issue 1 09 - APS Member Groups - Australian Psychological Society

Multiculturalism and Whiteness33Australian means a person fromanother culture living in Australia,living in the land of Aboriginals. Sobasically an immigrant, someonefrom a multicultural society withheaps of immigrants. I think theonly Australians are theAboriginals. Until they are giventheir full respect I think only thencould we all be Australians…. atthe end of the day they are Poms orIrish or whatever No one is fromhere really. It only two hundredyears. Dedenin dedesi (Grandad’s,Grandad). That is it.TaylanBecause everyone knows that youare not Australian. The only trueAustralian are the Aboriginals. Youcould call the British that camehere Australian but apart from thateveryone migrated here. If you sayyou are Australian you are eitherAboriginal or you came here whenthe Brits came here or you just saythe nationality that you come fromand everyone basically assumesthat you are born in Australia oryou came from that country likeyour parents did.Taylan also challenges the normativeposition of whiteness by positioningAboriginal people as true Australians.However, he then moves and positionsAboriginals and British descendents equally.This example demonstrates how whiteness isnegotiated however, whiteness is notproblematised and white privilege is notchallenged.DiscussionThe discourses discussed in this articledemonstrate that the Cypriot Turkish identitylike many other identities in Australia arepositioned in relation to what Frankenberg(1993) explains a privileged group that iscentred as normative and unquestionable, inthis case the dominant Anglo-Saxon ethnicgroup of Australia. Through these discoursesthey are positioned as the ethnic Australian, ahyphenated Australian. Cypriot Turks embodytheir position as an ethnic Australian and it isexperiences as a natural category rather than asocial category. Although these two discoursesare clearly relational it is perceived andexperienced as a determinist discourse, it isnaturalised and it is experienced as commonsense (Collins, 2004).Participants’ understandings of not beingthe right colour or from the mainstream religionarise through comparison to ‘the whiteAustralian’. The participants who embodied thenaturalised Australian capital, that is skin colour(Hage, 2003), noted their greater access toprivilege to other ethnics who can onlyaccumulate their Australian cultural capital.Even though they have the accumulated capitalthat has transferred into national belonging to agreater extent in comparison to participants whowere not ‘the right’ colour, governmentalbelonging has not been accessible. To someextent it translates into national belonging butnot as a dominant member, with power toposition others in Australia. Muslim identity inAustralia does not convert into governmentalbelonging (Hage, 1998) as Halil and Mehmethave displayed. In comparison to the ‘whiteAnglo Saxon Australians’, other forms ofaccumulated whiteness or even naturalwhiteness is overshadowed (Hage, 1998).In this data we can see that whiteness inAustralia operates as a ‘race’ construct – it is inpart based on skin colour. However, beingwhite is not sufficient to access whiteness. Thismakes whiteness something beyond biologicalunderstandings of race. Whiteness is not justabout being white, but also about belonging to acertain ethno-religious group. Consistent withImtoual (2007), Muslim identity is positioned asthe other to the real white Christian Australian.However, from these examples we see that youdo not need to be identified as a Muslim to feelthat you are excluded from being Australian.By creating the ethnic identity andThe Australian Community Psychologist Volume 21 No 1 June 2009