In the history of Australian Indigenous affairs, 2 December 1972 is an auspicious date. The election of the progressive government led by the late Gough Whitlam heralded a change in Aboriginal policy. The new prime minister declared that his aim was to ‘restore to the Aboriginal people of Australia their lost power of self-determination’, marking a decisive move away from previous ‘assimilation’ policies that intended to absorb Indigenous people into mainstream society (Whitlam 1973: 12). The following year, the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs was established, taking over the administration of Aboriginal affairs from various state authorities. It was a move applauded by Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous advocates alike. Influenced by intellectuals such as C.D. Rowley (1972a, 1972b), the guiding policy of the new department was ‘self-determination’ for Indigenous Australians, defined as ‘Aboriginal participation in making policies, and in decisions about their progress that affect them, and about their future’ (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1973: 971). The new department initially focused on supporting the formation of Aboriginal organisations that could run autonomous Aboriginal communities, and on promoting Aboriginal land rights.
The shift to self-determination was influenced by decolonisation movements, the United States civil rights movement and the burgeoning international Indigenous rights movement, all three of which gained serious momentum in the 1960s. 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, White anti-racists were now cast as partners and supporters (Rowse 2002: 110–30; Niezen 2003).
As I discussed in Chapter 2, a striking feature of White anti-racist discourse in the self-determination era is a reluctance to claim any agency in the process of Indigenous improvement: to suggest that Whites are ‘helping’ Indigenous people can be taken as an accusation of paternalism.1 White anti-racists prefer to think of their role as temporarily supporting Aboriginal people to reach their own goals until such time as White help is no longer needed. Indeed, the 1975 annual report of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs declares that once Aboriginal organisations have overcome their teething problems and ceased to depend on White advisors and employees, ‘the department itself should disappear’ (Batty 2005: 214).
The desire for self-effacement is still common among White anti-racists. My study of this group revealed a paradoxical agency: the will that wills its own demise. Many White anti-racists justified their work in Indigenous health by expressing their desire to train an Indigenous person to replace them. As we saw in Chapter 2, one downplayed her role as ‘mere facilitation’ of Indigenous people’s wishes.2 Another woman said, ‘I’m not wanting to drive the process at all, I want to give the process away’.3
This chapter explores two aspects of White anti-racist subjectivity: a highly ambivalent attitude towards one’s own agency, and the willingness to suffer hardships without complaint.4 These two related features of White anti-racist subjectivities – self-effacement and suffering – are rarely discussed in the academic or popular literature, yet they are crucial to understanding the limits and possibilities of current approaches to Indigenous disadvantage. I supplement my discussion of self-effacement and suffering with a detour through scholarship on fractured German identities, international development workers and North American anti-racist activists – all cases that illuminate aspects of Australian White anti-racism.
One way to approach the analysis of these reluctant agents is to consider their place in the ‘fantasy space’ of the Australian post-settler state. Drawing on Zizek’s (1993) concept of the ‘fantasy scene’ (where the subject is constituted through desire for the ‘Thing’), Ghassan Hage argues that the fantasy of the nation serves as an object of desire for White nationalists. For most White Australians, any move to include migrants and Indigenous people threatens ‘the imagined national home’, the ‘fantasy space in which the nationalists’ very being as desiring subjects is staged’ (Hage 1998: 73).
Povinelli’s work suggests that Indigenous social justice (what she explores as ‘liberal multiculturalism’) acts as a parallel, liberal fantasy space for Australians who reject White nationhood. Anti-racist Australians, who are genuinely troubled by Indigenous suffering, support Indigenous welfare programmes as well as the recognition of past wrongs and the limited forms of land rights offered by the state. Her work demonstrates how anti-racists partake in a ‘fantasy of liberal capitalist society’ where Indigenous subjects are called upon to perform authentic difference without offending liberal sensibilities (Povinelli 2002).
In this chapter, I extend Povinelli’s insights to interrogate the ideal future imagined by White anti-racists, a future when Indigenous people are lifted out of disadvantage to participate fully in Australian society, statistically equal to, but culturally distinct from, other Australians. This imagined future is the logical outcome of remediable difference, the concept I discussed in Chapter 2. Using the language of that chapter, White anti-racists who seek to change the structural determinants of Indigenous health and support Indigenous self-improvement hope to ‘close the gap’. Closing the gap in this way promises to erase unsanitised difference and produce healthy but recognisably Indigenous subjects with sanitised difference intact. Within this fantasy space, previous failures of the state to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous statistical outcomes are attributed to the lack of Indigenous control. To succeed, state programmes must be led by Indigenous people in the spirit and the letter of self-determination.
Why should this anti-racist fantasy space require that White agency be diminished to the point of disappearance? In this chapter I argue that applying the concept of ‘stigma’ to White privilege is a novel and productive approach to understanding these aspects of White anti-racist subjectivities. White stigma acts as a barrier to the broader goal of constructing ethical White subjectivities fit for the post-settler state. Overcoming this barrier necessitates a range of behaviours and beliefs, including self-effacement and suffering, that are otherwise difficult to explain. This analysis of White stigma complements the argument of Chapter 2, offering another tool for understanding how the construction of White anti-racist subjectivities necessitates remediable difference and copes with its failure.
Below I illustrate how self-effacement and suffering manifest themselves at the Darwin Institute of Indigenous Health. As we have seen, White anti-racists who work at the institute live in the regional capital of Darwin, but regularly travel to remote Indigenous communities where the bulk of the institute’s research is conducted. It is when White anti-racists venture into these spaces that they are most troubled by the stigma of privilege.
Stigma is a sociological concept developed most famously by Erving Goffman in his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Goffman 1963). To the Greeks, the term meant a physical mark on a slave or criminal to indicate their blemished status to the public. Goffman suggests that the modern concept of stigma is an attribute that acts as ‘an undesired differentness’ (ibid.: 5) from the ‘normal’ category that the viewer had anticipated. A stigma must induce a decrease in the estimation of the viewer, from a more highly esteemed category of ‘normal’ to a lesser category: a stigma is ‘deeply discrediting’ (ibid.: 3). The stigmatised identity must be managed through a variety of mechanisms, and if possible, by passing for ‘normal’. Another set of managing activities involves ‘in-group purification’, where there is an attempt to remake the stigmatised identity by ridding it of its undesirable attributes (ibid.: 108).
White stigma is a controversial concept. For the sake of the argument, Indigenous people, who are usually stigmatised themselves, would be taken as the ‘normal’ category.5 From the point of view of Indigenous people, the mark of white skin causes the (Indigenous) viewer to reassign the person viewed to the category of ‘White’. In contrast with categories usually associated with stigma (like disabled, homosexual or drug user), ‘White’ is not generally seen as inferior or sub-human, but associated with privilege, education and wealth.
However, within the norms of anti-racism, whiteness is also associated with a host of negative characteristics, such as exploitation, colonisation and imperialism, and general dominance over non-White people (Bonnett 2000), what we might call ‘negative Occidentalism’ (see Chapter 2). In the particular sites where the anti-racist fantasy space is the dominant imaginary, such as the institute, whenever whiteness is made explicit it is seen as something to be avoided, diminished and counteracted. When White anti-racists are interpellated as white (see Chapter 4), this is generally experienced as a stigma, whether the Indigenous people present explicitly denigrate whiteness (a relatively uncommon occurrence) or not. White stigma must then be managed by White anti-racists to minimise its impact on their work and lives. More broadly, White anti-racists must work to build a White subjectivity that transcends its stigmatised attributes. This hypothetical, ethical White subjectivity would be a perfect fit for the anti-racist fantasy space. Once it is achieved, White anti-racists could finally be confident in their ability to address Indigenous disadvantage without endangering the Indigenous subjects they seek to benefit.
