She who stumbles

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, emotions aren’t a sign of intellectual deficiency. They’re a tool for creating social changes that make our lives better. As such, they aren’t outside the realm of what can be worked on progressively. Emotional skills are part of creating social change.

That compares pretty poorly with the ideology of rationalist supremacy, by which I thought I could defeat my demons with good ideas.

For me, my depression transformed after I started the reading for my thesis. Being able to critically evaluate the reasons I’ve been made miserable by other people through a lens of race has helped my self-esteem and sense of myself in the world. And in that time I’ve rigorously rejected the individualistic models of mental illness that the mental health system produces by re-evaluating how certain experiences I’d had in the mental health system were indicative of a kind of violence done to people to make them fit into therapeutic models.

When I was young I went to an extremely racist school. Unfortunately, it was also a very small school. Racist slurs were de rigueur — children have a habit of picking up on any difference and bring rather nasty about it. But the school administration and the mental health system were complicit in that racism. It’s not only that experiences of racist ostracism were ignored by the counsellors and therapists years later, but that counsellors were called in to assess me while it was happening — because I was being disruptive — while the bullies were left untouched.
Later, when I was a day patient at a youth psychiatric centre, another patient — a loud boy who had an anxiety disorder — called me a “curry muncher” and I was assigned to an anxiety therapy group (with the same boy) when I lost it and yelled at him for it. The reason his comment was problematic wasn’t, as the (all white) psych nurses framed it, because it hurt my feelings. It was problematic because it underscored the racial and cultural alienation I felt in Australian society, and the double shame — of being brown among whites, and of being mentally ill amongst Indian people — that caused me.

To be fair, the mental health system isn’t as vested in a model of rational agency as other parts of society. But it has its own models of pathology that marginalise the concerns of women of colour and do violence to them (through aggressive medication that saps the capacity to act, and by restraining and restricting freedom of movement and association).

The disempowering effects of the mental health system compounded my depression, leaving me unable to confront the challenges I needed to meet in the past few years. I called it “activist burnout” but that was just one of many things that combined to make me nigh useless for two and a half years.
And because of that long hiatus from activism I don’t have the experience I need to fulfil all the responsibilities I’m taking on in my new activist projects.

But even though I feel so negatively about the mental health system, I still feel ashamed about my mental illness (which is why it’s taken me months to finish this post!). Because I’ve rejected the models of the mental health system, I don’t have clear guidelines on how to judge my capacities to deal with stress or get work done. Activism involves tensions and exhilarations that overwhelm me, and just the emotional rollercoaster could lead to mental exhaustion and depression. I’ve had to abandon easy, predetermined answers to my problems for a process of groping around in the dark to get my bearings (let alone navigating with success). This is possibly why I write about this topic so much!

Although I’m combating the elitist ideology that all problems can be fixed with good ideas, it’s good ideas that have helped me feel more empowered; it’s the ideas of women of colour that have supported me and inspired me to get to work on the anti-racism collective. While the doctrinaire belief of Trotskyists that a final revolution will solve all the problems of the world, ever, fuelled my passion for activism before, now it’s the practical relationship-building skills that women of colour have fostered that are helping me the most.

That’s why I read the blogs I do, and am doing the things I’m doing. And, selfishly, why I wanted to start the carnival. Because I’m learning from amazing people and we can change the world.

This week’s class was on W.E.B. Du Bois, and brought up the notion of double consciousness.

At that point, I had to pause and reflect. For a moment my mind tumbled and I took in the class not as a site of intellectual engagement with critical race theory, but as a site where race relations are produced and reproduced. Taking in the white supremacy of academia, the racist history of education, the socio-economic privilege it draws from and confers, I paused. The thought ended as quickly as it began, and I couldn’t think deeply about any of those things. But I did take in the racial composition of the class, the teacher, and the tenor of the conversation.

The class is mostly white. There are two people of colour in the class, myself and another South Asian woman. The class is small, so everyone is expected to contribute, and anyone who didn’t would stand out and lose marks. So the conversation is monopolised by white people. This is a space where white people try to figure out how people of colour feel about race.

It started to seem a bit ridiculous at that point, but I need to keep going, and fuck if I’m gonna abandon a space where I get to say my piece and be taken seriously.

In many ways, I have an unfair advantage over the other students: having begun my Honours thesis project halfway through the past academic year, I’ve been studying these very issues for six months now. I’ve been devouring critical race theory, radical women of color theory, and critical whiteness studies with a passion that surpasses my academic commitment to the field. I am a woman of colour, this is about people like me and our social experience, and it reads off that social experience to make a powerful critique of the global order. This is the place in which I found myself, the place I feel at home. So I find strength in it, it strengthens me.

But I was the one who kept silent while one of the white women nutted out the basics of the concept of double consciousness with the teacher (another white woman). The same student had brought in an article about twins of different races to ‘prove’ that Du Bois’ focus on his blackness was unfair, because he had a mixed-race ancestry, and we should all celebrate our human mixedness.

Did it ever occur to her that double consciousness, that polite epithet, was the reason I kept my mouth shut while she worked it out with the teacher?

I doubt it.

It sounds so neat. Too neat to describe the psychological violence it does to people of colour. Too neat to take on board the passions and conflicts evoked in engagement about racial issues. Too neat to describe the confusion, pain, conflict, and self-loathing it invokes in people of colour. And finally, too neatly subjective to identify its role in reinstating a white supremacist status quo.

