Surviving the survival narrative,part 2: Conceptualising Whiteness-as-utility and internalised racism

Methodology

The data utilised in this article was generated by the primary author, through a larger study that examined the salience of IR in the contemporary Australian zeitgeist. Three qualitative, semi-structured interviews with narrative-based inquiry were conducted with each participant, all of whom were members of the group racialised as ‘Asian Australians’. While having a general applicability across racialised groups, the specificity was because of the primary author’s own racialised identification (as an Asian Australian). This helped to increase rapport within the data-generation process, sharing experiences of racialisation and racism as informed by Kohli’s (2014) concept of reciprocal vulnerability.

Homogeneous sampling procedures (see Etikan et al., 2016) were utilised for participant recruitment; based on the criteria ‘1.5 and 2nd generation Asian Australian of East and Southeast Asian descent’. This was informed by the literature which highlighted the social significance of the term ‘Asian’ within the contemporary Australian context (Ang, 2000), recognising that this term is racialised by the Australian settler colonial Whiteness, despite its otherwise evident normality in a Pacific-Asian region of which Australia is a part. In other words, the term ‘Asian’ has a specifically racialised connotation due to a White supremacy that fails to imagine Australia as geographically, culturally, and socially part of Asia. Phenotypically, it was taken to refer to subjects that were ‘Chinese-looking’. The project was advertised via posting flyers around university campuses in Victoria, and 17 participants were recruited, with 8 males and 9 females. A total of 50 interviews were conducted (one participant only had time for 2 interviews). Participants ranged from 18 to 46 years of age, with all having some tertiary educational background.

The primary author personally listened to recordings and transcribed the data after each interview. Because of the multiplicity of interviews, it was important to limit the number of codes utilised to keep the analysis of data manageable (see Creswell, 2014). This made it easier to relate the codes to the reconstruction of overarching themes, one of which was the relationship between IR and resistance detailed within this article.

Drawing on the extant literature, the transcripts were analysed by the primary author for manifestations of IR. The analysis procedure took account of the fact that IR often manifests itself without the conscious awareness of individuals, making it, as Speight (2007: 131) asserts, it is ‘not so easy to see, to count, to measure’. As such, Pyke and Dang’s (2003: 150) suggestion that narratives should be analysed for ‘the subtle processes by which racial inequality shapes the way that the oppressed think of themselves and other members of their group’ was helpful. These were important guidelines to consider when analysing the data as the hegemonic nature of the phenomenon necessitates the victim’s own acceptance of and consent to oppressive beliefs, rendering a conscious admittance of one’s own IR unlikely. However, Kohli (2014: 370) cautions that the ever-changing nature of a person’s beliefs, worldviews and self-perception make it ‘problematic to pathologize someone as embodying internalized racism’. Instead, she advises an approach that recognises the phenomenon ‘as something complex and fluid in its manifestation’. This awareness was also incorporated within the larger study’s design to attend toward a nuanced understanding of participants’ narratives within a larger context of their life experiences, deploying multiple consecutive interviews per participant.

This study was given ethics approval by the official ethics board within a large university in Melbourne, Victoria.

Exploring resistance: critical consciousness and the will-to-resist

Given the salience of critical consciousness-raising as a tool to combat the effects of IR, we begin by adopting Trieu and Lee’s (2018) framework of three interconnected strategies of critical exposure. We use this to frame the strategies engaged by the participants in the larger study towards building resistance against internalising racist ideology. Trieu and Lee’s work demonstrates, in their own words: ‘how the critical exposures and emergence of a critical consciousness led respondents to resist the white racial frame of whiteness as normative and embrace a more positive self-image as Asian Americans’ (Trieu and Lee, 2018: 79). As will be seen, this dynamic has significance for the lived experiences of non-Indigenous racialised subjects in the contemporary Australian context, including in relation to the influence of White supremacy and Indigenous dispossession.

The first of Trieu and Lee’s strategies is exposure to one’s ‘ethnic and racial history’. The point here, as we understand it, is to counteract a dominant racist narrative of one’s racialisation through critically assessing the racialised sociohistorical trajectories that have imbued the racialised subject with (often negative) social meaning. In a sense, it is a strategy that engages a wider incorporation of information from periphery sources that enables one to rewrite one’s racialised narrative. This seemed to contribute to an improved sense of self among racialised subjects, both within Trieu and Lee’s research and in the current study. Take for instance F06, a 46-year-old Australian woman with an Anglo father and Chinese-Malaysian mother, who found that travelling to Asia gave her a sense that she was ‘embracing [her] Asian-ness’.

