She who stumbles

I made my blog private for a short while because I have a paper to write, and the blog world is just too distracting for me to avoid. The paper remains unwritten, but I decided to make SWS public again because today has been an eventful day and I feel the need to say something about it.

1. Today hundreds of Melbourne taxi drivers blocked off streets in the centre of the Melbourne CBD

I walked into work today to see the TV covered in images of shirtless, shouting brown men in the middle of Melbourne and wondered what was going on.

Notice how I highlighted race first? Apparently it never occurred to the news media, who framed it as an issue about safety, about cabbies wanting safety screens. According to the mainstream media, this is not about the fact that Jalvinder Singh, an international student from India, was stabbed while doing one of the few jobs available to international students and that mounted police were called in. If it’s about anything else, it’s about the mental health of his attacker.

Which brings me to my final point: are student organisations going to take this up? I have a feeling they won’t, despite being in one, and despite the fact that May Day is tomorrow.

2. There has been a massive bust at the Block in Redfern hot on the heels of the unveiling of a new plan to upgrade the train station and build new high-density apartments in the area

I don’t have time now to go into the entire history of Redfern, the 2004 uprising, or the State government’s triple-pronged attack in the form of: ghettoisation, gentrification, and police brutality (perhaps adding co-optation of the local Aboriginal Housing Corporation into the mix). Suffice it to say, this is convenient timing for a drug raid, when anyone who walks through the station knows that police can see everything that’s going on from the top of their tower down the road.

This is not something the newspapers will tell you, though they’ll happily print the two stories side-by-side.

3. The Rudd government plans to remove unequal laws regarding de-facto relationships, so same-sex couples can enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples

I have to confess to being somewhat blind to the legal aspect of this, and to the implications for queer politics (who’s advocating for what model of rights for same-sex unions, who’s likely to feel how), but I have to say it looks pretty ambitious. De-facto relationships have many of the privileges of marriages… which is why I’m wondering what the Opposition’s response will be (not that it’s terribly relevant, given that the ALP has a majority in both houses of parliament).

4. [Something I should've blogged about before, but:] A refugee family from Sierra Leone is being kept apart because of the prohibitive costs of DNA testing, which the Department of Immigration demands before they can go ahead and reunite the family

Regarding the families of people of colour, I was thinking about something Brownfemipower was talking around with regard to feminism, women of colour, and families. It seems like Bfp’s focus on this issue was informed by critical engagement with racial issues as a parent and a feminist (notice that I say was). As a young, unmarried, childless woman, that stands out to me. It’s something I think needs to be engaged with more, at least in the feminism I’m exposed to and practice with my peers.

I want to explore this more: violence against families of colour and other social bonds between people of colour, not because I think those bonds are inherently virtuous (hell, they can be oppressive and downright abusive at times), but because of how white supremacy constitutes itself through enacting these forms of violence. How are white families constituted when they’re not subjected to the same kind of institutional violence? At the risk of ending up with a heavily functionalist analysis, what is white supremacy doing, when it’s attacking familial structures this way?

Secondly, as it pertains to women of colour, as women, what are these politics — of fertility, of sexuality, of bodies — producing in the consciousness of women of colour?

It might seem like I’m asking these questions because nobody is answering them, but I know that isn’t the case. I think I’m highlighting my own ignorance more than anything. Or perhaps the way that important voices are silenced, so we go over the same problems again and again.

I’m being brief and rather more simple and direct than I normally am, because I don’t have much time. I did want to mention these things, though.

So I was all excited about being able to find new blogs/posts through the new WordPress feature that adds related posts to the end of each post.

Then I found out that it was linking my blog with a blog by a white guy who claims to be a “racial realist” and writes a bunch of racist shit. Given that The Angry Black Woman has just gotten over a white supremacist attack, I’m pretty wary of any link between SWS and anything white supremacist.

So I left a comment on the announcement post, and came back to my dashboard to find a troll comment. Note the obviously fake email address and banal sexism.

CaptainReality
fake@ibm.com | 121.45.94.116

Feminists are irrelevant losers. Their ideas die with them, because they’re invariably childless. They’re all so miserable and dour.

Anyhow, I’m off to make sure my daughter has dollies to hug and toy prams to push around so that she doesn’t become a miserable spinster like most of you lot.

So women of colour are, yet again, forced away from using a powerful networking tool because of actual or potential attacks. Hm.

Anyway, I’d suggest that most of you disable the feature. You can do so by going to the Design tab in your dashboard, clicking on Extras, and then checking the box that lets you disable the possibly related posts feature. I’ve also posted about it in the announcement thread (currently waiting for my comment to come out of moderation) and in the forums (if any shit starts there, I will start throwing knives), so maybe WP will change the feature altogether.

I’m going to make a comment policy too now, cos I now feel I need to specify that if you’re arsehole enough to use a fake email address your words must not be worth much in the way of dialogue, so you’ll be treated as a troll and blacklisted. And because this blog seems to be getting heaps more traffic lately, just off the whole feminist blogsplosion.

Edited to add: The comments policy is here. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. It’s also very late for me and I want to go to bed.
You might also notice a new Creative Commons License on my sidebar over there. Don’t be a jerk in comments and don’t steal my shit. That is basically it.

Edit #2: I’ve disabled the ‘Possibly related posts’ feature, but it doesn’t seem to be working. My blog is still showing up on the links at other sites.

A number of things in the news have been upsetting me this week for their sexist, oppressive nature and the potential consequences for women generally, and women of colour in particular. I’m going to write about the ones which got the least attention from the blogosphere first.

1. A rape charge against rugby player Anthony Laffranchi has been dropped because there was “no direct evidence of lack of consent”

Needless to say, this is fucking appalling. A woman who was so drunk that police “estimated her blood alcohol content at the time she arrived at the apartment at between 0.145 and 0.168 - a level at which most social drinkers would be “in a stupor and may be unconscious”" can not be said to be in a fit state to give “consent” to sex*, and if she says so after the fact then she should be believed. I’d say that her choice to go ahead with charging and prosecuting the assaulter speaks to a sense of believing this, but of course her voice is completely silenced in all the reporting about the case.

The disturbing thing about the magistrate’s decision is that it takes the capacity to withhold or withdraw consent completely out of the hands of the woman. Unless there’s “evidence” that she did not consent, it’s assumed that she did, or at least the outcome is the same as if she did. And because she got drunk, her testimony is positioned as inherently unreliable, so that the actual act that’s being punished is getting drunk, rather than rape. Hear that women? “If you’re gonna get raped, don’t get drunk first. Rape is your own fault, and you invite it if you get drunk. Don’t expect anyone to care if you’re drunk and raped. P.S. Men: you can rape all the drunk women you like!”

I’m also really sick of female judges and magistrates who punish other women who are raped. Again, proof that professional feminism/liberal feminism does not work.

I’d also say that it’s a clear case of why a “Yes Means Yes” approach to consent doesn’t work either. When the power to give consent, to withhold consent, and to withdraw consent once it’s given, is out of the hands of women, then exploring the hows and whys of women’s choices to consent to sex is inherently limited. Instead, perhaps what should be explored is how to convince the law (especially white female judges) that “no means no,” since it seems to have a really hard time with that concept. Or even how to dismantle rape culture altogether, since this entire disempowering framing of consent seems to be a key element of it.

