She who stumbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BlackAmazon has talked about this repeatedly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have to say, after the whole Yes Means Yes imbroglio, I swore to myself that I would never ever get involved in another US feminist blogwar. If US women of colour — who clean up after white women, who take care of white women’s kids, who cook white women’s food, who teach white women in schools, etc. etc. — are invisible to white women, then international women of colour must really be off the radar! And I’m okay with that, because there’s not much I need from white North American women, nor do I want to be part of their “feminist” movement, and I’m sure as hell not gonna fight them for it. I have my own battles to fight, and plenty to gain, right here.

[Notice how I've just given up on promising posts that I know I won't deliver on? Blogging is just not my priority lately. This one only appears because it's a very spontaneous response to some web shenanigans.]

But I did get involved. After seeing the asinine behaviour of Brooke Warner and Krista Lyons-Gould, editor and manager of Seal Press (the people who brought you Full Frontal Feminism and Love And Consequences), I made a comment on their blog post about the issue. (In case you didn’t catch it, they were incredibly racist and rude on Blackamazon’s blog.)

Along with other comments made by other women of colour, mine was deleted. Discussion in closed forums revealed tales of others’ deleted comments.

My comment was about the gross double-standards being perpetuated by Brooke and Krista, and the Seal Press “team”. In The World According to Brooke and Krista, only they are allowed to have feelings, and they get to lash out at anyone they want to when their feelings are hurt. They don’t have to face any consequences for lashing out, because they’re more important than everyone, especially women of colour, on account of they own the means of production. Women of colour should be grateful to Brooke and Krista for even condescending to speak to us, because they’re so busy running their press that they have no time to try to work with women of colour, who are basically unpublishable anyway, their books will never sell. Oh, but when they do publish women of colour, they get to use that work to flounce around proclaiming how virtuous and anti-racist they are, because clearly women of colour are choosing to work for them and not those other white people over there.

Secondly, my point was that they basically got a whole lot of business advice for free in the comment thread on their blog. People were critical, but many came with a genuine spirit of engaging and educating, and gave a lot of professional-quality advice to the Seal editors. I wanted to emphasise that they should at least acknowledge the people who gave them this advice, since appropriating and then taking the credit for the contributions of women of colour tends to be somewhat endemic amongst white feminists. It’s a bit of a hot-button issue right now.

Now, it hardly needs to be pointed out that deleting comments that are critical of you and that put pressure on you to act in a certain way really really doesn’t inspire trust in people who you just insulted. In fact, it might even be called a negative discourse that is engaged by haters.

…

Ohnoes, it looks like only white women can affect the precise level of whiny melodrama that it would take to make assertions like that. I’ll have to settle for actual critique.

In that vein, I’m going to invite anyone who’s had their comment deleted to post it here. Say what you think about Seal Press!

Me, personally, in the spirit of skewering double standards, I’m gonna settle for the immortal words of Blackamazon: Fuck Seal Press. You just made yourselves irrelevant.

I have a feeling that if the irrelevant feminists are the ones getting book deals, then pretty soon all the feminists doing groundbreaking work will stop paying attention to what gets published in books and start looking at other media that feminists have used to express themselves. I mean, that’s what feminist historiography has done — find women outside the malestream and analyse their strategies for survival, growth, change and challenge. Radical woc internationalism may have a ways go, but compared to this crap we’re basically on fire.

Edited to add: And in the spirit of acknowledging your sources, I want to quote Jessica Hoffmann’s An Open Letter to White Feminists:

[The] dominant, white-led feminist movement is consistently unresponsive to the grassroots while it works within and strengthens the very structures that violently maintain social hierarchies.

[...]

In the summer and fall of 2007, I found myself invited to participate in a slew of meetings and conference calls organized by small, new majority-white “feminist” groups around the United States; over and over again, members wondered earnestly how they could draw more women of color to participate in their projects. Around the same time, I read and heard a whole lot of white feminist media makers explaining that “we” need to show young women “why feminism matters.” Sometimes I asked them why, in the face of a series of egregious, in some cases highly publicized examples of state violence against marginalized people (e.g., Jena 6 and the New Jersey 4), prominent white feminists are MIA in and largely ignorant of the work and analyses of major, often feminist-of-color-led movements against state violence? And, I wondered, what is your feminism for, and why does it matter? Because feminists of color don’t seem to need convincing on that point — they’re engaged in profound, intergenerational, cross-cultural grassroots work that is transforming not only feminist movement but all social-change movements. [emphasis mine]

It’s not just the “haters” saying this. So does it make it easier to digest if a white woman says it?