Some models of stigma specify that only a group with less power than the dominant group can be stigmatised, thus disallowing the concept of White stigma (Link and Phelan 2001). Goffman, however, does not make such a stipulation. His conception is more relational and contextual. He argues that ‘the normal and the stigmatised are not persons, but rather perspectives. These are generated in social situations during mixed contacts by virtue of the unrealised norms that are likely to play upon the encounter’ (Goffman 1963: 138). White stigma is therefore possible in the minority of spaces where the ‘unrealised norms’ associate White privilege with negative attributes.
The norms of some academic circles, such as ‘whiteness studies’ scholarship, provide many examples of White stigma. Within this progressive discourse, the mechanism of colonisation and continuing oppression of Indigenous people and minorities is attributed to whiteness (Moreton-Robinson 2005). White anti-racists are in constant danger of inflicting further injury on non-White people, even as they attempt to do the opposite (Ahmed 2004). What White people can ‘do’ about their whiteness is the source of much debate. Can it be refused or even abolished? Or is it resistant to all efforts to evade and escape it? (Roediger 1994; Probyn 2004; Aveling 2004a, 2004b). The existence of whiteness studies itself is a cause of consternation of many whiteness studies scholars. The introduction of an important early collection suggests that ‘maybe this should be the last book on whiteness’ (Fine et al. 1997: xii). A paper by a prominent Australian scholar of whiteness studies announced her withdrawal from researching Indigenous people after she concluded that her White privilege is an incontrovertible barrier to conducting ‘decolonising’ research (Aveling 2012). Whiteness operates within this discourse as a stigma: an undesirable attribute to be managed, or if possible, disappeared.
The concept of stigma itself does feature in some whiteness scholarship, but only as a figment of paranoid, racist, White imaginations. Stigma always appears as ‘perceived white stigma’ whereby White people feel that their whiteness disadvantages them in the postcolonial, post-civil rights, post-apartheid era (Gallagher 1997; McKinney 2003; McDermott 2006). This is seen in the context of an ‘emerging crisis of white identity’ that Michael Omi predicted would occur as demographic shifts and immigration mean that Whites will soon be a minority in the United States (Omi 1996: 181; see also Winant 2004; Kaufmann 2005).
Whiteness studies scholars tend to view White stigma as a calculated fiction, a defensive gesture on the part of White people who see their unearned privileges beginning to erode as non-White groups gain political power. Underlying much of this work is an assumption of misrecognition. Whites, hungry to maintain their power at all costs, mistake justice for persecution. It is implied that if these White supremacists, mainstream college students and others who contest their apparent stigmatisation finally recognise their persisting privilege, they will stop feeling stigmatised and join the ranks of White anti-racists who actively seek to reduce their privilege and its detrimental effects on non-Whites.
The White anti-racists I am concerned with readily acknowledge their privilege, do not perceive their position as stigmatised, and only rarely and reluctantly complain of unfair treatment on the basis of race. As Hughey notes in his study of White anti-racists in the United States, White anti-racists differ from other Whites in that they are aware, perhaps hyper-aware, of their whiteness (Hughey 2012).6 This would not inoculate them from criticism from some scholars who are likely to interpret the experiences and behaviours of White anti-racists at the institute as the disguised efforts of closet racists to maintain their threatened privilege (see, for example, Zajicek 2002; Niemonen 2007). As I have discussed at various points in this book, I abstain from this evaluative approach to anti-racism and instead consider anti-racism to be a culture, discourse and identity worthy of anthropological attention. Before exploring how ‘stigma’ can elucidate White anti-racists’ tendencies to self-effacement and suffering, I consider a parallel project analysing progressive German identities.
Historian Dirk Moses has drawn on Goffman’s treatment of stigma to explore the problem of German identity in the long shadow of the Holocaust (Moses 2007b). He argues that Germans in post-Holocaust Germany are marked with the stigma of the perpetrator that has been passed down by their forebears. He draws on Luhrmann’s concept of the ‘traumatized social self’ to explain how the German group identity has been transformed by the revelations of Nazi atrocities and is ‘now associated with failure, moral inadequacy, embarrassment and guilt’ (Luhrmann 2000, 185; cited in Moses 2007a: 55).
Many German intellectuals today defend the national collective identity from such negative associations, arguing (for example) that Germans born after the end of the war cannot be held responsible for the events of the Holocaust. A minority, however, contend that every generation of Germans must come to terms with the events of the Nazi genocide and their country’s role in it. Events such as the construction of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the late 1990s (completed in 2003) highlighted the contrast between the defenders of German identity, a group Moses calls ‘German Germans’, and those that believe further identity reconstruction is needed, a group he calls ‘non-German Germans’ (Moses 2007a, 2007b).
‘Non-German Germans’ attempt to create a new German identity by strongly identifying with the victims of the Holocaust and with Jewish culture, and by rejecting all they identify as ‘typically German’. Many will recall the moment when they realised the extent of Nazi atrocities as the point when the German national identity was indelibly sullied (Moses 2007a: 62). They are vigilant in detecting residues of racism and fascism in their government and compatriots. They may also distance themselves from older family members who were alive during the war, or fabricate a family history of Nazi resistance.
These behaviours can be understood as strategies of ‘stigma management’ aimed at developing a ‘new German group self’ (Moses 2007b: 155). In contrast, ‘German Germans’ reject the stigmatisation of German identity by distancing the Nazi era from the narrative of the nation. They regard the efforts of non-German Germans to call them to account as a form of persecution (Moses 2007a: 58), a similar phenomenon to the ‘perceived stigma’ that whiteness studies scholars have identified.
In Australia, a similar national divide was revealed in the so-called ‘history wars’ (Macintyre and Clark 2003). Since the 1970s, progressive historians have worked to document the frontier wars of European occupation; the numerous forms of oppressive state control of Aboriginal lives; and most recently, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and into institutions in the name of assimilation (see, for example, Reynolds 1987; Haebich 2000). One of the most controversial debates has centred on whether the institutionalisation of Aboriginal children ‘for their own good’ amounts to cultural genocide (Tatz 2001). In a statement commonly cited to support this view, the Western Australian Commissioner for Native Affairs and key assimilationist thinker, A.O. Neville, posed a rhetorical question at a 1937 conference: ‘Are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any aborigines in Australia?’ (Commonwealth of Australia 1937: 11).
Unsurprisingly, conservative intellectuals have been critical of these attempts to expose the ‘fantasy space’ of White nationhood devoid of its original inhabitants. For their work exposing the poor treatment of Aboriginal Australians by the state, progressive historians are accused of perpetuating a ‘black armband’ view of Australian history (Blainey 1993).7 It is historically and morally wrong, the conservatives argue, to portray settler society in wholly negative terms as invaders and destroyers of Aboriginal societies (Windschuttle 2002). Like ‘German Germans’, conservative thinkers seek to defend national identity from defilement. Like ‘non-German Germans’, White anti-racists seek to generate new forms of national identity by exposing the unpalatable aspects of perpetrator history, so persuading White Australians to distinguish themselves from their (biological and social) ancestors.
