The White Possessive: Identity matters in becoming Native, Black and Aboriginal

Professor David Theo Goldberg reminds us to comprehend race as the paradox of modernity whereby prolific racial identities come into existence through exclusions that engender, justify, operationalise and encourage them. In the past two decades we have witnessed the emergence of new racial identities whereby white people are self-identifying as non-white. This article argues that Goldberg’s work on ‘conceptual primitives’ within racialized and gendered discourse provides an important way to understand how these epistemic drivers enable the appropriation of Indigenous and Black identities. One of the conceptual primitives – ‘identity’ – manifests in the exercise of white race privilege, entitlement and possessiveness with discursive regularity as will be demonstrated through examining three cases of identity appropriation: Joseph Boyden in Canada, Rachel Dolezal in the USA, and Elizabeth Durack in Australia.