Breaking the racial silence: putting racial literacy to work in Australia

ABSTRACT

Race structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized people in Australia. The language of race permeates institutions, workplaces, and is embedded in everyday life. Racial literacy as pedagogical praxis resists the racial contract that secures whiteness as a structure of possessive power. We explore the state of racial literacy in Australian education, and the obstructions and opportunities for educators to do anti-racism work. To this end, we draw on the preliminary findings from an ongoing research project, Breaking the Racial Silence, and use them to inform a theoretical framework for conceptualizing educators’ racial literacy practices. We bring to the fore effective strategies, practices, and programmes used to interrogate race and racism. Despite the efforts of educators, racial literacy in formal and informal education is oftentimes suppressed and concealed by languages and practices that sustain the practices and pedagogies of whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial literacy
• race
• anti-racism
• Australia
• racism
• CRT

Introduction

What we should know is that we can’t just talk, write or imagine oppression away. (Preston 2013, 103)

This article draws on preliminary findings from an ongoing research project, Breaking the Racial Silence¹ led by Debbie Bargallie, to outline a theoretical framework for conceptualizing racial literacy practices in Australia. The aim is to assist in the development of critical anti-racist education praxis that can foster generative pedagogies of race and racism in the continent. By interrogating what strategies and practices are already used, this research reveals the pervasive ambivalence that exists in talking and teaching about race and racism in Australia, which in turn perpetuates the racial silence (Schulz and Fane 2015). As a praxis, racial literacy is considered an antidote to the institutional and pedagogical constraints that further sustain the denial of racism in Australia (Lentin 2017). A key element in racially literate teaching is the ability to understand histories of racialization as they are theorized by those whose lives are constrained by the dominating and exploitative practices of racial rule. Breaking the Racial Silence is grounded in epistemologies and theories drawn from Critical Race Theory (hereafter, CRT) and Critical Indigenous Studies (hereafter, CIS).

The “ordinariness of racism” obscures the epistemological bearings of race (Bargallie 2020, 180). CRT counters this by being grounded in the experiences of those with an intimate knowledge of how systems of power founded on whiteness operate (Delgado and Stefancic 2001). It is attentive to the political, moral, and epistemological structures of whiteness (Mills 1997). By being applied to the analysis of different racial regimes, CRT makes visible how race operates in each local context (Bargallie 2020, 186). In Australia, whiteness undergirds state and society and structures the experiences of both Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized groups. The project of colonization enacted a racial contract (Bargallie 2020). However, the tendency to dissociate race from invasion and colonization and to speak of colonialism as a “legacy” rather than a set of ongoing practices, makes race more difficult to discern, even as it continues to determine Indigenous and other negatively racialized people’s “vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2006, 28).

In Australia, where racial literacy is dismally low and talk of race and racism silenced, the idea of racial literacy has become attractive in recent years. A 2023 article also emphasizes the radical potential of racial literacy pedagogies from a perspective grounded in CRT approaches to education (Schulz et al. 2023). However, there are divergent understandings of the concept (e.g. AITSL 2020; ATN 2020; Nelson 2021). The un-critical and cursory applications of the concept of racial literacy in some work signals the impending risk of its critical race roots being erased and co-opted into the neoliberal corporate catalogues of “diversity and inclusion” training and the burgeoning “anti-racism industry”. In one example, “racial literacy” appears in a position paper on Indigenous Education focused on cultural competency, but loosely defines it without reference to its origins in CRT. No explanation is provided of race as a structure of power that, in Australian education systems, produces and reproduces racist ideologies and racist violence against negatively racialized teachers and students. Steeped in the neoliberal multiculturalist discourse of “tolerance” and “embracing diversity”, racism is framed in a way that protects whiteness, and specifically, white teachers for whom it is a “sensitive issue”, to be cautiously approached as a matter of “unconscious bias or prejudice” to avoid provoking “defensive attitudes or unintentionally cause division” (AITSL 2020, 8).

