Learning Whiteness
Education and the Settler Colonial State
By (author) Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard
Publication date:
20 May 2022Length of book:
176 pagesPublisher
Pluto PressISBN-13: 9781786808615
Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.
Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state.
To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.
'A defiant corrective to the attempts to deny the existence of systemic racism. Refusing the lure of easy 'solutions', this book argues that education has an ongoing responsibility to open up spaces for grappling with racial injustice and imagining futures freed from racial domination'