Negotiating Australian academia as a historically white settler colonial institution: A comparison between Muslim and non-Muslim students

Abstract

In Australia, there is a dearth of research applying the theoretical lens of critical race theory to explore Muslim university students’ experiences in higher degree education institutions. The prevailing approach has been to focus on institutional barriers and policies. This article deviates from such studies by framing the analysis in terms of a comparison between Muslim and non-Muslim white students in higher degree education institutions in New South Wales (NSW) Australia in order to operationalize whiteness in Australia's settler colonial society as a central category of analysis. The article seeks to explore how Muslim and non-Muslim students experience and respond to the university as a white institution, considering how Muslim students engage in both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies in response to the university as a white institution, and how white, non-Muslim students experience the normativity, invisibility and hegemony of whiteness in the university.

Introduction

In Australia, there is a dearth of research on Muslim university students’ experiences in higher degree education institutions. The prevailing approach has been to focus on inclusion, diversity, accommodation of religious and cultural practices (Novera, 2004; Possamai and Brackenreg, 2009; Possamai et al., 2014; Possamai et al., 2016). While such studies are important in critiquing institutional barriers and policies, they often ignore the interplay between educational inequities and racial power structures. Focusing on diversity policies or prejudice reproduces race, because it avoids addressing the specific context of Australia as a white settler state which systemically inscribes whiteness in the academy. This article primarily draws on the theoretical lens of critical race theory (CRT) to compare Muslim and non-Muslim students’ experiences in universities in New South Wales (NSW) Australia in order to operationalize whiteness as a central category of analysis and comparatively understand how students experience the normativity, invisibility and hegemony of whiteness in the university. My understanding of race and whiteness in the context of Australia is framed by the work of First Nations (Goenpul) scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who argues that in Australia whiteness functions as a political position; as ‘identity, institutional practices and discursive power which function as symbols of national belonging and nationhood’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004, p. ix).

I use whiteness and race to think through Muslim students’ experiences as I locate my analysis among arguments that contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia are contingent on the world–historical (Abdel-Fattah, 2021; Grosfuguel, 2012). As a settler colonial project of the British empire, Australia was constituted through the dispossession, genocide and domination of sovereign Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The epistemological, ideological and Christian organizing frames for this colonizing mission were rooted in European ideologies of race. I proceed on the basis that this organizing history of Australia has developed interactive and relational (Goldberg, 2006) concepts of race that have informed and structured formations of Islamophobia in Australia.

Several of the Muslim students’ experiences would resonate equally with non-Muslim non-white minorities navigating the whiteness of Australia's academy. So why focus on Muslims? CRT posits that minority groups are racialized in different ways by dominant societies in different political and economic contexts. This is productive for thinking about how Muslims experience and perceive themselves to be ranked, categorized and measured against the normativity and dominance of whiteness in ways that may overlap with other minority students but are still inflected with nuances particular to Muslims’ religious identities, practices and histories.

I have previously explored how whiteness and Islamophobia, in the specific context of Australia, is animated by a white secular heuristic, and emotional and epistemic postures which characterize religious observance, particularly Muslim religiosity, as retrogressive and illiberal, and the secular West as rational, scientific and progressive (Abdel-Fattah, 2018). A secular ethos and epistemology in the university problematizes Islamic practices in ways that depend, in each context, on the type of secularism that animates public life (Gholami, 2021, p. 331). To be Muslim in Australia is to be encountered from a Western secular formation heavily imbricated with ‘Protestant epistemologies’ (Celermajer, 2007; Fernando, 2010, p. 26; Mahmood, 2006, p. 340) which only accept ‘the privatised individual religious subject’. In the stories that follow, we will see how this secular ethos affects Muslim students.

Methodology

My fieldwork consisted of semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 20 participants in total as part of a larger comparative project exploring Muslim and non-Muslim high school and university students’ experiences of their educational spaces. I relied on a ‘purposive sampling approach’ to source university students in universities in the Sydney metropolitan area, approaching academics in various degrees who then shared my recruitment flyer with their students, as well as posting recruitment flyers throughout university campuses. Ultimately, snowball sampling and opportunistic techniques were far more effective in expanding my sample. I was not focused on recruiting from one degree only, which explains the diversity in degrees among the students interviewed. I adopt Black Feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) standpoint methodology as a tool for thinking about how my sample of Muslim participants, who came from different ethnic and class backgrounds, embodied a shared location as racialized Muslims therefore providing a collective perspective. Likewise, I proceed on the basis that the white students I interviewed, belonging to the white majority population, offer a collective insight into that dominant racial group.

