Good White People: Lisa Slater’s Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism

It is neither an accident nor a secret that settler colonialism constitutes settlers as specific kinds of subjects.¹ This is Lisa Slater’s focus in Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism: Australia, Race, and Place (Routledge, 2019), where she wagers that specific types of settler subjects must be unmade or reconfigured if decolonial futures are to become possible. Slater focuses on a configuration of subjectivity she calls “good white people” (or, sometimes, “good white women”)—“progressive, educated, middle class, cosmopolitans, whose political and personal identities are tested, and found wanting, in the face of cultural differences and Aboriginal self-determination” (5)—and the anxiety they experience when confronted with their positionality as settlers and/or the inadequacy of their liberal aspirations to inclusion and equity. Slater identifies this subject as part of “the architecture of settler colonialism” (3), which “reproduces subjects who desire the luxury and security of exclusive possession, while also limiting good white people’s capacities to reimagine belonging, shared existence, social justice and solidarity” (4). Although this anxiety poses an obstacle to decolonization insofar as it centers white people’s feelings and silences indigenous claims to land and sovereignty, Slater also argues that such anxiety is potentially an opportunity: settler anxiety presents a possible opening onto a different configuration of subjectivity that embraces the “multiplicity” and “contemporaneous heterogeneities of people, places, histories and knowledges and futures” (21). In short, “staying with anxiety— being disturbed, halted and unsettled—provides ways to renew our imaginative life and contribute to creating ethical settler-Indigenous relations that do not rely on reconciliation, recognition and resolution,” but instead “give way to a potentially radical political empathy” (xvii).

Slater links anxious white settler subjectivity to changes in Australian state policy towards indigenous peoples from the late 1990s to the present. This period is perhaps inaugurated by the 1997 Australian state-issued Bringing Them Home report, which documented the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Slater says the post-report period was, on the one hand, “the height of the demonstration of non-Indigenous people’s goodwill toward Indigenous people” and, on the other, “an era of aggressive, paranoid nationalism with white settlers claiming that Indigenous people were undeservedly being granted special rights” (6). By the mid-2000s, however, such division had transformed into a more unified state policy of “neoliberal punitive interventions” aimed at “improving the lives of Indigenous Australians” in terms of “socio-economic equality, while often ignoring colonial history and the diversity of Indigenous circumstances, sociocultural distinctiveness and life worlds” (7). This is exemplified by the government strategy known as “Closing the Gap,” issued as a report in 2015 and now a yearly state initiative to measure life, health, education, and well-being outcomes for indigenous populations as compared with settler Australians and make policy recommendations for redressing disparities between them. Slater argues that this series of developments has resulted in “care” becoming the national norm for settler attitudes toward Indigenous people, with the consequence that indigenous people themselves become the problem for the state, rather than colonial social and political relations. This only reproduces good white people, however, this time as “caring,” and the “anxious white subject becomes a normative character on the stage of white Australia, so essential to the reproduction of power relations” (19).

Slater argues that, for good white people, “Indigenous self-determination is a threat to one’s sense of self, belonging and a hoped for ethical future” (22). They manage this threat by “fleeing into anxiety” in order to “reaffirm[s] one’s sense of ethical belonging and white authority” (23). She calls this virtuous anxiety, a practice that limits the possibilities for settler solidarity with Indigenous people and erases Indigenous experiences, agency, and sovereignty. By contrast, there is another kind of anxiety that is triggered by “an encounter with the political that interrupts settler certainty and suspends [settler] agency” (3, emphasis...