WHITENESS STUDIES AND THE MEMORY OF DISPOSSESSION Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation. By Belinda McKay, ed. Brisbane: Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, 1999. Reviewed by Janine Little. A Queensland artist's depiction of an Irish family fleeing the great nineteenth century famine stares down at me as I write this review. Titled 'Dispossessed', it is one of the works painted during Les Joyce McDonough's three-month residency last year in his ancestral home in Galway City. The invocation of loss and suffering through this two-dimensional medium coincides, as I read the articles collected in Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, with a longer intellectual project embarked upon in Australia by those who have been compelled to examine their historical place in a troubled multicultural milieu. Before Reconciliation, such an examination was not so compelling in an academic context where race was linked to class and gender as the constitutive priority of progressive feminist cultural theory. The impact of Black American feminist critics such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Michelle Wallace on relatively recent engagements with Indigenous women's writing was intensified by the then largely unpublished Indigenous Australian women's critical voice. Jane Durie describes how Lorde, in particular, had a fundamental influence on anti-racist practice, in her article 'Naming Whiteness in Different Locations'. With the exceptions of work by Marcia Langton, Maryann Bin-Salek, Roberta Sykes and a few others read as Indigenous, women's published work was concentrated in life writing or biography, and was given academic exposure in non-Indigenous feminist scholars' progressive application of postcolonial critical practices. Belinda McKay's observation in her introduction to this collection that 'whiteness is a complex and fragmented identity' was underscored by the increasing purchase of those practices in a national context where race was presumed as a marker of Indigenous presence. Figures reflecting upon their own positioning as they negotiated this presumption were located mostly within what would become, at the close of the century, a contracted left intellectual space. Their collective commentary on strategies for the political and social rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people held its foundations in what was once a potent Australian anti-capitalist movement - and included Indigenous literary pioneers such as Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert, and Jack Davis. Through the 1988 Australian Bicentenary, and into the early 1990s, race was certainly a signifier mostly of Indigenous identity. Given that the struggle up until then had been against the perversion of terra nullius as the driving aspect of contemporary mainstream Australian conceptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander being, the erasure had to be admitted. It was protested, demonstrated, seen and heard in ways that caught in the net of globalisation and its commodifications of difference. The advent of Australian Native Title legislation showed that, centrally, such an admission depended upon dominant ideological appropriations of race - and the practice of race relations - into the political and cultural centre. As Aileen-Moreton Robinson notes, the majority of Indigenous people had become 'captives of difference' (29). It is no wonder that such an experience, after surviving dispossession and terra nullius, would tap the cold anger of those who suddenly find more opportunities to speak, participate in, and contribute to the critical mass of work on Australian race relations. That is evident in each of the articles by Aboriginal and Maori contributors to Unmasking Whiteness who, along with non-Indigenous contributors from sociology, anthropology, education, journalism, and cultural theory, have managed to take cross-cultural conference to more level ground. It was not long ago that those who sought out Indigenous women's participation in discussions or readings were taken to task for their apparent failure to account for the complexity and fragmentation of their whiteness of being. Conferences had a bad name among Indigenous women commentators, writers and activists - as McKay, and Lillian Holt (in her biographical notes) attest. The forums for ideas and argument had become arenas for a new kind of ritual where exasperated Indigenous 'guests' told white questioners that the angst/confusion/racism embedded in their questions was their problem and they should work it out for themselves. End of story. For both exasperated Indigenous 'guest' and hapless, retreating audience member, white was its own explanation. American whiteness scholar Ruth Frankenburg talks about the same rituals in 1980s feminist conferences in the US, as all participants tongue-lashed and cold-shouldered each other toward race cognisance, and away from passive-aggressive versions of racism. Karen Brodkin's introductory paper, “Studying Whiteness: What's the point and where do we go from here?” stresses that finding cultural alternatives to gendered whiteness (in which power continues to be wielded through white male identity) would enable such Australian conversations on race relations to progress in a similar way. Brodkin argues that such cultural alternatives 'help build cross-racial alliances that weaken the social structure of whiteness and help bring social change' (26). Pinning down race as a specified and complicated historical phenomenon employed by that social structure to maintain the dispossession of Indigenous people, feminist cultural theorists have tended not to use the word whiteness to describe it in Australia. Out of familiarity, whiteness has been tracked (along with maleness) as both beneficiary and product of capitalism in the theatres of economic and cultural imperialism. In those places, as Carole Ferrier argues in 'White blindfolds and black armbands', encouraging subjective interchangeability between the terms of whiteness and race may risk giving ground to far right interests that have spouted 'white race' as vitriol against those who comprise most of the world's population (76). The persistence of white supremacist economic and ideological power requires more than a mere engagement into whiteness-as-race for social transformation, as 'a famous dead white European man' (Brodkin 7), who some recall as Marx, still suggests. Whiteness, notes Belinda McKay, is articulated through the racial paradigm as the identity in which 'all receive unearned benefits as the inheritors of racial privilege' (4). As the first conference on whiteness to be held in Australia, Griffith University's Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation (Queensland Studies Centre 1998) represented a turning point towards sustained dialogue on that inheritance. The defining terms of the dialogue, whiteness and race, are at once urgent and contested. While the collected articles emphasise that urgency and contestation by freeing both into a discursive dynamic framed by Reconciliation, they also highlight the nature of that dynamic as one that has never functioned apart from history, in its specific national context. Michael Meadows' study of media reportage of Prime Minister John Howard's Wik 10-Point Plan response to Native Title is a well-documented example of this; as well it illustrates how race, an ideological construct that has long served white supremacy, confers or strips away the markers of that white privilege along more complex lines than just cosmetic identity. Meadows observes two of the more fiercely guarded of those lines as those of property and territory, giving rise to attacks on what turned out to be conservative court rulings on Native Title by some of the most powerful interests in the country: miners, graziers, farmers and conservative politicians (91). Enabled by the lack of cross-culturally trained journalists working in the Australian media those attacks, according to Meadows, relied upon negative racial stereotypes of Aborigines already etched into the Australian social memory. Striking at the heart of white privilege, Aboriginal people were again painted (and tainted) as a threat to private property and established political territory - the same justifications used at the time of colonisation for the projects of annihilation and assimilation. As Jane Durie comments, these are just some of the 'very real dangers of engaging in whiteness studies in ways that are not seen to engage with the embodied experiences of racist discourses and practices as they are experienced by "racialised others" in the here and now' ('Comments on the Unmasking Whiteness Conference' 255). With white supremacy still very much the dominant ideological thrust of Australian political and cultural life, the project of talking about race, and of turning the critical spotlight on what it means to have inherited white identity, remains urgent and contested. Even after three decades of work by Left historians and literary critics, some intellectuals are only now putting it on their agenda. In another, longer look at that painting, 'Dispossessed', there emerges one potentially useful path of comprehension that takes its cue from Indigenous people's ownership of their own cultures, their own history. What ancestral legacies of dispossession, loss, and violence do white Australians need to admit? Like the ragged Irish family depicted barefoot, weak and haunted on McDonough's canvas, white presence on Indigenous land remains troubled, tainted. If white Australians looked into their own extended histories, as emigrants and 'guests' from places far away from here, perhaps the masks might fall far enough away for sincere cross-cultural awareness to heal some of the wounds inflicted upon others. As Unmasking Whiteness suggests, Reconciliation may then emerge as being more about the work that whiteness studies can do to compel an experiential understanding of what it means to be dispossessed. Janine Little completed a PhD thesis on reading race within culture at The University of Queensland in 1999. She has worked as a university lecturer but has recently returned to journalism.