A time for settler colonialism

Around six months after the massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, by 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, Zeinab, ¹ a Lebanese-Australian Muslim media studies student at Macquarie University attended an academic event there presented by a white male PhD student. The PhD student's paper sought to ‘decode’ Tarrant's digital manifesto. Zeinab, veiled, was the only ‘visible’ Muslim in the room. In her interview with me, Zeinab recalls how the speaker started:

There was no acknowledgment of country. He goes, ‘This is going to be a bit harrowing isn't it? I’ll be discussing the Christchurch shooting, what we can call Australia and New Zealand's greatest massacre.’

Zeinab was shocked: ‘He's talking about New Zealand and an Australian gunman, both settler colonies with histories of massacres!’ During question time Zeinab ‘politely raised my concern with his opening statement, that it disregarded the very macro structures of settler colonialism that the Christchurch shooting is grounded upon’.

The speaker was immediately defensive, Zeinab told me:

He said he ‘didn't mean to disregard’ but didn't have ‘time’, and that it's something ‘of course I do in my journal articles’. There was a bit of back and forth. It was only when a professor backed me that the speaker said ‘I agree with both of you.’ I felt like I was not accepted in my own right.

Heeding the call that we interrogate white discomfort not through individuals but through ‘wider structures’ that trigger ‘emotional resistance’ (Zembylas, 2018, p. 86) it is important to note that this exchange occurred at Macquarie University, a university named after Lachlan Macquarie, governor of NSW from 1810 to 1821, known for his brutal war against Indigenous people, particularly the Appin massacre of 1816. Yet the speaker, on the topic of a massacre committed in the name of white supremacy delivered on the grounds of a university named after Macquarie, did not have ‘time’ to centre settler colonialism, leaving it for his ‘journal articles’. Excising settler colonialism from a paper about a white supremacist terrorist attack committed by a white Australian male against Muslims in a neighbouring settler state is an example of how the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty operate to perpetually disavow and disappear Indigenous peoples (Moreton-Robinson, 2004; 2015). For the presenter, settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty are white discursive possessions, to be edited in or out of a paper. Race is consigned to specific spaces and audiences – a seminar paper, a journal article – to brought up here and not there; there and not here.

In her book On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life, Sara Ahmed (2014, p. 38) speaks about ‘acts of naming’, how building names ‘can keep a certain history alive: in the surroundings you are surrounded by who was there before. A history of whiteness can be a history of befores.’ For Zeinab, her university's ‘history of befores’ could not be ignored. To attend a seminar on white terrorism at this particularly named institution was to be affected by a history that was very much ‘alive’ to her.

Zeinab told me: ‘I’m at a university named after a man who supported lynching Aboriginal people. I shouldn't be surprised.’ This is instructive. Zeinab does not say I was not surprised. To not be surprised leaves open the possibility that there will be times one is surprised. There is a space for other possibilities. Zeinab instead said I shouldn't be surprised. This is more than semantics. Shouldn't suggests Zeinab understands she has no expectation of a true reckoning with race when the very structure of a space is built as a eulogy to settler colonialism, built on denial and erasure. Institutional histories, symbolism and the very structures on which conversations about race unfold matter. Bronwyn Carlson, Head of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, argues, Australian society ‘struggles to have an understanding of a truthful narrative of beginnings’ (Carlson, 2020). For students like Zeinab, the name Macquarie represents this truthful narrative of beginnings. ‘Shouldn't be surprised’ reveals Zeinab's low expectations that to speak about race at Macquarie University is an option that is foreclosed. How can one disrupt racial violence in an institution which proudly honours its ‘history of befores’?

Emma, an Anglo media studies student at Macquarie University, had never heard about Lachlan Macquarie. This is not to mount what would be an absurd case – that Muslim students know their settler colonial history and non-Muslims students don't. What matters is why settler colonialism follows some students and not others. In the wake of Christchurch and Zeinab's horror over what happened, Zeinab came to realize that ‘understanding Islamophobia in New Zealand by an Aussie perp became about understanding how settler colonialism and white supremacy connects with Islamophobia’. She started to pay attention. Emma, on the other hand, somewhat self-consciously admitted that she had never had to think about race in her life. When we spoke about race being a part of her studies – in her media undergraduate degree and now her Master’s in research – Emma said: ‘Not too much. I’d say if that's something you’re interested in it’d be more on you to look into it.’ I asked Emma to elaborate on how race was explored in her subjects: ‘The uni experience doesn't discourage it but … if you don't push and are happy to not go there, I think it's not a problem … it's up to you whether you want to push.’

Emma started to talk through her subjects, pausing as she reached for memories:

When we covered race. I can never remember it being a huge topic covered … oh, wait, there was an Indigenous movie … I’m trying to remember, I think it was an elective … a cinema studies unit. Again, I’m not sure … I think it was one of the weeks and then we moved on.

Another Anglo student, Roslyn, studying journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), said: ‘we did gender, law and ethics but we didn't really do culture and race. Or not that I remember. It's a pretty crowded space’.