Race in racial literacy is understood as discursively produced and reproduced; hence, “literacy” refers to the provision of concepts for talking about race, and the skills to decode the rhetorical practices and power of racial ideology. Such racial ideology functions to frame racist outcomes as not race-related, thereby sustaining – rather than dismantling – the racial hierarchies that perpetuate white advantage (Moreton-Robinson 2007). In being a politics of resistance, refusal, and defiance of racial hierarchies, racial literacy is grounded in black scholarship. It emerged from CRT² through the works of the late Lani Guinier (2004), a Black and Jewish legal scholar, educator and civil rights theorist in the United States, and Frances Winddance Twine (2004), a Black and Creek (Muskogee) Nation sociologist who undertook research with black–white interracial families in the United Kingdom. Guinier defines racial literacy as a “tool of diagnosis, feedback, and assessment” (Guinier 2004, 115) to “decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies and frames the narratives” of white-dominant nation-states (2004, 110). “Racial grammar” is the encoding and reproduction of unequal/hierarchical relationships in each racial regime (Wolfe 2006). The ascription of racial categories and what is “spoken, argued, transacted about race” (Bonilla-Silva 2012, 174) structures our cognition, vision and feelings on racial matters and normalizes the standards of white supremacy. Grayson (2020, xv) proposes that racial literacy “demands not only that we develop a multi-layered understanding of the function(s) of race in society but also that we learn to read individual situations for the ways in which they represent, reinforce, or resist systemic injustice”.

As Indigenous Australian (Kamilaroi and Wonnarua), Sri Lankan Australian, and Jewish European critical race/race critical and feminist scholars and educationalists, one of our aims in this article is to circumvent the misconception and dilution of racial literacy as it is taken up in Australia. Answering a call for greater racial literacy and critical reflexive anti-racism practice in Australia, this article builds on racial literacy scholarship to examine how racial literacy is taught in both formal and informal educational contexts within this continent. Despite the relative absence of race studies as an academic field of study in higher education in comparison to other comparable settler colonial and postimperial contexts, race, racism and anti-racism are being taught in Australia. We wish to give voice to these practices as a way of challenging the co-optation and dilution of racial literacy we are witnessing, and to reemphasize the importance of widening and deepening this pedagogical work.

Taking the position that more rather than less critical approaches to our understanding of race are needed (Bargallie and Lentin 2021), our approach is grounded in a conjoining of CRT’s “coherent and challenging set of important sensitizing insights and conceptual tools” (Gillborn 2006, 15) and the decolonial impetus of CIS, “where the object of study is colonizing power in its multiple forms, whether the gaze is on Indigenous issues or Western knowledge production” (Moreton-Robinson 2016, 4). For Patricia Hill Collins (2002), critical theorizing means taking a position while recognizing the provisional nature of the positions we take; it means being self-reflexive not only about other people’s behaviour, but also one’s own practices. This involves deploying positionality critically as a reflexive methodology to account for our differential and incommensurable social and power locations in coloniality, when producing knowledge as Indigenous and non-Indigenous critical race and intersectionality scholars in the Australian context and elsewhere (Moreton-Robinson 2013, 2020). This includes the rejection of depoliticized, colourblind and power blind (Tomlinson 2019) applications of intersectionality (Fernando 2021) and adopting critical analyses to expose how race as a technology is differently deployed to racialize Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of colour.

To bolster the theoretical arguments which are the focus of this paper, we draw on some preliminary findings from ongoing qualitative research carried out with thirty-five Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics and educators, working both within and outside of formal institutions of higher education.³ The project was conducted throughout Australia in 2021, and all selected participants were educators bringing race and racism into their teaching across multiple academic disciplines or in non-formal education. The article engages in a discussion of racial literacy, what it means and does not mean in practice, then examines the state of teaching on race and racism in Australia. This flows into a discussion of the state of race in Australia, articulated through the voices of the research participants who speak to the secreting of race and the constraints and implications of doing anti-racism work. Continuing to draw on participants’ voices, the next section explores the strategies, tools, and methods educators use to put racial literacy to work. The concluding remarks reflect on the value of the diverse practices of racial literacy building for developing bonds of solidarity between educators. We argue that racial literacy is a marginalized, suppressed, and disguised praxis within Australia’s teaching and education context. Dismantling racialized structures and hierarchies often takes place at the margins by committed anti-racism educators and practitioners who carve out spaces to do this work, regardless of the detrimental impacts that often ensue (Konishi 2019).

Racial literacy

Race is produced and reproduced through the classification, categorization, and labelling of people as immutable groups. It is a technology of power for the management of human difference in service of white supremacy (Lentin 2020). The meanings ascribed to difference shift over time to produce and reproduce systemic oppression and exploitation. Multiculturalist racism studies and anti-racism programmes in Australia routinely conflate race, Indigeneity, and ethnicity. However, these are distinct social locations that have specific impacts. Racism enacted against Indigenous people under colonial racial rule works differently, albeit relatedly, to racism against non-Indigenous migrant groups, racially stratified through racist migration regimes, temporary visa categories and asylum policies. Thus, race and Indigeneity are key ordering categories, with variables of gender, sexuality, ability, migrancy, class and so on further shaping the practices of racial rule. The technologies of racial rule develop in context-specific ways across geographical and temporal locations, and the meaning and experiences constituting racism constantly shift as race reinvents itself. Hence, racial literacy must be contextual, responsive, and interactive rather than static. It must interrogate “the dynamic relationship among race, class, geography, gender, and other explanatory variables” (Guinier 2004, 115).

