raceandthecity

Going Post-Racial: are we there yet?

This is a question I posed at the beginning of the project Race and the City. The temporal context was a determined Barack Obama in election mode in 2008, priming the hopeful and downtrodden into believing that ‘Yes we can’. This affirmative phrase was replete with possibilities, and here we are in 2010 with Obama as Commander – in – Chief, and while the world breathes a qualified sigh of relief, the possibilities seem somewhat less than they were.

In Australia, little has changed in terms of race and politics as I track the essays that have been randomly posted onto this site. Asylum seekers remain political footballs into the 2010 Federal election. Aboriginal activists and communities’ protest at the continuation of the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory is hardly registered in the halls of power, let alone mentioned as a token gesture in any mainstream news brief.

Most tellingly, in the last week of June 2010, no one was found culpable for the death of an elder who cooked in the back of a police wagon as law enforcement authorities ferried him across the continent like a caged animal. Where is the duty of care? Who is responsible? It is not like this is an isolated case. There are countless documented incidences of abuse, deaths in custody, and violence at the hands of authorities, yet no one is ever ‘culpable’. This is all about race and no one wants to face up to it. How can we in Australia even consider the idea of the post-race state, when this is our collective reality?

More to come….

In November 2009, Swiss voters went to a referendum on the question of whether the construction of minarets on mosques should be banned. A campaign, spearheaded by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), elicited a backlash with 57.5% per cent of voters approving the ban.

According to news reports, ‘[a]fter the official results were known, far-right politicians celebrated, while the government sought to assure the Muslim minority that a ban on minarets was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture” (Al-Jazeera).

Not unlike the contemporary struggles taking place in Western Sydney and its outskirts, architecture and zoning laws have become the fields in which questions of culture, religion, race, place and visibility are being contested in the public space, with dominant groups organising at the local level to assert cultural supremacy over ‘their’ suburbs.

More to come…

‘Don’t let her lack of a headscarf and her donning a bikini in public fool you. Miss Michigan USA, Rimah (sic) Fakih is a Muslim activist and propagandist extraordinaire’ (Schlussel 2010).

So wrote ultra-conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel in her blog about Rima Fakih, the Arab American woman who won the title of Miss USA in May 2010. Schlussel’s site is not for the faint-hearted, calling Fakih ‘Miss Hezbollah USA’ and ‘Miss Hezbo’ on account of the unlikely winner’s background. Not enough that she is Lebanese Muslim, but a Shi’a from the south had the right wing commentariat quaking in their high heels.

Aside from the primitive racism encased in Schlussel’s bilious commentary, her mention of both headscarf and bikini in the same sentence perfectly encapsulates the delimits of Western discourse about Muslim women. As Australian activist and theorist Anne Aly argues, ‘unlike members of any other religious group, a Muslim woman’s character and identity will almost always be brought into question based on what she wears, or does not wear’ (Aly 2009: 22).

An optimistic reading of Fakih winning Miss USA is that she, like Barack Hussein Obama, has broken the glass ceiling. This might count towards further proof that America is truly a ‘post-racial’ state. First, an African American wins the US presidency, then an Arab American Muslim reigns supreme as Miss USA in her glittering tiara. What a shame that the latter contest is a sexist event that is all about objectifying women’s bodies and reducing their individual agency to how well the contestant can negotiate a catwalk in bikini and back-breaking heels.

Hijab Scene #1

‘You dress strange,’ said a tenth-grade boy with bright blue hair

to the new Muslim girl with the headscarf in homeroom,

his tongue-rings clicking on the ‘tr’ in ‘strange’.

(Kahf 2003: 41)

In the same tumultuous week as the Miss USA pageant, liberal feminists and Christian fundamentalists alike were urging a ban on the burqa and niqab in Australia. Following the lead of European states, there are similar calls here to institute a law that would forbid face veiling in public. By the end of April 2010, the Belgium parliament had agreed unanimously on a law that would ban full veiling in public, and in May, the French cabinet introduced a similar bill. If the French parliament agrees to this measure, wearing a burqa or a niqab could carry a fine. Women who break the law would have to pay a sum of 150 euro according to some reports, and men who force women to wear veils could face a year in prison and a 15,000 euro fine (Deutsche Welle 2010).