For Australian White anti-racists, the pollution of the perpetrator is both more distant and more proximate than in the German case. The perpetrators of dispossession and child removal are temporally and genetically distant from contemporary anti-racists, while most young adult Germans have grown up with at least one grandparent who lived through the Second World War. Some White Australians of Anglo-Saxon origin may wonder whether their ancestors participated in dispossession, or know that they did, but for most anti-racists it is an identification with the nation and with whiteness that generates stigma, rather than with their immediate ancestors. ‘We have benefited from Indigenous oppression’ is the general claim that can be made on behalf of migrants to Australia as well as the descendants of early settlers.8
The pollution of the perpetrator is more proximate, however, owing to the persistence and visibility of the victims, the Indigenous population. The suffering of the Jews in Nazi Europe is a historical fact, but the suffering of Aboriginal people is a prominent reality, regularly gracing national newspapers. While the issue of German stigma is illustrated primarily through debates about history and memory, Indigenous Australians stand as living testimony to the genocidal crimes of White society, their shorter lives an organic barometer of colonial oppression.
My aim here is not to judge whether the subset of White Australians in question (or Germans for that matter) feel badly enough, too badly or too good about themselves. I am interested in the effects of a negative collective self-view among White anti-racists who seek to recognise and ameliorate the effects of colonisation through their work in Indigenous communities. For White anti-racists, the colour of their skin marks them as ‘colonisers’. If we are to see this ascription as a stigma, it is a stigma of a special, highly contextualised form. It is a voluntary stigma, applying only to those White people who accept responsibility for the effects of colonisation on Indigenous people.9 It only takes effect when these White people are engaged in Indigenous issues, usually in the context of paid employment, but also through activism, education and personal encounters. For most White anti-racists at the institute, the bulk of their daily lives in Darwin (where Indigenous people make up only 10 per cent of the population) takes place within the cradle of White privilege. Only upon entering specific spaces such as the institute or remote communities does the stigma of whiteness come into play.
Before we explore the workings of stigma management in the Northern Territory, it is useful to reflect on the White anti-racist self-concept presented in the social science literature on international development workers. This extends the discussion in the Introduction, where I suggested that the study of international development workers had great relevance to the study of White anti-racism in post-settler states. As social groups, international development workers and professionals in Indigenous affairs greatly overlap (and many institute employees had spent some time working in international development).10
Critical accounts of development workers build a picture of normative White anti-racism – what White development workers are like, and what they should be like. As we will see, the imperative to ‘help’ the marginalised and suffering is seen as an exercise in narcissism – a desire to cultivate a morally unblemished bourgeois identity. I will argue that this critique of the self-loving development worker reveals a normative belief that ‘good’ development workers should hate themselves, should seek to remove their oppressive, stigmatised presence from the scene of development and disappear. Two studies are the focus of analysis here: Paulette Goudge’s The Whiteness of Power, which focuses on Nicaragua, and Barbara Heron’s Desire for Development, which discusses development workers in Africa (Goudge 2003; Heron 2007).11 Both authors are ex-development workers who conducted interview research with fellow development workers. Both believe that development is a tool of global dominance of the North over the South, and that development workers are continuous with and similar to the missionaries and colonial administrators of the past.
The White development workers that Goudge and Heron interview are similar to the White anti-racists I studied at the institute, as I argued in the Introduction using quotes from one of Heron’s interviewees, Carol. Most members of both groups actively sought out work with marginalised people because they wanted to improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. Both groups approached their work armed with a (more or less) sophisticated critique of colonialism and geopolitics. They all believed that colonisation and imperialism are the causes of inequality and poverty, and saw their role as facilitating the empowerment of local communities to identify and address their own priorities.
Goudge and Heron consider the lofty goals articulated by many White anti-racists as sustenance for their narcissism. Goudge argues that the manifold forms of privilege White anti-racists enjoy means their presence can only reinforce oppression, even as they seek to dismantle it. Heron similarly argues that development work is geared towards the creation of bourgeois White feminine identities. White ‘desire for development’ is the desire to construct moral White subjectivities (similar to my argument in Chapter 2). Drawing on critical race theorists, Heron argues that through these attempts to help the less-fortunate masses that can never quite attain whiteness, the bourgeois subject can at once attest to their morality while affirming their superiority (Bhabha 1994; McClintock 1995; Cooper and Stoler 1997). In this rendering, White anti-racism is no less racist than racism, and is constituted through narcissism – it is all about us.
The answer Heron offers is for White development workers to keep in mind that they are inextricably implicated in global systems of oppression, and to understand that their desire to ‘help’ those in the global South is an expression of White bourgeois identity (Heron 2007: 151). Following these guidelines will prevent an array of narcissistic feelings, including the desire to help, good feelings about helping, and desiring friendship or love with the subaltern. However, there are two sets of emotions that are set apart from these ‘bad’ narcissistic ones and commended: pain, and the desire for disappearance.
First, the question of pain is important in both accounts. Goudge notes disapprovingly that White anti-racists get upset when recounting how co-workers or strangers abused them for being ‘white imperialists’. She is approving of one woman who dismisses her own hurt feelings (after being berated by a co-worker) because the woman understands ‘where and why such reactions to her might originate’ (Goudge 2003: 84).12 Goudge does not think White anti-racists should complain about bad treatment. Instead, we should welcome these painful experiences as tools to help us remain aware of our privilege. We should be treated badly considering our complicity in (neo)colonial oppression. As well as feeling good when we are treated badly, we should feel bad when we are treated well, such as when we are offered the best food and lodgings. Heron argues that bourgeois subjects must experience disintegration – ‘a dissolution of unifying narratives of a moral self’ – in order to form a ‘more moral position of accountability’ (Heron 2007: 154–55, emphasis in original).13 This disintegration is painful, but necessary to counter the oppressiveness and false morality of the anti-racist position.
Second, both authors see the solution in removing the White anti-racist from development. Truly anti-racist development workers should admit they should not have been there in the first place. Any reluctance to do so is due to a narcissistic attachment to their bourgeois identity (Heron 2007: 136–39). The proper place for White anti-racists is in their home countries in the North, working to challenge the system of racial dominance at its heart, and reduce its impact on the South by personally consuming less.
The normative anti-racist that emerges from this literature is one who knows that their desire to help is narcissism in disguise; who feels the pain that is inflicted on the subaltern by their presence and the broader development enterprise; and who resists rather than reinforces a White bourgeois identity, ultimately by disintegrating their sense of self and removing themselves from the scene of development.
Compared to the White anti-racists that Goudge and Heron describe, the White anti-racists who work in Indigenous Australia appear, on the whole, more politically sophisticated, with a greater understanding of the link between White privilege and Indigenous disadvantage. This could be a product of their location in a post-settler colony that makes their role as beneficiaries of the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people more difficult to deny or obfuscate. As a result, quite a number of them embodied the normative White anti-racism of Goudge and Heron (while those authors could only find one or two who fitted the bill). As we will see, Goudge’s and Heron’s prescriptions for pain and disappearance are adopted by some White anti-racists at the institute. I argue that the reason these therapies are recommended by scholars and adopted by anti-racists is their efficacy in managing the stigma of whiteness.
