This is very vaguely based on a workshop at a shitty student conference that I was going to run. I didn’t because something made me very angry and I pulled out.
Let’s rewind to the point when I got involved in activism. One of the colleges at my university decided to have a British colonialism themed party. Exclusively sub-continental waiters, dressed in Indian clothes served some of the most elite white kids in the country. I was livid. And the blood was going to boil out of my skin when I realised how fucking poorly it was being addressed by the university, which wanted to cover it up from the media. I felt powerless behind a facebook screen (where I was venting all my anger), and that’s what prompted me to join student politics. Fun.
One of the first things I did was attend a meeting of the anti-racism collective. It was awful- with the exception of two people they were all self-important white kids. Maybe I’m being a little uncharitable here, but at the time I was quite angry and that was exactly what they struck me as. They weren’t discussing the Raj party at all, but focused solely on two issues- the NT intervention and refugees. That’s because, the anti-racism collective on campus only focuses on the NT intervention and refugees. Both of these are issues I feel very strongly about, but racism in Australia is NOT isolated to these instances! I remember talking about racism on campus at one point, it was totally brushed off- "like, what racism on campus?"
(And then I joined the Greens, then Grassroots and the rest is history)
In essence, there is nobody on campus actually addressing racial injustice (properly) and as far as I’m concerned, to ignore injustice is the same as perpetuating it. The university is a very important site of political activism so this sucks :-( Even the political left only pay lip-service to the endemic problem of racism.
I think this is a part of a larger cultural problem in Australia. We’ve all been fed with ideals, since school of being the land of the “fair go” and to contest this image is taboo. Hell, it's taken me a while to even be able to say to myself that Australia is a fundamentally racist country. I’ve been watching a few of the videos of racist bus rants and reading about racism in the news. Despite the increasing frequency, there is never acknowledgement in the reportage of an underlying systemic problem: it’s always fobbed off as one raving lunatic.
Additionally, it needs to be noted that racism is not perpetrated by white people alone, just as sexism isn’t just the fault of men. In my experience, most explicit racism is horizontal. There’s this idiotic idea that being a PoC legitimates bigotry against other PoC. I have never heard a white person use the term “fob” and it’s other Indians, not white people, who have made me feel the need to “edit” my ethnic-ness. Also, the Anti-Racism Collective is just a bunch of people who just meet on the grass once a week, why aren’t there more PoC involved? White kids can’t entirely be blamed for their white-ness. Now that I've gotten to know some of them better, I understand that they are very well-meaning and good people. It doesn't change the fact that the whole situation is messed.
There’s another important site of racism that’s regularly overlooked: (drumroll………) academia. In the late 1960s, a number of women realised that there was a huge vacuum in the political and academic left that hadn’t engaged with the position of women. The other, more prolific ideology of oppression at the time was Marxism and so they tried to position women somewhere with relation to class structures. This led to some of them trying to subsume patriarchal relations within Marxist class, others to see it entirely outside capitalism, and yet others to consider the relationship in a much more fluid sense (ok this is incredibly crude version but that’s the essence of it). In any case, the fight to bring feminism within the purview of academia, as a legitimate subject of discussion was not easy but it eventually carved its own niche in the social sciences. Feminist analysis today is incredibly nuanced, diverse and well-theorised. No such struggle happened for academic racism, except, like some vague consciousness which started to seep in by the 80’s: "iz bad, omg dun do it”.
This year, one of my courses for Honours required us to delve into The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. Many of the anecdotes he uses and many of the philosophers he quotes are Indian. To my own horror, my first reaction was to assume that they wouldn’t be legit.
After I noticed this HORRIBLE thought process, I started to reflect about my overall experience at university. It’s a common topic of debate that the mass media sucks at representing ethnic people. Well, academia is bad too. In all these years of study, almost everything I’ve read has been the story told by dead, white guys. They are the Protectors and Producers of Important Ideas, for all the world to follow. Philosophy is Kant, Hobbes, Locke. Economics is Smith, Marx and Keynes, though I guess, we did once touch on some Latin authors. In all the units of Government and International Relations I did, I don’t even think a single major theorist was non-white (except maybe in the Politics of China). The more I think about it, the more frustrating it is, because I’ve always held academia as a kind of enlightened bubble outside the drudgery and ignorance of the "real world”: it ain’t.
Anyway I need to finish this and do some real work. It may all sound relatively petty. But, the fact is that small, insidious things like this are what snowball into more extreme oppressions like refugees and NT intervention. I mean, if academia- a tool to redeem oppression, is perpetrating and conditioning people against recognising the legitimacy of non-Western perspectives… we’re fucked.