* This is not to say that all women who get drunk and have sex are actually raped. I want to challenge the notion that women who combine alcohol and sexual activity shouldn’t be believed when they say they’ve been raped. Because the notion of an unreliable drunken woman is such blatantly slut-shaming one that it endangers the capacity of women to enjoy sex, of the drunken variety or otherwise.

2. Noellee Mowatt, a 19-year-old immigrant woman from Jamaica, was jailed in Canada because she refused to testify against her partner, who allegedly abused her

Credit for this story goes to Aaminah Hernández, Professor Black Woman and Ilyka Damen.

Earlier this month it was revealed that Noellee Mowatt was jailed under a law generally reserved for gang members who don’t testify against collaborators because she refused to testify against her boyfriend, who she alleged was abusing her. “Mowatt told the court she made the abuse statement after Toronto police Det.-Const. Mandy Morris threatened to “lock her up” for public mischief if she didn’t corroborate the 911 call.”

She says:

“I only made a mistake by calling the cops,”

“This is what I get. … I’m never calling the police again – even if I’m dying, I’m not going to call them.”

She has since testified that she made up all reports of abuse, and that the bruises and abrasions she had were self-inflicted. She said that she made up the allegations to punish her boyfriend, who kicked her out of their apartment after an argument.

Mowatt seems to have no source of support in Canada other than her boyfriend. Her mother and 2-year-old daughter are in Jamaica, and her father, who she moved to Canada to live with, died last year. She was living in shelters and a boarding house in the months before she was arrested.

And it turns out that Christopher Harbin, her boyfriend, was already in breach of the conditions of his probation for a previous domestic violence charge.

Now, the Toronto Children’s Aid Society is planning to take custody of her child because of “her inability to be able to offer proper care to the child when the child is born, and one of the factors is the domestic violence situation surrounding her circumstances”. Yet neither Ms. Mowatt nor her lawyer heard anything about this.

I’m completely shocked and appalled by the way the entire policing and legal system have handled this case, and the dehumanising media reporting about it. Each self-righteous attempt to “help” seems to have been designed to coerce Noellee Mowatt into behaving in an appropriately “victimised” way. Which is to say: having no will of her own, no sense of her own prospects for survival and presenting no challenge to the restrictive attempts to aid her. There’s also a complete lack of any reporting on her circumstances since emigrating from Jamaica, or how her race and nationality shaped her choices about work, family, or her safety and that of her child. She may have made up the testimony, and she may be clumsy, but the erasure of her agency seems to be the worst aspect of the entire scenario.

3. The implicit racism of singling out and homogenising the voices of people of colour in a protest situation

BlackAmazon has talked about this repeatedly:

TO mention your name once and magically turn you into women of color while expressing sympathy for people who flat out made you cry. To turn one SINGULAR you into this monolithic beast as if the people who agreed with you couldn’t possibly be diverse interested in their own realities but some side that is being ‘counterproductive” and not ACTUALLY wounded?

The phenomenon whereby the blackness of a person who is vocal and vehement in their protest at something is singled out as “colouring” that action as racial, and is used a sort of code to delegitimise the concerns raised by the protest action, is something I’ve noticed in the past with regard to social movements.

For instance, in an action taken in October last year to oppose the nexus of mining interests and dispossession of Aboriginal people by the Northern Territory intervention, the protest was branded as “violent” (because an old white man was scratched by a placard) and one of the few Aboriginal people who was there was depicted as “the most vocal of the protesters”.

Now, having been at the action myself, and helping to organise it, I know that it ended up having very little to do with the Northern Territory intervention at all. It was actually meant to be a protest in solidarity with women in the Territory who were protesting the intervention. Environmental activists who were involved with organising suggested protesting the Australian Nuclear Association conference, and invited speakers who hardly said anything about the intervention. The linking of “violence” to Aboriginality (when in fact many older white men were shouting in the faces of younger women) in this case, without any reference to the actual politics of Aboriginal resistance to the nuclear industry (which has a long history in Australia), is blatantly racist.

But white activists never do anything about it. Often they do the reverse, claiming legitimacy with other activists because of the involvement of people of colour.

It plays into a protest dynamic whereby many people of colour at protest are put in unsafe situations because of the actions taken by white protesters. For instance, a Persian friend of mine was called a “terrorist” for starting a chant in a heavily-policed protest situation, when it’s widely known that ASIO have been monitoring her. This is a rather extreme example, but it highlights something I want to bring up, which is the privilege inherent in some kinds of action being taken by white protesters. While we’re on the subject of people of colour distrusting police, it really needs to be said that there’s an uneven distribution of risks across racial lines in a protest situation. White activists deciding that certain types of action are appropriate and not taking into account how they affect people of colour differentially is a huge problem which I think needs to be addressed.
I really wish I could link to the great discussions of this issue at Brownfemipower’s blog, but of course it’s been shut down.

Delegitimising a protest through racialising and homogenising its interlocutors is something that Hugo Schwyzer, a self-proclaimed “pro-feminist man” has done repeatedly:
“Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing…”
“…my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere…”
“Many of the prominent “women of color” bloggers in the feminist blogosphere clearly don’t read my blog regularly.”
This is while many white feminists were raising the same issues.

He’s by no means unique in this respect, and I bring his posts up as examples illustrating a more general point rather than to represent him as The Bastion of Race-baiting in the “feminist” blogosphere. I have no desire whatsoever to start any kind of argument with him about this (and he’ll probably ignore this anyway, since he’s never ever answered me before). Certainly there are white women who make the same mistake, invoking “women of colour” as a homogeneous batch in an affirming way, which tends to play into a logic of “best ally in the room” by oversimplifying race issues.

Ultimately, I’m writing about this as a consciousness-raising exercise. I would like to see more white “allies” discussing this, and perhaps keeping it in their awareness when they organise, write, and interact around issues of race, with an view to avoiding, overcoming or dealing with it.

4. A bunch of geeks get together at a convention, and initiate what they call an “Open Source Boob Project” (OSBP), in which women are offered badges that designate whether they would welcome having their breasts groped or not

There have been many, many analyses of this already, so I won’t offer any more. There are some good round-ups of the posts about the subject, including one at Hoyden About Town, and one by a woman who participated in the original situation. I haven’t had time to read through all the posts and comments, but I wanted to add my own take on it. I have to say that my opinion of it was heavily influenced by this post by Springheel Jack (through skywardprodigal), which was pretty much the first I heard of it. I also want to point out the unspoken whiteness of both the original ‘project’ and a lot of the feminist and feminist-inspired criticism of it, which Delux Vivens has outlined.

Stuff like the OSBP is why I absolutely hate “geek culture”.