White anti-racists need to manage White stigma in an attempt to create a White subjectivity that can help Indigenous Australians without harming them. Like non-German Germans, one way White anti-racists manage their stigma is through criticising other Whites, including other White anti-racists. In the German case, the figure of the arrogant anti-Semite typifies the stigmatised identity. For White anti-racists, the assimilationist intent on making Indigenous people White is the paradigmatic symbol of disdain. It is extreme, however, for a White anti-racist to accuse him/herself or a colleague of being an assimilationist – akin to an accusation of cultural genocide. At the institute, stigmatised whiteness is more commonly encapsulated in the classificatory system of ‘missionary, mercenary or misfit’, the most widespread trope of self-critique among White people working in the Indigenous arena.
This triumvirate has been used to refer to White people working in a variety of development contexts the world over. It is always cited as a piece of insider knowledge, a local joke. Two cross-cultural consultants from Alice Springs in Central Australia tell us that ‘there is a tired old saying in the NT [Northern Territory] that the kardiya [white people] who come from South to work with yapa [Indigenous people] are either mercenaries, missionaries or misfits’ (Price and Price 1998), while the author of a New Canadian Magazine article about development workers recalls ‘a person from Oxfam told me there are three kinds of people who do this type of work’ (Silverman 2005). Four other books have used this title (T. Hall 1996; Loney 2001; Patterson 2006; Warah 2008), as well as an Australian Medical Association conference on Indigenous health held in Darwin in 2002.
Veteran development anthropologist Jock Stirrat has explored this lexeme in the context of international development. He identifies ‘mercenaries, missionaries and misfits’ as employees of international development agencies, employees of non-government organisations (NGOs), and disillusioned development workers, respectively. He argues that those in the ‘development business’ claim to be in it ‘just for the money’ as a defence mechanism against the guilt of earning so much and the uncertainty of their impact on the lives of the poor. The title of ‘missionary’ is applied to the NGO worker who ‘is motivated by a sense of duty and obligation. This may derive from some sense of guilt at the poverty of the developing world; it may derive from a particular political agenda or it may be fuelled by some romantic dream. No matter what, the outcome is the same: a sacrifice of self in the pursuit of some greater goal’ (Stirrat 2008: 412). As will we see, it is this latter category of development worker that most closely resembles the White anti-racists at the institute and that they find the most problematic. Stirrat sees both the mercenaries and missionaries as working towards the transformation of the subject of development into a modern post-Enlightenment individual with the ability to transcend the social ties that bind her to hierarchy, dependency and powerlessness. These two categories are opposed to the misfits, the development worker who no longer believes in development but cannot fit into Western life, and remains trapped in a cycle of overseas postings.
The aforementioned cross-cultural consultants – a Warlpiri woman who is now a Northern Territory member of parliament, and her White husband – explain how the categories apply in Indigenous development:
The mercenaries are fairly straightforward. Self enrichment at the expense of naïvely trusting and tolerant yapa [Indigenous] communities … Then there are the missionaries, the old, Christian and conservative and the new, rationalist and radical, out to change the world. Many of the old are exhausted and burdened by self doubt. The new are energetic and confident … Feminists, environmentalists, various brands of socialists, anti-nuclear activists and others all come with burning, youthful zeal … Misfits turn up in all groups of course. In the North they become ‘colourful characters’ and find a ready acceptance in yapa [Indigenous] communities. (Price and Price 1998)
All three of these tropes were present at the institute. White researchers are the first to show suspicion of their colleagues’ motives, and interpret any hint of self-interest as a sign of exploitation. Indigenous communities are portrayed as victims of those who purport to help them, ‘inundated’ with interest from White researchers clamouring for their involvement in an effort to secure easy research funds from funding bodies eager to support Indigenous projects.14 White researchers accuse their colleagues and themselves of ‘build[ing] their careers on people’s ill-health’,15 while hiding their selfish motives by ‘cloaking what we do in good intentions’.16 The mercenary is a prominent trope of White stigma, managed through criticising others and anticipating suspicion of one’s motives from colleagues. The second discourse of the misfit surfaces in light-hearted quips about us ‘mangy collection of odd-bods’ who work in Indigenous health.17 The third trope of White stigma, the missionary, is the most complex and compelling.
In the narrative above, mercenaries and misfits, along with the ‘old’ missionaries, are hangovers from the colonial frontier. What one might call the postcolonial frontier is inhabited by what they call the ‘new, rationalist and radical’ missionaries. Some White anti-racists at the institute also critique themselves as ‘new missionaries’:
One hundred years ago people from our societies went away and became missionaries, and that is how they got their raison d’etre for being good. I think now what people do is, in the last twenty years or thirty years … people from southern states, not everyone, but a certain group of people have got their raison d’etre from coming up to save the black man. If necessary, from himself as well. And they would have been missionaries three or four generations ago, and they’ve now become ‘people who work in Aboriginal health’. Now that’s reasonably denigrating, but I think that’s the way to understand it, myself probably included in this.18
The charge of ‘missionary’ is a serious one to make against a White anti-racist. In other texts where progressive Whites are accused of being ‘like missionaries’, this serves as reproof enough, with no further elaboration required (Henkel and Stirrat 2001; Niezen 2003).
In Australia, Christian missions were set up around the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with regions parcelled out to various denominations. From the turn of the last century until the 1970s (and in some cases the early 1980s) these missions served as the main arm of government administration in most parts of Aboriginal Australia (Swain and Bird Rose 1988). Typical representations of missions in the public sphere focus on their role in ‘the suppression of Aboriginal cultural practices and languages’ through ‘engaging in practices such as forcibly separating Aboriginal children from their families in order to maximise control over the child’s education into Christian ways and beliefs’ (Australian Museum 2006). Comparing someone to a missionary implies they are imposing their belief system on Indigenous people, and that their failure to respect Indigenous culture will have deleterious effects (recall here the discussion in Chapter 2 of anti-racists’ fears of ‘imposing’ their beliefs and desires on Indigenous people). Taking this view, the ‘new missionary’ uses secularity as a guise behind which lurks the imposition of values, just as the ‘old’ missionary used Christianity.19
Whether missionary or mercenary, White anti-racists appear destined to inflict harm on Indigenous people by exerting power over them, either for blatant self-gain or out of misguided superiority. As this stigma acts as a serious obstacle to realising the anti-racist fantasy space of imagined future equality, stigma management is required. At the institute, the predominant method of countering White stigma is to minimise White agency. If White intervention in Indigenous lives is by definition damaging, then it follows that the less White people are doing, the less chance of injury to Indigenous subjects.
In the professional development courses I have run with White professionals in Indigenous health, participants are asked to choose, from a range of quotations, one that particularly resonates with them. This quotation from an Indigenous person commenting on what White people can ‘do’ about racism is always strongly endorsed, ‘You don’t have to do anything to help me. You don’t have to do anything to help my people. Just be there. As soon as you say you want to help me, that puts me down. Always remember that’ (Mellor 2004: 64).