As a travelling concept, racial literacy emerged only recently in Australia, initiated by Aboriginal artist Dianne Jones, and Odette Kelada, a senior lecturer in creative writing. Influenced by US scholar, Yolanda Moses, Jones and Kelada⁴ developed the course Racial Literacy, Indigeneity and Whiteness to redress a “compelling need for greater racial literacy” (Brown, Kelada, and Jones 2021, 83). At a time when racial literacy is fast becoming a buzzword in Australia (Bargallie and Lentin 2020), the risks of misapplication, dilution and whitening undermine the potential of these critical black analytics (Hesse 2014). Not unlike intersectionality, decoloniality, cultural competency, and indigenizing, its potential as a political concept to enable practices of refusal, resistance and defiance is easily undermined when existing relations of power are camouflaged.

We stress that racial literacy work is critical, and we strenuously reject the notion that racial literacy is merely another “training” that can be added to the hotchpotch of cultural sensitivity/competence, unconscious bias, or diversity training programmes routinely recycled and wheeled out by a burgeoning anti-racism industry. As a praxis that is “congruent with CRT’s commitments to community formation and social transformation” (Cho and Westley 1999, 1409), racial literacy has the potential to decipher discourse that creates material conditions of inequity and illuminate how interpersonal and structural racisms are enacted together. In that sense, racial literacy is distinct from race theorizing in that it is a praxis – that is to say, CRT and CIS are enacted and directed towards dismantling and transforming racist systems. Liberal discourses prohibit and dissipate a central and critical focus on race. Rather, CRT and CIS must theoretically inform racial literacy work and deploy its tools to break through the veneer of embedded liberal multiculturalist ideologies which underpin programmes that mask state and institutional racism. It is therefore a critique of liberal discursive constructions of race as identity by recognizing that racialization is a process enacted through performances of knowledge and power. As an example of this, the language of cultural competency has been endlessly peddled as a salve for racism, despite critiques by Indigenous scholars that cultural competency, or safety, training fails to critically deconstruct race or racism (Fredericks and Bargallie 2020; Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016) and “promotes victimhood rather than Indigenous agency and resilience” (Nakata 2013, 296).

To fully embody a racially literate stance in Australia, Indigenous theoretical and practice methods need to be made central and respectfully engaged with, and the incommensurability between Indigenous and Western ontologies made explicit. Racial literacy work must show Western theoretical concepts such as nationality and sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson 2021) to be distinct from Indigenous theorizations of law and land, which conflict with the state and cannot be reduced to a commodity or an economic unit and extinguished (Watson 2015). Moves to “decolonize” and “Indigenize” everything (Walter and Aitken 2019) must be disarticulated from metaphoric uses within white frames that normalize coloniality. “Decolonization” refers to returning land (Tuck and Yang 2012) and Indigenous sovereignty entails the enshrinement of an inherent and inalienable right to lands and self-government (Moreton-Robinson 2015). We must also make explicit the technologies deployed by the nation state to enact race, in particular, the violent, exclusionary and carceral asylum and migration regimes that Australia has developed and exported around the world.

Racial literacy requires a variety of pedagogical approaches. Racial literacy research, produced mainly in the context of teacher education in the US and Canada, has shown that educators employ multifaceted pedagogical tools and curricula to move through and beyond textual analysis to provoke private reflection (e.g. journaling) over an extended period. Race is shown to be reproduced through an assemblage of discourses. Thus, to be racially literate, one must read race across multiple registers and modes, and include visual literacies (Twine 2016) and emotional literacies (Winans 2010; Grayson 2019) to confidently address the resistance and backlash educators encounter from students asked to confront white advantage (Hollinsworth 2014; Fredericks and Bargallie 2020). Books, films, photographs, song lyrics, historical figures and events are brought into critical conversation with present-day events (see Grayson 2019; Laughter et al. 2021). In Australia, the Foley Collection (2006), a digital historical archive of forty-five years of Indigenous resistance curated by esteemed Aboriginal academic, historian and activist Gary Foley, exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach at the scholarship/activism nexus that fosters public facing racial literacy. Also, the erstwhile Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA), initiated in 2003 by Aileen Moreton-Robinson and non-Indigenous colleagues, drew together interdisciplinary critical race scholars and activists under a shared decolonial commitment. The public site Deathscapes (Perera and Pugliese 2021) takes a transnational decolonial approach, mapping black sites and distributions of custodial deaths in police cells, prisons, and immigration detention centres across the settler states of Australia, the US, Canada, and their points of origin in the European metropolis.⁵