By Emma's account, race is a place, ‘there’, which you can go to or not. Race is something you can push or not push. Race is not ‘too much of an issue’, not a ‘huge topic’, ‘elective’, something ‘moved on’ from. For Roslyn, curriculum was ‘crowded’; race becomes a question of competition over space. Emma's experience of race suggests it was something that could always be brought into or out of focus. Emma lamented not being ‘taught at high school and then uni, how to understand who we are’. She said:

I can't even contribute to discussions on race when I’ve never learned how to talk … it can be hard not to take it personally … white privilege … it's hard to navigate with people to explain it's not you …

Tom, a law student at the University of Western Sydney, felt that it was ‘difficult’ to talk about race ‘as a white guy’. He had ‘no issues’ at uni, but he was ‘unsure how to speak up in class about topics on racism’. He seemed slightly resentful: ‘There's this assumption I must be racist or I’m at this uni studying law because I’m a white guy not because I worked hard or anything.’ Tom therefore ‘found it hard to talk in class …often I won't say anything if the topic of racism comes up’.

My interviews with Emma and Tom made me think about how young white people struggle to talk about race and white privilege without defensively feeling that these conversations foreclose their own identities. Critical reflection on race and white privilege can be experienced as a threat to one's emerging sense of self and place in the world; a denial of one's ‘good intentions’ and ‘hard work’. This has been variously described as a manifestation of ‘emotionality or fragility’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; DiAngelo, 2011) or ‘white discomfort’ Zembylas (2018). The problem, as shown by Emma and Tom, is that white people: ‘often hear this as a naming of themselves as individuals, rather than as beneficiaries of a system that they could contribute to dismantling for everyone’ (Lentin 2020, p. 90).

White education systems, which ‘push race as a serious subject to the margins of scholarship’ (Lentin, 2020, p. 11), impact on racialized students and white students. Young people need education systems that teach racial literacy, emphasizing ‘the relationship between race and power’ (Guinier, 2004, pp. 114–115). What they receive instead is what race philosopher C. Wright Mills (2007) called an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ or ‘White ignorance’, the production and reproduction of ignorance with respect to the contemporary and historical realities of racism. In education systems structured around ‘white ignorance’, white students, like Emma and Tom, are not introduced to their racial identities, let alone their potential role in refusing, resisting and disrupting white structures. Indeed, the struggle they articulate arises precisely because they have never been taught to understand whiteness in a racialized social system, given that whiteness has always floated above ‘diversity’ and ‘multicultural groups’, constructed as a taken-for-granted, normalized universal. Curriculum content reinforces and reproduces this assumption by privileging white epistemologies, histories and optics. Students need the intellectual tools to understand whiteness not as skin colour or biology, but as a ‘set of power relations’ (Mills, 1997, p. 127), a political identity, a location of structural advantage and privilege.

Navigating race

What happens when race is something elective – something to push or not push, go to or not go to, engage with or move on from – for some people, but inescapable for others? I want to think these questions through by attending to how racialized Muslim bodies experience the university as a space that is raced and therefore needs to be navigated, and how white bodies never need to encounter the university as a racialized space in need of navigation. The university represents a metonym for a white national home that privileges and reifies white epistemologies, histories, bodies and symbols. Rather than analyse the university space as one made up of a group of dominant (white students) and dominated students (non-white and, in this case, Muslim students), I am interested in examining the power relations inherent in the ‘academy as an apparatus of the colonial project … committed to the task of dispossession via knowledge production’ (Mukandi and Bond, 2019, p. 262).

CRT promotes the voices and storytelling of and by people of colour as a tool to ‘name their reality’. What do students’ testimonies reveal about their reality? About the cumulative impact of the curriculum universalizing white epistemologies? CRT argues that racism is not an individual pathology but a cultural system which is played out in our institutions. In the stories that follow, we can see how a white cultural system which plays out in the academy endows white students with a sense of familiarity and expectation, while burdening non-white Muslim students with a sense of exclusion, deviation and struggle.

At our interview, Zeinab took out her laptop. It was decorated with political decal: ‘Report Fascist Activity’, a picture of Edward Said, ‘Seeking Asylum is a Human Right’. Zeinab smiled. ‘I was talking to my friend and we’re like, why do we love doing this? I’m in hijab, already, like, branded by other people as oppressed bla bla, and now I’m branding myself more!’ The stickers were political gestures, small-scale, informal acts of protest and activism in Zeinab's everyday life. Zeinab was simultaneously proud and self-deprecating about the impact of her political expression: ‘Why am I wearing a shirt that says, don't ask me where I come from? then when someone reacts badly to it, I’m going to get the shits? Why do I do this to myself?’ Zeinab laughed. ‘I feel like a part of it is we romanticize this situation where someone is going to confront us in class, and we’re going to have this moment of justice where we tell off the bad guy in class … but realistically what just happened with the stickers was people just shrugged or were disinterested.’

