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: Whiteanti-racistAustraliapost-colonialstigmaIndigenous 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 Frankenberg , R. 1993 White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness , University of Minnesota Press , Minneapolis, MN Crossref , Google Scholar). 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 Li, T. M. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crossref , Google Scholar, Mosse 2005 Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice, London: Pluto Press. Google Scholar). 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 Bonnett, A. 2006. 'The Americanisation of anti-racism? Global power and hegemony in ethnic equity'. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(7): 1083–1103. Taylor [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 Cowlishaw , G. , Kowal , E. Lea , T. 2006 ' Double binds ', in Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies , T. Lea , E. Kowal & G. Cowlishaw , Darwin, Charles Darwin University Press , 1 16 . Google Scholar). 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.