The state of racial literacy in Australia

As we move to further discuss the formative practices of racial literacy in the Australian context, we must disentangle several factors which have led to disparate approaches to race studies and an impasse in progressing critical approaches. This impasse has been created in part through the institutional negation of race as a field of study. Despite having a firm position in legislation and policy, Moreton-Robinson (2020) poses the important question of why race has never been a field of intellectual endeavour. The lack of race education in Australia has meant that race is “hard to define and even harder to understand [due to] a dangerous refusal to acknowledge racism” (Lentin 2020, 5). There is a lack of “serious discussion of what the origins and functions of race are, and why racism continues to proliferate and constantly adapt itself” (5). Added to that, decades of multiculturalist policy have stratified and managed difference from the white Anglo European norm through categorizations of culture, ethnicity, or country of origin. Within this framework, Indigeneity has been inscribed as an “ethnic” identity rather than a sovereign location on colonized lands (Moreton-Robinson 2016). Sedimented liberal multiculturalist understandings of race as social pathology, aberration, or deviance have obfuscated critical examination of race as undergirding contemporary relations of power in its ongoing coloniality (Lentin 2017). Such a “cultural” approach is problematic when non-Indigenous academics, researchers, government officials and policy makers in areas such as health, education, and criminal (in)justice fail to conceive of alternative knowledges and worldviews, or identify and acknowledge their status as settlers (Fredericks 2008; Hollinsworth 2006; Fredericks and Bargallie 2020).

Liberal approaches to race are informed by centuries of racial framing and counter-framing (Feagin 2013) which largely ignore critical Black and Indigenous analyses (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016). When a white analytic frame dominates (Hesse 2014; Lentin 2017), critical meanings of race are made illegible through discourses of racial liberalism that emphasize inclusion, diversity, and tolerance, and reduce racism to overt acts of prejudice, bias, vilification, or discrimination (e.g. Blair et al. 2017; Dunn, Klocker, and Salabay 2007; Nelson 2021; Paradies et al. 2015) as studied through the scrutiny of white perpetrator attitudes (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016). Public anti-racism campaigns that focus on “stamping out racism” largely sideline structural and institutional racism. By its own admission, the Australian Human Rights Commission (2018) report on their public campaign, Racism. It Stops With Me, states that directives to integrate diversity, inclusion, harmony, and tolerance have diluted efforts to address institutional racism and discrimination.

Yet much research continues along the same trajectory. Dominant racism research – to distinguish it from race scholarship (Lentin 2017) – tends to re-entrench epistemic whiteness. One recent example is Nelson’s (2021) study of “racist talk” and racial literacy development within families. The author adds and stirs the work of a handful of Australian Indigenous and scholars of colour, but beyond fleeting ceremonial citation, fails to engage with their work in any depth. A cursory mention of Twine’s (2004) work is used to situate the author’s focus on families but does not engage with her criteria for critical racial literacy: the translation of racial codes to decipher the broader structures and functions of race.

An example of a national, white-led anti-racism project is All Together Now, a charity whose aim is to “educate Australians about racism”, but which limits racism to interpersonal forms of race-based discrimination. Focusing on prejudice, stereotypes, attitudes to cultural diversity, and cross-cultural tensions, it tends to stress people “speaking up” against racism. A discussion paper on Indigenous Cultural Competency in the Australian Teaching Workforce defines racial literacy as an individual's “racial consciousness” and “deeper awareness and understanding of race” (AITSL 2020, 19). This mere name-checking of racial literacy individualises it and fails to set race in the Australian colonial context. Many organisations such as these tasked with tackling racism in education settings deploy the language of cultural competency, diversity, tolerance and so on, and thus dilute a critical focus on race as a technology of power with a precise set of functions.

Another problem we note is the common strategy often deployed by white researchers which entails acknowledging their white location, before moving on, and thus neglecting the implications of power/knowledge. Stating that one benefits from racism, shares racial privilege with white interviewees, and has no common experiences with racially targeted participants, clearly shows that such practices of self-location fail to interrogate the ontology of whiteness (Leonardo 2009). Complex, or unattractive aspects – such as unmasking the workings of white supremacy in researchers’ and advocates’ own social locations – are left out, as are critiques of dominant liberalism and multiculturalist frames. We argue that while white educators must educate themselves and others on whiteness, anti-racism cannot take out single instruments from the anti-racism and CRT toolbox (e.g. white privilege, white fragility), to legitimize a white capitalist project promoted through popular anti-racist books and marketed as a salve for corporates. Nor can it be fair that the theoretical work of Indigenous and racialized scholars of colour be appropriated by such ventures with inadequate citation. White race scholars doing race work must do it critically.⁶