There was more to the political decal than performativity or provocation. Zeinab's laptop was a conduit, standing in for the times she was unable to express herself in class. ‘I’m just constantly up in arms in these classes’, she said, ‘and where I can't say my views, I’ll literally just display them on my belongings.’ The stickers became an act of defiance, a way for Zeinab to claim a voice at university.

Layla, a Pakistani-Australian Muslim scholarship student at Sydney University (one of NSW's ‘sandstone’ universities), started her arts degree, ‘already feeling left out in a predominantly white, middle-class cohort of students’. Layla first majored in philosophy. She started ‘on edge, ready to attack.… I was quite underdeveloped in politics, but I just already knew going to USyd, the white man was the enemy.’ Layla laughed. ‘But I was quiet! I never said a single word…. I didn't want to call attention because it's already hard enough being the only brown person in the room.’ Layla lamented the fact that the class was mainly: ‘European classical, classic liberal, stuff like that. It's a Western canon completely.’ Describing the kind of ‘unlevelled playing fields’ (Bailey, 2014, p. 62) that mark epistemic oppression, Layla found that ‘the way the content was framed was alienating. I went in already feeling behind.’

I asked Layla how she experienced the simple act of reading through course content. Her account reveals how she has learned to audit whiteness, encounter her curriculum from a position that she must instinctively search to find herself: ‘I go in thinking, okay where are the people of colour, how many white men, white women are in there? It's like this checklist.’ I asked her if it had always been like this for her and she thought for a moment. ‘Nah, not at first. It's something I’ve just learned to do now after four years at uni, well expect to do, it's just automatic now, kind of hard to explain …’

Luke, an Anglo-Australian arts student also majoring in philosophy at Sydney University, said the philosophy course:

was definitely white-centric but it's not something I even absorbed, like, this is a white-centric curriculum. I mean, philosophy, it's a very ivory tower type of pursuit. I know that there's … been a push for more marginalized voices. I think it does a lot better on gender than it does on race … they’ll have the occasional course on Eastern Philosophy or possibly even Indian Philosophy, but the course reading list will very rarely feature any kind of deviation.

The whiteness of Luke's philosophy curriculum is invisible to Luke. As Ahmed argues: ‘Whiteness is only invisible to those who inhabit it’ (2004b, p. 1). I was interested in how somebody like Luke, who acknowledged to me his white privilege and who was also a student in the same course as Layla (although in a different year), nonetheless experienced the invisibility of a white-centred curriculum. Luke explained:

Realistically, coming from my background, white private school kid, I would not have had any internal motivation or thought to questioning things in that particular way. I mean, frankly, prior to probably my first year of uni or whatever, I would’ve just thought that it was … those were the texts … chosen on merit, these philosophy people know what they’re doing. It wasn't until it was kind of brought to my attention that I noticed.

I was keen to interrogate what Luke meant by ‘brought to my attention’. He explained that it was friends ‘people of color who would just point [it] out in conversation’ and ‘social media’. Luke's ‘general involvement in left-wing politics’ also exposed him to ‘questions of representation and diversity’, and he came across a Facebook group called ‘Why is my curriculum so white?’ He also recalled: ‘a tutor in first year who might have been involved with that. And so I think I liked the Facebook page and that opened my eyes.’ It is the intellectual and emotional labour of people of colour compensating for the failings of curriculum and making whiteness visible that has taught Luke to notice, question, pay attention.

Roslyn, the UTS journalism student, narrated that: ‘there's a girl in some of my classes, she's Muslim, I always remember her saying she has to educate her lecturers about race and religion. So she always found there's a gap there in their knowledge and experience.’ Muslim youth often feel a responsibility as ‘everyday explainers’ (Harris and Hussein, 2018), taking on the role of educators on history, culture, faith and politics. Sam, an Afghan-Australian Muslim politics and international relations student at the University of Notre Dame, started his degree ‘knowing that I’d be with a bunch of students who were mainly from the northern suburbs and who’d pin me down as the Muslim guy from Western Sydney. I went in knowing I’d be a walking ambassador for Muslims.’ Sam was constantly confronted with ‘the racialisation of Islam, conflated with terrorism and Arab men shouting insults at the West. I found myself having to remind people of the role of Muslims in Australia.’

Sam found it ‘utterly exhausting, being this ambassador for all Muslims. I became that and it just got too much … I’m constantly defending … you can't move forwards when you keep getting pushed back.’ Sam spoke about classes where:

the tutor asks a class a question, but their eyes go to me. Anything about terrorism, criminality. The stuff we’d look at would paint Muslim men as perverted towards women and I’m there a Muslim guy. I’d have to defend myself, defend Islam.