What I want to talk about, instead, is a personal experience of a party where there was a similar level of sexual liberality, initiated by a group of men and one or two women. It was a costume party where skinny white women played on sexual stereotypes to get men’s attention, which eventually ended in one woman offering to strip in exchange for a lift, while a group of men looked on. This was while I was ignored in a corner by those men, who I’d known longer than this white woman, and assumed I was friends with them. Funnily enough, it was at this party that I declared “patriarchy ruins everything” and was met with jokes about how it’s great cos it benefits men.

Now, I don’t hold it against any woman who strips in exchange for anything. I felt kind of uncomfortable with passing judgement on this behaviour because I felt I might be slut-shaming. I realised, though, that my problem wasn’t with anyone’s behaviour in particular, but the uncomfortable dynamics whereby “winners” and “losers” are created in a sexualised economy. I did feel that as soon as sex became a currency by which women got attention from men, I was on the “losing” team because I didn’t want to play.

As a woman of colour who was told repeatedly when I was young that brown is unalterably ugly and undesirable, I have a bit of a complex about this. There are two extreme sets of stereotypes that woc can fall into: the asexual hard worker, and the oversexed ‘whore’. I think they play off each other, because they’re predicated on erasing a woman of colour’s capacity to negotiate both meaningful work and sex. A lot of the suspicion around the work of woc revolves around a suspicion of the sexuality of woc. The agency of woc is never recognised outside its sexual dimension, rendering the sexuality of woc one-dimensional, and erasing the reflective, reasoned decision-making capacities that go into work.
I’ve felt pressured to perform either, or both, stereotypes in order to get recognition, depending on the situation. The alternative would be to disappear altogether. “Geek culture” has its own roles for woc to play, often as the ‘whore’, since it is by definition a leisure/hobby culture. Often, the sexism of this culture lies in reifying women’s sexuality which is especially harsh on woc. The result has been that I have at times felt that my sexuality is out of my own control.

Clearly, valorising women when their sexuality falls into a set of predetermined outcomes has its own inequality built into it, since it reduces socialising into a two-dimensional space.

I think it relates to capitalism, and the creation of value. (I’m getting all Marxist on your arses because I’m studying it right now.) Without going into elaborate detail, I think the Marxist notion of labour markets involving an unequal exchange is really important here, as well as the notion of a homogenisation of values across a commodity-producing sector. Capitalism rewards some workers over others, for producing things which are more conducive to its interests, in similar ways that patriarchy rewards women who comply with its interests (and of course, these are interconnected systems). It tends to mean a reproduction of those modes of activity over any given social space. I.e. women’s sexuality is homogenised into a set of repetitive forms — stereotypes.

But it doesn’t mean that women who do take up those positions of privilege are inherently bad for doing so, or that the solution — as some feminist strategies would have it — is to refuse those positions. ‘Reforming’ them is obviously rather problematic, since that process will be exploitative and unjust. The solution is for all women to organise together to work against the oppressive conditions faced by women, in all their different forms. And this is what women of colour seek when becoming involved in the women’s movement — it’s not about “jealousy” of white women’s privileges, or ressentiment towards them. Obviously this is an idealisation of the women’s movement(s), but I do want to outline an ideal here without compromising an oppositional stance towards the multiple forms of injustice that women face.

… so I guess what I mean when I sometimes tell male friends that they wouldn’t understand something because they’re men (which one friend tried to argue was “abusive”), I really have a point. There are so many things which are poorly understood in our society, but the “poor understanding” actually produces false forms of knowledge that are predicated on reproducing racist and sexist stereotypes which leave huge gaps in understanding. I write in this blog to sort those gaps out.

First of all, I have to sigh and restate my desire to get away from blogosphere conflicts that centre around white North American women. I consider the conflict itself a waste of time for me, since I don’t think I’m going to make a difference to the business of the US feminist blogosphere by contributing on white peoples’ blogs.

I am appropriating from this conflict a few specific issues which I want to address, because they caught my attention and jibed with a few other things I’ve been thinking about. But they do involve criticism of another blogger, who is being criticised for a few other things at the moment. If that hurts her feelings, well, ok.

I want to talk about the blogging v. book publishing and how the divergence between these two modes of communication reflects divergences in social justice work in general. My ideas about his have been informed by the work of Brownfemipower in writing about the nonprofit-industrial complex and blogging as a tool for liberation. (And yes, I’m referring to the Incite! Women of Color Against Violence anthology with a similar title, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.)

I guess my other deleted comment* from the Feministe thread is a good place to start:

I don’t buy that in the years of reading and commenting at Bfp’s blog, Amanda didn’t notice that Bfp was working on dealing with immigration as a feminist issue. I can remember, last year, Bfp blogging about every single issue that Marcotte mentions in her article. If Amanda wants credit for not being stupid, then she has to own up to paying attention to a blog she claims to read.

I also find the article in question highly bizarre since it doesn’t mention a single immigrant women’s/women of colour organisation which is working on the issues, despite Marcotte’s willingness to make ambiguous statements about the relevance of feminism and intersectionality. Returning to Jessica Hoffmann’s piece, it’s clear that the state of feminism is such that it’s women of colour who are the innovators and doing the most cutting-edge work. Hoffmann is one white woman who isn’t afraid to credit specific woc for that work. So why the disappearing act with woc in Marcotte’s article? Why do woc appear only as victims, but not the originators of the concept of intersectionality — one of the ideas which woc use to push for liberation?

It points to a common practice whereby white people render women of colour, especially radical woc activists, invisible. Where white women take credit for the innovations of woc. This is harmful to women of colour. It reduces the visibility of the resources which are out there, and it limits the growth of woc-initiated initiatives.

I for one don’t trust Marcotte’s judgement in deciding who is out to get her and who has genuine criticism. It’s common for her to claim that her critics are jealous of her book deal. I find it interesting that accusations against her are egregious and unethical because she’s a professional, but that she can attribute all kinds of motives to people who don’t have book deals, and that’s okay because writing isn’t their livelihood. So accountability in the feminist movement has to go out the window to support those privileged women who get into positions of power? So the work of women of colour is less valuable than that of white women because woc are unpublishable (then again, Marcotte’s publisher is Seal Press)? Again, I would expect that from conservative feminist organisations like NOW, not from people who are familiar with and accept the work of radical women of colour like Brownfemipower. I don’t accept the implicit vanguardism in that formulation.

If it’s personal and about Amanda Marcotte’s livelihood, then it should be equally personal for Bfp and all the women of colour involved too. If Marcotte stands to have her means of making a living damaged by accusations of “stealing,” what do woc stand to lose? And the answer is no less personal, no less vital, than the means of our existence too. Woc might not make our bucks by blogging, but woc have long criticised and resisted co-optation by capitalism as the strategy for achieving justice (and yes, Bfp blogged about this as well). For radical women of colour, blogging in itself is a tool for change, used in different ways than it is used by white liberal feminists.
Hence why white liberal feminists who do deal in capitalism have to face up to the onus of dealing justly with these alternatives. And that means not appropriating, and giving support to woc initiatives whenever possible. I do not see that Marcotte has done these things, and in fact has made a series of excuses to avoid doing them in the future.