The abovementioned research and campaigns exemplify what racial literacy is not; that is, anti-racism strategies that do not centre race as an analytical construct and entangle discourses of diversity, inclusion, unconscious bias, prejudice, or attitudes. Due to the prevalence of this work, participants in our research reveal an imposed requirement to adapt to dominant language, concepts, and practices that function to secrete race and racism. Scholars and educators feel corralled into the “frame of diversity” that is mostly, as one participant argued, “a PR exercise” for organizations and companies to speak to demands of equity (1). Although the same participant considers it “backward,” doing “soft” anti-racism work such as corporate “diversity” or “cultural reflexivity” training, is “something”, which is better than doing “nothing” (1). Even when companies and institutions, such as universities, commit to “respecting diversity” there is no “accountability for being explicit in bringing in racial literacy” across disciplines (4). Despite the commitment by institutions to embrace inclusion, institutional coloniality fosters “reluctance and [ … ] an avoidance” to educate on the workings of race and racism and bring to the surface the systemic prevalence of whiteness and white privilege (5). The secreting and silencing of race are evident not only through the lack of commitment and push back critical race scholars and educators receive, but also in the “not observing, not naming, [and] not putting it on the table” (5). As Participant 5 said, “not engaging in the space is saying something too”, as it is “tacitly” endorsing how race operates in society.

The systemic secreting of race is further evident in how critical race scholars and educators enact their anti-racism praxis. In the words of Participant 13, “even listening to myself now, I do not use the word race a lot”. There is resistance to naming race in curriculum and teaching; critical race educators feel forced to “sneak in” words such as “whiteness”, “race”, or “Black/Blak” as “people do not want to see it named, brought into their space, and be asked to account for it” (16). Educators recognize the importance of naming, but the space does not allow for naming things in the “right” way. Participant 26 felt that each time they were talking about race, the institution was concerned that they implied they were working for a racist organization, hence interpreting anti-racism as an accusation rather than working towards dismantling racialized structures (26). A kind of “gymnastics” had to be performed to avoid accusations of being a terrible scholar by management for undertaking discussions about race and racism. As Ahmed (2021, 65) writes; “all you have to do is use a word like race and you will be heard as complaining”. The struggle of being in the critical race space, in the words of Participant 27, is “trying to make a difference by not replicating – continuing – a pattern of behaviour and making it normal”. However, as Ahmed asserts, the challenge is that “we still need to survive the institutions we are trying to transform” (Ahmed 2021, 309). Backlash against race educators disrupting the existing patterns of behaviour come with (underestimated) professional and personal drawbacks that border on a form of violence and harassment (15) on the grounds that “racism is not a thing” (21), and neither is “race studies a thing in Australia” (12).

In the absence of race studies, a key elision has been the neglect of Indigenous theorizations of race in Australian higher education and research, amounting to epistemic racism:

It is not until all Australian (and other) researchers recognise and own the racism that emerges from their epistemological foundations, imposed or not … that the true strengths behind Indigenous Australian identities can be understood within the educational setting. (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016, 786)

Indigenous scholars are often cloistered in Indigenous Studies units outside of the major disciplines, where a culturalist (rather than a critical race) approach predominates (Moreton-Robinson 2016). There, scholars face the interlocking violence of epistemic erasure and epistemic racism that subjugates Indigenous knowledge and positions Indigenous scholars in ways that make them objects of continued exploitation and complicity in the production of knowledge (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson 2016). Disciplinary apartheid (Fredericks 2009) keeps Indigenous theorizations of the specificities of race in Australia separate from other disciplines and race studies. This bifurcation of Indigenous studies and race scholarship in general has meant that too much race scholarship takes the realities of settler colonialism for granted, rather than interrogating them through Indigenous theorizations of race and coloniality from Australia and elsewhere. Standing apart is the handful of scholars and practitioners who engage critically with both critical race and critical Indigenous studies, working with and against their limitations. For example, Gomeroi education academic Nikki Moodie (2018) expands on the work of Lumbee scholar Bryan Brayboy (2006) to critique possibilities and limits of applications of CRT in the context of a growing literature on Indigenous education, decolonization, and settler futurity. McLaughlin and Whatman (2011) argue that emancipatory, future and action-oriented goals of CRT would enhance the embedding of Indigenous perspectives in the project to decolonize education at universities. Legal scholars Marcelle Burns and Jennifer Nielsen (2018) employ CRT perspectives to teach race and law. Racial literacy educators (Brown, Kelada, and Jones 2021) foreground Indigenous voices of First Nations artists, curators, scholars, and health practitioners to begin the story of race with an understanding of colonization as foundational to imperialism and the dispossession of First Nations Peoples, and go on to connect them to the narrative of the slave trade and slave rebellions. Race scholar Alana Lentin (2020) draws the connections between race, coloniality, indigeneity and capitalism to uncover the relationality of anti-racist, racist, and non-racist practices, often convoluted and conflated in white supremacist contexts. Lentin (2020) pushes back against the dominant voices in society that suggest we are talking too much about race. Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard (2022) interrogate how whiteness is “learned” through educative practices of state and non-state entities and actors invested in relaying and maintaining the white possessive and white racial dominance. Schulz et al. assessed the role of film in contributing counterstories to enhance affective racial literacy beyond the textual in teaching settings (Schulz et al. 2023).