Senem, a Turkish-Australian Muslim security studies student, recounted to me the time she ‘confronted’ and sought to ‘educate’ her lecturer, a specialist in law and Buddhism. The topic was whether certain religious practices should be legislated against. Nobody in class responded and so the lecturer, trying to stimulate discussion, gave an example:

He goes, ‘Some Muslims practise jihad, which is the violent aspect of the religion. This is something terrorist groups do, most Muslims follow this, look at ISIS, they believe in jihad. It's a part of their religion.’ I was furious!’

Senem decided to speak up: ‘I said, If you call ISIS Muslims, then Christians are the KKK.’ Senem was still clearly incensed by this incident, sitting up tall in her seat, her face flushed as she recounted it to me. ‘He rejected my analogy,’ she continued.

He told me, ‘you’re wrong’. Nobody else said anything. It was me on my own. There was a hijabi in the class and she didn't say anything. She never speaks. I know why though. I overheard one time a girl next to her say to her it's so embarrassing how the teacher looks at you when he talks about Muslims and she agreed.

Senem sighed. It was relentless.

One time we were talking about the Sri Lankan war with the Tamil Tigers and Buddhists justifying it as a just war. One of the girls in my group was surprised and goes I never thought Buddhists would be violent, maybe if you said Muslims I’d understand. These discussions get so exhausting. If it's not terrorism it's Muslim women and the whole oppression stuff and I’m there in my hijab defending, explaining. I call my friend to vent every week.

It is essential that we think about these encounters not as individual case studies, but as symptoms of a social and political culture that has educated and trained bodies and minds to approach Muslims and Islam through certain frames (the Muslim man as oppressive and volatile, the Muslim student as part of a homogeneous monolith, Islam as violent and so on) which translate into these kinds of encounters and pronouncements. In the academy, Muslim students do not exist beyond language, beyond the political and ideological mediations that have historically framed representations of Muslims in a wider meta-narrative that ‘constructs a binary framework that juxtaposes the West's “liberated” women with Islam's “oppressed” women’ (Zine, 2002, p. 12 12), or the “civilized” “secular” West versus violent Islam. Muslim students often enter their teachers’ and peers’ white gaze not as individuals in their own right, but as ‘a universal, ahistorical, and undifferentiated category who become essentialized through the uniqueness of their difference’ (Zine, 2002, p. 12).

Layla recalls her very first class in her first philosophy subject, ‘Reality, Ethics and Beauty’:

They pose the greatest question of all time is God real? I was fresh-faced, just came out of a very disadvantaged school in Western Sydney, the only visibly Muslim person in this lecture hall. In maybe five hundred people, I was the only hijabi, every time. When that question was asked in the first lecture, it was just all heads turned to me.

Later on, in the same lecture, the lecturer turned to the question of culture and ethics. An image of a fully veiled Muslim woman ‘head to toe, eyes only showing’ was shown, alongside the image of a woman in a bikini. ‘We were looking at the ethics behind covering the body just because the culture does so, it doesn't make it right. Sort of that question. Everyone turns to look at me. This is all in the first lecture!’ In the ensuing discussion some students spoke about the veil as oppressive and backward. Feeling ‘alone’, Layla remained silent.

Layla changed her major because she felt excluded from a course that centred whiteness and so clearly posited white bodies as the subjects for whom and by whom the institution is shaped. But Layla also felt that her veiled body was instrumentalized, made a part of the subject, a problem to be solved, a question to be answered in the way it was framed for the lecture hall filled with students all of whose ‘heads turned to me’. Sayyid (2014, p. 21) argues that reading and interpreting racism is based on ‘intuitive, holistic mastery of context’. Reading racism, ‘like reading any behavior, is a doggedly interpretive activity that has to be learned’ (Sayyid, 2014, p. 20). Layla possessed a historically situated understanding of the enduring resonance of the veiled woman defined by her ‘victim status’ (Mohanty, 1988, p. 339). Layla therefore immediately projected herself into the image of the veiled figure on the lecture theatre screen and was simultaneously projected by her peers (through their staring at her) as standing in for the PowerPoint image.

For some Muslim students, race mattered so much so that it impacted on their university and course selection. Shahinda, a Lebanese-Australian Muslim law student, was offered a place at the University of Sydney but declined the offer ‘despite it being more prestigious’ because ‘I was more comfortable going to a uni out west because the likelihood of me copping it would be less.’ Shahinda instead accepted an offer at the University of Western Sydney in the multicultural, working-class outer western suburbs of Sydney where she also lived. Rhonda Itaoui's research on ‘geographies of Islamophobia’ in Sydney attests to the way public space shrinks for young Muslims as they create ‘mental maps of Islamophobia across Sydney’ (2016). Itaoui draws on the concept of a ‘pedagogy of unbelonging’ developed by sociologists Greg Noble and Scott Poynting (2010), referring to the way in which racism can transform the spatial imaginaries of Australians from migrant backgrounds by ‘teaching’ them to feel less comfortable in certain neighbourhoods and the wider national space simultaneously. An anticipation of racism therefore creates ‘inventories of the spaces of fear’ among racialized minorities. Shahinda is primed to expect to ‘cop it’ outside of Western Sydney.