The fact is, ‘professionalisation’ in feminism is not a new issue nor an issue specific to white US feminists. I have had a number of conversations with women around the world who have criticised the women who take up “leadership” positions in their regional/local/national feminist movements through a combination of class/ethnic/race/sexual/able-bodied privilege and professionalisation of feminist work.

The criticisms — that these women represent only a narrow agenda based on an even narrower conception of the problems, that they are self-serving and unresponsive, that their work is compromised by the agendas of business, academia and the state — are predictable and well-worn, but still have yet to be addressed or dealt with.

However, there’s a bigger criticism out there. It’s an elephant-sized issue, and hardly anyone talks about it. Anne Summers mentioned in a speech last year, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I want to explore it more.

That is, when you rely on bureaucratisation and incorporation of high-level leaders into the state and business, once the state decides it doesn’t want to deal with women’s issues any more, you’re basically fucked. And this is what has happened to the Australian women’s movement in the eleven years that John Howard was in power. Women’s government agencies were consistently de-funded, attacked ideologically and dismantled, while sexist policies around abortion, welfare, family, childcare, maternity leave and workplace relations were put into place.

This is also occurring in the environmental movement, where large NGOs are becoming more conservative so as not to lose lobbying access, while ineffective and even dangerous policies are being pursued (e.g. increasing reliance on nuclear energy, carbon trading, bio-fuels, carbon sinks, ‘clean coal’, electricity privatisation).

It is not a new observation I’m making (regrettably, I’m at a loss for who to link on this, other than Paula Rojas, who I found via Bfp), but I would like to explore it further than it seems to have been. Specifically, I want to explore what kinds of consequences it has on social movements when relatively fragile (and I use the term relatively here, for contrast) social movements must interact with the agendas of the state, of business, and academia. For it seems to me that these interactions are often toxic, producing a huge level of division, disorganisation and ultimately, in destroying fragile coalitions and organisations.

The much larger apparatus’ of the state, business and academia seem to appropriate the best energies of the activists whose genuine ingenuity and passion are co-opted into ossified hierarchical structures. And the movement responds by rallying support for those activists because they command unprecedented levels of power and mainstream credibility. Yet that credibility is premised on an overall tokenism about the issue at stake, be it ecological justice, women’s liberation, racial justice, disability rights, or queer rights. The hierarchical accountability structures which authorise that credibility can muzzle the most radical activist (e.g. Peter Garrett).

In many cases, a lack of political will at the top co-exists with fluctuations in activist work in creating alternatives around an issue or set of issues. Howard’s ruling out same-sex marriage rights hasn’t stalled queer community-building, and the announcement of a “new paternalism” in Aboriginal affairs hasn’t stopped Aboriginal activists from organising their communities. But when equal access to elite status becomes the goal of a political movement, it becomes apparent that it is no longer concerned with justice, and it develops a parasitic relationship with the grass-roots of that movement.

This is why I’ve started to believe in the concept of ‘revolution’, if not the actuality of a national revolution. It’s because optimism about piecemeal change relies on putting your faith in incrementalism — the model where small changes accumulate on top of each other to eventually lead to a situation of greater justice. But the strategies of the system only reproduce injustices and inequalities in different ways. If you abolish legislative racial segregation without ousting the agents whose interests lie in certain types of labour and certain types of housing being devalued, then they will continue to be devalued. If you abolish nuclear energy without ensuring more ecologically sound energy production, you stand only to strengthen fossil fuel industries and pave the way for re-nuclearisation.

Ultimately, incrementalism only works insofar as goals stay the same while everything else changes.

We may be able to make a difference by initiating reforms which work against the logic of the existing system. But that requires deliberate and very considered work, involving a great variety of groups, to achieve. And to achieve that, we need spaces in which radical forms of democracy operate, so as to establish a level of independence from outside agendas.

This is why the most path-breaking work is outside most of the power structures in society, and why non-profit/non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and for-profit corporations lag so far behind in transforming society in the shape of radical justice. It’s why the revolution will not be published, and certainly not by Seal Press. It’s because the most groundbreaking feminist work isn’t being published at all, and in fact is in an antagonistic relation to the publishing industry and the academic-industrial complex.

Perhaps grass-roots radicalism will frame the shape of a new, just society, because it needs to frame new ways of being to survive. Or perhaps those new ways of being are only transitional forms, or maybe they’re just instrumentally useful. I’m not a soothsayer, so I don’t have the answer to that. I do, however, believe that I need grass-roots radicalism to survive, and that I can see changes occurring because of what I do. That’s good enough for me; I don’t need a book deal.

* With Feministe and the thread in question I can readily believe it was just a case of caught-in-moderation, but it doesn’t seem to have affected anyone else, and the mod restrictions seem lax enough that a pointless provocateur got through when I didn’t. After the Seal Press imbroglio, I’m just a little bit sensitive to being censored for making reasonable criticisms, so excuse me if I need to joke about it to blow off steam.

From a mailing list:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/27/2174099.htm

Welfare restrictions for WA Indig families

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin has announced welfare restrictions for some Western Australian Aboriginal families in the same way they apply in the Northern Territory.

A Western Australian coroner recently delivered a scathing report into service delivery for the state’s Aboriginal people and called for welfare restrictions.

Ms Macklin has announced that she will adopt his recommendation.

“I am announcing that the Australian Government will proceed with a trial of welfare payment conditionality and income management to combat poor parenting and community behaviours in selected Western Australian communities including in the Kimberley,” she said.

Ms Macklin says the WA Government will be partners in a trial and will fund parent responsibility teams.

“[They will] work with Centrelink to improve parenting where children are being neglected and are at risk of abuse,” she said.

“As part of the case management of a family, Western Australian child protection officers will be able to request Centrelink require that a person be subject to income management.”

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23249316-5013172,00.html

Outback taskforce gets star chamber

Simon Kearney | February 21, 2008

A FEDERAL investigation into child sexual abuse and violence in Aboriginal communities has been given star chamber powers to imprison unco-operative witnesses after its 18-month investigation hit a wall of silence in the outback.

The granting of the status of a special intelligence operation is a significant upgrade of the Alice Springs-based taskforce running the investigation, and came only after members had to argue its case in front of Australia’s eight police commissioners.

The new powers put violence and child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities on a par with outlaw motorcycle gangs and international crime syndicates as priority for law enforcement. The powers investigators will use are similar to those granted to people investigating a terrorist plot.

The Australian understands that investigators, while having significant success uncovering information, have been frustrated by the unwillingness of non-government organisations to provide formal disclosures.

In addition, people in Aboriginal communities are often intimidated into not disclosing crimes, such as child sexual abuse and domestic violence. Critically, the investigators have uncovered many communities run through intimidation and standover tactics by men involved in criminal activity, including abuse.

Anyone questioned in what is known as the star chamber is legally prevented from revealing that the interview occurred, except to their lawyer.

Australian Crime Commission chief executive Alastair Milroy told The Australian yesterday the aim of the new powers was to obtain specific intelligence relating to violence, child abuse and related offences of substance abuse and pornography.