For us, race, racisms, and whiteness were transnationally produced and “imported” to Australia through the imperial colonial project (Moreton-Robinson, Casey, and Nicoll 2008; Bargallie and Lentin 2021). Therefore, there is a need to engage with locally produced theory and praxis as well as those from elsewhere. Race, though plural and specific to context, flows through transnational colonial circuits among white nations. Anti-Muslim, anti-asylum, and anti-immigration discourses, as well as post-racial discourses and far-right wing white supremacist ideologies, are cases in point. A most recent example is the emerging “whitelash”⁷ against the global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, resulting, for example, in the legal pursuit of Indigenous women who organized the protests in Melbourne (Sweeney 2022). Critical Race Theory itself has become the target, publicly denounced for its supposed divisiveness and toxicity as a poisonous ideology. Teaching people to approach race critically and analytically is apparently the cause of racism, not racism itself. In April 2021, Australia’s Attorney-General’s Department intervened to halt a tender by the Australian Human Rights Commission as it sought to enhance its existing anti-racism programme to address structural/systemic and institutional racism, citing as a concern that the programme, Racism. It Stops With Me, was promoting CRT. As is the case elsewhere, CRT is not widely used in Australia, and little is known about it by those publicly attacking it. Moreover, some scholars claim to use CRT but engage superficially with its core tenets in analysis, as we have shown with regard to racial literacy work. “Critical race” is used loosely in Australia as elsewhere (Goldberg 2021) to refer to all race scholarship. Attacks on CRT signify how neoliberalism reduces racism to individual beliefs and prejudice, stokes white grievance and keeps power and privilege in the hands of those who have always held it. In Australia particularly, the confected attack on CRT set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of overt far-right white nationalism, shores up longstanding attacks on Indigenous analyses of the colonial continuous present.

However, in response, without the critical element, there is also great potential for Indigenous approaches to be misused and characterized only in the language of victimhood. Indigeneity is comfortably used in academia as data, course material, and soft voices, but there is resistance to employing Indigenous epistemologies, ideas, and skillsets in ways that undermine whiteness and the ideas and institutions it is embedded in (14). The experiences of interviewees strongly suggest that Australia is not progressing in terms of critical education on race; rather, there is a concern among race educators about the diminishing state of critical pedagogy and the rise of anti-intellectualism. In a space where being listened to as a critical race scholar is already difficult, anti-intellectualism further minimizes the potential to bring racial literacy to the fore and, in doing so, resist racial structures and attendant oppression. In the pertinent words of Participant 10:

We become our own internal enemies by taking anti-intellectualism on board and disavowing the power of language, the power of critical terms, the power of critical thinking.

Putting racial literacy to work

As we have shown, racial literacy work enacts a refusal, resistance and defiance that act to reveal, comprehend and change existing relations and structures of power. As John Preston (2013, 103) writes, “refusal to accept privilege is a powerful weapon” and “this hole we have made for ourselves requires both humility and activism”. It makes sense, according to Participant 9, to carry that into the academy, and engage with the transformative potential of theory. As a praxis, racial literacy is about empowering and understanding the place of oneself and others in the world, and how our relational dynamics are defined by racialized histories and subjectivities. And “if we are serious about racial literacy and anti-racism, we would need to rethink the theories that we teach” (11), as it does “not make sense to be looking at questions of race and racism in Australia without bringing in Indigenous, postcolonial, decolonial, [and] anti-colonial studies” (12). But it is also about recognizing that the dominant theories of “dead white dudes” have the potential to be developed into “something critical” (16). Social theory is the backbone of racial literacy (Rabaka 2010) because it provides the conceptual tools to render a visible standpoint and endows educators and students with the language to describe, unpack, and disrupt social, political, economic, and cultural whiteness and coloniality (4).

