She who stumbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, goodnight!

I apologise for my silence here. Many of the things I’ve talked about in this blog I’ve taken up in my activism and so I don’t feel I need an outlet for those ideas so much. And that’s taken up my time and energy, so I haven’t read or written in blogs for a little while.
Meanwhile, because of an extension, I have a little over a month and a half to finish my thesis. Most of my writing energy needs to go into that right now, and I don’t have time to keep up blogging and thesis writing at the same time.

The one thing I can commit to is a monthly CORA post, since I feel somewhat responsible for the Carnival starting in the first place.

So, until Spring, you’ll hear very little from me. I have some big ideas which I’ll see if I can get going after that. Seeyou all then!

Love,
Fire Fly

I was planning to write up some posts this weekend — I’ve had some great conversations with people about strategy and politics in activism — but yesterday my eldest uncle died.

He was quite ill, and old. My mother didn’t get a chance to see him one last time before he passed away, although she and her brothers and sisters were starting to plan a trip to see him when we were in India earlier this year. And now she’s here without them to support her, which is hard.
This is one of the big reasons why I don’t like it here.

I’m also sick, damp, and cold, and I have a whole lot of assessment work to do. So I’ll have to put off blogging for a little while longer while I knuckle down and try to concentrate on getting things done offline.

The Carnival of Radical Action will still happen — please promote it widely and get your thoughts together for submissions — but not much else until then.

My apologies.

In my post entitled ‘Radical brainmeats’ I mentioned “a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system” who was organising a campaign to raise awareness about mental illness, and to address the mentally unhealthy effects of activist culture.

She died yesterday, of suicide.

It’s horribly ironic. Whenever I think of that post I think of her.

I spent most of last night at the student housing co-op where she lived, commiserating with friends and doing what I could to support them. It was intense.

I think the worst thing about last night was that the people at the co-op — most of them activists of one stripe or another — were so dejected, and that police, University security, counsellors from the university, and ambulance staff were the ones taking charge of the situation. This is a community of people whose response to any crisis is proactive and progressive. Frequently, it’s police and University security that we fight against. With police officers talking about a Coronial inquiry and normally-confident activists (some of whom knew her even less than I did) relying on police for support, I’m worried about the activist community here. Will the state use this as a means of intervening in our fights for social justice?

I’m scared for myself, too. The past few weeks have been heavy, and even though I haven’t done all that much, just the tension of waiting for something to happen, the hope that something will, is giving me headaches and disrupting my sleep. I don’t like to believe I’m emotionally disabled, that I have to be very careful or else I’ll end up completely useless, but all signs seem to point in that direction.

It could very easily have been me to succumb, to be made miserable by the pressure, to lose all hope, to be in a state of near-constant psychological pain that I can neither ease nor talk about.

And although at times I’ve not taken my mental illness seriously — at times that was necessary — right now I take it very seriously.

Mental illness kills. Activism kills.

I feel that this is a form of violence inflicted upon a human being by her environment; and because she was uniquely vulnerable to it, she was its casualty. But it’s a violence that affects us all. A mentally unhealthy environment that causes all kinds of
Just as one might say that the Union Carbide leak in Bhopal was a violent disaster — it was caused by negligence and greed that harmed peoples’ health for years to come — the unhealthy, combative, judgemental, culture of activism has done harm to a human being. Now she is gone from this world. She no longer exists. The life of a woman who had so much to offer has been snuffed out.

And although at times I hoped to ignore my pain and weather the feelings, right now I need to talk about it because the only hope I see is through dialogue, understanding, and working together for change.

Yet I fear that, in the end, the same awful dynamics that harmed her in the first place — and which she was working against — will be reinstated as people argue over the meaning of her death. There’s a strong materialist current that militates against taking the subjective experiences of oppressed people seriously. And that could very easily be reinstated in the weeks and months ahead.
I never spoke to her about how I empathised with her, or how much I agreed with her about the terrible flaws of the activist culture. I kept silent out of fear too. I didn’t want to be scrutinised and judged. And I wanted to say something to her about it, but I was biding my time. Now it’s too late.
I feel like I have to say something now, and it scares me. I don’t want to carry this burden alone, but I also don’t want to expose my personal experiences for public scrutiny, like she, so bravely, did. Is that a kind of vulnerability that kills? I don’t think I’m brave enough to find out.

