She who stumbles

A message forwarded over e-mail lists:

26th January 2008

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT

TO ALL AUSTRALIANS

On this 26th Day of January 2008, in commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the proclamation of SURVIVAL day, it is hereby announced that the month of JULY 1-31st is now proclaimed BLACK history month in Australia.

From this day forth and for all years to come, JULY will remain a month of significance and symbolism for the unity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations, in celebration of Australia’s rich, vibrant Indigenous histories and cultures.

JULY will provide an opportunity for ALL AUSTRALIANS to recognise the true Australian identity, giving Schools, Government, Multicultural Australia and most significantly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities the opportunity to respectfully promote greater awareness of the diversity, innovation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander splendour.

Australia’s BLACK history month, will join the worldwide celebration of Black History Month, giving a greater international profile to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, alongside Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

The Australian community is hereby advised to BLACK out JULY in their diaries annually as a month of pride and celebration of all tribal groups and people throughout Australia and the Torres Strait.

1st JULY ­ 31st JULY AUSTRALIA’S BLACK HISTORY MONTH

WE HAVE SURVIVED

Tomorrow is the big APEC protest in town. Yes, I will be there.

I wish I had some insightful analysis of the effects of APEC in the Asia-Pacific region, but I’ve been too busy with my thesis to really educate myself beyond “provides a forum for Australian and North American imperialism in the Pacific, services the USA’s global nuclear agenda, and legitimises heads of oppressive states like Arroyo, Bush and Yudhoyono.” Those reasons are good enough for me to go and protest, as are the massive disruptions to public life and violations of civil liberties (such as police being instructed to fire on protesters in certain circumstances) that have accompanied this summit for the sake of ’security’ (I thought police were meant to keep citizens safe, not foreign dignitaries mass murderers).

But in the past few days I’ve had a few experiences I felt like sharing.

The first was on Sunday. I went to see a play with my family. The play is about Gandhi, performed by a theatrical company from Delhi, and touring around the world as part of the 60th anniversary of Indian independence.

Australia saw fit to celebrate this occasion with a series of exhortations about trade links between India and Australia (what, like uranium?), something that sits awkwardly alongside the critique of imperialist trading systems that Gandhi himself made (and which figured prominently in the play).

I got a lot out of the play, including some really good ideas about non-violence (violence involves the manipulation of fear, and using it in liberation struggles reproduces domination), but it seems like I was the only one who was interested in Gandhi’s politics.
My family spent the entire trip to and from the theatre bitching about APEC — how it’s shutting down the city, how Bush is unwelcome, how we’re all forced to change our lives around, how the fence around the CBD is making the place into a fortress — but then when I told them I’d be protesting against it, they all tried to convince me it was a terrible idea, that I’d get hurt, that it wouldn’t achieve anything, that I was wasting my time. Now, I personally know people on the exclusion list, I know people whose phones have been tapped and who have been harassed by police in the lead-up to this summit. I’m scared, but not so scared that I’ll cower and let these things happen. Knowing our history of struggle, the fight that an earlier generation of activists undertook to liberate India from British imperialism, that they went to prison for, that helped my resolve. At no other time have I felt more like I was living in an outpost of an empire, and that it was my duty to resist.

I’m not sure how other people saw this, given my parents’ characteristically apolitical response to APEC right after seeing the play. There’s a tendency to romanticise Gandhi and the independence movement, to take the focus away from its politics and dramatise the heroism of its leaders. It makes it seem like liberatory politics are the provenance of extraordinary people, rather than being accessible to everyone who needs them.
Certainly, given that I never grew up with the imagery of the independence movement in the public, popular culture I was consuming, I never had its politics distanced from me by the processes of constructing popular heroes. I always looked to the Indian independence movement as a political force that I could identify with as an Indian, where I felt the whiteness of social movements in Australia excluded me.

Which, I guess, brings me to my next anecdote.