Being a praxis, racial literacy requires taking what happens in the classroom to the reality “out there” and back. That is, racial literacy happens on the ground as much as in educational institutions. For racial literacy to be effective, students cannot leave at the door what they learn in the classroom; the transformative and disruptive potential of racial literacy is in being reflexive about their racialized position in the world. In the words of one research participant, it is about going “into their communities or families and making a difference and shaking things up a bit” (3). As a praxis of empowerment, racial literacy has to extend beyond positionality to make a difference (21). With the objective of building relations of solidarity, racial literacy aims to disrupt the way race is entangled with other forms of oppression, such as labour exploitation (9). Racialized relations of power can be rendered visible through a multitude of tools and methods, such as visual works, art, poetry, music, and collaborative narrative building. A formal example is exemplified by Brown, Kelada, and Jones’ 12-week undergraduate course, fusing forms of visual literacy through interrogations of the performativity of race, Indigeneity, identity, and representation.

Racial literacy fosters a “critical, complex and historical understanding of the concept of race [and] the logics connecting race, colonisation, privilege, power and whiteness’ (Brown, Kelada, and Jones 2021, 12). It is that kind of “deconstruction” that Participant 1 employs to bring to the foreground the racialized hierarchies that are otherwise more easily concealed. Deconstructing racialized realities through visual works, such as art, pictures, videos, is what Participant 1 uses to bring about a “shock and awe” effect. Emotionally embedding the subject in the material is a way for them to “really remember […] what they thought is reality, is wrong” (1). Media also provides people with “different entry points” (3) to seek their own deconstruction of social reality. Such a subjective experience of learning functions to move beyond the experience of racism towards a radical understanding of the ideas – the language, concepts, and practices – that make systemic forms of racism possible. That is not to say individual and interpersonal experiences of racism are not important; it is about envisioning that things can be radically different. Such “radical hope” is imperative for disentangling social logics of race, colonization, privilege, and whiteness. Radical “hope as a discipline” (Kaba 2021), of continually challenging racism and colonialism, is what makes racial literacy transformative and powerful; it is what binds people who are working towards social justice in a way that it is not about “just becoming a sad story” (3). Rather, it is about being actively critical so that teaching and learning becomes an embodied experience that has the potential to break down the complacency (22) that prevents “really disrupting that paranoid delusion that race is a scary, controversial, risky topic” (26).

Racial literacy offers a way to centre Indigenous perspectives and knowledge to challenge us to rethink the effects some “critical” interventions have on either sustaining or dismantling whiteness and white privilege. It brings us to the contentious question of who is to take ownership of racial literacy work. Institutions expect and demand that Indigenous people do so. However, there appears to be a consensus among research participants that partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators are vital for racial literacy to succeed. Notwithstanding the importance of standpoint, racial literacy work cannot be the burden of Indigenous educators alone. As it does for those who have been performing racial literacy and anti-racism work, it carries a weight that has an impact on the professional standing and personal well-being of practitioners. Therefore, solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators is all the more important in mitigating the stress and weight carried by those facing racism every day.

It is not uncommon, however, as Preston (2013) argues, for white academics writing about whiteness to “centre the analysis on themselves and make the object of whiteness studies […] more about the subjectivity of white people”. As a language, racism and whiteness “almost does not do enough” (12) to expose white supremacy, or it can do too much (13) leaving non-racialized groups with a sense of guilt that risks culminating in passivity or antipathy to anti-racism work. Participant 5 suggests that the distinction between those who can and cannot engage in racial literacy work does not lie with negatively racialized experience, but with humility. As a white educator, by virtue of “owning things’ and showing that guilt needs to be “negotiated” for it to be “productive”, they can become a genuine accomplice “capable of supporting and working alongside” those aiming to disrupt racialized realities (5). It is this subtle but important distinction that makes racial literacy and anti-racism work critical and effective, or not, and underlines the need for solidarity between differently racialized standpoints. Research participants affirm that in Australia at present, the structures and institutions are more likely to hinder than promote solidarity and effective collaboration between critical race educators, scholars, practitioners, and activists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Participants’ voices reveal that when these solidarity bonds are fostered and cultivated through constructive and deep conversations – which also speaks to the methodological approach of the research project itself – there is potential for racial literacy to be a key force in attaining social justice.

