Reading Race: A study of reading as an approach to changing racial consciousness

Abstract

Ongoing inequality persists in Australia between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations. While traditional forms of government programs have been implemented for many decades there has been no meaningful change to the statistics, referred to in common vernacular as “the Gap”. This research proposes a different approach: one which has as its focus non-Indigenous Australians’ race consciousness. The question is how race consciousness can be changed. This study investigates how reading might work as a means of change. This is examined through the lens of readers in book clubs. A study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase seven interviews were conducted with members of a reading group in a metropolitan area which engaged in reading texts which only present engagement with Aboriginal issues. In the second phase, four book clubs meeting in a regional city read a common text concerned with settler/Aboriginal relations. Their group discussions were recorded, transcribed and analysed. This was followed by individual interviews with twenty-eight members of these groups. These were transcribed and analysed, and individual case studies prepared from six of them. While the text engendered anti-racist sentiments and empathy, these feelings could also be submerged within group peer pressure. These group and individual studies provided interesting data relating both to the initial problem and to the method itself.