In the past week, my fellow women of colour bloggers have been duking it out with white feminist bloggers over various issues, all centring around how much WoC should get on board with the issues prioritised by white feminists. This is a fight that’s been going on for a long time, on many fronts. White feminists’ insistence on the centrality of the issues they prioritise has been taken apart and debunked for the way it merely centralises whiteness, fixes femininity and womanhood within a white locus, and asserts the hegemony of white feminists within women’s movements.

It’s not a new issue, but it’s one that plays off certain psychological dispositions created by racism. The dispositions are durable, so it continues to be an issue.

Racism alienates people of colour from ourselves. Especially when we are isolated from other people of colour, we lack the vocabulary to put together a view of the world that exposes the bases of the injustices inflicted upon us from a young age. We lack the knowledge to come up with a notion of our place in the world, how we got here and why, and therefore limits what we can do about it. We have no secular mythology that convinces us that we’re entitled to the entire earth and all the people on it, but we feel the lack of that self-affirmation and don’t know what to put in its place.

This is because white people have something we need and hold it over us. The ability to define ourselves according to who we are: self-constituting subjectivity.

They have this power because of various social, political, and cultural relations which put them in positions of power over us. Be that slavemaster, principal, employer, committee chair, member of parliament, or even spouse.

Before we can even conceive of our own needs, we’re taught to conceive of needs in general on white terms, in ways that re-instate the power that white people have over people of colour. Those white terms are, by various ideological tricks, cloaked in a language of fair play and universalism that disavows responsibility for the injustices inflicted upon various users of that language. This orthodoxy is so powerful that when people of colour assert our own priorities for justice, we are shut down for being unfair.

This happens in so many ways: from the use of stereotypes in fiction, to calling out classmates for racist taunting, to telling off a partner for using racially derogatory sexual imagery, to calling out the disavowal of white feminists for their own white supremacy… we end up getting blamed for being too angry, too histrionic, too emotive to fit into their polite fictions that erase our being.

Having learned that the punishments will fall upon us from white authorities if we speak out against racist peers, we learn to shut ourselves down. Better to get what we can, and avoid the pitfalls, than to meditate on injustices and be miserable. The helplessness of children binds this troubled consciousness into the psyche.

The weight of authority places pressure on ourselves to identify with the terms that whiteness sets. Not doing so results in severe punishments. We still recognise authority as legitimate, regardless of how much faith we have in it, and so our dependence upon it for our needs — education, care, inclusion, etc. — leads us to take on board its terms and neglect our own.

This “double consciousness” isn’t just dualistic and peacefully co-existent, it’s an interrupted consciousness that stops us from recognising ourselves as people, from recognising our own needs and the way those needs fit into the global order. It leaves us worried, depressed, resentful, hurt, and confused.

Later, when we have a measure of independence, and we come into contact with white people, that double consciousness leads us to make compromises. We don’t want to alienate anyone or cause conflict. We put up with casual slights, meant in good humour, because white supremacy divides our loyalties.

White people are free to exploit any part of the racial hierarchy they want, with impunity. They have the power to enforce this entitlement, both through force and through social cues. They can make jokes at the expense of people of colour, and they’ll have hordes to back them up with “it’s only a joke”. We can either accept that it is, turning aside from the racism the joke reinforces, or we can declare ourselves outside the social sphere of whiteness, cast ourselves into the murky realm of irrational savagery, by standing up against the only thing that could be considered fair, true, acceptable.
It happens when PoC point out more substantial arenas of racial injustice, too, and white insistence on race not being an aspect of justice cancels us out.

When you have no theory, no community at your back, standing up to the only community you know is next to impossible.

This power to set the agenda, to divide the world according to their priorities, causes PoC of good faith to be confused, compromised, and to hate themselves for wanting anything else. Sometimes that loathing is projected on other PoC who do stand against white supremacy.

“How did I let myself become colonised?” asks my psyche.
“Through my humanity, through my good faith and credulity, through my neediness and weakness,” answers my insecurity, and I project that onto my brown skin and hate it for holding me back from love, acceptance, and success.

But it’s not our fault the world works this way, and when we come to realise that, we become angry. This is a righteous anger, which protects our new-found self-consciousness from the onslaughts of a white society that functions to elicit compromise and self-defeat from us. Our self-constituting work is fragile. We don’t have the resources, material or cultural, that white communities do. We need to protect ourselves.

This is the anger of feminists of colour doing work in communities of colour, when they are faced with the insistence by white feminists that they fall into line. We are protecting ourselves and our agendas from the insidiousness of whiteness, which turns alliance and friendship into mastery and slavery.

Maybe, after going through this process, I should have more sympathy for the white people in my class. They’re trying to work out the meaning of race and to decolonise their own minds. I’m not sure if my resources can stretch so far as to accommodate them; people whose agendas are different to mine, but want my support anyway.

I don’t have a community in my immediate reach, to turn to if I need it. This class is not a safe space for me, and for the moment, only this blog is.

I have white friends and allies to turn to, but I’m ambivalent about their loyalties. The PoC I know are scattered and disorganised. My project to start an anti-racism group is on the backburner this week, as I stress about studies, social life, blogging, and housework… I’m blogging anyway, because it’s better than hating myself and shutting up about it.

But I have a thesis to write.
This thesis is my baby and my parent. Choosing to write about race has been the best decision I ever made, because now I can decolonise my mind. Working on it enriches me in ways I couldn’t name for you. This is my magnum opus. It’s my proof to the world that I can work by its laws, and my proof to myself that I can be productive and worthwhile for my own self.
It’s the bastard child of my double consciousness, and I love it to death.

Seeyou in June, baby.