Beyond visiting her Chinese-Malaysian relatives on her maternal side of the family in Penang, F06’s visit to a number of locations within (the cartographic locale of) Asia was enough to connect her to a sense of ‘Asian-ness’. Other participants described in more specific detail how such a ‘pilgrimage’ contributed to their ability to resist hegemonic White supremacist ideology within contemporary Australian society. Trieu and Lee’s (2018) emphasis on critical exposure seemed to be embodied by M06, a 31-year-old Australian man of Hong Kong-Chinese and Singapore-Chinese parentage.

For M06, visiting China and learning the country’s cultural history and the national language alongside his family members ‘made a difference’ for him. In particular, he found that tracing and experiencing this ethnic history for himself allowed a form of resistance to be built up toward his desire to be White, and specifically towards his aversion to being regarded as ‘Asian’ within contemporary Australian society (i.e. ‘I can still remember deriving . . . a lot of pride out of my friends joking about . . . how non-Asian I was’).

Trieu and Lee (2018) identified critical exposure to ‘ethnic organisations’ through participation as a second strategy. While those authors’ participants engaged with this form of exposure through actual physical communal organisations, participants in this study did so utilising online media platforms such as YouTube. Because they did so with the intention of creating a sense of racialised community around them and participating in it, this bears a similarity to Trieu and Lee’s notion of critical exposure through participation in ethnic organisations. Both, we would argue, seem to engender a sense of racialised normalcy for the racialised subject who would otherwise largely be socialising within dominant White spaces. Indeed, F05, a 28-year-old woman of Indonesian-Chinese descent, attributed her interest in participating in the current study to her time spent engaging with Asian American content on YouTube.

F05’s determination ‘to help Australia to be a better place’ as a schoolteacher was inspired by a popular Asian American YouTube content creator who, according to her, ‘always talk[s] about . . . exposing . . . Asian American culture’. In this sense, her own desire to reshape common understandings of Asian Australian-ness led her to participate in the current study, and to engage with exploring the difficult terrain of racialisation and its impacts, in this case, on the Asian Australian community. Yet importantly, this was also generated from her own experiences growing up ‘as a minority’, alluding to the racism she experienced in the schoolyard and how she has noticed a difference since becoming a teacher (i.e. ‘I can see how schools have changed from when I grew up which is really nice’). Clearly, the self-fostering of a sense of racialised community within a hegemonic White Western milieu through online media content was emblematic of the critical exposure to ethnic organisations that Trieu and Lee (2018) discuss. This kind of consciousness-raising was more explicitly stated by M08, a 34-year-old Australian man of Chinese-Malaysian descent and part-time musician, who described an infuriating conversation with a White Australian musician who wanted to ‘find . . . a country town’ in China and ‘just . . . meditate and . . . practise music for a year’.

Beyond searching for other sources of information such as blogs and peer-reviewed scholarly articles to examine his own emotional reactions to the above incident and specifically why he found the White musician’s comments ‘offensive’, it was his engagement and participation with content on YouTube that M08 found ‘most gratifying’. It is clear here that M08 utilised the Asian American content online specifically to create a sense of community, through which his feelings of anger would be met with empathetic understanding. This relatability allowed him to construct the normality required to retain a sense that his frustration was not misplaced, and that, perhaps, his subconscious identification of the White musician’s orientalist construction of China and its subsequent White Western utilisation as a playground for some mystical self-actualisation mission had some foundation in social reality.

The last form of critical exposure within Trieu and Lee’s framework is the exposure to one’s co-ethnics. While it shares a similarity with the above strategy of creating a sense of community, and indeed can and often does have this effect, there is something more here that concerns a particular manifestation of IR. This particular critical consciousness-raising strategy seems to share an affinity in principle with contact theory, which suggests that within a migratory context, ‘the presence of ethnic diversity’ among a populace would lead to increased ‘positive attitudes towards immigration’ (Bilodeau and Fadol, 2011: 1090). Translated here, this hypothesised dynamic would mean that greater contact with members of one’s own racialised group would lead to more positive attitudes to one’s co-ethnics, previously marred by the internalisation of racist ideology. In this sense, this strategy is particularly concerned with a manifestation of IR that causes one to have negative views about one’s own racialised group (i.e. Pyke and Dang, 2003). Some participants, such as M03, a 36-year-old man of Vietnamese and Hakka descent, specifically utilised this form of exposure as a panacea to ‘self-hating on [his] Asian heritage’, and his co-ethnics:

M03 shares an experience of a period in his life where he turned away from racialised ‘self-hating’ and choosing to surround himself with other ‘Asian friends’. This was something he felt he could not do during his teenage years, a period marked by having to navigate a perceived stigma stemming from his racialisation. However, this soon transitioned to a phase where he made ‘peace with some of the demons’, referring to his internalised aversion toward his co-ethnics. It was a period he characterised affectively as one where he ‘loved being Asian for a little while’. M03’s specifying going to ‘Asian night’ is a reference to the racialised nightclub events (commonly) held in Melbourne that promotes itself through Asian Australian channels (i.e. people), thereby attracting a predominantly ‘Asian’ crowd. The self-directed immersion within ethnic/racialised enclaves helped M03, as they did Trieu and Lee’s (2018) participants, to challenge the previously held negative view of his co-ethnics. Progressing through this (counter-ideological) phase, where he carried a sense of ethnic/racialised pride, seemed to help cause a fissure in the internalised White supremacist frame that produced his devalued sense of racialised self. However, M03 reports being ‘more chilled now’, indicating his de-racialised view of friendships, preferring instead to surround himself with ‘people . . . that are just wholesome, and that are accepting’. However, while M03 utilised this as a panacea to rehabilitate his internalised racist perception of co-ethnics at a later stage in his life, it is M04, a 36-year-old Australian man of Taiwanese descent, who remembers seeking out other ‘Asian people’ early on, reporting that he has ‘always had the idea’ that he ‘preferred to hang out’ with members of his racialised group. Below, M04 reflects upon the experiences that led him to the consolidation of his racialised preference in friendships:

The above excerpt reveals a more complex experience of racialisation and other forms of social categorisation. Although he struggles with the normalisation of racialised segregation among peers in his secondary schooling years (i.e. ‘it just felt more natural to do it . . . I think everyone feels that way’), M04 eventually gives insight to a dynamic that we believe demonstrates a form of resistance towards hegemonic ideology. It is hegemonic because M04 clearly recognises a stigma attached to an essentialised Asian-ness, which he acknowledges implicitly through describing how some Asian Australian students would purposefully distance themselves from their co-ethnics (i.e. ‘to move away from that stereotype’). However, he chooses to resist its mediating power by distancing himself from the dominant White group instead. Of course, he then goes on to further explain his Asian choice of friendships through the feminising discourse of being a ‘nerdy’ person, simultaneously revealing an embedded perception of the high social capital of Whiteness through marking it as an embodiment of ‘cool’. It is clear that this reveals the depths of IR embedded in M04’s thought processes, an important area we engage with further on. But there is an element of resistance here that can nevertheless be seen through the (self-)exposure to his co-ethnics.

Collectively, the excerpts presented in this section suggest that whether through seeking out one’s ethnic/racialised history, fostering a sense of ethnic/racialised community, socialising with one’s co-ethnics or indeed, as is most common, an amalgamation of two or three of these strategies, the participants do demonstrate an ability to resist White supremacist ideology.

Individualising resistance: evidencing the will-to-resist

Beyond a simplistic deployment of ‘the-ability-of-the-racialised/colonised-to-resist’ type of observation, we suggest that the strategies engaged in by participants were indicative of more than just creative forms of resistance towards hegemonic racist ideology at work, although this clearly was also present. Given that the participants actively sought out what Trieu and Lee (2018) have categorised as strategies of critical exposure, they also are demonstrating a certain drive to acquire these strategies of resistance. That is, they are not only displaying agentic capabilities through the employment of strategies to resist White supremacist ideology but, more interestingly, they reveal a deeper underlying drive, subconscious or otherwise, to challenge their recognised subordinated positioning. It is this drive that we term the will-to-resist, a characteristic of ‘survival’ that seems to be inherent to these racialised subjects. It is more important, however, also to notice that what the above suggests is how the will-to-resist does not require any conscious awareness, by the racialised subject, of the structural positioning attributed to their racialisation. This is evident, for instance, in M04’s travelling to Taiwan to learn about his ethnic history. One could understand this more as a reaction to resisting personal feelings of being unaccepted due to his inferiorised racialised status, rather than any meta-realisation of the reality of structural racism embedded within Australian society. Likewise, the evoking of M08’s will-to-resist, demonstrated by fostering a sense of community through engaging with online media content, seemed to stem from the need to understand his own feelings of anger, induced in him by the statement made by his White musician acquaintance. It is one which both interpellated him as an ‘Asian’ and reduced this essentialised notion to an orientalist object of (White) conquest. Hence, we argue that there is an individualised aspect within these examples that reflects the presence of a reactionary response to experiences of interpersonal racism.