I went along to a discussion on ‘white privilege’ as part of a pre-APEC convergence of social movement activists. When only two other people turned up besides me (one of them being a good friend of mine who I urged to come along), I ended up volunteering to host the workshop.
Both of the other people were white, and weren’t anti-racist activists. They were looking at how to deal with whiteness and race in their own movement, which is a desire people have often come to me with since I started putting the word out that my thesis is on whiteness and I want to work on anti-racism.

After talking a whole lot about my thesis, I asked what they were interested in. They were looking to overcome white guilt.

This issue annoys me, which is a mask for what it really does, which is frustrating and confusing me. I really don’t have time to listen to white people talk about how guilty they feel, or to hold their hand and make them feel better about themselves. I think that allowing white guilt, and white peoples’ need to find absolution for that guilt, to obfuscate anti-racist agendas is very destructive for anti-racist work (e.g. I’ve heard it suggested very seriously, by an older white feminist, that we should abandon the word “racism” because it makes white people who have “good intentions” feel bad). So I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want it to waste my time, and I guess I’ve been lumping the baby in with the bathwater in terms of crafting a pragmatic response to it. So in the discussion I made the mistake of treating it like an issue for individuals to sort out by re-orienting themselves towards the movement; I psychologised it.

While I still don’t have time to hold anyone’s hand or make them feel better about their whiteness and privilege, I do think that white privilege is something that needs to be dealt with in social movements.
I’ve had a couple of casual discussions about this with people. White privilege isn’t something we can either will away, nor do away with simply by reconfiguring how social movements operate. But the kinds of hierarchies that come into being when people get organised can do a lot of damage to the intentional goals of the social movement… like the whiteness and male-domination of the anti-war movement that I’ve talked about before.

After the workshop I thought about this, and immediately wanted to call both of the other people to tell them what I figured out. I don’t think the key issue is either (1) getting white people to refocus away from themselves on an individual level — because white privilege isn’t necessarily the unconscious positioning within personal attitudes — or (2) in “giving up their power.” The voluntarism implied in both those statements has a very static model of power at its basis, something which isn’t true for social movements at all. In fact, social movements are an arena in which power is negotiated and consciously circulated more than anywhere else. That’s because, in social movements, the kinds of resource-control underpinning power have a lot more to do with space, speech, and decision-making than in other parts of society. That makes accountability a key relation.
And making sure that white accountability to people of colour doesn’t follow the format implied by the statement “giving up power” means that people of colour need to be in control of the agenda in the first place. Political space, and the sharing of it, isn’t for white people to “give”, it’s for poc to take and make into an arena for the construction of power relations along certain lines. “Giving” implies maintenance of the relations of host and guest — while guests are honoured, they don’t have mastery and never will.

When I was asked to do something representatively anti-racist for a women student’s conference, I responded by requesting an autonomous space for women of colour, organised autonomously by women of colour, and not answerable to the network that set up the conference. Then we negotiated the terms of their accommodation of us. It worked well, because we never gave any ground to white women, even in organising, and they never asked for it, assuming autonomy.
While I think autonomous organising has its limits, it can be very good for getting poc to speak about issues which get occluded in white company and which white people will deliberately obfuscate on in order to reassert control of the agenda. And that creates a powerful space in which to forge new agendas, outside the limitations that white silence.

So while I was thinking about this in terms of white peoples “needs” — a need to confront the realities of racism in such a way as to be maximally receptive to the lesson — this came across as making it about ‘reversing’ the lines of control. But the thing is, one of the privileges of whiteness is that its effects are never accounted for, and it can frame discourse in such a way as to assert the primacy of its needs without explicitly stating that white is more important than anything else. By framing the issue in terms of accountability, in terms of a relation, it does away with the necessity for pretending like ‘being a good ally’ is an individualistic, all-or-nothing proposition.
The truth is, a lot of poc have something to learn in terms of being good allies too: straight men have something to learn about being good allies to queer and trans poc; non-Indigenous poc have a lot to learn about being allies to Indigenous people; middle-class poc have class issues to contend with in organising with working-class people…

Because while this is “identity politics,” the issues really are structural and historical, and you can’t completely resolve them through identity or tinkering with individual subjectivity. The “anti-racist white,” as a fixed identity with fixed politics, might be an impossibility (according to George Lipsitz), but there are political resources to turn to where white people want to engage in anti-racism. And, especially, those potential resources are there for poc to engage in social movements without feeling like there’s nothing that can be done about white privilege or overwhelmed by whiteness.