But how can we face her family if we don’t? How can we face each other? Ourselves?

I… have a lot more to say. But I’ll leave it there for now. Dwelling on this too much is unhelpful, and I have friends who need me right now.

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.

I’ve signed up with del.icio.us so that I can store links in one spot. I’ve been thinking I might put together some online resources for certain topics, and I think del.icio.us would be perfect for that too. It’s amazing how much great stuff there is on the tubes, which doesn’t stand out until you look for it.

But in the meantime, I have to write a bunch of thesis, and I have two papers due. I’d love to be a superhero and manage to do all that and write hard-hitting, thought-provoking blog posts, but I’m being a bit realistic and I’m gonna have to regretfully say that they’re probably gonna be thin on the ground for the next couple of months, while I put my thesis together.

I’ll be bookmarking all the good articles I see with del.icio.us, though, which means you’ll still have lots of awesome theory and politics to read. I am fire_fly on del.icio.us. There’s a widget in my sidebar that lists my latest links, and apparently there’s a feed of my favourites (at http://del.icio.us/rss/fire_fly), but I’m not sure if it’s working or not.

In other news, the time and date for the anti-racism reading group I’ve been planning has finally been chosen. It’ll be during the time that the women’s collective usually holds their reading groups, which makes me feel I ought to give it a gender focus. The first chapter of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman is a good candidate, since it brings together race, gender, and an Australian perspective really well. Otherwise, it’ll probably be a US black or Chicana feminist reading, although that’s less relevant to Australia… I was thinking of going with something from Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks until the women’s collective volunteered their time and venue.
It’s funny how I have a thesis bibliography with at least 100 references on it, but when it comes to deciding on a reading to start up a student anti-racism activist collective, my mind comes up blank! I have a feeling it’s because all of the references deal with specific race issues, while none of them take all the issues on, and because I’m so immersed in this literature that, trying to see what will be most accessible and comprehensive to someone who isn’t writing a thesis on race, is nearly impossible!

Speaking of learning and activism, BFP has mentioned that she’s planning to write some posts on how to organise, and while I reflect on the direction this anti-racism collective will take, I really feel that some bloggy discussions on techniques, methods, strategies, and tactics in activism would be good (and timely!). After some stints in activist campaigns that left me feeling very negative about activism, I’d like to have a better-informed idea of what I’m getting into, as well as more ideas about how to do activist work. Publicity about diverse campaigns and strategies is great for getting ideas, but I’d love to see more ‘technical’ discussion of how to conduct activist organising. I think a lot of people would benefit from this kind of blog activity, and also that lots of people have something to contribute to a discussion like that. So, this is my official cheer to BFP, and any other bloggers who want to kick-start something like this.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and begin by talking about the anti-racism reading group we have planned for next week. Eventually, I’d like to organise and host a blog carnival about organising (but that may have to wait until I finish the big T). Who’s with me?

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t win, but I don’t have to.

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

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

More later, with added Fanon!

I’ve been lax with my blogging over the past few days because Real Life intervened. I wrote about 3000 words of thesis in 2 days and then family from India came to town.

I’ve been busy busy busy busy and no signs of life slowing down are emerging.

Wiradjuri campaigners at Lake Cowal have also been busy. Along with a Corroboree to celebrate Easter, campaigners are occupying the offices of Barrick Gold to protest the illegal and dangerous gold mine on Wiradjuri lands.

There are also refugees in Villawood immigration detention centre on a hunger strike to protest against a new wave of deportations.

About 60 prisoners at one of Australia’s notorious immigration detention centres launched a hunger strike on March 28 to protest against a new wave of refugee deportations

In the face of massive, life-threatening issues like deportation and cyanide poisoning of indigenous waters, I feel a bit intimidated in expressing the doubts and difficulties of trying to start up an anti-racism collective at my university.
But we have to start somewhere. Hopefully we can start tackling issues around the Block once we kick things off.

I have to organise a reading group to get it all started, but I’m not sure what’s a good starting point. If anyone has any suggestions for a reading (preferably a self-contained chapter from a book, or an article, bonus if it’s available as a PDF), I’d really appreciate it. I want to discuss anti-racist activism broadly, as well as delve into the political/psychic/ontological/material/historical/social dimensions of race.

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

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