The popularity of this quotation is instructive for what it tells us about the desires of White anti-racists. This unnamed Indigenous person promises that by ‘just being there’, it is possible for White anti-racists to be of use to Indigenous people. To be ‘helpful’, White people must not act, and must not declare that they want to act.20
Statements that similarly minimise the agency of White anti-racists are often made by institute researchers. One researcher stated that her role was ‘supporting individuals, giv[ing] them the capacity to do what they see fit … providing opportunities for self-determination’. She constructs her role as not following her own volition, but supporting Indigenous people to follow theirs. As discussed in Chapter 2, another colleague stressed that when she was a nurse in a remote health clinic, ‘I was merely just facilitating what [the Aboriginal health workers] had been doing for a long time’.21 Such tame language is needed to diminish the stigma of White agency. Like Anna, whom I discussed in the Introduction, this woman referred to White people who try to assist Indigenous people to make decisions as ‘contaminants’, unfailingly biasing the process towards their own desires, despite all efforts to be neutral.22
I witnessed another group of colleagues at the institute brainstorming a term for ‘White people who worked in Indigenous health’. Terms like ‘altruistic’ and ‘helper’ were tried and rejected, and no term was found. The next day, a colleague approached me to tell me that she and a few others had come up with the perfect label: ‘White Helpers on Indigenous Projects – WHIPS!’ (Kowal and Paradies 2005: 1353). The irony of the acronym was intentional, and exemplifies both the persistent stigma of whiteness and the constant need to attenuate it. While we try to establish a position of neutral assistance, we cannot escape our role as ‘whips’, instruments of discipline and castigation.
The task of managing White stigma requires constant vigilance, as one colleague explained: ‘Constantly, constantly, constantly, you are thinking: “Am I not seeing the Indigenous side to this”. You know? And often that will have nothing to do with it. But you are always thinking, “Is this an Indigenous issue?”’23 Another colleague felt ‘you have to question yourself every step of the way … you’re not so confident any more’.24 The constant possibility that one may be imposing one’s beliefs or otherwise harming Indigenous people requires the White anti-racist to remain, in Goffman’s terms, ‘self-conscious and calculating about the impression he is making’ (Goffman 1963: 14).
Another related device that attempts to resolve the problem of White agency is to claim to be the least of all possible evils, the ‘good-enough White anti-racist’. As one researcher put it, ‘I think that if I don’t do this job, maybe someone else will do it who does not care about Indigenous issues at all’.25
The few White anti-racists that Goudge and Heron approve of in their accounts of international development workers come close to the White anti-racists I have described. Carol, the interviewee discussed in the Introduction, is praised by Heron for problematising her agency and admitting that she does not ‘know how to deal with having power by virtue of [her] race’ (Heron 2007: 96). Carol described her efforts ‘not to impose herself’ by remaining silent as much as possible (ibid.: 103). Her ultimate goal was ‘to live a life that is as harmless as possible’, pointing towards the inherent harmfulness of the White anti-racist that must be self-managed with vigilance (ibid.: 135).
As well as self-vigilance, White anti-racists deal with the problematic nature of their agency with the self-assurance that it is only temporary. This is expressed in what I call the ‘five years’ time’ discourse. For White anti-racists, ‘the ultimate endpoint is to be out of a job’, either because the statistical gaps have finally yielded to reasoned intervention, or because Indigenous people are filling all the positions. White anti-racists take up positions on remote communities (as town clerks, sport and recreation officers, health promotion officers, clinic managers, or store managers) with the intention of mentoring a local worker so that ‘in five years’ time’ they will be happily redundant and able to hand over to the ‘now suitably skilled’ Indigenous person.26
The strategies discussed thus far are aimed at recognising the stigma of whiteness in the hope that through self-vigilance, the anti-racist will be less likely to act ‘White’, or that their damaging influence will be temporary. In addition to these strategies, White anti-racists at the institute also creatively engage in constructing new identities beyond the missionary and the mercenary. Unsurprisingly, these efforts are marred by ambivalence.
One colleague told me that she had been discussing the ‘three Ms’ with her workmates: ‘You know the three Ms? Well, we think there is one more: Motherers’.27 Another colleague describes her attitude to working in Indigenous health as ‘like being a mother; it’s unconditional love’.28 To conjure the figure of the mother as an alternative White anti-racist identity is a complex move. It is clearly meant to depart from the other ‘three Ms’, especially missionaries. Paradigmatic mothers differ from paradigmatic missionaries in that they are women, and their love is unconditional, not tied to religious affiliation or the task of improving souls. Although this feminised and secularised concept goes some way to overcoming the White stigma inherent in existing tropes of White anti-racism, it is still a deeply ambivalent category (Jacobs 2009). The researcher who suggested the ‘4th M’ intended the category of ‘motherers’ to be as problematic as the other three categories. The most obvious problem is the use of a mother–child analogy for the relationship between White anti-racists and Indigenous people, positioning the latter as passive charges. Although maternal authority is perhaps softer and kinder than paternal authority, it is authority just the same.
To escape the stigma of authority, a final strategy for White anti-racists is to divest themselves of power altogether (if only discursively). This was a factor in the pleasure that many colleagues experienced when going on hunting trips or attending ceremonies in remote communities, activities to which they brought little knowledge or aptitude. A doctor working at the institute expressed this explicitly as an attempt to invert dominant power relations: ‘I am trying to counter the whole power thing that comes from being a doctor. If I go there with the doctor hat on, people treat me a certain way. But if I go there with my community development hat on, people are completely different. Out bush I am the kid and they are the absolute experts’.29
In refusing the professional expertise of ‘the doctor hat’ and adopting the subservient role of White ‘kid’ to Indigenous ‘absolute experts’, White anti-racists can remedy their excessive and pathological power over Indigenous people and thus counter White stigma.30 As a child, the White anti-racist cannot exploit Indigenous people. This relief is a good part of the pleasure Whites feel in those (unusual) moments where they are in the care of Indigenous people.
To be hunting in a remote place, knee-deep in mangrove mud, totally reliant on your Indigenous host to find your way back to the car, and then to direct you down barely visible tracks through the bush, back to the dirt road; to be in the middle of a lively discussion in a language you do not understand, reliant on translation; to make halting attempts to speak a few words of language and be heartily laughed at; to hand over control of important possessions on demand – the driver’s seat of your car, your bank card for the purchase of camping supplies. In these moments we feel the unadulterated delight of cross-cultural exchange and the relief of oppressiveness shed, if only temporarily.
The stigma of whiteness is resolved most completely, and most fantastically, through the figure of the child. The child does not wish to impose her beliefs, nor is she able to do so. The fascination of the child with the ‘other’ hides no agenda of self-interest or exploitation, and is not suspect. The epitome of innocence and powerlessness, the figure of the White child realises the ultimate goal of White anti-racists: the inversion of colonial power relations. Through this imaginary inversion, the White anti-racist is cleansed of stigma. The White anti-racist that most comfortably inhabits the anti-racist fantasy space is neither overbearing father nor tender mother, but fervent child.
The attempts of White anti-racists to manage White stigma through self-effacement can only be partially effective. As various scholars of whiteness have argued, even the most vigilant White anti-racist will find it impossible to transcend their privilege. Ultimately, the indelible stain of White stigma denigrates the moral worth of White anti-racists, and precludes their ability to help Indigenous people. As I have argued, since the 1970s White anti-racists have increasingly taken up the challenge of Indigenous studies and whiteness studies to recognise their role in the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous peoples. From the point of view of White anti-racists, this has been both the triumph and the tragedy of the self-determination era. Problematising the role of non-Indigenous people in Indigenous development was long overdue, but it can reduce White anti-racists to children, leaving them without sufficient confidence to accomplish the difficult tasks their work entails.
