She who stumbles

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!

My thesis is finished, making me a free agent (almost) now!

I’m very slightly burnt out on academic writing, but I do have some stuff to say Re: the thesis, knowledge production, race and academia. I’ll probably get around to writing that later in the week.

Also, APEC is coming up. I will be busy.

I need to get back into the swing of the blogosphere. Right now my intellectual and political interests aren’t very current-affairs-y and not neatly fitting into blog post formats. Hopefully that’ll change once I catch up on blogs.

Meanwhile, Blackamazon put together a fantastic edition of the Carnival Of Radical Action: Back to School - Knowledge as Radical Action. Go check that out!

Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis is hosting the next CORA!

But for now I’ll do a little dance of freedom! {dance}

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

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?

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.

I just read a paper presented at a conference (not published on the site) which goes into anal detail, fetishising whiteness and being all dismissive of “the left”. As if it were a homogeneous entity. As if “the right” represents the views of PoC equally, instead of trampling all over them (literally and figuratively).

I’m sick to death of (white) academics from the so-called “left” apologising for racist violence. I’m sick of hyper-detailed ethnomethodology being used to erase the power differentials between people of colour and white people. I’m sick of self-absorbed academic relativism that refuses to see the bigger picture.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

I can’t believe I have to share the stage with this shit. Or even keep to polite, middle-class ways of critiquing it, rather than tear it to shreds like I really want to.

Instead, I’m gonna repost something I wrote for a different community, but which I’d like to share here. The sentiments are all the same, but I’ve thought more about it since then. As usual for me, stuff I wrote a few months ago now seems really naive. I’ve added emphasis to the things I’ve been thinking about.

________________________________________________________________________________________

What follows is an email I wrote to a well-known Sydney community activist, after she made a presentation at an academic conference about racism. I’ll add some footnotes to contextualise everything for any non-Australian readers.

—————————————————————–
I heard your paper yesterday at the conference.
I made the comment that the response to gang rapes in
Sydney by young Lebanese men[1] wasn’t really feminist.

First of all, I want to apologise, because I ended up making a
statement that used your presentation as a soapbox, rather than
engaging with it. But I’ve been thinking about it more, and I think
there’s a lot more to be said for feminism around this issue, even
if white feminists have been lacking in a critical voice.

First of all, I just want to elaborate on my comment about the
threat of rape, and the positioning of the rapists in popular
media. This kind of sexualised racism is nothing new; bell hooks
talks about the same thing with regard to black men in the USA
being demonised through their sexuality. But what she also says is
that this was done not just to control white women’s sexuality, but
also to prevent miscegenation. And she defines miscegenation not so
much as interbreeding (even though for biological racists, that’s
what it was; and it created difficult issues for slave owners as
well) as relationships that mix race and produce unmanageable
political loyalties.

At the same time, it made white women complicit in white
imperialist patriarchy. By positioning them as objects of its
extension, and their bodies literally as national territory, rather
than animated by independent political wills, it fostered a
separation between white and black on sexual and affective grounds.
The same thing is happening in Australia: with the Sheehans[2] of the
world talking about gang rape as if the racial dimension of the
crime override the gendered dimensions of the crime, they’ve
re-made the gang rapes into crimes against the (white) nation, not
crimes against women’s bodies. They’ve made them into treason and
sedition, not rape.

I think white feminists have fed very neatly into this in ways I
find positively creepy. [...]

I’m not saying that the race relations of the USA map perfectly to
the situation in Australia; not nearly. But that non-white
feminists have something to say about racialised sexism, and have
been saying these things for a long time. [...]

But, going back to the point Ghassan Hage made[3] yesterday, about
comparing patriarchies, I don’t think it’s so simple a case of
different, discrete, and independent patriarchies as he made it out
to be. Because gender relations in the Arab and Muslim world have
for many years been formed and re-formed by imperialism. It’s
mind-boggling that feminists can forget that the forces that became
the Taliban were sponsored by the USA! Not to mention the entire
history of Western imperialism in the Middle East.

The fact is that it’s not about comparing patriarchies. It’s about
critiquing imperialism as a mode of patriarchy, and critiquing the
ways in which white imperialist patriarchy uses non-Western
patriarchy to its own ends, and has done so for a long time.

At the same time as patriarchy was formed and re-formed by
imperialism in the Arab/Muslim world, so too has feminism. Some
(white) friends of mine were talking about whether white feminists
should engage in “missionary” work to spread feminism to non-Western
countries. Well, it’s already happened, and the non-white feminists
it made are already talking back to those white feminisms/ists.
What’s going on is a strategic amnesia/deafness about those
critiques and movements, as white people dither over whether or not
there’s a White (Pseudo-)Feminist’s Burden.
At the same time, the same thing is going on within Australia. The
other week Leslie Cannold, a very prominent (white) Australian
feminist scholar, wrote an article in the SMH saying that women
from traditional ethnic and religious backgrounds should be treated
as if they are victims of domestic violence, and given “refuge” if
they want to “escape” their traditional families[4]. She didn’t quote
a single “ethnic” or religious woman.