These accounts are a sample of many more narrated to me which speak to how Islamophobia and race have shaped a certain affective register for Muslim students, a ‘direction, stance or orientation’ or ‘a way of apprehending the world’ (Ahmed, 2004a, p. 7) through the lens of defence, exclusion and anticipation of racism. For these students, race is upfront and centre, a coordinate in their mental maps of Islamophobia; certainly not something they can manoeuvre around or opt in or out of. The students expect to be encountered as a problem, as representatives of a monolith, as people requiring explanation, as outsiders. The students were clearly cognizant of the fact that they were encountered as standing in for a collective – of local, national and global Muslim community.

Speaking/self-censoring

The pressure to self-censor, to manage one's political and religious expression in classroom contexts was a common theme among many of the Muslim students I spoke to. Anticipating how one's tone, words, emotional register would be interpreted through racial and Islamophobic tropes bore down on Muslim students’ self-presentation and contribution to classroom discussions. Emma, Roslyn, Alex and Luke all narrated to me that they had never felt censored. Any hesitation about expressing themselves was a question of ‘feeling unsure’ or ‘like out of your depth on a topic’, as Alex put it. Emma felt constrained only sometimes by her gender. Alex and Luke were conscious of their position of privilege as ‘white guys’ and, as Luke put it, ‘didn't face any issues talking up’. Luke was open that he had: ‘certainly not faced any structural barriers and I’ve always been pretty, I think because of debating and stuff, happy to share my opinion with people. So I’ve never felt pressured to keep my opinion to myself.’ Tom said he only felt: ‘I can't speak freely’ when the topic of racism comes up in class. While Tom reluctantly ‘understood it's obviously important to learn about social issues’, he felt ‘there's too much focus on race’. I asked Tom to elaborate:

Like breaking down society into all these groups. It's divisive to always focus on all the differences. Like there's always a question in essays about Indigenous people, it feels like they’re forcing it on us at any chance they can get.

Tom felt:

like people will attack you if you say anything that criticizes … like I’m no way a Trump supporter, but you can't even talk about why Americans have genuine issues like immigration or Muslim terrorists without being shut down as racist.

Tom classically positions himself here as the embattled, silenced white majority: ‘can't talk, can't speak, shut down, forcing it on us’. Importantly, he is quick here and earlier to wield the rhetorical device of presenting himself as not racist. In this way, his freedom of speech argument is, as Alana Lentin has noted, dominantly packaged in the terms of ‘not racism’ (2018, 2020), and raising the issue of race is implied to be unhelpful (‘can't even talk’), mobilizing ‘the idea of censorship’ (2018, p. 409). Race, split from whiteness (which for Tom is universal and therefore invisible) and attached to ‘Indigenous people’, ‘groups’, ‘difference’, and is hyper-visible – ‘too much focus’, ‘always focus’, ‘any chance they can get’. Tom's ‘not racism’, as Lentin names it, is weaponized to diminish efforts to render whiteness and race visible. Ironically for Tom, who sees such efforts as going too far, Muslim students feel such efforts do not go far enough.

Following the murder of NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng by a 15-year-old Afghan-Australian Muslim boy in October 2015, Sam felt ‘hypersensitive’ in the ensuing climate of fear about ‘homegrown terrorists’ and youth ‘radicalization’. Interviewing young Muslims in the UK, sociologists Gabe Mythen, Sandra Walklate and Fatima Khan write about how in the war on terror young Muslim people experience a risk reversal. The routine surveillance, suspicion and questioning of young Muslims in public life means that ‘the relatively safe are being contrarily represented as risky’ (2009, p. 743). Sam, because of both his Muslim and Afghan background, felt that he ‘got a lot of eyes. Surveillance is changing. I felt like eyes were on me. Even if they’re not, politicians are saying they are so that's what counts. The feeling of it.’ As with Foucault's metaphor of the Panopticon, Sam understands that there is no practical difference between the fact of surveillance and the feeling of surveillance: this is what it means to ‘live in the everyday of surveillance’ (Maira, 2016). The point is that politicians were speaking about a change in surveillance (with increased CVE [Countering Violent Extremisim] funding, widening police powers, intensification of surveillance regimes across schools, mosques and communities), which bore down on Sam's capacity to continue speaking as usual. What Muslims observe going on around them, in terms of police or security agencies focusing on Muslims, can be experienced directly and vicariously, forming a perception of a ‘community under siege’, shaping responses accordingly (Cherney and Murphy, 2015). Sam was calculating what he thought ‘everybody was thinking. Did they see me as dangerous? Sympathetic?’ When I asked Luke and Tom whether they felt nervous about being associated with, say, Brentan Tarrant or any other white male perpetrator, they immediately said no. ‘It wouldn't even cross my mind that people would link me like that’, said Luke.

