Decolonising while white: confronting race in a South African classroom

In this paper, I explore whether and how white people can make a meaningful contribution to decolonising university curricula. Drawing on my experiences as a white academic teaching at a South African university, I argue that identity matters when talking about decoloniality and that whites need to think carefully about the effects of their whiteness on their attempts to contribute to decolonial scholarship. I also suggest that white contributions to attempts to decolonise university curricula involve a kind of ambivalence that needs to be recognised and worked with, rather than denied and obscured. Without such recognition, white participation in decolonial struggles may ultimately do more to alleviate the guilt of white academics than it does to dismantle the hierarchies that decolonial struggles ostensibly oppose.