Abstract:
The infamous White Australia Policy, enacted through the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, secured a unique Australian brand of whiteness at the core of the nation’s history and identity. Commensurate with racialized anti-Asian fears of the Yellow Peril and an invading ‘Other’, this historically engrained form of whiteness has endured and evolved via contemporary articulations of Sinophobia and new Orientalised racisms. Given the increasing prevalence of migration from the discursively constructed region known as ‘Asia’ to Australia, this ongoing climate of anti-Asian racism is deeply problematic. Within schools—which function as microcosms of broader society—this climate of anti-Asian racism is particularly problematic for migrant ‘Asian’ international students who are invariably positioned as ‘Other’. In response, this paper adopts a race critical collaborative autoethnographic approach between a migrant ‘Asian’ (ex-secondary schoolteacher) researcher and a small group of migrant ‘Asian’ secondary students to interrogate contemporary sites of whiteness in the form of school-based anti-Asian racism. In particular, it focusses on shared understandings and experiences of discrimination alongside the contradictory possibilities of antiracist action within school spaces. In so doing, this paper simultaneously dislocates historicised notions of racism while redefining the notion of change—and its related processes of transformation—in the present, for more socially just futures.