One of the ways that the will-to-resist is also evident in the participants’ narratives seems to be through the humanisation of their racialised group. As the process of racialisation often imbues such groups with negative stereotypes, the process of humanisation as a resistance strategy seems to engender a focus on more positive associations with that racialised group. This could be seen earlier with participants rewriting, through critical exposure to their ethnic and racialised history for instance, an experience of Asian-ness that was more dignified and less stigmatised. It seems the same principle applied to White folks, often glorified in their racialisation, evokes the opposite reaction where more negative stereotypes are applied to the group. This furthers the above argument of the will-to-resist as primarily an individualistic phenomenon, requiring no wider structural consciousness. Such data emerged within the narratives, suggesting an effective counteracting dynamic to the internalisation of White supremacist ideology, if only to weaken its hold on the subject. The narratives in this particular case demonstrate a seemingly uncritical adoption of an alternative, counteracting set of ideological tenets. This argument here is purposefully silent on the credibility or morality of the ideological beliefs themselves, but rather focuses on their seemingly uninterrogated internalisation by the participants. Nevertheless, if we are discussing effective strategies to counteract the internalisation of White (patriarchal) supremacist ideological tenets per se, then the strategy of exposure to counteracting ideological tenets does seem effective.

For M05, a 27-year-old Australian man of Singaporean Malay and Chinese descent, it was exposure to ‘local [White] Australians’ that engendered a critical awakening in his own consciousness, to refrain from his own previous ‘worship’ of ‘White people’. He discusses this through a class-based stereotyping of the differences between White ‘expats’ and ‘the local [White] Australians’. Clearly, such unreflective situating of localness with Whiteness fails to challenge the dispossessive logic of White settler-invader sovereignty in which Indigenous people are replaced with a White subject as the autochthonous norm. In this case, Whiteness, in and of itself representing settler-invader migration, is invisibilised. That is, M05 continues to participate in a double process whereby non-White migrants negotiate their national belonging in relation to other migrants for hegemony, while the hegemonic migrant (Anglo-Celtic subjects) becomes normalised as autochthonous (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

M05’s discussion of the average Singaporean who ‘worship[s] the White people’ can be seen as his recognition and articulation of a colonial dynamic which in itself is emblematic of systemic (and therefore widespread) internalisation of European/White supremacy on a global scale (see Seet, 2019). He is confident, through his own psychic conversion (to utilise Malcolm X’s term), that if he were to bring such a person to ‘interact with the local [White] Australians’, their virtual image of a White person would be shattered, in the same way it was for him. While this seems to be an effective strategy towards counteracting his previous glorification of White folks, this strategy utilises a (globalised) class-based discourse that interpellates White Australians as a whole, as seen through his perception that ‘a lot of [White] Australians have never travelled’. He continues to qualify this construction between one’s vacation habits and class status through identifying Bali as a holiday destination primarily for working-class Whites, at least stereotypically. This is made clearer as M05 compares ‘local [White] Australians’ to the White upper middle-class expatriates one might expect to meet overseas, and classifies the former as ‘a bit more rude, a bit more rough’. Although M05 could be recognising the dominant Australian nationalist cultural norm that glorifies (White) working-class culture, it is the internalisation of an uninterrogated (globalised) class-based ideological frame of reference that causes a fissure in his internalisation of White supremacist ideology. Furthermore, M05 does not engage with the ways in which Australian working-class culture is grounded in Indigenous dispossession by taming, clearing, enclosing, and building over Indigenous Country into a colonised landscape of cities or farms for migrants to fill and work.