For Muslims, self-managing one's speech after reports of a terrorist attack becomes about what people are saying, what people are thinking and what people might be thinking – what UK academics describe in their research of young Muslims being educated under the UK's Prevent regime as ‘checking’ and ‘hushing’ practices used to demonstrate one's ‘safeness’ (Mythen et al., 2009). To speak as a Muslim student in this environment is to navigate an obstacle course of other people's assumptions, prejudices and generalizations. Every Muslim university student I interviewed had engaged in some kind of personal risk calculation in response to a terrorist attack involving a Muslim. They understood that they were hailed into a collective by the mere fact of sharing the same religious identification as an accused terrorist.

In the first couple of years in his social and political science subjects Imran, a Palestinian-Australian Muslim student at the University of Technology, recalled, ‘There's a lot of talk about Muslim identity, it constantly comes up.’ Imran was ‘really afraid to talk because they’ll either see me as this brainwashed person or angry person’. Imran was conscious of managing his peers’ impressions of him:

I knew that for some people I might be their first encounter with a Muslim. I didn't want, like, angry or political to be their first perception. I wanted to be calm, reasonable, rational like them. I was very aware of what I would say, how I would say it.

The Orientalist trope of the angry, humourless, irrational Muslim/Arab (because in the public imagination they are synonymous) is pervasive. Imran understands that he must manage what and how he speaks, taking care to present as not angry, not political, not brainwashed. That he also anticipates that other students might encounter him as their ‘first’ Muslim reveals how Imran bears the weight of ambassadorship and the burden of representation. In his third year now, Imran said: ‘that's definitely changed. I’ve stopped caring. My need to speak and to speak out supersedes my fear of being badly perceived. No matter what I say people will still have this perception.’ Things have not changed: it is Imran who has changed his expectations, accepting that he cannot change the perception and so lives with it now.

One of the most frustrating things for Senem was having to manage her emotions in class.

I always feel like I have emotion and others don't care. Then it hits me at the end of the class oh shit I’m embarrassed. You’re the only one so passionate about it. It's annoying because I think why don't they care? Like when it came to the Middle East and brown and black lives, collateral damage in Syria, drones, Yemen and stuff, why don't they don't get passionate? I’m sitting there and saying this is so wrong etc. Some even defend it, usually army background so it's expected, but others just don't care.

This kind of response by some of Senem's peers reveals the power relations inherent in emotional regimes. To not care, not be affected, is a question of privilege rather than emotional intelligence. A mark of what counts as ‘publicly grievable lives’, on the one hand, and ‘unmarkable’ lives, on the other (Butler, 2009, p. 394).

It wasn't shyness that stopped Shahinda from ‘piping up’ in class in her first year. It was because she ‘didn't want to come across as too confrontational, defensive, intense. That's the perception of Muslims, brown people.’ Shahinda also revealed another layer in her decision to ‘stay quiet’.

One time, in a Social Work class, a white student goes, ‘I don't want to work with anybody Indigenous or Middle Eastern, just the North Shore.’ That floored me!

One of Shahinda's best friends, an Anglo, immediately challenged the student. Shahinda had mixed feelings about the incident. On the one hand:

if a white person stands up to a white person she’ll respect it more. On the other hand, my friend was too quick to the chase. Sometimes there are white people who are ashamed of their own people so she rallied quickly. Kind of a white saviour way. It was great but there were so many people of colour in the room who could have also expressed what she said and challenged that woman with their own lived experiences. But then again, it was an awkward, intense environment so the people of colour in class held back, because also you don't want to be accused of a pile on.

We can see here how much is going on at once. How many emotions are being managed, how many scenarios are hailed into a moment. Like a Venn diagram of emotions, what remains at the shared centre for all the Muslim participants was how much they were aware that they were up against a racialized package of racial codes, scripts and tropes about Islam and Muslims. These students have internalized an expectation that they need to project an image of themselves as not-angry/rational/calm to repudiate common stereotypes. The trope of the angry Muslim/person of colour wields material force, subtly shaping the students’ behaviour and speech acts.