The key elements of reclaiming race and grounding anti-racism work in Indigenous ways of knowing (epistemologies), ways of being (ontologies), and ways of doing (axiologies) (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003) that inform the approach taken by the research allow us to articulate a broader taxonomy of structural racisms such as gendered racism, epistemic racism, a focus on immigration/asylum regimes and carceral racism (such as prisons, juvenile detention centres, and offshore detention camps for people seeking asylum), deaths of Indigenous people in police custody, and state-sanctioned military and policy-led interventionist approaches to Indigenous affairs.⁸ Further, this approach brings into view the multiplicity of sites where race does its work at the interpersonal level: structural and interpersonal racism operate hand in hand. For example, Indigenous people are arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate for lesser offences than non-Indigenous counterparts and, within the prison system, are subject to gross neglect of their health and greater levels of force, resulting in high rates of Indigenous deaths in custody (DPC 2018). By examining both structural and interpersonal racism, we can bring together and lift into view the multiple projects (and multiple racial literacies) of scholars, activists and artists that publicly contest this racism. These include projects such as Indigenous people issuing passports to people seeking asylum as a symbolic gesture in an assertion of their sovereign right, and solidarity actions with Palestinian people.⁹ These are examples of meaningful, directed, and practical alliances across racialized assignments in the settler colonial context that eschew opposition and fragmentation.

Concluding thoughts

In a settler colonial state founded on racial rule, a call for greater racial literacy does not mean we think that it alone will solve racism; racial literacy can equip people – Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike – with tools that are fit for purpose, and critical concepts, terms, and languages to talk productively about race and racism. As we have shown, as the concept grows in popularity, racial literacy lends itself to being co-opted by all sorts of tendencies, leading others to want to distance themselves from the approach. Therefore, the utility of this article is to bring racial literacy back to its critical race roots to minimize misunderstandings, and to state our opposition to the co-optation of the terms of racial literacy by the anti-racism industry in Australia.

Racial literacy has much to offer to counter liberal anti-racism. To do so, it must be grounded in the critical frames informed by CRT and CIS and work towards a common commitment to revitalize a critical anti-racist pedagogical praxis. We hope this article adds to a crucially important conversation about what needs to happen for a more critical and subversive racial literacy practice to spread throughout Australia. In one sense, as we have shown, these practices are already happening. Those traditionally marginalized in academia have always come together with communities in what Robin D.G. Kelley has called “Black study, Black struggle” (Kelley 2016). However, we are also mindful of how even the most radically fertile ideas and practices are open to co-optation, and the ways in which critical discourses such as Critical Race Theory can and are being used to whitewash colonial institutions and corporations. The solidarity among the often-segregated community of race educators built over the course of the project lays the ground for our future work. As Mariame Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone” (2021, 172). We suggest that, in this way, our research serves not only to take the temperature of racial literacy in Australia, complementing other similar locations, but also serves as a model of practice towards the renewal of a community of critical racial literacy educators whose work, in these times of wider and more openly fascist agendas, is more urgent than ever before.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Griffith University Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme.

Notes

1 Human Research Ethics Approval was through Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee (GU Reference No: 2020/751).

2 CRT emerged in the mid-1970s through Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman’s work in critical legal studies in the USA. CRT is a set of interrelated conceptual and methodological tools, insights and defining elements (Delgado and Stefancic 2001) which address the significance of race and the changing character of racism and its opposition in contemporary society (Gillborn 2006).

3 The preliminary nature of this paper does not extend to a discussion of the specific experiences of educators working in different institutions.

4 The course is taught together with Lilly Brown, a Gumbaynggirr Aboriginal Australian researcher and educator.

5 Other examples include the Race in Society YouTube series by Alana Lentin and Zuleyka Zevallos that focuses on the institutionalisation of race and racism through conversations with Indigenous and people of colour academics and community organisations. The Guardian’s Deaths Inside online database tracks every known Indigenous death in custody in every jurisdiction from 2008 to 2021. Change the Record, a coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, human rights, legal and community organisations provide a “blueprint” for coordinated national action to address imprisonment rates and violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly women and children. International examples of such forms of public-facing racial literacy include Race the Power of an Illusion by US black anthropologist Yolanda Moses. In the UK, The Black Curriculum delivers black British history through the arts, in schools and beyond, and Surviving Society podcasts draw together academics, artists and activists to explore local and global politics of race and class.

6 Jane Haggis, Fiona Nicoll, David Hollinsworth, among others, exemplify white critical race scholarship.

7 “Whitelash” is a term coined by CNN political commentator Van Jones in 2017, referring to white backlash to black gains post Trump’s election victory. See also Smith (2020) and Yancy (2018).

8 Altman and Hinkson (2007) provide a collection of thorough critiques of the NTER in Coercive Reconciliation: Stablilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia.

9 “Solidarity for Palestine – Aboriginal Land” is one such example: https://www.facebook.com/SfPalestineMelbourne/.