Clearly, however, it is important to note that there must be other correlational factors here since all participants live or have lived in areas where immersion with White folks was frequent. Nevertheless, this is still worth mentioning as a potential counter-ideology to White supremacist doctrines through the highlighting of supposed negative behaviours portrayed by White Australians. This negative perception of Whites is furthered by F03, a 21-year-old woman with a Chinese Australian father and White Australian mother, who expressed her view of White men in particular based on her anecdotal experience in the dating scene:

F03 draws on her own dating experiences to construct a perception of ‘White men’ as prone to being perpetrators of sexual assault and emotional abusers of women. In particular, she believes that it is their (either societally and/or individually sanctioned) ‘impunity’, which allows them to ‘feel like they can get away with’ such actions, and to continue ‘carrying on with their lives . . . not giving a shit about anything’. In this regard, it is akin to the camera obscura, a reversal of Goffman’s (1963: 128) sociological analysis of the archetype of power he terms ‘the unblushing male’, that identifies a set of traits (i.e. young, White, heterosexual, athletic, etc.) which signify hegemonic masculinities within Western society. While we recognise that the above excerpt is complex in its consideration within an intersection of racialisation, gendered, and sexuality dynamics (and is discussed in more depth elsewhere; see Seet, 2020a), we include this example here as it is nevertheless an effective resistance strategy against White patriarchal supremacist ideology. Yet it is one that seems to be uninterrogated, given that it seems based upon a similar dehumanisation of a racialised and gendered group without the apprehension of nuance. It is in this sense that we have included this example here, as it demonstrates that one does not have to have a clear understanding of structural issues to engage in strategies of resistance to White supremacist ideology.

We suggest that the strategies discussed within this section, representative of the will-to-resist, could be seen to be derived from the individual need to be recognised as ‘of worth’ and specifically as ‘not inferior to’, say, the dominant racialised group. It could be seen as an ad hoc problematisation of circumstance, so to speak, rather than any wider structural awareness of the systemic nature of racism, or indeed, any other form of structural oppression. It is possible, of course, for the racialised to have the aspirational ‘critical consciousness-raising’ experience, although this would be difficult to achieve. Indeed, it is a dynamic that is not evident within the narratives, which instead demonstrate an individualised drive to resist and counteract one’s inferiorisation, whether as an affect (i.e. feeling angry), or through social impact (i.e. being ostracised from certain racialised friendship circles), and/ or other material and psychological impacts. Yet the recognition of the impulse as an individualistic drive does not in any way diminish its ability to humanise the racialised through recognising their will-to-resist, nor reduce its effectiveness as a strategy to gain personal advantage within a system where one is positioned as structurally disadvantaged. Importantly, however, the presence of IR is not diminished, necessarily, within the will-to-resist. Indeed, a racialised subject can gain individual advantage within a system through the denigration of their co-ethnics (see Pyke and Dang, 2003).

Another way to understand the difference between individualised resistance and structural resistance is through the difference between racialised survival as opposed to racialised subversion, as it is captured within the colonial scholarship. We therefore turn next to examining how the will-to-resist may be utilised by the racialised to gain an (individualised) advantage within the system.

Interrogating resistance: colonial mimicry and Whiteness-as-utility

Although ‘resistance’ is often utilised as a blanket term to refer to the wider race/settler colonial scholarship that focuses on foregrounding agentic dynamics exemplified by racialised/ colonised subjects within oppressive circumstances, there are other modes of studying this same dynamic within settler colonial and race scholarship. While we are conscious of the settler colonial context of Australia in which this article is situated, we draw from the postcolonial literature to examine a common narrative within the study of ‘resistance’ in recent scholarship, specifically as it concerns the notion of subversion. Homi Bhabha’s (1994) collection of essays in his Location of Culture is perhaps exemplary in this regard. Bhabha’s work has implications for the study of (colonised) resistance, via his emphasis on ambivalence within the colonial discourse. For instance, Bhabha discusses his reading of the work of poet Adrienne Rich, and her self-positioning within what Bhabha describes as the ‘interstices . . . of . . . national and international histories and geographies’, which, according to him, emphasises (and facilitates) ‘the importance of historical and cultural re-visioning’. He then utilises this to argue what becomes his main position for his work:

If we look at the relation of cultures in this way then we see them as part of a complex process of ‘minoritarian’ modernity, not simply a polarity of majority and minority, the center and the periphery. Rich does not merely string together the woes of the ‘wretched of the earth’; she turns the abjection of modern history into the productive and creative history of the minority as a social agent. Out of a spirit of resistance and forbearance emerges the minoritarian will to live, to make, to introduce the act of poesis into the imagined life of the migrant or the minority as part of civic and civil society. (Bhabha, 1994: xx, original emphasis)