Why stop there? Can’t we fine men who tyrannise women in the workplace and harass them on the street?  What about footballers who glass their girlfriends? And men of just about every persuasion who force women into all sorts of oppressive conditions, contexts and clothing, including politicians, religious leaders, advertisers and fashion designers?

In addition to Belgium and France, several bills banning face veils are being prepared simultaneously in the Netherlands, with schools and the public sector being especially targeted. Right-wing politician Geert Wilders is pushing hard for a ban on veils and Italy’s Equality Minister Mara Carfagna wants to write an explicit ban on the burqa into laws on the ‘protection of the public order’. Additionally, there are also four different bills from the governing coalition and the opposition for a ban of face veils, with penalties of up to two years in jail. The Austrian far-right Alliance for the Future of Austria party intends to introduce a bill to parliament calling for a burqa ban. Switzerland has already passed a ban on the construction of minarets, and is also calling for a ban on the burqa (Deutsche Welle 2010).

While the catch-cry ‘ban the burqa’ has populist currency in Europe with Sarkozy leading the charge in France, how many burqa-wearing women are there lurking in the back lanes of Sydney and Melbourne? While the niqab is more prevalent, it is rare enough to see a niqabi in the multiracial interstices of the largest metropolis in Australia. For its part, the burqa is quite specific to Afghanistan and represents the most potent symbol of the political supremacy of the Taliban, a movement of disaffected men that evolved out of the guerilla forces that fought the Russians, nurtured and supported by the American CIA. Having worked with Afghan women for over a decade in the suburbs of Sydney, I am yet to see an Afghan Australian woman wearing the burqa in Bankstown, Blacktown or beyond. So, if the burqa is specific to Afghanistan rather than Australia, how likely are the Taliban to take note of the local Western liberal feminist and the fundamentalist Christian in their call for a ban? Are you listening, Talibs?

As for the woman in the niqab, if indeed she has been forced against her will to wear this item of dress, how does a discussion conducted by mostly white elites in the media change the immediate situation of women living in oppressive conditions? And what to do with the woman who says she dons the niqab of her own volition? What exactly are we saying to her in the broad light of day? That she does not have the right to wear what she so chooses, because perhaps, she looks like ‘death out for a walk’ as Guy de Maupassant so morbidly put it a century or so ago?

‘I’ve seen it elsewhere around the world, but I didn’t expect to see it here. Certainly not on a hot summer’s afternoon at the Canberra Centre. But there it was. A ghostly figure walking towards me, clad from head to toe in a heavy black niqab, black gloves and dark shoes. She was trailing along behind her husband and four little children. The sight of this hideously shrouded figure in an Australian shopping mall is confronting and offensive. And it makes me angry, very angry’ (Haussegger 2010).

It is important to discern what is really at work in this ‘debate’ and who is leading and participating in it. If we are to speak of women’s political rights, is it at all possible to desist from making reductive assumptions about Muslim women in general, and scrutinise the political contexts where the burqa and the niqab are prevalent? That way, instead of drowning out and exhausting the women who are attempting to effect change from within, we might offer a different sort of solidarity that neither privileges the big white voice, nor makes a spectacle or rescue project out of the ‘other’ woman.

Hijab Scene #7

No, I’m not bald under the scarf

No, I’m not from that country

where women can’t drive cars

…

Yes, I speak English

Yes, I carry explosives

They’re called words

And if you don’t get up

Off your assumptions,

They’re going to blow you away

(Kahf 2003: 39)

The wearing of the burqa in Afghanistan, the chador in Iran, and the full covering of Saudi women all have historical and political contexts that are as markedly different from each other as are the histories of women’s evolving emancipation in European states. Many Afghan, Iranian and Arab feminists have been working under the most difficult of circumstances for decades to effect political and social change in terms of gender and anti-colonialism struggles. It doesn’t help that neo-colonialist feminist and patriarchal agendas continue to intrude and impact on the evolution and sustainability of both the women’s and broader democracy movements in those spaces, especially so in Afghanistan.[1]

The burqa is but one of many infringements on the human rights of women in Afghanistan. It is a recent phenomenon that is tied to the absolute breakdown of civil society via the political ruptures of largely imperialist interference, and the internal fracturing and fragmentation of the state and society over the last 30 years. The latest Human Rights Watch report provides a sobering picture of the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan. This is how the report begins:

‘The US and its allies cited the defense of women’s rights as one of the primary reasons, after the need to root out al Qaeda and defeat the Taliban, for their 2001 invasion and subsequent commitment to rehabilitate Afghanistan. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, and the establishment of the Karzai government, Afghan women continue to be among the worst off in the world. Their situation is dismal in every area, including in health, education, employment, freedom from violence, equality before the law, and political participation.