The picture that emerges from this analysis shows that the normative anti-racism implied in Goudge’s and Heron’s critiques is not the solution they hope for. The question that remains is why normative White anti-racism is based in the negation of its own possibility.
A psychoanalytic lens offers one answer. Following Zizek, Hage argues that the ‘fantasy space’ of White nationhood can never be realised because in the moment that it occurs, the desiring White subjects of that nationhood would cease to exist. The migrant and the Aborigine play the crucial role of scapegoat, providing a reason for the perpetual deferral of the perfect nation, and thus preserving its possibility (Hage 1998: 74).
Extending this argument to this case would imply that White anti-racist identities are constituted by the desire for the anti-racist fantasy space of imagined future equality, and would dissolve if its goals were ever achieved. For the White anti-racist who dreams of a world where Indigenous people are no longer oppressed, a scapegoat for the unrealisability of their fantasy space must be found. That scapegoat is the racist White state and the racist White people who populate it – a category that is forever threatening to include the White anti-racist herself. To preserve the possibility of the anti-racist imaginary of future equality, the ‘good’ perpetrator must always be in danger of betraying her exceptional status, reverting to type and ruining the very goal she purports to strive for. The torturous ambivalence of the white anti-racist may be a prerequisite for the existence of this subjectivity that requires her to be saviour and scapegoat simultaneously.
The fantasy space of white nationhood is encapsulated in A.O. Neville’s racist hope that Aborigines would be absorbed into whiteness and we would ‘eventually forget that there were any aborigines in Australia’ (Commonwealth of Australia 1937: 11). The ‘fantasy space’ that ultimately animates White anti-racist hopes is the inverse of this vision. Instead of disappearing Aborigines, White anti-racists wish to disappear themselves. As we have seen, institute researchers enjoy anticipating their obsolescence at such time when Indigenous people are finally self-sufficient; they also muse about ‘pulling out’ of remote communities in order to more immediately remove their contaminating influence.31
When the anti-racist fantasy space fails to deliver a tenable construction of ethical White agency, the most soothing fantasy is the dream that colonisation never occurred. An ethical, unstigmatised identity is thus premised on an historical impossibility. Like the ‘non-German German’ who must ‘endure a non-identity’ (Moses 2007a: 70), a stigmatised identity may be inescapable for White anti-racists.
Alongside the existential suffering I have outlined, some White anti-racists at the institute endured other forms of suffering, including exhaustion, humiliation and discomfort. The remainder of this chapter focuses on these experiences that range from everyday inconveniences to more conspicuous indignities. Stigma management contributes to an explanation of these experiences, as the stigma of whiteness is temporarily alleviated in moments of suffering. But first, we must return to the institute to hear Patricia’s story.
Patricia: What can I do Emma? I’m only one person. I’m not a missionary, I’m not a saviour.
Author: What are you then?
Patricia: I’m a workhorse, a donkey, a mule.32
I had caught Patricia in a vulnerable moment. As we sat in the sunny courtyard of the institute, she reflected on her experiences of a community-based health promotion project that had been her focus for over five years. While she lived in Darwin, she regularly made trips to a remote Aboriginal community of just one thousand residents on the north coast of Australia, where the project was based. Stepping off the plane was like stepping into another world, a world of great physical beauty and stark disadvantage.
Like the vast majority of researchers employed by the research institute, Patricia is a non-Indigenous Australian who sought to improve the social and health status of Indigenous communities. She believed that projects that were grounded in the local ‘cultural landscape’ had the best chance of making a real impact.33
The project she was working on appeared to reflect these principles. Despite this, it was not going as well as she had hoped. Utilising culturally appropriate community-development principles, she was supporting the development of a clan-based fishing business, an intervention that would hopefully improve nutrition and physical activity in the community, as well as economic independence. Although her community collaborators had initially been enthusiastic about the project, embracing the chance to access the skills and resources needed to start their own business, there had been little progression in recent months. ‘I am totally zapped of energy’, she told me:
You know how it is, when you go out there, you have a list of ten things you need to get done and if you get two things done you are lucky and to get that done you have to do doglegs everywhere around the community … We buy the equipment, we facilitate training in stock storage, occupational health and safety, first aid, bookkeeping; we take them to talk to small businessmen in town. The boat just circulates around the family and there’s no local business.34
Frustration and exhaustion are prominent emotions in this account and other ‘backstage’ conversations among White anti-racists working in Indigenous health. Patricia had followed the principles of self-determination and community development, and the wishes expressed by her Indigenous collaborators and advisers. She had strongly advocated with her bosses at the institute to harness their support for the notion that a small business could be a health intervention. Now she feels frustrated by the apparent lack of motivation among her Indigenous collaborators, which has prevented a demonstrable ‘project outcome’ (in this case a family business) despite her impeccable process and personal commitment.
In this narrative, Patricia plays the role of the suffering workhorse, doggedly soldiering on even when self-determination fails to deliver. While the tragic suffering of Indigenous people is the reason that anti-racist White people move from their metropolitan homes to the towns of the North, the suffering of anti-racists themselves is a common if unacknowledged feature of work in Indigenous affairs. My research found that suffering is an experience shared by many, whether the suffering relates to physical hardship, professional frustration, or suspicion and betrayal from Indigenous colleagues. Although these experiences are common, White anti-racists are unlikely to directly complain about it, instead speaking obliquely about the ‘difficulties’ of working in Indigenous affairs. Recognising whiteness as a stigmatised identity that White anti-racists continuously attempt to rehabilitate and make liveable makes this puzzling behaviour more intelligible.
One aspect of White anti-racist suffering is illustrated by the widespread and mundane belief that working in Indigenous health should be difficult for White people. Newcomers to the institute are told by their peers that research projects cannot proceed until trusting relationships are developed between community leaders and researchers, and that this process can take a long time. They are told that when planning visits to communities they should regularly phone to check that the proposed date is still convenient, and should expect that trips may be cancelled at the last minute due to ceremonies, funerals, or competing events run by government departments or NGOs. When research trips do go ahead, the high level of mobility in remote communities means that potential research participants may be absent, due to visiting family members or attending funerals elsewhere. Family rivalries within communities may mean that some families will avoid a research project that a competing family is involved in.35 White anti-racists at the institute are alternately frustrated and sanguine about these difficulties as they learn to anticipate and manage them, seeing them as inherent to working with a disadvantaged minority group in a post-settler context.
Another important contributor to the difficulty of working in Indigenous health is the rigorous ethical approval process. There is general endorsement at the institute of the high level of suspicion that human research ethics committees show towards projects that are led by non-Indigenous people (which is the case for the majority of research projects). Indigenous-specific ethical guidelines state that non-Indigenous researchers must demonstrate that their motivations for doing the research are pure, for instance by describing how they changed their plans in response to Indigenous desires (National Health and Medical Research Council 2003).36 These requirements are generally seen by White anti-racists as necessary to protect Indigenous people. As one colleague commented, ‘It’s certainly harder for us [White people] but that’s the way it should be; it should be even more rigorous’.37 I propose that within the belief system underlying this comment, difficulty for White anti-racists equates with safety for Indigenous people.