This quotation clarifies an understanding of Bhabha’s positioning on the colonial discourse. Bhabha seems to argue for refraining from fixity, abstaining from the polarised categorical distinctions which he believes discursively maintain power relations, and for a focus on ‘a spirit of resistance and forbearance’ among the minoritised populations of society. Here, within what Bhabha terms the third space, which suspends any illusory notion of originary identity, is where truly creative, unitary and non-static, ‘new’ identities are allowed emerge. While such a reading of the colonial discourse exemplifies Bhabha’s injection of a sense of ambivalence within common understandings of coloniser–colonised relations, it is important to recognise Indigeneity as a non-illusory originary identity, to recognise Indigenous people as primary colonised subjects within the Australian nation-state, and to recognise that the emerging third space or identity is founded on Indigenous dispossession and replacement by the White migrant (Wolfe, 2006). With this in mind, Bhabha’s (1994: 10) consideration of the temporal and the spatial dimensions of cultural poesis is connected to his notion of hybridity:

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of necessity, not the nostalgia, of living. (emphasis added)

‘Newness’ or rather, uniqueness, is generated from this in-between or liminal space that seems to exist outside spatial-temporal considerations. The implication is that the translation of cultural difference that occurs in the liminal spaces is outside the paradigms of oppression, where Bhabha argues that the oppressed can remake themselves, the colonised culture, and the colonial culture. This refers to what Bhabha terms hybridity, both of cultures and of identities.

It is through the concept of colonial mimicry, in particular, that an ambivalence within the phenomenon of IR is seemingly injected. Bhabha’s concept critiques the categorical polarisation of coloniser–colonised as a paradoxical re-utilisation of the same discursively formed oppressive dynamic – which is the problem, as he puts it, of fixity – and, in a sense, calls for a nuanced view towards such relations. According to Bhabha (1994: 127), within the oppressive paradigm of colonial oppression, mimicry demonstrates a method of subversiveness on the part of the colonised through their imitation of the coloniser’s ways. In his own words, ‘it is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come’ (1994: 127). Here Bhabha describes the contradictory nature of a coloniser–colonised relationship (the requirement for the subjugated population to be colonised requires an imitation of the coloniser’s ways), yet, for the coloniser to remain in such a position of dominance, it must allow an aspect of difference to remain within such a colonial frame of reference. Here, the colonising gaze is said to be returned and reflected through the performative act of the mimic, and the imitation becomes an unsettling reflection for the colonisers. This – described as a kind of mockery of the coloniser’s sense of self, performed by the colonised – constitutes what Bhabha argues was a weakening of the colonial power, occurring when the arbitrary performative gestures and habits of the coloniser, embodied by the mimic, reveal the futility of the co-dependent discursive construction of coloniser–colonised. He writes, famously:

Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. (1994: 126)

And he goes on:

The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. (1994: 129)

Bhabha intends the act of mimicking, in disrupting the authority of the colonial discourse, to be inherently destabilising to the established order. It is in this sense that colonial mimicry bears a superficial similarity to the phenomenon of IR. At least in terms of the performative manifestation within the colonised/racialised, the ‘always the same but not quite/White’ subject of colonial mimicry may indeed be reminiscent of the impact of IR upon the racialised. Bearing in mind that mimicry implies an ability on the part of the subjugated to subvert the system of domination for their own benefit, it is possible to identify performative aspects within the participants’ narratives that may be seen to subvert the White supremacist system while simultaneously acknowledging that such benefit stems from the ongoing viability of the collective settler colonial project. This is demonstrated by M05, seen earlier, who explains the anglicising of his own traditionally Malay name, due to the circumstance living in an Anglo-Celtic dominated social milieu:

M05 chooses to relinquish his birth name and adopt an anglicised name because of the difficulty he experiences in contemporary Australian society with its pronunciation. More concerningly, due to the lack of understanding of the Malay structure of his name among the Anglo-Celtic majority, such confusion leads to some of M05’s legal applications not being approved. Hence, the interpersonal difficulties have led him to consciously adopt a dominant marker of a naturalised (Anglo-Celtic) citizen, such as the anglicised name. Such a performative measure may, as Bhabha acknowledges, include an element of identity suppression (i.e. the downplaying of one’s ‘ethnic’ name or making it secondary, yet here it is done for a purpose that benefits them person. Within the oppressive paradigm that can be understood as one of institutionalised White supremacy, the anglicised name may signify one’s acculturation to the dominant (White) culture, which signifies greater suitability and trustworthiness within the workforce (i.e. being viewed as ‘less foreign’), which translates into increased job opportunities (as demonstrated by implicit bias studies on racialised hiring practices: i.e. Booth et al., 2012; see also, Soutphommasane, 2017). The benefit achieved through this performative measure of name-adoption can be viewed as a vying for a share of the economic and social power governed/dominated by Whiteness, while at the same time being complicit in continued Indigenous dispossession and elision of Indigenous peoples (cf. Tuck and Yang, 2012). The subversive or insurgent function here of the mimic’s act of name-adoption is revealed through the acquisition of greater social mobility in a system designed for racialised exclusion, a marker of which, in part, lies in the naming. This particular instance is important in order to understand a distinction between Bhabha’s colonial mimicry and the phenomenon of IR, as we have understood it.

The participant discussed demonstrates what Bhabha (1994: 129) has termed the ‘menace of mimicry’ through the explicit recognition (and therefore conscious awareness) of the White supremacist spaces in which they are navigating. He, Bhabha (1994: 131), draws upon Lacan’s work to remind us that ‘mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically’ (emphasis added). One could see this adaptation to the structures of hegemonic power as a kind of Whiteness-as-utility. In mimicking Whiteness as a tool of navigating racialised space, the racialised subject is able to, as Bhabha puts it, ‘disrupt its authority’. Here, White supremacy is made a mockery of through the racialised subject’s performativity of Whiteness, rendering and demonstrating the set of actions or behaviours, as markers of Whiteness, to be arbitrary constructs. Yet this recognition of the racialised subject’s ability to resist structural power in the form of coloniality, or in our case, White supremacist ideology, should not be conflated with the phenomenon of IR. We argue that the internalisation of White supremacist ideology for the racialised subject is an inculcation of a racist Weltanschauung, one which co-opts her/him into a racialised and racist system that diminishes her/his subjectivity. And herein lies the potential differentiation. If the racialised subject’s relation to spaces saturated with White supremacist ideology can, through the concept of mimicry, be seen as one of Whiteness-as-utility, then the phenomenon of IR describes one of Whiteness-as-referent. That is, Whiteness is taken as the standard against which the racialised self is measured, therefore inculcating a sense of self defined by a lack.

By highlighting this distinction, we further this argument in the final section by interrogating how Whiteness-as-utility, as a strategy of resistance among racialised subjects, serves to maintain the colonial structure within which it necessarily operates.

Conclusion

So far, we have demonstrated a conceptual difference between relating to Whiteness-as-referent, embodied within the concept of IR, and Whiteness-as-utility, wherein the racialised subject mimics aspects of a Whiteness, in order to benefit materially from spaces which are a priori (to its formation) saturated with a colonial Whiteness. Through this understanding, it is important to highlight, however, that the racialised subject’s relation to Whiteness-as-utility to subvert the contemporary system of White supremacy, does so specifically for the individual. While this evidences what we have called the will-to-resist, it is unclear if this form of resistance or survival has a meta-focus on the structural nature of racist ideology, and its implication in the maintenance of such systems. It is also clear that resistance of this kind fails to challenge the hegemony of Whiteness as autochthonous and the possessive logic of White supremacy in Australia as a settler colonial nation-state. Indeed, if mimicry is particularly concerned with racialised survival through adaptation, then it is unclear how exactly these acts seen above, actually subvert the racist structures. If anything, it would seem to maintain them via the normalisation of Anglo-Celtic Whiteness as non-migrant, serving to displace First Nations’ claims to Australia. While this argument does not intend to efface the ingenuity of stratagem evident among the colonised/racialised in navigating oppressive paradigms, it seems like survival through adaptation does, nevertheless, involve an element of complicity with the settler colonial project.

As a concept that explains the internalisation of hegemonic racist ideology, any evidence of IR’s manifestation among the racialised themselves suggests the mechanism of complicity inherent to the maintenance of existing structures and systems of racism, the possessive logic of settler-invader ontologies and global White supremacy. Hence, we submit that any understanding of the effects and impacts of wider systemic racism upon the racialised will be incomplete without the incorporation of this phenomenon. It would therefore also act as an impediment to any efforts to dismantle such a structure.