Despite the rhetorical commitment to women’s rights and women’s empowerment, and despite the millions already spent on women’s rights and development projects, women have not been a central priority for the government or for international donors, whose focus is primarily on the armed conflict rather than the broader concept of civilian security and rule of law’ (Human Rights Watch December 2009).

It is dangerous to be a woman in contemporary Afghanistan. It is dangerous to be a young Hazara man for that matter. Perhaps that’s why so many are seeking asylum in Australia. And as the ‘debate’ about banning the burqa in Australia takes all our attention, those who are escaping the Taliban are rejected with hostile indifference, with the Federal Government announcing that there will be no processing of new asylum claims by Afghan nationals for six months because of ‘changing circumstances’ in Afghanistan (McAdam and Murphy April 2010). Why doesn’t a political decision that takes away the right to humanitarian protection have the same anger attached to it as the hostility lobbed at the woman wearing a niqab in the shopping mall?

Hijab Scene #3

‘Dammit … I’m a Muslim woman, not a Klingon!’

-but the positronic force field of hijab

jammed all her cosmic coordinates.

(Kahf 2003: 25)

In thinking about the first wave of feminism in the United States, dress reform was a theme that underpinned early political agitation. The height of the dress reform movement occurred in the 1850s in America when a group of women adopted Turkish-style trousers as a protest against their clothing. They became known as ‘bloomers’ and this term took on a derogatory meaning. They faced so much hostility from the public that this first wave of women’s dress reform failed. Australian feminist Dale Spender provides us with some clues as to why:

Because so ‘many laughed it to scorn and heaped such ridicule on its wearers that they soon found that the physical freedom enjoyed did not compensate for the persistent persecution and petty annoyances suffered at every turn. To be rudely gazed at in public and private, to be the conscious subjects of criticism, and to be followed by crowds of boys in the streets, were all, to the very last degree, exasperating’ (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, quoted in Spender 1983: 249)

Spender goes on to write,

‘Today, we would call this form of behaviour harassment. Like the bloomer wearers, a media image – became a caricature … and because of the adverse publicity – and because women were obliged to defend their dress at the expense of articulating their ideas – many women, like Stanton, returned to the conventional and restrictive costume of the day. (Spender 1983: 249)

Women who wear the hijab and the niqab relate uncannily similar stories of harassment, being stared at, ridiculed and spat upon. ‘To be the conscious subjects of criticism’, and always being ‘obliged to defend their dress at the expense of articulating their ideas’ is resonant of the contemporary condition that Muslim women living in the West find themselves in. Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger is at pains to make the point that she doesn’t have a problem with the hijab, seeing it as ‘a matter of individual right’. She writes, ‘whether worn for reasons of devotion, modesty, conformity or fashion, it is personal and the state has no business banning it’ (Haussegger 2010). These reasons could equally be argued by the niqabi, so where does that leave Haussegger’s argument?

‘I am furious that some women will continue to choose to wear [the niqab]. But then, throughout history, feeble women who are afraid of modernity have always been complicit in their own oppression’ (Haussegger 2009).

So, women only have the right to choose up to a point. Who precisely is deciding what is ‘acceptable’ and what is not? Who is feeble and who is not? In this economy, on the one side there’s the oppressive male forcing women to put it on; and on the other, the oppressive liberal feminist forcing women to take it off. If women freely choose to wear the niqab – and certainly women in Australia do – haranguing them in the media and in shopping malls amounts to little more than harassment.

Hijab Scene #2

‘You people have such restrictive dress for women,’

she said, hobbling away in three-inch heels and panty hose

to finish out another pink-collar temp pool day.