“Coercive powers will provide a clear legal basis and protection for non-government organisations, state and territory authorities, service providers and individuals to provide confidential information, as well as an environment that is more conducive to gathering personal testimony,” he said. “The approval of coercive powers was considered essential to overcome impediments in accessing information collection relating to indigenous violence and child abuse.”

Mr Milroy said the powers would not be used to target victims. The star chamber may travel to communities, if necessary, taking into greater account the need in many cases to protect the identity of witnesses being questioned.

The 31-strong National Indigenous Violence and Child Abuse Intelligence Task Force has made significant inroads exposing an epidemic of child sexual abuse and violence similar to revelations contained in the Little Children Are Sacred report, which was released in June last year and prompted the Howard government’s emergency intervention in the NT.

As of Tuesday, the taskforce had provided police and child protection authorities in every state and the NT with 236 reports that could be used in subsequent investigations.

The star chamber inquiry is carried out by an independent examiner.

The findings of inquiries cannot be used in court but the disclosures can be passed to police to investigate later.

Initially, the powers would be used to force organisations and individuals to produce documents from which further inquiries would be launched, Mr Milroy said.

“The ACC will utilise coercive powers in a culturally sensitive manner in order to identify offenders and obtain specific intelligence relating to violence, child abuse and related offences of substances abuse and pornography,” Mr Milroy said.

The taskforce is expected to continue its work until the end of this year before presenting a comprehensive report to the nation’s police commissioners in the middle of next year.

There are NO WORDS.

None.

I absolutely cannot believe that they would do this and have the nerve to try to cover themselves in glory by “apologising” for kidnapping Aboriginal children at the same time as imposing this authoritarian, racist horror on Aboriginal children now.

Here’s a newsflash, Kevin: if you apologise, but keep doing the same harmful things you were doing that you had to apologise for, then it becomes clear that you’re not only insincere and untrustworthy, but also an opportunistic, manipulative abuser.

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

Stand up for Aboriginal rights on the first day of the new parliament!

Tuesday, February 12 2008
Meet Aboriginal Tent Embassy 11:30am
March to Parliament for 1pm rally

Turn back Howard and Brough’s racist legacy!

- Reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act
- Demand immediate review of the NT intervention
- End welfare quarantines, compulsory land acquisition and
‘mission manager’ powers
- Implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal People
- Aboriginal control of Aboriginal affairs

In the final months of government, John Howard introduced a package of discriminatory, unfair and punitive measures against Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Aimed at controlling Aboriginal lives and land, the legislation was a stark violation of basic human rights and dignities.

Federal Labor is promising a new era in Aboriginal affairs. They are pledging to say sorry to the stolen generation and to sign the UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. They have promised to restore both the CDEP (Community Development and Employment Program) and the permit system, which will ameliorate some of the worst effects of the NT intervention.

Unfortunately there are aspects of ALP policy that is still disturbingly similar to the Liberals’. Plainly discriminatory measures such as mandatory welfare quarantines, compulsory land acquisition and the presence of non-Aboriginal “business managers” with extraordinary powers are being suffered under right now. There has been no move to allow the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act. The cry for immediate review of the legislation coming from across the NT has been ignored.

The Labor Government must comply with accepted international human rights laws and standards of non discrimination, equality , natural justice and procedural fairness. Legislation being implemented in the NT breaches commitments Australia has made as a signatory to major human rights treaties and conventions; such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Human Rights Commission must immediately review the legislation to ensure compliance with these obligations.

The federal election revealed overwhelming opposition to the intervention among Aboriginal communities. When Labor MP’s in affected areas emphasised political differences to the Coalition they consistently received over 80% of the vote; with 95% in the town of Wadeye.

Despite government claims that the intervention is a response to the Anderson & Wild “Little Children are Sacred” report, no new community-based services to ensure the safety and protection of children have been established, and there has been a notable duplication of services - particularly in the area of child health checks. There is an urgent need for delivery of essential services, infrastructure and programs genuinely targeted at improving the safety and well being of children and developed in consultation with communities. Huge amounts of public money have been wasted, with $88 million alone going towards bureaucrats to control Aboriginal welfare.

Moving Forward
A vibrant, mass convergence Canberra on the first day of parliament will be an important step in challenging the lingering legacy of Howard’s racism. We can strongly push for an immediate end to what Aboriginal communities have themselves described as an invasion. We can send a strong signal to Kevin Rudd and his new government to put Aboriginal rights at the centre of their agenda; to massively increase the resources available to communities across Australia and to respect Aboriginal control of Aboriginal affairs.

How to get there!
Buses will be leaving from the Block, opposite Redfern Station, on Tuesday 12 February. Get there at 7am for 7:30am departure.

Ring Janene to book a seat on the bus – 0416 490 481 - $20 ($10 concession).

If you are interested in going down to Canberra on Monday 11 Feb, let us know that as well. Bus times for Monday are still being confirmed.

Initiated by the Aboriginal Rights Coalition, Sydney. Come to the meetings 6pm every Monday at Redfern Community Centre, Hugo St.

Contact:
Shane Phillips 0414077631
Greg Eatock 0432050240
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to try to write more about this later, in response to Bfp’s post about identity politics. I want to unpack the notion that women of colour feminism is a “home” to which we can return after fighting injustice on several fronts. The best unpacking of those dynamics is Bernice Johnson Reagon, in her piece ‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’. The piece is about the dangers of coalition work, and of working across difference. I like to read it alongside Chela Sandoval’s ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World’. I think what these two texts highlight is that women of colour feminism is about more than ‘woc issues’ or about creating a space for women of colour excluded from other communities and movements, that it involves distinct methodologies. I think it’s especially pertinent to point out that women of colour feminist traditions centralise issues differently than other social movements, define subjects differently than other social movements, and operate differently than other social movements. This isn’t to say that women of colour feminism is perfect. But the conversations on alliance and difference have a bit of history amongst women of colour, and it gets beyond 101 level.
To me, Bernice Reagon’s piece is a logical — and less intellectualised! — extension of Audre Lorde’s comments about difference in ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. These texts describe the creative, and terribly difficult, engagement across difference that needs to occur when we come together under the banner of ‘women of colour’ only to realise that there are still many differences dividing us.

Enough of my prattling. On with the show.

Coalition Politics: Turning the Century*

(*based upon a presentation at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival 1981,
Yosemite National Forest, California)

BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

I’ve never been this high before. I’m talking about the altitude. There is a lesson in bringing people together where they can’t get enough oxygen, then having them try to figure out what they’re going to do when they can’t think properly. I’m serious about that. There probably are some people here who can breathe, because you were born in high altitudes and you have big lung cavities. But when you bring people in who have not had the environmental conditioning, you got one group of people who are in a strain—and the group of people who are feeling fine are trying to figure out why you’re staggering around, and that’s what this workshop is about this morning.

I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.