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’ll be posting more on the Aurukun case in a little while. I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging… I have no idea how people with full-time jobs can make time for it, honestly!

But for now I have a bit of a commentary and critique of other things happening in the feminist blogosphere.

Jessica Valenti has announced that she has a new book contract and has put the call out for an anthology on rape culture that she’s co-editing with Jaclyn Friedman.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Potential essay subjects could include;

* Revamping how public sex education is taught, and to whom.

* The new backlash against rape survivors (i.e., media obsession with drinking, Girls Gone Wild culture being to blame for assault)

* Bringing men back into the conversation, making men leaders in the movement to end rape culture

* Thoughts on “enthusiastic consent”

* Taking Back the Porn: How changing the pornography industry can stop rape

* The power of language (naming rape for what it is, or the new myth of “gray rape”)

* A primer for men on sexual assault

* How good sex (where women’s pleasure is central) can mean an end to rape culture, and how a society that values genuine female sexual pleasure will make it easier to identify and prosecute rapists.

* Rethinking sexual interaction as a private joint performance, as opposed to as an exchange of a commodity or service

* An analysis of the economics of female sexual alienation/oppression, and an economic model for resistance

* Holding the MSM accountable for torture porn, kidnapping crusades and faux feminism.

* Desegmenting the Market: overcoming commercially enforced sexual stereotypes to organize across race, class, gender, and difference

* On pulling out the invisible lynchpin of rape culture: homophobia

* Creating accurate media representations of rape

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

In general, I’m very supportive of exploring consensuality as an element of rape culture, and some of the proposals in the call-out are exciting to me as a feminist. I think that good sex education ought to be a big priority of feminism, to empower young people to make healthy decisions about their lives and bodies. I also think that sex education can be a life-long endeavour, that adult feminists have a great deal to learn, and young people a great deal to offer, when it comes to understanding sex and revolutionising sexual practice.

However, the way this anthology is being framed seems really limited to me.

I’ve seen pro-consent activism that went into a great deal of depth about the needs of a consent-based approach to sexuality. Groups like worldwithout in Melbourne have some great resources on sexual assault based on ongoing activism they’re doing around the issue. So I’m in no way unsupportive of the stated aims of this project.

But while talking about the IDA for community response to sexual assault, I also heard some criticism of consent-based work on sexual violence because of all the people who experience sexual violence without having the opportunity to give or withhold consent. Indeed, given that the majority of sexual assaults occur in institutions, not within the family or amongst intimate partners, this is a glaring omission.

The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.

This data reminds me of some of Bfp’s writing about women’s experiences of sexual violence when crossing the US-Mexico border, women who are raped by border guards or in immigration detention facilities…

And I think that this kind of blatantly non-consensual sexual contact, which can either serve the purpose of sexual pleasure or not, occurring in institutional contexts has to be considered when defining the term ‘rape culture’ and deciding what “the key to dismantling rape culture” really is.
I don’t think that the call-out for the anthology deals with systemic and institutionalised sexual violence very well, and it seems to privatise the issue, so that partner and acquaintance rape is central to the understanding of ‘rape culture’ being employed.

So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?

That’s a very strong claim to make, and I have serious doubts that an anthology framed as it is in the call-out will be able to live up to that claim.

I think that this call-out is implicitly centralising certain kinds of women and certain kinds of rape by crowding-out many other kinds of women, and other kinds of rape. And I thought feminism, and Valenti, had learned enough from “identity politics” to realise how problematic that is.

And in that case, I don’t think it’s advisable to claim to “fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex” or to frame a pleasure-positive, consent-based sexual politics in opposition to an oversimplified caricature of older feminisms. For one thing, older feminists such as Betty Dodson have done ground-breaking work in promoting female sexual pleasure as a means of empowerment; for another, this newer work wouldn’t exist without that older work.