(Kahf 2003: 42)

It doesn’t stop there. Muslim women are randomly called up to answer for the burqa in Afghanistan, the Saudis, the chador, and the niqab-wearing-subject respectively, regardless of their own political and personal choices.  Perhaps, the worst form of harassment is pitting Muslim women against each other as a way to force them into some sort of public spat-as-spectacle. Haussegger does precisely this in her article, invoking the opinions of high- profile women like the The Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and award-winning journalist Mona Eltahawy, who both make a point of expressing their ‘abhorence’ at the niqab.  Alas, we don’t hear a peep out of the niqabi.

‘I can’t sleep from stressing out whether I’ve got the guts to do it. To wear the hijab, the head scarf, full-time. ‘Full-timers are what my Muslim friends and I call girls who wear the hijab all the time … Part-timers like me wear the hijab as part of our uniform at an Islamic school or when we go to the mosque or maybe even when we’re having a bad hair day’ (Abdel-Fattah 2006: 2)

Despite the seeming acceptance of the hijab by some liberal feminists, it still remains the object of derision for the most part, with women being the targets of racial abuse.  Australian social geographer Kevin Dunn has surveyed public attitudes towards the hijab, noting that in Europe, it is seen by critics as ‘emblematic of “non-integration”; a performance of “non-conforming nationalism”’ (Dunn 31). The niqab could thus be read as an absolute rejection of everything the Western state has to offer women, bikinis and all.

The bikini and the burqa are the two sartorial extremes that have come to define women’s modernity or lack thereof. To this day, dress remains a gendered signifier of a woman’s morality and sexuality in much of the world, including the ‘modern’ West. In that sphere, the oppressive ideals of Western beauty have women defacing their faces with botox and other toxic substances, rearranging their bodies with a repertoire of cosmetic surgeries and interventions. Corporate advertising continues to objectify women’s bodies, with girls hyper-sexualised and grown women infantilised. Is this liberation?

‘Despite her dark, cascading waves and toned body, the new Miss USA has come under fire by right-wing bloggers, who have dubbed her a “terrorist in a bikini” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2010)

Like the first wave of feminism, the right to freedom of dress was a demand of second wave feminism as it arrived a century later in the late 1960s and 1970s. Another demand was an end to the sexual objectification of women. A note from the archive:

‘The existence of the movement burst upon the general public in September 1968, during the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where demonstrations against sexism and the objectification of women were given a great deal of media attention’ (Tuttle 1986: 36).

It seems there is a great deal of applause and glittering rewards for a Muslim woman who puts on a bikini and joins her Western ‘sisters’ in a sexist parade in the brave new 21^st century. Perhaps Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah scored a political point when asked his opinion on the new Miss USA: ‘The criteria through which we evaluate women are different from those of the west,’ he said.

Neither Hezbollah nor those triumphalists in the West have anything to crow about when it comes to the treatment of women in all spheres of social, political, cultural, spiritual, emotional and economic life. While the Western liberal feminist might feel she has more ‘freedom’ than the average Muslim woman, white women’s ‘freedom’ in Australia has come at the expense of other women’s freedom, most notably, Indigenous women. Indignant posturing about the niqab has a rather rank ring when you consider the bigger picture.

Notes and References

Abdel-Fattah, R. (2006) Does My Head Look Big in This? Pan Macmillan Australia.

Ahmed, L (1992), Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Aly, A. (2009) ‘Media Hegemony, Activism and Identity: Muslim Women Representing Muslim Women’ in T. Dreher & C. Ho (eds.) Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations in Gender, Race and Religion Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Deutsche Welle  ‘The prospect of a burqa ban spreads across Europe’ 21 May 2010 http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5594778,00.html Cited 23 May 2010.

Dunn, K.M. (2009) ‘Public attitudes towards Hijab-wearing in Australia: Uncovering the Bases of Tolerance’ in T. Dreher & C. Ho (eds.) Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations in Gender, Race and Religion Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Haussegger, V. (2009) ‘Ban unAustralian Burka (first published in The Canberra Times 27 June 2009 http://virginiahaussegger.blogspot.com/2009/06/ban-burka-27-june-2009.html Cited 23 May 2010.

Haussegger, V. (2010) ‘The burqa is a war on women’ 21 May 2010  www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-burqa-is-a-war-on-women-20100520-vnp3.htm Cited 23 May 2010.