I’m Bernice Reagon. I was born in Georgia, and I’d like to talk about the fact that in about twenty years we’ll turn up another century. I believe that we are positioned to have the opportunity to have something to do with what makes it into the next century. And the principles of coalition are directly related to that. You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.
A hundred years ago in this country we were just beginning to heat up for the century we’re in. And the name of the game in terms of the dominant energy was technology. We have lived through a period where there have been things like railroads and telephones, and radios, TV’s and airplanes, and cars, and transistors, and computers. And what this has done to the concept of human society and human life is, to a large extent, what we in the latter part of this century have been trying to grapple with. With the coming of all that technology, there was finally the possibility of making sure no human being in the world would be unreached. You couldn’t find a place where you could hide if somebody who had access to that technology wanted to get to you. Before the dawning of that age you had all these little cute villages and the wonderful homogenous societies where they everybody looked the same, did things the same, and believed figure out the same things, and if they didn’t, you could just kill them and nobody would even ask you about it.

We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there. Even when we have our “women-only” festivals, there is no such thing. The fault is not necessarily with the organizers of the gathering. To a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.
Read the rest of this entry »

Answer: when it happens to Aboriginal women.

Recently Cairns District Court Judge Sarah Bradley sentenced nine men, aged between 14 and 26, who pleaded guilty to the rape of a 10-year-old girl, to probation. I.e. no conviction is being recorded for this offence, according to Judge Bradley’s judgement.
One of the men has a prior conviction for child sexual abuse. Despite this, the Crown Prosecutor did not ask for custodial sentences for the men.
[***EDIT: Correction-- No conviction is being recorded against the juvenile perpetrators, who are getting probation. The adult perpetrators will have suspended sentences with convictions recorded. Articles were a little ambiguous on that point.***]

The lenient sentence was justified on the basis that the girl apparently “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of [them].”

Many of them are from powerful families in Aurukun, the remote Cape York community in which the rape occurred; the girl is not. She has now been placed in foster care.

The Queensland Attorney-General Kerry Shine is planning to appeal the sentence, although the appeal period of 28 days has expired, and the state Premier Anna Bligh will review all sentences handed down in Cape York over the past two years.

More details:

• Row over gang rape of 10yo - The Daily Telegraph
• Cape York sentences to be reviewed after rape judgement - ABC Online
• Qld A-G to appeal gang-rape sentences - The Age, Melbourne
• Indigenous leaders slam sentence - Courier Mail

The issue not being discussed in any of these reports is the whiteness of the judge who handed down the non-sentence. Why did she play havoc with the life of a young Aboriginal girl? Why is her life worth so little to this white judge? Why is she being kinder to rapists (black though they may be) than to young women? Isn’t it because Aboriginal women are considered worthless by the white legal system?

And why has this girl been removed from her family? In the Age article it suggests that the girl was initially placed in care in the Aurukun community.

I think Auntie Shirley said it best: for Aboriginal people, child removal equals paedophilia.

I think this case reveals the corruption and hypocrisy of Australian governments in dealing with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. While the state is enabling confessed abusers, it is also chastising the entire Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory with punitive welfare quarantines and paternalistic community managers. While Aboriginal leaders condemn the enabling of abuse and the malevolent neglect of governments, the state congratulates itself on taking military action. For eleven years John Howard let report upon report about abuse, poor health, inadequate housing, unemployment and poverty pile up and he did nothing but take a knife to the guts of Indigenous leadership and rights. And now all Aboriginal people get is their money quarantined and threats to roll it out to the entire country.

It looks like the ALP is tripping on whatever ideological sauce the Coalition was on. It’s the only way this kind of bullshit could possibly make any goddamn sense.

So the Chaser guys have outdone themselves and are clearly desperate for laughs, because now they’re not only content to exploit Muslims, they’ve broken out the boot polish and actually gone for full blackface.

Who would’ve thought that some middle class white guys doing sketch comedy could be so unoriginal!?!

I can’t embed the video but it’s here on the ABC’s website, and is this week’s default video. You can also download the whole episode from the ABC site.

In the past two weeks, the New Zealand government has cracked down heavily on civil liberties, with a series of raids of the homes of activists around the country. The arrested activists are known as the ‘Urewera 17′. This weekend saw thousands take to the streets in marches for solidarity.

The Civil Rights Defence Committee summarises it as follows:

In a wave of massive state repression, 300+ para-military Police, in many cases armed, raided houses around the country on Monday October 15th 2007, making 17 arrests. Search warrants were carried out in Auckland, Whakatane, Ruatoki, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Wellington and Christchurch. The warrants mentioned that the Police were searching for evidence for possible charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 (TSA), making this the first time the Act was invoked in a search warrant. The arrestees have been active in the Tino Rangatiratanga, peace and environmental movements and in their communities.

Prominent Tino Rangatiratanga activist Tame Iti was among the first arrested at his home at 4am Monday morning. At 6am raids were carried out at A Space Inside anarchist social centre in Auckland and the 128 activist Community Centre in Wellington. In Tuhoe Country, the towns of Ruatoki and Taneatua were blockaded by armed police for several hours, with no cars allowed in and many searched, including a school bus full of children.

All the arrestees were charged with various breaches of the Arms Act and most recieved multiple charges. Police have said they may still lay further charges, including under the TSA. In order to lay charges under the TSA, Police must get permission from the Solicitor General. All but two of the arrestees, Tame Iti and Jamie Lockett, have recieved name supression.

Since the initial arrests, many people around the country have been questioned by police, more properties have been searched, and one more arrest has been made.

On Tuesday October 16th, Jamie Lockett applied for and was granted bail in the Auckland District Court. Later the same day, the Police appealed to the High Court and bail was revoked. An arrestee was bailed in Palmerston North on Wednesday 17th under restrictive conditions.

Support for the arrestees has been vocal across the country, with many solidarity demonstrations and packed courtrooms. There have also been demonstrations in Australia and messages of support from around the world.

The past week has seen a number of protests around the world in solidarity with the arrested activists. From Aotearoa Indymedia:

The Global Day Of Action in solidarity with those arrestes, harassed and questioned on and since October 15th has seen over 2000 people take to the streets across Aotearoa, while overseas, solidarity protests took place in many other parts of the world.

Auckland saw around 1000 people take to the streets of the central city, then march to the Remand Prison in Newmarket where many of the prisoners are being held. The protest was addresses by Rongomai Bailey, recently released on bail, amongst others.

Ana of Whenua, Fenua, Enua, Vanua re-posted this call for solidarity from the families of arrested Maori activists:

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Family,

It is in great distress that I am urged to write this appeal and to inform our international community of the recent events that are happening within Aotearoa (New Zealand) social justice, environmental justice and indigenous movements.

For the past 60 hours Aotearoa activists have been subjected to home invasions,raids and interrogation under threats of terrorist activities against the state.The Crown has decided to employ its
recent Terrorism Suppression Act to lockdown on social justice activist, movers and shakers and this is now world wide news with many of our close friends and families houses (mine included) being
invaded, possessions confiscated and charges being threatened which will allow for solid activists to be charged under the Terrorist Suppression Act that carries sentencing for life.

The ages of people currently under custody range from 18 – 64. Many of us being implicated in this investigation are young people trying to do good things for our communities.We are headed into an election year and these events are the largest scale operation headed by special operations from the head of states office. We have difficulty in
understanding the timing for these invasions of our privacy except for political campaigning off of our backs.The indigenous movement for self - determination is what is being blamed by the media for instigating acts of terrorism.