This all might sound incredibly naive, because I’m very new to theorising about social movements. I really do have a lot to learn in that respect. But it’s kind of the place I’ve arrived at after writing my thesis, and it is helping me work out ideas for one of the two essays I have yet to finish.

So, goodnight!

I want to scream. I want to cry.

The Indigenous Land Council has announced that it will set up a system of boarding houses to give Indigenous children an education… This article is so disgustingly racist that I need to make fun of it to make sense of the fact that the things it’s reporting on are deathly serious.

“Think of the children!” has been uttered before in Australian history. It produced the Stolen Generation.

Prime Minister John Howard has just announced a series of extremely repressive measures for Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, including taking control of Indigenous townships through a system of leases and increased police intervention into Aboriginal communities.

Did I mention that there have already been proposals for nuclear waste dumps on Indigenous lands in the Northern Territory despite the PM’s assurances there never would be?

And oh gods, I need a rest so I’ll just offer you these two terms for consideration:
“divide-and-rule”
“comprador”
Seriously, they explain a lot more than you’d imagine.

This coming Friday, June 1, 9 men who were arrested in November 2005 will stand trial in Sydney. They are amongst 18 people arrested around the country on November 8, 2005 in a campaign by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the federal government. Days before these arrests were made (and the homes of the accused men’s families raided), the federal government rushed through the first part of the unpopular anti-terror legislation on the grounds that new “threats” had been detected.

Omar Merhi has spoken out about the surveillance, threats, and intimidation he and his family have faced since his brother was arrested. And others have investigated and reported on the discriminatory and abusive prison conditions faced by the arrestees, as well as the lack of transparency and legal murkiness of the situation.

What’s more, earlier this month two Tamil men were arrested and charged with providing material support for terrorism, due to fundraising efforts for Sri Lankan agencies (including relief effort for the 2004 tsunami). The federal government has charged the men with supporting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), although the organisation isn’t listed as a proscribed organisation by the government.
While the Sri Lankan government is playing up its connection to the Australian government, the Attorney-General denies any involvement with the Sri Lankan government in this particular case.

I call bullshit.

TAKE ACTION TO SUPPORT THE ‘GOULBURN NINE’
JUNE 1,
MACQUARIE STREET COURTS, SYDNEY

EDIT: The picket of the Goulburn Nine is actually on Thursday May 31st (i.e. tomorrow).

from the Guardian Unlimited:

Australia and the United States have signed an agreement to exchange a few hundred refugees held at island detention camps in an effort by both governments to discourage future asylum seekers, Australian officials said Wednesday.

from The Age, Melbourne:

Refugee advocates have expressed outrage at a plan to swap asylum seekers intercepted en route to Australia with those detained while trying to enter the United States, describing the scheme as a “dark and murky” political fix.

Under the new refugee exchange scheme announced by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, asylum seekers detained on Nauru would be taken to the US and Cuban refugees held at Guantanamo Bay would be resettled in Australia.

While commentators and politicians debate over whether this will “deter” or “attract” more refugees (as if refugees are rats in mazes), the bigger picture — of how this is about the Australian nation-state — is being lost. As many indigenous Australians have pointed out, debates within white Australia about who’s “allowed” into the country actually have the effect of undermining indigenous sovereignty. They’re about consolidating the rule of an elite by skewing the terms of engagement over these issues into ones of paternalistic responsibility, or realpolitik.

The actual political costs and benefits to be wrung from these peoples’ lives aren’t being measured by the numerous editorials and opinions floating around. It’s not just about the upcoming election; it’s about white Australia’s entitlement to steal peoples’ sovereignty, both within the Australian territory and in the Pacific. It’s about the nation-state constituting itself as a deputy sheriff in the Pacific, getting power by tacking itself onto the USA. It’s about state power making itself more important than people.

