She who stumbles

A message forwarded over e-mail lists:

26th January 2008

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT

TO ALL AUSTRALIANS

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE HAVE SURVIVED

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 »

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.

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!

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.

Wow, Brownfemipower of the excellent Women of color blog tagged me with a Thinking Blogger Award! What an honour!

Here are the rules of the meme:

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

These are my picks. These are blogs that have pushed my mental boundaries in one way or another that really stuck in my mind. Since I’m new to the blogosphere and the meme, I’m gonna mix up recent and older posts, because there sure is some solid gold buried in archives.

1. Angry Brown Butch: I found Jack’s blog when it was linked by someone in an anti-racist LiveJournal community. The issue was gentrification. This post transformed my ideas about what’s going on in the Redfern community. Although I’d been told that gentrification has already happened in Sydney, I knew from a research project I did for an undergrad class that displacement and neoliberalism are affecting people of colour on the very doorstep of our university. Linking capitalism to indigenous dispossession (and subsequent indigenous housing issues) through Jack’s words on gentrification and race blew my mind. While the communities Jack is talking about aren’t necessarily indigenous, the way Jack talks about race, space, and class just really hit the right mental nodes.

2. Diaries of an eccentric nerd athaba hijibiji: Zooey’s posts on postcolonialism and radical women of colour feminism do a lot for me. They make me think, they make me feel implicated/included in the struggles of people of colour around the world, but at the same time they challenge me about the privilege I have in relation to those struggles. Zooey strikes a balance between reflection and responsibility; theory and practice. I’m especially grateful for her post Women of Color Feminisms, Chela Sandoval etc. which encompasses so many excellent thoughts.

3. Women of Color blog: BFP manages to push my mind in new directions with pretty much every post. The “thinkiest” for me so far has been her post on pornography, which is a wonderful example of her amazing mind! BFP is a crucible of synthesis, because she combines these insights with posts about activism in the arenas of labour, anti-violence, media, anti-racism, peace, queer rights… as well as occasional posts about literature, academia, and theory. How can all this fit inside one woman? This question inspires me to push myself to understand and engage more and in new ways.
I know BFP tagged me with this meme (meaning she got the award before tagging me with it), but I’m so in awe of her blog that I have to name her here.

4. Having Read the Fine Print……: I’ve just recently started reading this blog, but the link in Donna’s blog to BlackAmazon’s post on “Sofia Coppola feminism” really got me thinking about how to deconstruct the feminist category of “woman” (despite the naysayers who herald the death of justice by such a move), and made it abundantly clear why we need to keep doing that.

5. Queer Dewd Formerly Known As (): QD/Bitch|Lab has, in the past, got me thinking really deeply about feminism and about the implications of our own political stances. Posts about sex wars and feminist positioning reignited my interest in feminism, which had very much taken a back seat to my politics until recently.

According to the rules, I’m only allowed to tag five people, but I should share the love with every blog I read. My time is precious and I spend it on these for a reason — your blogs are good, people! I don’t think there’s a blogger who doesn’t make me think. But these have influenced my thinking in particularly noticeable ways, and I wanna acknowledge that. I have no doubt that all of you will get the acknowledgement you deserve from the blogosphere, because you are brilliant.

Goodnight!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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