Human Rights Watch, ‘We Have the Promises of the World: Women’s Rights in Afghanistan’ 6 December 2009 http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/12/03/we-have-promises-world-0 Cited 23 May 2010.

Kahf, M. (2003) Emails from Scheherazad University Press of Florida, Gainesville Florida.

Maupassant, G. de, (1890) La Vie errante quoted in Mabro, J. (1996) Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women, I.B. Tauris, London.

Schlussel, D. (19 May 2010) quoted in Sydney Morning Herald ‘Newly crowned Miss USA ‘pride’ of hometown in Lebanon’

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/newly-crowned-miss-usa-pride-of-hometown-in-lebanon-20100519-vcji.html Cited 23 May 2010.

Spender, D. (1983) Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them Ark Paperbacks, London.

Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-315.

Sydney Morning Herald, (19 May 2010) ‘Newly crowned Miss USA ‘pride’ of hometown in Lebanon’ http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/newly-crowned-miss-usa-pride-of-hometown-in-lebanon-20100519-vcji.html Cited 23 May 2010.

Tuttle, L. (1986) Encyclopedia of Feminism Longman, Essex.

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[1] Underpinning gendered imperialist discourse is the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, a legitimising device that has effectively functioned to justify attacks on Indigenous societies and colonial expansionism in the form of patriarchal colonialism. Cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak terms this rather ironically as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (1988: 296). In a similar vein, feminist theorist Leila Ahmed tracks how ‘the discourse of patriarchal colonialism captured the language of feminism and used the issue of women’s position in Islamic societies as the spearhead of the colonial attacks on those societies’ (Ahmed 1992: 243). She exposes the hypocrisy particularly of imperialist men ‘who were the enemies of feminism in their own societies, [while] abroad espoused a rhetoric of feminism attacking the practices of Other men and their ‘degradation’ of women, using the argument that the cultures of the colonised peoples degraded women in order to legitimise Western domination and justify colonial policies’ (1992: 243).

‘There are important racial, ethnic and religious minorities in

Australia who come from nations with sexist traditions which,

in some respects, are even more pervasive than those of the West’.

- James Spigelman, Chief Justice of NSW, April 2010.

When the chief justice of a state, in his enunciative capacity, speaks of minorities with ‘sexist traditions’ in a post 9/11 world, it is not difficult to guess which groups are about to be imputed. That the Middle East and South Asia are the likely culprits, with Islamic communities singled out for special attention, the terms of the discourse are immediately set in the confines of the Orientalist episteme.[1]

James Spigelman’s words were widely published in the Australian English-language press as an edited extract from a speech he gave to the UNSW Law, Governance and Social Justice Forum at the University of NSW. The headlines that accompanied this piece ranged from ‘When Laws Clash with Culture’ and ‘Sexist migrants create legal problems’ (Gibson, 2010), to ‘Honour Killings coming to our courts: top judge’ (Gibson, 2010).[2] So, this is where we enter the discursive minefield.

While the two examples of violence against women cited by Spigelman – ‘honour killings’ and forced marriages – are not exactly new to Australia, having been practiced across various communities over the last 222 years of colonial settlement, the fingering of the usual suspects provides a contemporary context of how the Orientalist scheme of knowing both determines the conditions and fixes the limits of public discourse when issues around race, gender, sexuality, culture and violence enter the ‘news’.

Inclination speaks out: ‘I don’t want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final …’ (Foucault 1972: 215)

Spigelman[3] prefaces his entrée into this difficult terrain by drawing on the experiences of Indigenous communities and the ‘conflict of values’ when it comes to applying the ‘law’, ‘most clearly in the Northern Territory intervention triggered by revelations of physical abuse of women and children, mainly girls’ (Spigelman, 2010). While the Chief Justice inserts the voice of Aboriginal human rights activist Mick Dodson into his text to counter the idea that violence is ‘cultural’, he does not mention in his published extract that in order for the white ‘Intervention’ to occur, the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) was suspended by the former Howard administration, and this unacceptable state of play continues with the current Rudd government, despite platitudes to re-instate the RDA by 31 December 2010. Even so, core Intervention policies such as compulsory income management and 5-year leases over Aboriginal land look set to continue. This is but one example that highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘majority culture’ that professes to not be ‘able to compromise on the criminalisation of physical violence’ (Spigelman, 2010), but is more than happy to allow for slippage when it comes to the violence of racial inequality when the political agenda necessitates.[4]

Spigelman’s thesis that ‘violence against women is significantly greater in some social groups, whether or not it is based on cultural tradition’ is concerned with non-Anglo groups rather than football fraternities and other such ‘social groups’ here. That he ‘takes heart’ in Dodson’s assertion that, ‘[Aboriginal people] have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation and violation … Most of the violence, if not all, that our brittle communities are experiencing today [is] not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture’ hardly absolves the Chief Justice of articulating an essentialist position that takes us nowhere we have not already been.