The Police showed up at my house with files of my activities over years, my phones have been tapped for years, my house under surveillance and everything subject to their review. We have not been involved in any activities that could allow the police to make these claims and the distress they are causing for our families and children
is devastating.

Right now we are fighting for friends in Police Custody to make bail. A number of these requests have been denied. A number of people are
now been moved between prisons and I will be liaising with them and their families.

Court costs, travel costs, food costs and lawyer costs are above the heads of many of our people and we are asking for support from our communities both national and international to come to our aid in this time of need.’Terrorism’ world wide has become a cause for unjust state intervention into the lives of many peoples committed to change
and now we are seeing that reality play out here in our own backyards within our own community.

Please support us in anyway specifically: Sending your concerns against state interventions to Annette King, Minister of Police aking@ministers.govt.nz
and to your local New Zealand Embassy’s;- By
sending financial support towards the Family Support Network to assist with food, travel expenses and Court costs and; By sharing our stories with your own networks.We have had some international support by indigenous brothers and sisters by way of protests on the streets
outside the NZ Embassy’s, we encourage any of you to organize and do the same. Thank you all for taking the time to hear what is happening
for us here in Aotearoa, these are very troubling times.

For further information please refer

to:www.indymedia.org.nz/

www.stuff.co.nz/4240168a25364.html

Most of our Internet sites have been taken down also in relation to these chain of events however all responses and correspondence can be
made through me.

Mauriora,

Kiritapu Allan Co – Director, Conscious Collaborations

www.conscious.maori.nz/
Collaborations

www.conscious.maori.nz/
Related

* http://www.conscious.maori.nz/
* http://indigenist.blogspot.com/

More info available at http://www.tangatawhenua.com/ and http://indigenist.blogspot.com/.

I know I’ve neglected this blog lately, and I’m sorry. I wish I had the energy to get over that last hurdle of inhibition about posting. But I’ve been throwing myself into activism and essays, which hasn’t left much mental space for blogging.

I do have some big plans for this place, though, so keep watching! (Please!)

Today I’m just re-posting a comment I left at Feministe about a study of whiteness and the feminist blogosphere. I think that post encompasses many of the problems I have with critical whiteness studies as a field. Go have a read of the original post and the responses. My comment will be in the moderation queue for a while yet, so get the scoop right here at She who stumbles!

_________________________________________________________________________

Dear Katie,

Let me make this very clear before I begin:
I appreciate that you are taking the time to examine whiteness critically. I really do.

But I have many grave reservations of your rationale/methodology for your project.

First of all, I’m pretty familiar with the field of critical whiteness studies. I recently completed a year-long thesis project on whiteness and the Cronulla riots, in which I interviewed people. I am a woman of colour, an on-the-ground anti-racist activist, and a blogger. I’m from Australia, but I’m pretty familiar with the U.S. work in critical whiteness studies, having spent a good portion of the past year reading and thinking critically about it.

I originally only wanted white participants for my study as well. I took to heart Ruth Frankenberg’s lessons about trying to solicit interviews with white women for White Women, Race Matters, and I imagined I could get around the taboos of race talk by framing my questions in a certain way. In my case, my ethics committee made the final choice for me — they didn’t want me explicitly mentioning whiteness in my participant information statement.

But when one of my respondents turned out to be a person of colour, I continued with the interview and used it in my project. That’s because of a lot of work I did in reading for my thesis, most of which led back to the conclusion that not only did people of colour invent critical whiteness studies — the widely-cited Souls of White Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is considered the first canonical work of whiteness studies — but the perspectives of people of colour are integral to its development as a discipline.

That’s because whiteness only takes on significance in relation to the racial subordination of people of colour. The privileges of whiteness are the things that people of colour don’t have, or can only get access to at great cost. So reading white testimonials against the perspectives, priorities and positions of people of colour is integral to critical whiteness studies as a discipline. And most of the better work in critical whiteness studies does this by actively including the voices of people of colour.

As such, your comment that “creating race-based safe spaces” where white people can “talk about racism without feeling so worried that folks of color will judge them” is seriously questionable on many grounds.

Firstly, because critical whiteness studies has demonstrated that white race consciousness is deeply shaped by colourblindness and aversive gestures towards racism that limit white accountability for the oppression of people of colour. While white people can acknowledge racism and talk about it, this gesture can equally be turned into an opportunistic and solipsistic pursuit of virtue, or a generalisation about people of colour (which is also something critical whiteness studies focuses on). Part of the project of critical whiteness studies is to unpack the discursive manoeuvres that do limit white race consciousness, based on what they obscure. I.e. the lives and experiences of people of colour are obscured by white race consciousness and the operation of whiteness. This is a critical aspect of racial domination. This is why the many criticisms of race-matching in qualitative research apply doubly to the study of whiteness.
Moreover, the project of critical whiteness studies is to understand the effects of this discursive closure. This cannot happen without recourse to the perspectives of people of colour.

I’m sure you’re aware that the feminist blogosphere is replete with conflict over race. I won’t go into the specific conflicts, but there are a number of issues which women of colour bloggers have with white feminist bloggers. Yours is (one of?) the first formal study (AFAIK) of race in the feminist blogosphere. That means, methodologically, there’s very little material for you to draw on in contextualising a critique of whiteness. The blogosphere conflicts are specific to this arena. Understanding them is necessary to contextualise how whiteness operates in it. Ignoring women of colour in this study means that you’ll get an incomplete picture of the field. As such, I have many doubts about how critical your study will be.

Your comments about why you’d rather avoid the perspectives of people of colour seem to indicate that you are unfamiliar with the work of women of colour bloggers and the specific criticisms and claims we make. While it is tiresome for people of colour to always be considered the authoritative voices on racism, that is mostly a response to white people not listening to us, and having to repeat ourselves. As such, I don’t see how your methodology will address your professed concern for the feelings of people of colour. Offering white people a “safe space” to talk about racism will only mean that the dynamic of exclusion and ignorance is reinforced.

Moreover, the idea that:
Within the poc group, I might have folks who are South Asian, East Asian, Latin@, Black, Native American, etc. That doesn’t make for a very good sample because different groups likely have different relationships to whiteness within the feminist blogosphere.
presumes that people of colour in the blogosphere do not interact as poc, or recognise these differences for ourselves. In fact, the opposite is true — bloggers of colour have led the way in analysis of how different groups of poc relate to whiteness, and to one another. This is accomplished through the dense and lively multi-racial blog networks we’ve formed. Ignoring the internal structure of that, and its relation to the white blogosphere (for indeed, many of the networks we’ve formed arose from conflict over race with white bloggers), means that you’re missing a vital aspect of the race politics of the feminist blogosphere.

Finally, I have huge issues with the claims that critical whiteness studies makes to “de-centring the white subject” and putting “an explicit and critical focus on whiteness”. In my experience, critical whiteness studies has limited anti-racist effects, and my experience has been borne out in the work of (white) critical whiteness scholars. In order to assert the claims to virtue of critical whiteness studies, the voices of people of colour are often drowned out. For instance, I have read pieces where white academics told people of colour that it was more important for white people to teach critical whiteness studies than for the critiques that people of colour made of whiteness to be heard. I’ve also had a teacher dismiss my concerns about my own interview project because she experienced “reverse racism” when trying to do research on Aboriginal people.