Since my visit to India this February I’ve been thinking hard about my Hindu faith and how it sits with my commitment to social justice.

I think perhaps the only thing I’m sure of regarding the status of Hinduism is that it’s very, very contested. Reading about it only serves to confuse me, because every discourse is underpinned by a political position, all of which reflect positions in a material reality. Given the complexity of the subcontinent, the length of its history, the size of its population and the very density of practices, values, discourses within it, I’m reluctant to approach them. After visiting India, and comparing my point of view from there to mine here, I know that distance distorts these issues. Reading isn’t a substitute for participating in a society.

But of course, as a Hindu Brahmin woman from Bangalore, with a strong intention to return there to work in “aid and development” (a set of terms which, to me, is a respectable way of talking about fighting imperialism and capitalism) I need to understand what all that history, practice and social complexity means.

Until now, most of my knowledge about Hinduism has been religious — explicitly religious and not historicised or taken in its political and social context. This is the identitarian logic of how Hindu groups seem to operate in Australia. Knowing how heavily Hindu revivalism has influenced the practice and discourse around religion, this blindness now strikes me as gratuitous. How can we talk about morality without politics?

At the same time, I feel like a hypocrite for being so invested in Hindu spirituality while at the same time feeling defensive about being a Hindu where Hinduism is a minority religion.

I can’t win, but I don’t have to.

It’s in this spirit that I read these articles about contemporary Hinduism:
Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left? by Ruth Vanita
Hinduism Versus Hindutva: The Inevitability of a Confrontation and A Billion Gandhis, by Ashis Nandy.

While these make me feel better about being Hindu as well as left-wing, I’m not so sure they’re helping me understand the responsibilities of my social position. I know that overcoming privileged guilt (and turning it into practical self-knowledge and conscious action) is an important part of being a good ally, though. I wish I knew what would become of these confused sentiments.

More later, with added Fanon!

from ABC News Australia:

A new report has found Australia lags badly behind other wealthy nations in addressing the health and wellbeing of its Aboriginal population.

The report was commissioned by Oxfam and the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation and examined a range of key health indicators.

It found Australia was ranked at the bottom of a league table of wealthy nations such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

Oxfam executive director Andrew Hewett labelled the situation a “scandal”.

“If you’re an Indigenous Australian you’re going to die 20 years younger than most other Australians,” he said.

“That compares to similar countries where the gap is only about seven years.

Mr Hewett says governments should stop ignoring the issue.

“What’s lacking in Australia is the political will from governments of all parties at all levels and that’s what we need, we need to set a national target to close the gap between between health outcomes for Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians,” he said.

Here’s the full report from Oxfam.

from BBC World News:

Dozens of young women from a religious school in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, have broken into an alleged brothel and kidnapped the owner.

The women, from the nearby Jamia Hafsa madrassa, burst in late on Tuesday, demanding the premises be shut down.

The women say they have a right to end immoral activity under Islamic law.

There are so many things going on in this piece that I’m not sure where to start.

What strikes me is:

1. That women are at the centre of it, not men.
2. The implications it might have for white Western feminists, in reinforcing or repudiating Orientalist sensibilities towards women of colour (especially Muslim women).
3. What the Western “sex positive” and “anti-porn” feminist camps will make of it, as it falls outside the traditional (i.e. Western) scope of either movement.
4. That it’s been beaten up by Western media who talk about “Talibanisation” as if it meant “more terrorists” and therefore “Pakistan is next on the list, after Iran”.

I’m a bit too scatterbrained to formulate coherent thoughts about Western feminism, patriarchy and imperialism right now, but I do think there’s a lot to be said about it. Point #4 is the most obviously objectionable, I think, while the complex interconnections between gender, religion, and empire leave it all a bit more ambiguous.

I think it’s really important to remember that what we think of as political might have completely different dimensions in other societies. Our own priorities may not be integral for justice or change elsewhere.