Many in the South Asian and Muslim communities in Australia equally would reject the notion that violence is part of their culture or tradition. Who wouldn’t? Critical anti-racist feminists for their part would argue that violence against women and girls is a feature of masculinist culture that cuts across ethnicity, race, religion and socio-economic background. Research bears this out, most notably that violence against women and girls is more likely to occur where there are rigid gender roles, weak support for gender equity, a sense of masculine entitlement, male dominance and control in relationships (Webster 2007), all of which are prevalent in both Western and non-Western groupings.

Spigelman’s claim that there is ‘a fundamental conflict between a human rights approach and the tolerance of cultural traditions’ is oppressive in that he sets up a supremacist allegory that positions the ‘majority culture’ as having a human rights culture (modern and secular), and ‘minority cultures’, i.e., those with cultural traditions (‘the other’), as lacking in human rights culture (primitive and religious). This approach does not augur well if dialogue is the object. Siege mentality, moral absolutism and defensive reactionism are to be expected.

Institutions reply: ‘But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we’re here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we’ve waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it – a place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who should give it that power’. (Foucault 1972: 216)

Foucault sees the notion of tradition as intended to give ‘special temporal status to a group that is both successive and identical’ (1972: 21). It is the non-Anglo /non-white subject who is invested with tradition in Spigelman’s tent. Tradition, like race, is all but effaced when it comes to framing issues of gender, culture and violence if you are white. When a white male assaults or kills his wife, it is not the practice of the majority culture to invoke race, culture or tradition as a mitigating factor. At worst, it might be referred to as a ‘crime of passion’; at best, domestic homicide or intimate partner terrorism.

When a brown man perpetrates these sorts of acts of violence against women, race, religion and culture become crucial to the narrative. Further, his ‘community’ must take responsibility for the violence, whereas, the white male is an atomised individual who operates outside the normativity of his ‘community’.

It is important to acknowledge these racial double standards from the outset in order to develop an anti-racist practice for publicly speaking about violence against women. If we are committed to combating violence against women and girls regardless of culture, religion or origin, then learning a race-neutral language is crucial so that we are able to speak of the specificities of violence that afflict different women and girls’ lives, rather than persisting in the pretence that some cultures are more violent than others.[5]

Activist Purna Sen critically explores these issues in her essay, ‘“Crimes of honour”, value and meaning’, arguing that to posit a specificity that is flawed and one that fails to see linkages is as problematic as it is to deny specificity if it exists (2005: 50). We must situate ‘honour killings’ within an understanding of violence against women in a contemporary and localized context, and in so doing, we might avoid making sweeping generalizations about regions and religions.

‘I now know which voice it was I would have wished for, preceding me, supporting me, inviting me to speak and lodging within my own speech’. (Foucault 1972: 237)

By uncritically mobilising the term ‘tradition’, Spigelman creates a temporal disjuncture that pushes the other back in time and thus infuses the South Asian and the Muslim with backwardness. By deploying this strategy of temporal distancing, Spigelman is able to freeze the other in the past and therefore in a state of immutability, thus diminishing the possibilities for change.

There is a contemporaneous urgency to scrutinise the structures and the social and political conditions (both internal and external) that perpetuate violence against women, rather than distancing the other from the modern present. Spigelman’s foray into the public sphere thus begs the question: ‘What does it mean to talk of honour killing?’ (Sen 2005: 42).

‘To Westerners, honour killings are seen as anachronistic, scarcely believable, anthropological phenomenon that continues only in a few rare, isolated, still primitive pockets – like head-hunting in New Guinea’.

