Just a Hobbit; my experience of culture and identity in education.

Just a Hobbit; my experience of culture and identity in education.

When I talk to people around campus I love to hear about their backgrounds. It seems every student at UNSW has a rich cultural background and had school friends with diverse cultural backgrounds. These students celebrate cultural and religious holidays and are an exemplary example of multiculturalism. When asked to do a blog post to reflect on my own experiences of culture and identity in relation to education my mind went blank and then I thought what culture?

I was born in Australia, my parents were born in Australia, and their parents were born in Australia. Generations ago my ancestors travelled to Australia from Scotland, Ireland and Wales however that is the extent of what I know about my cultural background. I am the stereotypical white privilege girl (McIntosh, 1992). I live and grew up in South Sydney, the infamous ‘Shire’. My high school was a government school in the Sutherland shire also and was dominated by teachers and students who were white and had cultural backgrounds similar to mine; I can count the number of culturally diverse students from my school grade on one hand. Growing up with the only experience of different cultures at the local Asian and Italian restaurants I was stumped as to what I can write about. As someone who is not from a minority group I don’t think of my culture as something that defines me (Phillips, 2006).

Then I thought about Identity. I have an identity; these little suburbs I grew up in have an Identity. The Shire is thought of by many as a cultural wasteland and that it is full of bigoted people and racists who go to the beach and don’t know about life the other side of Captain Cook Bridge. During my school years living at Cronulla I did experience a disgusting side of culture and identity and maybe this has led me to have a negative view of culture and identity as a whole. I was in year eleven at the time of the Cronulla Riots; a boy from school was in the pictures in Sydney newspapers; throwing a beer bottle at a man ‘of middle eastern appearance’. Bashings, stabbings and sexual assaults occurred towards people from The Shire by cultural groups from western Sydney and similar violence toward these groups from white people from The Shire. I saw firsthand what prejudice and ignorance (and alcohol) can do when people think of others who are different to them; people with different identities and cultures.

My time ‘over the bridge’ at UNSW however has been a positive experience of different cultures. Maybe young people and education are the key to multicultural harmony?

Phillips, A. (2006). What is culture? In Arneil, Barbara and Deveaux, Monique and Dhamoon, Rita and Eisenberg, Avgail (eds.) Sexual justice/cultural justice. London, UK: Routledge, 2006, pp. 15-29.

McIntosh, P. (1992) White Privilege and Male Privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies, In M. Anderson & P.H Collins (eds), Race, Class, and Gender: An anthology. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Publishing.