Abstract:
This article explores the political beliefs and the forms of reasoning about
racism, national identity and Other developed by young Australian women and men from
different ethnic and class backgrounds. The interviews on which the discussion is based are
drawn from a larger longitudinal study of Australian secondary school students which
examines how young people develop their sense of self and social values over time. The
present article has two overall purposes: to add to understandings of how the cultural logic
of racism functions in one national setting, and to consider political reasoning about race
and ethnicity in relation to processes of young people’s identity positioning. Three main lines
of argument are developed. The first concerns students’ positioning of themselves vis-a-vis
the current ‘race debate’ in Australia, and in relation to us as researchers, including their
negotiation of the protocols for speaking about ‘race’ and racism. This includes consideration
of the methodological and political effects of white Anglo women asking questions
about racism and ethnicity to ethnic minority students who are routinely constituted as
‘Other’: what blindnesses and silences continue to operate when posing questions about
racism directly? A second and related focus is the range of emotional responses evoked by
asking questions about racism and about an Australian politician (Pauline Hanson), who
has been prominent in race debates. Third, the authors examine young people’s construction
of ‘us and them’ binaries and hierarchies of Otherness and whiteness. They argue
throughout that reasoning about race, national identity and Others, and the taking up of
‘political positions’, is intimately linked to identity formation and to how we imagine
ourselves in the present, the past and the future.