There are two ways that White stigma can explain suffering. The first is suggested by the equation above linking White suffering to Indigenous safety. The stigma of privilege puts White anti-racists in perpetual danger of oppressing Indigenous people, even as they actively try to do the opposite. The experience of suffering provides temporary relief from this self-imposed stigma. For if we are suffering, we take solace from the belief that we cannot be simultaneously causing harm.
We can apply a similar analysis to Patricia’s frustration in the account above. Though she is clearly frustrated with the seeming inability of her Indigenous colleagues to deliver, she focuses on the difficulties of her own position. Any elaboration of her Indigenous colleagues’ shortcomings – why all the training and support she has provided has led to nought – remains unspoken. This may reflect more than mere politeness. If we read the episode through the prism of stigma management, it makes sense that her own suffering remains the focus. Although the project may have failed, at least the stigma of privilege has been lessened. Her suffering promises that she has remained true to the wishes of her Indigenous colleagues, and has done no harm.
Related to such frustration is the suffering of service. Becky Thompson’s social history of White anti-racist activism in the United States includes much commentary on the physical and mental suffering associated with being an activist. As one of her interviewees comments, ‘I don’t know that we treat ourselves very well’. Others discuss the financial strain of donating money to many campaigns and supporting needy visitors, and the lack of resources in underfunded universities and NGOs. She comments that her interviewees did not complain about these hardships. Rather, the theme of suffering ‘was the one most people baulked at, tried to avoid, and said they didn’t understand’. Thompson does not attempt to explain this suffering, although two of her interviewees suggest ‘White guilt’ or the ‘Protestant ethic’ may be to blame (Thompson 2001: 348, 354, 360).38
A colleague at the institute talks about the hardships of staying at the community where she commonly works:
I go there and sleep on the floor at the women’s centre, I don’t have a proper shower … When I stay there the old chooks [term of endearment for old women] come along too to keep me company, which is a big ask for them, to leave their other responsibilities. But you’ve also got to feed them, and it’s hard to cook for six people out of a billycan and [with] no knife. The toilets at the women’s centre when I went there last were disgusting; there was poo on the walls. So I went and bought them big mobs [large amounts] of cleaning materials out of my travel allowance.39
Similar stories of poor accommodation abound in tales of research field trips, along with complaints about the battered vehicles hired out at exorbitant rates by the town council, the poor range of food available at remote community stores, and the risk of being attacked by unrestrained dogs that roam the community. The threat of physical violence is perhaps the ultimate form of potential suffering. While the high rates of violence in remote communities are overwhelmingly incidents in which Indigenous people are both victims and perpetrators, occasionally White professionals, particularly nurses, are the victims of assault (including sexual assault). Very few institute researchers have been victims of violence, and it is infrequently discussed, but there are a few shared stories of individuals feeling threatened, such as one researcher who woke up in (poorly secured) council accommodation to find an unknown man in the room (luckily for her, he fled).40
The experience of shared suffering is prominent in the narrative above. The ‘old chooks’ with whom my colleague has cultivated a strong relationship are happy to put their own family responsibilities aside to stay with her in the women’s centre to ensure her safety. And while she struggles to stay clean and well fed as she goes about her community development work, my colleague knows that the poor conditions at the women’s centre are no worse and probably better than the state of the locals’ overcrowded houses.
The story had the effect of invoking sympathy and admiration for her suffering, and for the Indigenous people who bear these poor living conditions as a permanent arrangement. It also contained a kernel of pleasure. This pleasure derives partly from a relief from White stigma in the moment of suffering. The White anti-racist who engages in cooking for six old ladies with one pot, or who cleans excrement off toilet walls, clearly demonstrates her harmlessness. The pleasure of the story also reflects the pleasure of the affective tie that is evident between my colleague and the old women, a phenomenon which relates to the second explanatory model linking White stigma and White suffering.
This second model of stigma and suffering concerns the tendency of White anti-racists to crave acceptance and love from Indigenous people. The stigma of whiteness is lessened when we feel that we are loved by the Aboriginal people with whom we work – if they love us, we cannot be so bad. Just like our suffering, their love attests to our innocuousness. The imperative to counter White stigma takes White anti-racists beyond an Orientalist desire for ‘the other’ (Bhabha 1994), and into a realm where we desperately seek Indigenous acceptance. This need makes White anti-racists highly vulnerable to betrayal by Indigenous people, and liable to endure instances of betrayal when they occur.
Patrick Sullivan’s study of an Aboriginal organisation in the Kimberley provides an example of this type of suffering. He describes how young radical White employees were badly treated by their bosses: ‘Whenever confrontation surfaced between the [government] administration and Aboriginal groups, these committed whites absorbed most of the aggression. This was partly because Aborigines themselves were frequently exploitative, being so concerned not to allow the capture of their organisations by whites that they tended to use and discard them, always sure that there were others to take their place’ (Sullivan 1996: 115). The importance of White suffering in managing White stigma means these Aboriginal leaders can be confident that more White anti-racists who are willing to absorb Aboriginal aggression can always be found.
Geographer Rachel Slocum has argued that pain and humiliation is central to anti-racist politics. She defines pain as ‘feelings of sorrow, sensations of blushing, tears and tightened throats as well as the anger from whites against other whites and non-whites against whites and the further sadness that such anger brings’. She describes how White anti-racists in the United States are subjected to ‘harsh words’ from both other White anti-racist activists and people of colour when ‘someone failed to understand the analysis [that is, failed to accept the inherent oppressiveness of whiteness] or when they wanted to prove their anti-racist credentials’. In one meeting of the anti-racist organisation she studied, her explanation of her research and request to take notes produced an angry reaction from a non-White participant. This led to a barrage of criticism from many people, her eventual ejection from the meeting and the forced surrender of her notes. Later, another White participant in the meeting told her that if she had cried, those at the meeting would not have exiled her and labelled her as untrustworthy. Her ability to hide her suffering suggested to others that she did not sufficiently crave love from non-Whites, and thus she was not sufficiently aware of her stigmatised status (Slocum 2009: 19, 33).
At the institute, experiences of public betrayal did occur, although uncommonly. One colleague described how she was publicly insulted by a senior Indigenous man at a community meeting, and left undefended by any of her other Indigenous colleagues. ‘I honestly nearly fell off the chair’, she recalls. ‘I’d worked with these people at the meeting for four years really, really closely, and not one of them spoke up for me … I was devastated. I was betrayed, devastated, unloved, [and considered] untrustworthy’.41 Elsewhere in the discussion she rationalises her treatment, recognising that she was a convenient scapegoat used to resolve a clan conflict without anyone from the community having to be ‘shamed’. However, her acceptance of this behaviour on ‘cultural’ grounds does not overshadow her sense of betrayal and rejection.
The language she uses in recalling the episode suggests the importance of White stigma in experiences of betrayal. She laments that she is not only ‘betrayed, devastated, unloved’ but also considered to be ‘untrustworthy’ (this last accusation echoing Slocum’s story recounted above). This is a desire not just to be loved, but to be worthy of being loved. A White anti-racist is marked by their privilege as untrustworthy and unworthy of Indigenous love. The importance of her efforts to overcome White stigma, through loving and being loved by her Indigenous colleagues, is revealed in the moment they are threatened. Rather than arguing that their treatment of her was unfair, she rationalises their behaviour and focuses on her feelings of betrayal. To her, the experience reveals not the potential cruelty of anti-racist practice, as highlighted in Slocum’s account, but the pervasive nature of White stigma – she is unlovable, after all.
