This intercultural and post-ethnic everyday suggests that policy can avoid setting the culture versus modernity trap by dissolving the equation of cultural adaptation with loss, and that dissolution may cultivate attitudes and behaviours more receptive to education. This is the import of Aboriginal educator Chris Sarra’s slogans, ‘young and black and deadly’ and ‘strong and smart’ (2003). For these slogans to amount to real change though, policy must be appropriate to the post-ethnic lived reality of cultural intersection and identity multiplicity, and must account for the agency of the objects of policy.