, where the slave gets to work on the world and becomes more competent than the master’ (p. 149). This mirrors the lack of reciprocity in the original situation from which Sarra starts which is one in which white society has commented upon and investigated aboriginal society, in an unreciprocated gesture – i.e. there are no white skulls for aborigines to observe.

6 Sara notes, ‘This is exactly what the racists of this land accuse us of doing. They say in effect that we become aborigines when there is land to be claimed’ (p. 75, c.f. p.6).

7 Thus Sarra says he supports fully her notion of an authentic and essential and indigenous self that can be recovered from the wreck of the colonial experience, ‘It is just such a recovery that I believe we have begun at Cherbourg State School’ (p.88).

8 Editor notes: Chris Sarra subsequently did publish his thesis as a book (Sarra 2014).