Yarning About Yarning: A Potential Strategy to Deconstruct Whiteness

This chapter presents a yarn about yarning and Whiteness. It shows how yarning can be a practical strategy for deconstructing White knowledge and power in the social work academy, in the context of Australia. The purposeful use of a decolonizing yarn can assist to counteract the pervasiveness of Whiteness and to disrupt the status quo. The first part of the chapter describes the yarning methodology and how it has been used so far. The second part of the chapter provides an example of applying this methodology in practice. Building upon Carole’s previous reflections on Whiteness and Amy and Carole’s previous yarns about Stolen Homes in Australia, this chapter uses a yarning methodology to present a themed conversation between Amy and Carole. In this chapter, the authors reflect on whether White people can yarn and unpack the idea of a hybrid and decolonizing yarn, making visible colonialism, Whiteness, and racism. By deconstructing colonial discourses embedded in White institutions, a yarning methodology challenges dominant Western practices, by talking in ways that prioritize relationships through Aboriginal ways of being, knowing, and doing. From our positions of colonizer (non-Aboriginal) and colonized (Aboriginal), this yarn focuses on the benefits of yarning as a methodology and the use of yarning to render visible the interplay between Whiteness and racism.