In Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State, Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, and Jessica Gerrard explore both the history and present-day entanglements of education and settler colonialism in modern Australia. In this short but powerfully argued book, Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard assert that education has long functioned as a tool for those seeking to further settler colonialism as a political and capitalist project. Settler colonialism, they suggest, requires a set of hegemonic ideas about white domination and racial hierarchy. These ideas must be reinscribed in all aspects of social and political life through constant effort by both state and non-state actors. Education, they argue, is an important but overlooked space in which the settler colonial state claims a political future for itself on lands seized by the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Formal and informal educational institutions serve as sites for “learning whiteness,” an active process of fortifying an existing political structure predicated on white racial domination.
Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard provide a strong theoretical grounding across the book's three parts. In part one they offer a cogent synthesis of recent scholarship, introducing and developing the key terms and concepts from which their core argument is drawn. This includes Alison Moreton-Robinson's concept of the “white possessive,” the logic of white settlers creating new sovereignties to mask the illegitimacy of settler claims to colonized land (4), and Jessica Pykett's “pedagogies of the state,” which suggests governance of the modern nation-state operates through interventions to teach and mold the political subject (10). Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard make a strong case for studies exploring how systems of white domination operate. Yet they remain attentive to work, particularly by Indigenous scholars, that highlights continuing challenges to the project of learned whiteness through Indigenous epistemologies and alternative educational visions. As such, the reader can see how settler colonialism functions as an intellectual project that constantly anticipates contestation.
Part two is the core of the book. In each of its three chapters, Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard explore a different aspect of how systems of white domination are sustained through education. In the first of these chapters, they consider the materialities of Australian education within racial capitalism, in the tradition of Cedric Robinson. In this wide-ranging chapter, Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard argue that Australian educational institutions were constructed through the dispossession and capitalization of Indigenous lands, maintained through racialized divisions of labor, and promote the commodification of education, including the creation of so-called prestige education products for national and international student markets that further entrench racial hierarchy. The second chapter in the section, on epistemologies, is also very successful. Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard convincingly demonstrate how the settler colonial state has used education to produce a hierarchy of learning, promoting epistemologies that promote white ignorance and safeguard “futurities of whiteness” (15–16) while continuing settler colonialism's eliminationist ambitions to destroy forms of Indigenous knowledge. This chapter adds important context to Australia's ongoing culture wars, including popular debates, beginning under the Abbott government after 2013, about promoting histories of a triumphant white, Western, Christian civilization over those documenting settler colonial violence against First Nations peoples.
The third chapter in this section looks to education's affective influence in the public sphere through popular media and other mass cultural products. Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard suggest that making whiteness familiar, “friendly” (71), “homely” (81), and therefore powerfully hegemonic required the promotion of the dual feeling-states of “happy benevolence” and “wounded fragility” around white Australia (76). These affective interventions cultivate a popular idea of Australia as an easy-going, friendly, open society. Yet, as Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard show, these interventions also encourage a sense of white victimization and outrage when faced with alternative visions of Australian society. Self-described progressive projects championing multiculturalism and diversity, too, reinscribe these affective dynamics by cultivating a popular concept of whiteness as generous and open-minded, without renegotiating racial power structures and material conditions.
In part three, Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard offer a brief conclusion, arguing for the need to denaturalize and make visible the ideological frameworks of race and settler-identity that continue to structure education's aims and provision: unlearning whiteness, as a form of reparation and historical justice.
Readers expecting either an archive-based history of Australia's education system or granular analysis of present-day policy debates in Australian education at a state or federal level will likely be disappointed. Though Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard describe the book as offering a “grounded account of the workings of British settler colonialism as a globally enduring project” (4) they do not offer much comparative analysis of former British settler colonies. Nor do they thoroughly unpack the transnational dimensions of settler colonial governance. The reader is left with few tools to determine whether education's relationship to settler-colonialism in Australia should be considered typical among the settler colonial states, or what distinguishes Australia, versus, for instance, the Canadian example. Moreover, Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard highlight moments where debates over education reform in Britain and Australia have mirrored one another, including over issues of whiteness, racial othering, and national identity. Yet elementary, secondary, and higher education systems developed in very different ways in modern Britain and Australia. Each had its distinct relationships to modern state-building, political economy, and democracy. To counter this, the authors might have considered how the figure of the child operated in the settler-colonial imaginary as a symbolic future of the late British settler world. The parallel expansion of philanthropic child emigration from metropolitan Britain to Australia, and the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families, relied upon ideas about interventions in child welfare, the role of the family, and children's physical and psychological development which straddled both the metropole and settler colony. Drawing on histories of settler colonial childhood might have helped more successfully put the Australian case in a broader imperial surround.
Nevertheless, historians ought to heed Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard's call to better understand how education has historically functioned as a tool of settler colonial governance in the so-called British world. Learning Whiteness is a highly useful, well-argued book that underlines how deeply enmeshed the politics of education is in sustaining the fiction of terra nullius on which settler-colonial nation states like Australia were built.