EDIT:
So uh... I forgot about the PoC discussion thing oops
Let’s rewind to the point when I got involved in activism. One of the colleges at my university decided to have a British colonialism themed party. Exclusively sub-continental waiters, dressed in Indian clothes served some of the most elite white kids in the country. I was livid. And the blood was going to boil out of my skin when I realised how fucking poorly it was being addressed by the university, which wanted to cover it up from the media. I felt powerless behind a facebook screen (where I was venting all my anger), and that’s what prompted me to join student politics. Fun.
One of the first things I did was attend a meeting of the anti-racism collective. It was awful- with the exception of two people they were all self-important white kids. Maybe I’m being a little uncharitable here, but at the time I was quite angry and that was exactly what they struck me as. They weren’t discussing the Raj party at all, but focused solely on two issues- the NT intervention and refugees. That’s because, the anti-racism collective on campus only focuses on the NT intervention and refugees. Both of these are issues I feel very strongly about, but racism in Australia is NOT isolated to these instances! I remember talking about racism on campus at one point, it was totally brushed off- "like, what racism on campus?"
(And then I joined the Greens, then Grassroots and the rest is history)
In essence, there is nobody on campus actually addressing racial injustice (properly) and as far as I’m concerned, to ignore injustice is the same as perpetuating it. The university is a very important site of political activism so this sucks :-( Even the political left only pay lip-service to the endemic problem of racism.
I think this is a part of a larger cultural problem in Australia. We’ve all been fed with ideals, since school of being the land of the “fair go” and to contest this image is taboo. Hell, it's taken me a while to even be able to say to myself that Australia is a fundamentally racist country. I’ve been watching a few of the videos of racist bus rants and reading about racism in the news. Despite the increasing frequency, there is never acknowledgement in the reportage of an underlying systemic problem: it’s always fobbed off as one raving lunatic.
Additionally, it needs to be noted that racism is not perpetrated by white people alone, just as sexism isn’t just the fault of men. In my experience, most explicit racism is horizontal. There’s this idiotic idea that being a PoC legitimates bigotry against other PoC. I have never heard a white person use the term “fob” and it’s other Indians, not white people, who have made me feel the need to “edit” my ethnic-ness. Also, the Anti-Racism Collective is just a bunch of people who just meet on the grass once a week, why aren’t there more PoC involved? White kids can’t entirely be blamed for their white-ness. Now that I've gotten to know some of them better, I understand that they are very well-meaning and good people. It doesn't change the fact that the whole situation is messed.
There’s another important site of racism that’s regularly overlooked: (drumroll………) academia. In the late 1960s, a number of women realised that there was a huge vacuum in the political and academic left that hadn’t engaged with the position of women. The other, more prolific ideology of oppression at the time was Marxism and so they tried to position women somewhere with relation to class structures. This led to some of them trying to subsume patriarchal relations within Marxist class, others to see it entirely outside capitalism, and yet others to consider the relationship in a much more fluid sense (ok this is incredibly crude version but that’s the essence of it). In any case, the fight to bring feminism within the purview of academia, as a legitimate subject of discussion was not easy but it eventually carved its own niche in the social sciences. Feminist analysis today is incredibly nuanced, diverse and well-theorised. No such struggle happened for academic racism, except, like some vague consciousness which started to seep in by the 80’s: "iz bad, omg dun do it”.
This year, one of my courses for Honours required us to delve into The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen. Many of the anecdotes he uses and many of the philosophers he quotes are Indian. To my own horror, my first reaction was to assume that they wouldn’t be legit.
After I noticed this HORRIBLE thought process, I started to reflect about my overall experience at university. It’s a common topic of debate that the mass media sucks at representing ethnic people. Well, academia is bad too. In all these years of study, almost everything I’ve read has been the story told by dead, white guys. They are the Protectors and Producers of Important Ideas, for all the world to follow. Philosophy is Kant, Hobbes, Locke. Economics is Smith, Marx and Keynes, though I guess, we did once touch on some Latin authors. In all the units of Government and International Relations I did, I don’t even think a single major theorist was non-white (except maybe in the Politics of China). The more I think about it, the more frustrating it is, because I’ve always held academia as a kind of enlightened bubble outside the drudgery and ignorance of the "real world”: it ain’t.
Anyway I need to finish this and do some real work. It may all sound relatively petty. But, the fact is that small, insidious things like this are what snowball into more extreme oppressions like refugees and NT intervention. I mean, if academia- a tool to redeem oppression, is perpetrating and conditioning people against recognising the legitimacy of non-Western perspectives… we’re fucked.
EDIT:
So uh... I forgot about the PoC discussion thing oops