In fact, the only means I have of making sense of daily cavity searches in women’s prisons, or of friends telling me about the humiliation and fear they experienced when being strip-searched, is to divest myself of any concept of sexual consent and to return to the older feminist catchphrase: “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power”.

Answer: when it happens to Aboriginal women.

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

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

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

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

More details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

from the Sydney Morning Herald

WHEN David Williams’s uncle returned from the Korean War - exhausted and recovering from a gunshot wound - the family took him to Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane. The door was closed in their faces.”They basically said, ‘Just another black coon’,” Mr Williams said. “They didn’t want to know us. The fact that he fought for his country - nearly died for his country - didn’t mean anything to them.

“They left him to look after himself and he ended up hitting the booze and just slowly deteriorating.”

This was not an isolated experience. About 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fought in World War I and as many as 5000 took part in World War II, according to Australian War Memorial records.

But while they fought alongside other Australians in the trenches, on the battlefields of Europe and in the jungles of Asia, those who made it back often received little or no recognition of their efforts and continued to face racism at home.

Next Wednesday, despite criticism from the RSL, their unique experiences and contribution will be recognised when hundreds of indigenous veterans and their descendants march through Redfern in Sydney’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anzac Day parade.

The RSL is an extremely conservative organisation. They’ve taken many anti-queer stances in the past. It’s hardly surprising that they’re opposing this effort to recognise indigenous soldiers (and subtly undo the image of white masculinity that’s celebrated as quintessentially “Australian” on ANZAC Day). Because of course, so long as white Australians get recognised, everyone else is unimportant!

Why isn’t Alan Jones being lambasted like Don Imus?

Dom Knight, of the Sydney Morning Herald blog thinks he knows why.

Honestly, I’m not impressed with his analysis.

These two stories about multi-millionaire white broadcasters exercising appalling judgement when talking about minorities, though, say a great deal about each society.America is hypersensitive on the subject of race. I guess a legacy of slavery will do that to you – although a legacy of genocide doesn’t seem to have achieved the same result in Australia.

Um, what about the American legacy of genocide?

I think it was the work of black activists who’ve worked consistently over decades to push an anti-racist agenda, not the harried conscience of white broadcasting authorities or ad execs.

We haven’t had a movement with the kind of momentum of the anti-racist movement in the USA because we’re a much smaller country and the indigenous rights movements have focused around legal reform, suffrage, land rights, health, housing, etc.

By contrast, anti-racist movements by people of colour have been few and small. Although the post-invasion history of Australia does feature non-indigenous people of colour, those people were deliberately kept outside formal politics and weren’t numerous enough to force anti-racism onto the political agenda.

Since multiculturalism became the official policy, however, most ‘leadership’ in ‘ethnic communities’ is heavily mediated by the state. State funding and agencies underwrite most political activity by community groups, and they are made accountable to state agencies for that funding.

So what we’ve seen is a polarisation and depoliticisation of the terms of debate around race, with right wing media personalities and politicians talking about “getting tough” and having no time for “political correctness”, while left wing activists are left with this soft-centred discourse of “culture” and “tolerance” that doesn’t address the inequalities and injustices that underpin racism.

It’s really difficult for coalitions to form around these issues too, because communities are so besieged.

That’s why the response to Jones was to reassert the racist norm rather than “go[ing] completely overboard, American-style” and ousting the fucker. We don’t have the cultural or political tools to make that happen.

And that’s why Knight’s complacency and white-centrism will only usher in more of Jones-style hate speech.

So the Australian Communications and Media Authority have finally (a year and a half later!) condescended to determining that Alan Jones* made remarks before the Cronulla riot that encouraged violence against “Middle Eastern” Australians (well, there were Bangladeshi, Thai, and Greek people assaulted that day too, but nobody cares about that, do they?). Does the fact that David Marr wrote about it days after the riot happened make any difference to anyone?

What the fuck do these people think they’re playing at?!?

* Prominent right-wing talkback radio personality in Sydney. He’s been brought up on several fraud and hate speech charges but still manages to connive his way out.

EDIT: Jones is on the defensive, with the backing of the Prime Minister. “Permission to hate” indeed. Ugh.

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.
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[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.

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 my