It is possible to interpret these experiences of suffering as extreme displays of tolerance. The toleration of frustration, discomfort and betrayal would then demonstrate the position of power from which White anti-racists can choose to suffer, or not to suffer. Hage argues that tolerance is ‘a form of symbolic violence in which a mode of domination is presented as a form of egalitarianism’ (Hage 1998: 87).42
When someone makes the observation ‘He/She is tolerant’, the extended phrase ‘He/She is tolerant for someone who has the power not to be’ is always implied. A powerless person is never thought of as ‘tolerant’: the title is reserved for those people who are in a position to tolerate, or not tolerate, others. The ‘tolerant’ person therefore benefits both from being judged as tolerant, and from the social power that makes this tolerance notable. Toleration involves setting the limit between the tolerable and the intolerable, or what he calls an ‘empowered spatiality’, a fantasy of ownership of the nation that decides where and when to tolerate outsiders. The futility of the symbolic denial of social distance is a convenient way to have one’s cake and eat it too – to be considered a ‘good’ White person and retain the privileges of whiteness (Hage 1998: 87, 89).43
This analysis is congruent with the dominant thread of whiteness studies discussed previously in this chapter: the attempts of White people to be anti-racist are really conscious or subconscious efforts to reinstate or protect their privilege. The concept of White stigma sets this in a different light. For these Whites, the social power that makes tolerance noticeable is the very thing they wish to erase. They aim to deliberately privilege Indigenous desires and meanings over their own in an attempt at empowered disempowerment. However, like Hage, Bourdieu and others suggest, most find it impossible to transcend their privilege, no matter how vulnerable they make themselves or how much they suffer. In Chapter 2, I suggested that some White anti-racists respond to the unravelling of remediable difference by withdrawing from an anti-racist identity and retreating into other realms of intercultural conviviality (such as pleasure and friendship). In the light of this chapter, this withdrawal can be seen as a resignation to the stigma of whiteness, and an abandonment of attempts to be recognised as anti-racist (see Chapter 5). Such Whites no longer desire to disappear, but the cost of their continued presence is an incompatibility with the territory of anti-racism.
1. 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 (Mosse 2005a, 2011; Li 2007). Other ethnographies of ‘professional altruists’ (as Arvidson calls them) reveal similar tendencies towards self-deprecation (Allahyari 2000; Riles 2004, 2006; Arvidson 2008).
2. Transcript: 15, 6.
3. Field Notes 12 Oct. 2004: 2, 8.
4. Parts of this chapter draw on material from Kowal 2011 and Kowal 2012a.
5. 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 chapter, 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). Another related issue is the stigma of ‘White trash’, that is, poor White people (Wray 2006). However, there is likely to be little overlap between White anti-racist and ‘White trash’ segments of the White population.
6. Hughey argues that U.S. White anti-racists experienced ‘stigma allure’ whereby they actively ‘embraced a stigmatized white racial identity as a lifelong burden’ in order to demonstrate their commitment to anti-racism. Stigma acts as an ‘integral marker of group identity’ (Hughey 2012: 228, 237).
7. Progressive historians rebutted the charge of ‘black armbands’ by imputing that conservative historians wore ‘white blindfolds’ (Macintyre and Clark 2003).
8. See Chapter 4, note 23, for a discussion of the difference between settlers and migrants.
9. Although it is a voluntary stigma, I would argue that where it is passionately felt or fostered in childhood it could be experienced as involuntary. One way that white stigma can be fostered is through ‘Sorry books’, a community initiative popular in the late 1990s where ordinary Australian citizens assumed some responsibility for the cruelties of the colonial state by recording messages of sympathy for the Stolen Generations. A selection of publicly available messages are from children; for example, ‘I’ve very sorry for taking your rights and liberties. Keiren Callahan, 9 years’ (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies 2013).
10. Although it should be noted there are key differences between working overseas and working in a post-settler colonial context. Briefly, in general international development workers experience white privilege; those working in Indigenous affairs experience white stigma.
11. For another useful account, see Eriksson Baaz 2005; and for a recent review of the broader field, see Mosse 2013.
12. Hughey (2012) is similarly disapproving of White anti-racists complaining of bad treatment, and O’Brien (2003) assumes that willingness to suffer discomfort, pain and humiliation is the sign of a ‘good’ anti-racist.
13. On bad feelings and anti-racism, see Ahmed 2005; and Maddison 2011.
14. Transcript: 11, 16.
15. Transcript: 16, 7.
16. Transcript: 8, 2.
17. Transcript: 6, 16.
18. Transcript: 4, 5.
19. The empirical question of the impact of missions on Aboriginal lifeworlds 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. See also Schwarz and Dussart 2010; and Laugrand 2012.
20. For an earlier exploration of this point, see Kowal and Paradies 2005.
21. Transcript: 15, 6.
22. Transcript: 15, 14.
23. Transcript: 13, 21.
24. Transcript: 5, 13.
25. Field Notes, 6 Apr. 2005.
26. Transcript: 15, 18. This discourse has been around for decades (Cowlishaw 1999; Tatz 1972). Batty 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 (Batty 2005).
27. Field Notes, 17 Mar. 2005.
28. Field Notes, 14 Apr. 2006.
29. Field Notes, 10 Sept. 2004.
30. 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”’ (Lampert 2003: 17), 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’ (Lampert 2003:19). At the same time, she draws on the discourse within whiteness studies discussed above, 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: 18).
31. Transcripts: 17, 20; and 15, 14. As I will explore in the conclusion, the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention that began in July 2007 signalled a paradigm shift away from self-determination and towards some new era that resolves the dilemmas of Indigenous improvement in another (equally contingent and provisional) way (Cowlishaw, Kowal and Lea 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.
32. Field Notes, 18 Apr. 2005. The follow sections appear in another form in Kowal 2012a.
33. Field Notes, 12 Aug. 2004.
34. Field Notes, 18 Apr. 2005: 4, 22–23.
35. As discussed in Chapter 5, many of these examples were discussed in a photocopied document called ‘How to Stay Out of Trouble when Visiting Remote Aboriginal Communities’ that was distributed to new employees at the institute.
36. Field Notes, 6 Dec. 2004.
37. Transcript: 9, 20.
38. Hughey also found that White anti-racist activists complained of hardships. In contrast to Thompson he did not find they were reluctant to talk about these difficulties, but rather they wore them as a ‘white badge of pride’ and used them to undermine the suffering of non-White Americans (Hughey 2012).
39. Field Notes, 18 Apr. 2005: 4, 23–24.
40. See Lea’s discussion of ‘Occupational Health & Safety’ in the Northern Territory Health Department (Lea 2008).
41. Transcript: 17, 17–18.
42. Wendy Brown makes a related argument that tolerance is a practice of domination; see Brown 2006.
43. He sees this as an example of Bourdieu’s ‘strategies of condescension’, whereby those in a superior social position symbolically deny the social distance between them and those below them by acting in a non-stereotypical fashion. The symbolic denial is simultaneously a recognition of the social distance, according the denier both ‘the advantages of proximity and the advantages of distance’ (Hage 1998: 78).