Sarah Maddison, Associate Professor in the Indigenous Policy and Dialogue Research Unit at the University of NSW, guest blogs for us about the story behind her new book Beyond White Guilt, the 'collective guilt' stopping engagement in debate about Aboriginal issues and the hate she expects some people will have for her book.

At the launch event for Beyond White Guilt the journalist Jeff McMullen described the book as “putting the nation on the couch for a very thorough psychiatric examination”, and in a sense I guess he is right.

What I most wanted to do when I began researching and thinking about this book was try and understand why so many non-Indigenous Australians finds ourselves so ‘stuck’ in our relationship with Indigenous Australia. These issues had been on my mind on and off over the 20 years since I had been a youth worker in inner city Sydney. During that period I worked mostly with Aboriginal young people and was genuinely confronted by my own ignorance about our shared history and the impacts this history still had on these young lives. My response to my new knowledge was a paralysing guilt, which took quite some time to work my way through.

But it was when I was researching and writing my earlier book, Black Politics, that I really began to think about guilt at the collective level. When I told people what I was working on, non-Indigenous Australians repeatedly told me how “brave” I was to enter such fraught and difficult terrain. Brave? Because I might be criticised? Isn’t the point of political writing to stimulate debate?

But for so many non-Indigenous Australians there seems to be something large in the way of being able to engage in debate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or their relationships with the rest of us. Instead of engagement what I often see is anger, frequently there is blame, and very often there is the kind of paralysis that I experienced. Why, I still wondered, are people who otherwise have a great deal of goodwill in this area so stuck in such unhelpful responses?

My diagnosis was “collective guilt.” With a background in political research this project took me into new territory, reading social psychology for the first time (although carefully avoiding the articles with statistics in them!) to try and develop this diagnosis further. I had to learn a new language of ingroups and outgroups, high identifiers, and adaptive versus technical work.

The result is a book not quite like anything I have written before. It is both deeply personal and quite theoretical. It reflects on the worst of our history but tries to keep and eye on a more hopeful future. Still, I think a lot of people will hate this book. They will feel angry and want to immediately deny that they share in the collective guilt that I diagnose. But I hope they read the book anyway. And then I hope they take the time to reflect on why they hate it. Acknowledging guilt is uncomfortable, but if we continue to deny it exists we will not get beyond it and experience real change.

Beyond White Guilt is out now in paperback and ebook. You can read a sample below.

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