So my first couple of posts have received a bit of positive attention, which is nice and flattering, but also pretty scary.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have a feeling that other bloggers will see this as a quaint issue — theoretically rich, intellectually stimulating, but practically irrelevant. I don’t blame them, but I’m going to write about it anyway.

For the past 6 months or so, I’ve been reading a lot of critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. The field is quite varied, politically rich, and I haven’t gotten bored yet, so I must be onto something good.
One of the pre-eminent theorists in the field is Paul Gilroy. He’s a British academic who’s written about race and immigration in Britain. I’m reading a lot about racist violence at the moment, so his work is exceptionally relevant.

But he has this annoying habit of putting the term race into inverted commas whenever he uses it. He doesn’t do this often for racial and never for racist, but he uses it more prevalently for race.

For quite a while I wasn’t sure why it bothered me. Gilroy seeks to disrupt the biologically essentialist assumptions that accrue around the term, and I’d be an idiot to disagree with his agenda in doing that. I have no attachment to an essentialist notion of race.
But in drawing attention to the word itself, Gilroy is treating it like biological essentialism is inherent in the term. It forecloses the possibility of any other definition of race.

In the first place, I think that the role of the biomedical sciences in constructing racial definitions has been overemphasised. European colonisation was a set of social relations, not just an ideological project. There was material impetus for colonial expansion, colonial violence, and colonial racism as much as it was all a projection of the white European ideological frame onto the rest of the world. Critiques of the (ir)rationality of racial classification systems treat these systems as if they were purely ideological, as if there was no material impetus for the social structures and changes wrought by colonialism.
Dalton Conley, in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness puts it like this:

Early modern conceptions of the white race–in fact of all races–stemmed from confrontation with and domination of peoples outside the European sphere.
(p. 25; emphasis mine)

In other words, the nature of social relations produced the definitions that people used to understand, classify, and regulate their social life. I believe it was an eighteenth-century philosopher by the name of Karl Marx who first said it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.

… But my bitterness about the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences, and the glib dismissive treatment that Marxism gets, is a rant for another time.So Gilroy’s criteria for technical sociological terms is a little different than that of Marx. Theoretical disagreement, let’s move on.

… Or not. Gilroy says in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack that:

‘race’ is nothing special, a virtual reality given meaning only by the fact that racism endures

I think this view erases the structural reality of race and racism. Britain’s present racial minorities didn’t give up their ties to the colonial machinery when they migrated — their migration was part of the postcolonial process, and their presence in Britain today is part of the structural re-alignment of Britain in its de-colonisation process. Their social position in Britain now is shaped by a political logic underwritten by history. You don’t just dismantle that by removing the visors of virtual reality!

Gilroy’s logic is tempting, because it alludes to a solution to the problem of racism. But the problem of racism is just the violent tip of the iceberg — the iceberg being the problem of global injustice.

Gilroy could be forgiven, because this book was published in 1987, while a lot of race theory was still being realised. But since the 1960s and 70s, when anti-discrimination measures were first instituted in wealthy white welfare states, attitudes and institutional logics have changed. There has been a backlash against the recognition of inequality, and the institution of measures to address it, a backlash commonly known as colourblindness.

Within the work of W.E.B. Du Bois there’s a strong sense that, although his society was vehemently racist, white liberals were at least committed to improving black Americans’ lot in life. Paternalistic and ultimately self-serving though it may have been, abolitionists and their political descendants were at least addressing the problems of race rather than sweeping them under the carpet.

Nowadays overt racism isn’t so mainstream. There are legislative measures in place to prevent the exclusion of racially marginal people. But these measures address the attitudinal elements of that exclusion, not its structural elements. As such, social relations being what they are, and determining consciousness, people get the impression that attitude is all there is to racism.

Common-sense notions of race and racism limit it to an attitude of biological inequality, but it’s an ideologically confused definition. Notions of race have always been a cipher for certain kinds of social relations, but they haven’t been the determinants of those relations. Gilroy’s limiting of what race can mean to the definitions received from pseudoscience limits his own ability to unravel those social relations.
It limits the ability of anti-racists to organise around racial issues, because it leaves the power to define race in the hands of people whose social position is supported by racism. It’s an evacuation of responsibility to re-shape categories of understanding so that their underpinnings are exposed and their liberatory potential is activated.

