She who stumbles

Just as I was lamenting the irrelevance of my blog to my mostly-American audience…

Immigration minister Kevin Andrews denied Snoop Dogg a travel visa to enter the country to perform at the MTV Awards ceremony. While I’m no fan of the guy and I’ve sheltered myself so successfuly from the vicissitudes of pop culture that I couldn’t even name a song of his, I still think this has to do with race.

In a situation where we have the American military coming into Australia for training exercises in less than a month’s time, and Bush himself coming to town later this year (while the whole goddamn city is being shut down for him, BTW), I think some “drug and gun offences” look pretty fucking trivial.

It’s this whole drive to individualise moral culpability and evade the issue of power that’s really outrageous about this. While a high-profile black American rapper whose audience is mostly white, whose wealth is built upon a skewed portrayal of black men, which again benefits wealthy white Americans (and was indeed constructed to do so) is made out to be personally degenerate for embodying elements of a culture that has both been socially engineered and lambasted, the whole fucking country is getting ready to hold an orgy in celebration of war and capitalism.

I know who I’d rather bar from the country and it’s not the rapper.

EDIT: Now the PM is comparing his behaviour to Holocaust denial and making comments about his “background”.

from the Sydney Morning Herald

WHEN David Williams’s uncle returned from the Korean War - exhausted and recovering from a gunshot wound - the family took him to Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane. The door was closed in their faces.”They basically said, ‘Just another black coon’,” Mr Williams said. “They didn’t want to know us. The fact that he fought for his country - nearly died for his country - didn’t mean anything to them.

“They left him to look after himself and he ended up hitting the booze and just slowly deteriorating.”

This was not an isolated experience. About 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fought in World War I and as many as 5000 took part in World War II, according to Australian War Memorial records.

But while they fought alongside other Australians in the trenches, on the battlefields of Europe and in the jungles of Asia, those who made it back often received little or no recognition of their efforts and continued to face racism at home.

Next Wednesday, despite criticism from the RSL, their unique experiences and contribution will be recognised when hundreds of indigenous veterans and their descendants march through Redfern in Sydney’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anzac Day parade.

The RSL is an extremely conservative organisation. They’ve taken many anti-queer stances in the past. It’s hardly surprising that they’re opposing this effort to recognise indigenous soldiers (and subtly undo the image of white masculinity that’s celebrated as quintessentially “Australian” on ANZAC Day). Because of course, so long as white Australians get recognised, everyone else is unimportant!