So, what I want to ask is whether there’s a place for those
anti-imperialist feminist critiques in the community/activist
response to contemporary Islamophobia? If so, what might that place
be, and how might these insights be used to form strategies,
alliances, activities in the community sector as it deals with the
new racism?
Although there have been many analyses of Muslim women under the
Howard regime, I don’t think enough of them have been explicitly
feminist, or have drawn on the broad array of postcolonial,
non-white feminist critique. There’s a deeply incisive body of
thought on issues of race and gender already around in global
circles, which isn’t finding its way into Australia, or so I see.
But feminists in other countries are using it to combat the forms
of racism in their societies, and I think it has a big place in
combating Islamophobia.

Can we decouple white feminism from the positioning of white
femininity under white imperialist patriarchy? If so, how?
Because I definitely think that colonial patriarchy had a guiding
hand in forming and re-forming Western patriarchy in the imperial
centres, and white feminists have swallowed the platitudes of white
patriarchy and ignored that.
—————————————————————–

[1] In 2001 a series of gang rapes were committed in Western Sydney by young men (aged from as young as 14 to their early 20s). Most of these young men were either first or second-generation Lebanese migrants (I think I remember one or two of them described as Egyptian, but I can’t think which case it was). The victims of the rapes were young white teenage women. What followed was a moral panic about Arab masculinity/sexuality and misogyny.

[2] Paul Sheehan is a prominent right-wing journalist. About 2 months ago he released a book titled Girls Like You about the gang rapes. In it he argues that basically Islamic culture is misogynistic and encourages rape, amongst other things. The thing is, this is what the defence lawyers of the rapists also argued in their trials.

[3] Ghassan Hage is a prominent Lebanese-born Australian anthropologist. He’s the chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, and he was the convenor of the conference last week.
The point he made was that feminism is an inherently progressive philosophy, because it compares the past and present, and feminist activism tries to make the future better than the present and past. If we can compare patriarchies historically, then why can’t we compare them cross-culturally?
(I do think he understood the limitations of this line of questioning. I think he was more interested in inviting a clear and comprehensive answer to this question than in playing devil’s advocate.)

[4] http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/caught-between-right-and-right/2006/10/08/1160246008793.html — the Sydney Morning Herald is one of the major daily newspapers in Sydney.

Recently the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj el-Dinh al Hilaily, in his Ramadan sermon, made comments to the effect that women are to blame for rape. He compared uncovered (female) flesh to cat meat, and said that if women stayed at home in their hijabs there wouldn’t have been any problem.

There’s been a similar backlash around his comments in the press and by public figures. Paul Sheehan pretty much sums it up in his article: Sheik’s views show up the wider problem with Muslim men (27/10/2006)

I think we need a similarly comprehensive critique of this issue as with “cross-cultural patriarchy”.

The Mufti is actually supported by the government. He was hand-picked about a year and a half ago, after the London Metro bombings, to be part of the government’s Muslim Community Reference Group. In this policy, there’s an explicit assumption that ethnicity is the cause of terrorism and other social problems. The MCRG is also made up of conservative, middle-aged, middle-class men, most of whom don’t speak English very well, and doesn’t represent the breadth of diversity in the Australian Muslim and Arab community.

Again we can see how the logic of “client patriarchies” is applicable here. While the voices of Muslim women are silenced and co-opted because they’re “too oppressed” to speak for themselves (patently untrue), the government is sponsoring conservative community leaders to speak on behalf of it, to aid their demonisation campaign.

________________________________________________________________________________________

It pisses me off that white academics are playing with this economy of race, and trading on white femininity to demonise men of colour. Making out like the “revenge attacks” were equivalent to the riot itself (and minimising the racism that has fed into Islamophobia with some glib, dismissive asides), and using some ambiguous one-sided statements to support sexualised racism.

HOW THE FUCK IS IT “FEMINIST” TO TRADE ON WHITENESS IN ORDER TO BE TREATED AS A HUMAN BEING??? TO STEP ON OTHER WOMEN JUST TO GET RESPECT???

The people who lose out when white women trade on their whiteness to demonise men of colour and make themselves look good are women of colour. Does it matter to these theorists that thousands of Muslim women are afraid to leave their homes because the Good White Patriarchy has eradicated the “threat” to “their women”?

Co-operating with this macho crap makes white women complicit, not “anti-racist”. It’s White Woman Syndrome — trading on victim femininity for white privilege — NOT feminism.

Moreover, these academics appear to not know their shit. After working so hard to familiarise myself with the world of critical race theory, radical women of color, and critical whiteness studies, that really pisses me off. These people are given audience and publishing space for their hedging and apologism, without even referring to the major theorists who’ve worked before them and opened up so much critical space. It’s not just dodgy politics, it’s dodgy work.

I guess Ruth Frankenberg was right when she said that studying whiteness can just reinforce its centrality, I’d just never seen it played out so appallingly.

I guess I’m exaggerating over a few articles here, but it really is the thin edge of the wedge.

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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.