All in all, I find that the project of critical whiteness studies is undermined by its own academic practices and its elitist epistemology. Many criticisms of the claims of critical whiteness studies are discussed at length by Sara Ahmed in this article from borderlands e-journal (it’s a peer-reviewed academic journal, so you can reference it in your thesis). I strongly recommend that you read over the article, and others from the same issue.

In order to avoid many of those criticisms, it’s necessary that you examine how your own whiteness is operating in the context of the blogosphere, and your project. It might be outside the scope of your project, but I can tell you that including those concerns in a smaller, year-long project is not difficult (I included them in the literature review and methodology). Moreover, responsibility to the racial justice context which shaped critical whiteness studies fairly demands some attention to the concerns of people of colour, and a critical whiteness project is incomplete without it.

If you’d like, I can refer you to a number of readings which will elaborate many of the points I made above, and I’m happy to elaborate on anything you’d like clarified.

Good luck with your project.

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.

I know I just said I’d take a break from blogging, but I really thought these articles needed to be passed on.

1. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on white sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory with characteristic power-aversive race talk that downplays the colonial violence occurring there.

2. Academic Larissa Behrendt says that there’s a racist discourse of Indigenous issues in this country which is destructive to Indigenous peoples’ rights, health, safety, and wellbeing. (What about self-determination, Larissa?)

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).

It seems like most bloggers I read are also heavily active in campaigns for political and social change. My own involvement in activism has been so sporadic that I feel like a fraud claiming to be an activist. I’m not nearly experienced enough with activist work to feel entitled to the appellation, although activism is something I desperately want to do.

When I started working on my thesis I strongly believed that theory could be empowering and support social change…. now I’m not so sure. I’m well aware that the class and caste privilege I enjoy underwrites whatever manage to think, understand, or express politically. There are times when I feel that the intellectual pursuits of studying, discussion, and theorising are a waste of my time, and I should be out there working hard for social change. But I’m also well aware of the obstacles to my doing that.

A few weeks ago I went along to a mental illness discussion group at university. Student campaigning around mental illness has been pretty much non-existent, which is something people are addressing now. The discussion was led by a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system.

The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.

My latest bout of serious depression began in 2003, a few months after the USA invaded Iraq. I was heavily involved in campaigning against the invasion, doing something almost daily, which stirred up a lot of intense emotions. One of those was frustration at the way the campaign was organised.
As an independent activist working with people belonging to socialist parties, I had very little say in campaign strategy. At the same time, I was tokenised as a woman of colour in a white-dominated movement; I was urged to make speeches at rallies and forums, but because I wasn’t part of their organisation I couldn’t contribute at the caucuses where each faction determined how they’d vote. The parties that trumpeted loudly about justice used me personally — they’d assign a member to make friends with me to woo me into their organisation, or at least into voting along party lines. Yet most of the work I did was handing out leaflets and putting up posters.

Ironic that the period of time that I was most heavily involved with politics was also the time when I felt most pressured, alienated and dehumanised. A few months later I was in the grip of some of the most intense lows of my life.

Since then I’ve dallied with the mental health system again, and ultimately rejected it as a means of defining or addressing my mentality.

These are experiences that have led me to really doubt that thinking is such a magnificent thing that ideas can transcend social boundaries and set humanity apart from everything else. Part of my middle class (although not wealthy) upbringing was a belief in the power of good ideas to make a difference, and to overcome material obstacles to their realisation. Like most ideologies, it operates in such a way as to deny its material underpinnings. It underlies a liberal humanist model of agency that marginalises anyone who doesn’t have the means to realise their ideas: women, people of colour, working-class people, peasant-class people, disabled people (including the mentally ill), queer people, trans people, and anyone else whose oppression markedly reduces their ability to access and use resources.

I think mental illness, in some ways more so than race and gender, breaks the liberal humanist model of agency in fundamental ways. Agency, according to the liberal humanist model, is based on rationality, the cornerstone of consciousness. Mental illness is by definition the evacuation of the capacity for rationality in a human being.

Internet discourse about itself holds that the internet is a sphere of pure ideas, where inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. don’t matter. What matters are the quality of your ideas, evaluated by rational minds all made equal by freedom of speech and equal access to the means of communication. In an environment like this, emotions are unnecessary. In many ways, this is the same belief academia has about itself.

Women of colour know it’s different.

Now I’m going to discuss some things that came up in the recent conflicts over Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. I do not want to discuss the book, and any comments criticising me for my position Re: Valenti or the book are neither welcome nor relevant. I have nothing to say about either of them. I do not read Valenti’s site, Feministing, and I have not read the book. That’s because I live in Australia, where the book is unavailable, and I find Feministing too US-centric to be worth my internet time. I realise how debate about the book has spanned several blogs, posts and threads, but I do NOT want it to be brought here. Comments about it will be edited for irrelevant content.

Moreover, this is a safe space for women of colour to talk about their concerns. Specifically, the way that subtle racism and sexism marginalise us and affect our mental health. Comments that aren’t about this topic will be closely scrutinised.

Recently a number of women of colour have talked about the hurtful effects of internet discourse about this book on them. The ways that woc have been positioned draw on the ideology of the rational liberal humanist agent and relegate the concerns of women of colour to a space outside that model.

The fact that this has been accomplished through doublespeak, contradiction, evasion, and outright ignoring woc doesn’t affect the integrity of the model. By nature, the dualism of the model ensures that criticism mostly travels in one direction, and the material inequalities behind that duality are ignored.

What does this mean for woc?

For activism, it means a lack of discursive space in which to raise concerns and have them addressed.

But discursive spaces reside in minds. Minds which have a personal, emotional, mental, and neurochemical substrate, all of which are affected by discourse. Not having any language or concepts to express one’s concerns leads to a chronic lack of hope. And hopelessness leads to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.

Recently Jenn of Reappropriate and Vox Ex Machina (amongst others) posted about this CNN article on Asian American women’s suicidality. The article takes a social perspective on the relationship between race, gender (although not class or sexuality), and mental illness, subtly bringing to light the inadequacy of individualised models of mental health care which do little to address the needs of Asian American women.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. “They felt the counselor couldn’t understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman.”

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

This brief quote doesn’t do justice to the resourcefulness of women of colour in dealing with the emotions, and the durable effects of oppression on our mentalities. Leaving behind completely the dualistic model of rational agency, I’ve found that women of colour have much more practical, grounded and holistic ways of conceptualising and dealing with social problems. For women of colour, both political consciousness and personal life are not separate, and it’s not possible to be disinterested or detached from them. Instead, woc have a reflexive and measured understanding of our own lives and can move between high theory and daily practice without compromising ourselves on the grounds of lacking objectivity or rationality.

And by that I mean that we can do, and do do more with our brains than thinking along abstract lines or evaluating evidence according to abstract criteria. For woc, emoti