Even if you wanted to fix the definition of race in biological terms, where would you start that made sense? Biological racialism wasn’t uniform over time. At first, race was seen as a product of climate rather than biology. Then, as Darwinian Natural Selection overcame the Lamarckian theory of heredity, race was biologised. After that, the biology kept being revised as theories were raised and disproved time and again. And now geneticists have disproven that there is human racial differentiation on a genetic level (which is neither here nor there, apparently, because colonialism still exists, and evolutionary biologists still study population differentiation).

Tracing the development of these definitions, or making a big show of rejecting them wholesale, doesn’t help us deal with the idelogical codes used to refer to race in the present, either. In the wake of racial biology being discredited (at least as a source of state policy), there has been a proliferation of other terms used to refer to the social relations that bring about race. “Middle Eastern Appearance”, “culture”, and “ethnicity” are some popular ones.

At the same time as mentions of race are becoming hyper-politicised to the point of taboo, these more sociologically acceptable terms are becoming de-politicised. They’re becoming naturalised, in an ideological regime of spatio-cultural essentialism, which fixes social problems in a presentist locus of difference. Thus, there can be such things as “Australian values” and “Middle Eastern appearance” which can pass as having no racist connotations because they refer to nation and custom, rather than biology. Yet in all this there’s a denial of history, or the durability of the colonial relations that enable the people in power to make up these ridiculous notions in the first place.

Perhaps, to Gilroy, this is a good thing, because it’s a step in the direction of a common sociological understanding of social relations. I don’t know, cos I haven’t read his recent work. But his sentiments about what desirable race relations are like have been echoed by Ghassan Hage (probably Australia’s pre-eminent theorist in the field). Namely,

a liberating sense of the banality of inter-mixture and the subversive ordinariness of this country’s convivial cultures in which ‘race’ is stripped of meaning and racism just an after-effect of long gone imperial history
-There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack

To me, this is worrisome. It’s worrisome when someone tries to tell others what an anti-racist future ought to look like, and presents the alternative as empty, navel-gazing multiculturalism which reinforces post-biological essentialisms.

This is where I balk, because the problem of identity has been raised. Is identity about social position, or is it about the soul? How are we to manage the fact that it’s about both?
Attention, in this case, is a zero-sum game. I can give attention to my social being at the expense of the more spiritual aspects of identity; or I can focus on spirituality and ignore its social underpinnings. Certainly, these are the alternatives that Gilroy paints.

But I’m gonna reject both of them. ‘Banal’ intermixture won’t replace the revolutionary work of activism, and it won’t invigorate souls. At least, this has never been my experience.
Creating a hierarchy of oppressions with class at the top has never benefited me in my attempts to decolonise myself, or to understand justice. All it’s done is pave the way for white people to tell me that my issues don’t matter, or they’ll get solved along the way to the resolution of their own efforts. Denying the durability of white supremacy just allows white people to re-centralise whiteness and avoid dealing with the consequences of the racist social systems that benefit them.

And all of that is why I’m turned off Gilroy’s work, why his later books sat on my shelf for months and I didn’t read them. On the first page of After Empire I saw the inverted commas, and I balked. I couldn’t read much after that, and it’s taken me a while to unpack the reasons. But they are there.

I’ve found less banal, but more spiritually invigorating, modes of engaging through studying critical race theory and hearing from the activists who’ve crafted it. I’m trying to get an anti-racist group started on campus, and I’m scared. White socialist vampires are everywhere. But this is my consciousness talking back to the society that made it. I don’t know if that’ll be an exercise in spiritual triumph, or just plain old demoralisation again. But I can’t help but feel that doing anti-racist work is something important. That it’s my way of intervening in the unjust processes of the world, the world that made me, and changing them. Certainly, thataddresses identity, without being identitarian.

Maybe I’ll finish this thought later. It’s late, and I should sleep.