Whiteness In Australia

In todays society “whiteness is not anything, really, not an identity, not a particularizing quality” (Dyer, 1997, p. 142) and as such “secures its power by seeming to not be anything in particular” (Dyer,1997, p.44). As a non-Indigenous Australian I have remained part of a group which was unmarked, unnamed, and unraced. Whiteness in definition is not limited to skin colour but also refers to “ideologies, policies and practices involved in the domination and subordination of colonised peoples on the basis of ‘race’...to the institutions of power that carry out [these] practices: Parliament, the legal system, churches, schools, the welfare system…”(Deane, 2014, p. 6). During the period spanning from the 1970’s to the 1990’s “Whiteness became

It is known that education is an incredibly influential tool in shaping future populations. However, it is also known that “Education is deeply implicated in the politics of culture. The curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge…the decision to define some groups’ knowledge as most legitimate, as official knowledge, while other groups’ knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says something extremely important about who has power in society” (Apple, 1996, p. 22). Current school curriculum shows whiteness as the main influence occasionally with some token mention of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Whiteness can firstly and most evidently be seen in the curriculum phrasing of white australian history. It is strange to think that the phrasing of one word could depict so much about the political dominance of a nation. By phrasing white Australian history as “settlement”, white knowledge is being privileged over Indigenous knowledge. This isolated Indigenous students by denying the Indigenous people sovereignty of land and reinforcing this with every generation. However, there has been much debate by politicians and education

21) and as such, schools and their curriculum materials are racialized in preference of the dominant political body. In the case of Australia today this means that the white Australian culture and History is elevated and treated preferentially over that of Indigenous Australians. Schools generally adhere to western standards and leave very little room for other practices as educational institutions “Reproduce[d] white Western norms, values, understandings and cultural frameworks” (Deane, 2014, p. 21). The education curriculum has been used as a tool for assimilating generations of impressionable use to a white system of values and colonial preference. Historically, by educating youth about one politically prefered history, the resulting society has been indoctrinated and more likely to adhere to political policy. Today’s curriculum is a result of this history and still contains aspects designed to assimilate minorities into a majority culture. The “Dominant curriculum normalises whiteness” (Deane, 2014, p. 21) as “‘official knowledge’” (Deane, 2014, p. 21), thereby dismissing other deviating perspectives. Society today has acknowledged these practices and in an attempt to disrupt them “Since the NAEP of 1989, there have been sustained calls for an inclusive curriculum: to ‘decolonise’ it” (Deane, 2014, p.