Norma Khouri (2003:196)

In Australia, we have come to know the trope of ‘honour killing’ as proof of Islamic misogyny. Norma Khouri’s book Forbidden Love, published in 2003 brought the subject of ‘honour killing’ to the fore. Selling over 200,000 copies, then Brisbane-based Khouri told the ‘non-fictional’ story of her ‘friend’ Dalia, a Jordanian woman who died at the hands of her father and brother. A profoundly flawed text replete with factual inaccuracies, internal contradictions and plot inconsistencies, the book was an instant best seller. Khouri was invited to speak at International Women’s Day events and feted as feminist of the moment on the back of this book (or perhaps it was the fetishised cover).  Of course, the book turned out to be fiction and Khouri was sent to the sin-bin for duping her loyal following, mostly a Western female public, her publisher and media, not to mention undermining the pulp Orientalist ‘non-fiction’ industry.

Sen confirms that ‘the term honour killings is more widely known at the start of this century than in the previous decade and such killings are increasingly cast as emblematic of the problematic nature of one religion – Islam – and its treatment of women’ (Sen 2005: 42).

She writes:

In the post-September 11 climate, some Western concerns with honour killings so closely overlap the anti-terror discourse through exactly this recourse to almost knee-jerk condemnation of Islam that a Western anti-honour-killings agenda is in danger of being deeply mired in Islamophobic potential. In this context, any identification of the specificity and particularity of crimes and killings associated with honour codes is in danger of sharing this reception’.                                      (Sen 2005: 42)

This is precisely where the limits of Spigelman’s discourse are most obvious. He references European experiences, noting that ‘significant issues have arisen, particularly for Islamic and south Asian communities’ and believes as ‘we have significant communities from the Middle East and south Asia in Australia, we are unlikely to avoid similar issues’ (Spigelman 2010). The condensing of geographical regions into a discrete homogeneity is at once problematic, and the singling out of Islamic communities explicitly feeds into the viral anti-Muslim animus that pulses through the globalised Western-leaning nation.

Feminist theorist Haideh Moghissi argues that,

‘the spatio-temporal existence of Islam points to the heterogeneity of “Islamic culture”. The idea that Islam as a kind of meta-culture obscures the reality that, as Aziz Al-Azmeh has noted, there are many “Islamic cultures” as different geographical, social conditions, size of wealth and educational levels can produce (Al Azmeh, 1993: 6-8) … there are differences among Shi’i and Sunni Maliki, Hanbali and Hanafi schools of law on such issues as compulsory marriage and child marriage …’.                                                                              (Modghissi 1999: pp17-18)

The point Moghissi goes on to make is that ‘Islam cannot be taken, perhaps, as the sole signifier of the situation of women in Islamic societies’ as class, wealth, the processes of social and economic development, the strength of local customs and cultural practices all inform and define women’s varied life options and gender experiences (Moghissi 1999: 18). Certainly, Muslim communities in Australia are as culturally and ethnically diverse, disparate and hybrid as all other faith-based communities in the nation and surely can’t so easily be bundled into a neat little singularity all sharing the same culture, traditions and practices.

Insofar as cultural practices are concerned, theorist Anne Phillips provides a nuanced interrogation of culture and the legal system where Spigelman, for his part, simply avoids. In her chapter, ‘What’s wrong with Cultural Defence?’ Phillips critically assesses a series of cultural defence arguments, drawing on cases from the United States and British courts.

As a starting point, she argues that ‘culture can lend itself to opportunistic defences’ and ‘claims about what is normal within a particular cultural group are highly contentious’ (Phillips 2007:80). In unpacking the maneuvers at work in these contexts, Phillips notes that ‘something may be claimed as a cultural practice when it has long been contested or abandoned by other members of the group’ (2007:80). Significantly, she cites objections that recognise culture ‘as historically changing, open to a variety of interpretations, and internally contested’ (Phillips 2007:82), thus problematising the very idea that ‘culture’ is fixed and immutable, a singular and stable category.

‘I now understand better why I experienced so much difficulty when I began speaking, earlier on’ (Foucault 1972: 237).