Emma, Roslyn and Luke spoke briefly about the stereotypes they faced. Luke had faced being labelled as a ‘private school boy’. Emma and Roslyn spoke about gender stereotypes. But none of the white students I interviewed had experienced being ascribed with an array of visceral, violent, redoubtable, hegemonic racial scripts. Because whiteness is privileged with ontological complexity, presented in its individuality and not as an archetype, their encounters with class or gender stereotypes were never scaled up to ‘grand’ racializing narratives. The Muslim students by contrast were readily interpellated into meta-narratives about Islam and Muslimness.

Shahinda spoke to me about the moment in a moot trial held in class when a Muslim student gave her ‘a reverse experience of feeling Muslim’. I asked Shahinda what she meant by ‘reverse’. In a climate where Shahinda was accustomed to Muslims minimizing their Muslimness, Sharif presented the complete opposite: I’ve never met someone so visibly Muslim!’ Shahinda grinned:

He was South-East Asian Australian, wearing the full garb to a moot court case! He gets up and he starts with bismillah! And then he translates it, and then he goes ‘May it please the court my name is Sharif, I’m senior constable for the state of …’, whatever, he made up a name, and then he launches and throws in Islamic stuff into his argument.

Shahinda was both amused and impressed. ‘It was the first time I’ve been in a class where I had a visually and audibly what-the-fuck moment. He was almost like a character. He wasn't over performing his Muslimness cynically or deliberately.’ Shahinda recalls how other students responded:

They were completely floored. Some were looking into thin air, avoiding his gaze, others couldn't give a rat's arse. I was on Facebook and some of the other students were commenting, as the class was happening, ‘What just happened?’ One guy looked at me, rolled his eyes. Two other hijabi students in class giggled with me. It kind of all looked like a joke. The teacher didn't flinch. She pretended it was completely normal. She liked his opinions and would often go back to what he said in class. It was kind of an endearing, strange, awkward experience for me. It confused me.

I pressed Shahinda: what did she find confusing? Shahinda paused. ‘Sharif was basically like I’m going to just do me. I’m going to ignore whiteness and just be me …’

This is sensational stuff. Sharif shows how whiteness and epistemic racism can be destabilized in subtle yet powerful ways. In the power of not ceding power to whiteness by simply being oneself: ‘I’m going to just do me.’ One of CRT's central tenets is that racism is permanent; a pervasive, systemic condition that structures institutions and the relationships within them. Whiteness is endemic in Australian academic institutions because of how these institutions are structured on white epistemologies which presume whiteness as ‘the invisible human universal’, ‘secur[ing] hegemony through discourse by normalising itself as the cultural space of the West’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004, p. 78). Sharif had challenged this cultural space. The very act of challenging it had been received as comical, odd, out of place, and had ‘floored’ and ‘confused’ Shahinda. In assuming the right to draw on Islamic epistemology in the ‘secular’ university space, in not preambling his reference with a disclaimer or explanation, Sharif was powerfully rejecting whiteness as his reference point.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to centre race and epistemic oppression in order to examine the lived experiences of students studying in the university as a historically white settler colonial institution. In Space invaders, Nirmal Puwar argues that non-white bodies come to inhabit, or ‘invade’, institutional spaces, and that non-white bodies can feel ‘out of place’ in spaces which privilege white bodies as somatic norms. If the academy has historically positioned white bodies as naturally entitled to academic space, then exploring how such bodies experience such entitlement achieves two things. First, it exposes whiteness as ideology, structure and resource by rendering visible what is assumed to be invisible, universal, unnoticed because ‘it remains hidden beneath a veneer of normality’ (Gilborn, 2015, p. 278). If Muslim students feel visible, and in some cases hyper-visible, we must ask whose gaze is privileged.

Second, the juxtaposition of Muslim and white non-Muslim in the context of a climate of Islamophobia attends to how race is the organizing grammar of students’ curricular experiences. My focus has been how both Muslim and non-Muslim students experience and respond to curriculum content reinforcing and reproducing the university as a white institution structured around epistemic racism. The stories presented demonstrate that navigating the white academy shapes a certain affective register for Muslim students, who have learned to encounter their classrooms, curriculum and university space from a position of hyper-visibility, epistemic marginalization and disappointment, whereas white students are affectively primed to not notice white hegemony. From both the Muslim and non-Muslim students’ perspectives considered within this article, it is clear that when race is an ‘add-on’ to the curriculum, corralled into a week or two, the white ‘master script’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 18) of curriculum remains unaffected. For the Muslim students I interviewed, it is not enough to ‘add native, stir and proceed as normal’, as British sociologist Gurminder Bhambra (2007, p. 149), citing the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, reminds us. What is needed, what these students crave, is no less than an ‘insurgent intellectual practice’ (hooks, 1994, p. 11) – a radical and genuine decolonizing pedagogy; an emancipatory project that this article has argued has the potential to transform and challenge the world views, critical thinking and lives of both Muslim and non-Muslim white students.