Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism

Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2002. Originally printed in 2000. ISBN 0-7022-3134-7; xxv + 234 pages, notes, bibliography, index. A$22.00.

In her introduction to Talkin' Up to the White Woman, Aileen Moreton-Robinson explains that her book is "an extension of my communal responsibilities" because she is "representing an Indigenous stand-point within Australian feminism" (xvi). This refusal to abide by the academic fiction of an uninvolved researcher gives notice that a refreshing honesty based in a straightforward telling of the Indigenous view of white Australian women is about to unfold.

And what an unfolding it is! Moreton-Robinson explores how white, middle-class women enjoy a racist privilege based in colonization and dispossession of the Indigenous nations of Australia; how notions of the white race continue to legitimate theft of Aboriginal lands, and, subsequently, the existence of the state known as Australia; and how whiteness and nationality are central to white feminists and their theory and practice of white feminism.

Whiteness, as construct and reality, is institutionalized-as it is in the United States and other imperialist countries-through capitalism and its necessary scaffoldings: educational, bureaucratic, governmental, and cultural. In all manner of interactions, whiteness as ideology and practice is shown to confer "privilege and dominance in power relations between white feminists and Indigenous women" (xxi). As an example,...