Phillips suggests that ‘the use of a cultural defence inappropriately elevates cultural membership above other features … sustains and legitimates patriarchal practices, and encourages stereotypical representations’ (2007: 82). She makes the salient point that cultural defence,

‘like  all defences leave themselves open to opportunism and manipulation. If you are defending yourself against a possible criminal sentence, you will presumably take what opportunities you can to present your acts in the most favourable light, and if citing some cultural practice or tradition promises to help, it’s likely you will choose to do so’.                                                                                                (Phillips 2007:83)

Phillips’ argument is underscored by the fact that the ‘question of stereotypes looms large: the stereotyping of culture as a purely minority phenomenon, the stereotyping of what are taken to be practices of specific cultural groups, and within that, the stereotyping of male and female behaviour’ (2007:84).

Thus, ‘any deployment of culture involves a stereotype’ (2007: 84) and the question that perhaps Spigelman could be asking is, ‘what kinds of stereotypes get mobilised in a cultural defence? (Phillips 2007: 85), rather than freezing groups into the past.

So, on the one hand, we have cultural relativism of the perpetrator and his supporters relying on the receptivity of the stereotype to minimise his sentence; and on the other, we have the cultural essentialism of Spigelman as way to talking about ‘the challenge to balance the objective of cultural equality and diversity against the protection of women from gender-based violence’ (Spigelman 2010). How do we move beyond the enclosures of relativism and essentialism when they are the frames that dominate discourses about gender, culture and violence in the public sphere?

Language is a good place to start. I strategically enclose the word ‘honour’ in inverted commas as a sort of short cut to problematising its use, perhaps because ‘honour’ is the perpetrator’s articulation of motive. Feminist activist and teacher Uma Chakravarti confirms this type of strategic gesture, seeing ‘scare quotes [as] act[ing] to distance feminists from [the term’s] ideological baggage’, but considers that this is ‘not enough of a distance’, and that we

‘must discard the term in search of another that does not mask the violence in the killing and abuses, but rather describes it more aptly, acknowledging feminist understandings of violence, which do not accept the ideology under which such violence is masked’.

(Chakravarti 2005:15)

As Dobash and Dobash ask, ‘do we us the perspectives of victims? Of those who peretrate the acts? Of researchers? Of the law? Of policymakers? Should researchers attempt to develop distinct, abstract, and definitive conceptualisations of these acts’(quoted in Welchman and Hossain 2005: 8)?

What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that? (Foucault 1972: 216)

Finding race-neutral nomenclature is not a difficult task: femicide, intimate partner violence, domestic violence, domestic homicide are all terms in contemporary use. As the Southall Black Sisters’ strategically articulate in a campaign that reflects all these concerns: ‘There is no honour in domestic violence, only shame’ (Siddiqui 2005). And as criminologist Mark Findlay potently reminds us, ‘domestic violence – rather than rape or homicide – is the true face of crime epidemics in Australia’ (Findlay 2010).

‘I know now just what was so awesome at beginning; for it was here, where I speak now, that I listened to that voice, and where its [owner] is no longer, to hear me speak’ (Foucault 1972: 237).

Law scholar and teacher Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im provides a glimpse of what is possible in terms of engaging in productive community discourses outside the polemics of the mainstream. He writes,

‘It is not enough to condemn the crimes without developing specific strategies to prevent their occurrence, and to deal with perpetrators and their supporters …if engaging in community discourse can help to prevent ‘crimes of honour’ and/or hold perpetrators accountable … then those concerned with combating such practices should utilise and develop this approach’.                                            (An-Na’im 2005: 64)

An-Na’im believes internal discourse within communities must be supported and promoted in order to transform family and community attitudes (2005: 65). Men must actively and voluntarily engage in this internal discourse, developing leadership around gender equity, and challenging their peers within as well as established leaders who insist on perpetuating gender bias and sanctioning violent acts against women and girls via cultural defences. Further, Anne Phillips adds that we ‘need to engage with citizens in their complex diversity, rather than through narrow preconceptions’ (Phillips 2007: 73).

Finally, activist and community worker, Hannana Siddiqui, argues for a ‘mature multiculturalism’ that takes ‘forward the human rights agenda and bridges the space between race and gender, demanding black and minority women’s rights without trampling on the rights of black and minority communities’ (2005: 279). These are the critical voices that I want to hear in the public sphere in Australia, not the ‘clash of civilisations’ scenario that refuses to go away.

Notes and References

An-Na’im, A. A. (2005) ‘The role of “community discourse” in combating “crimes of honour”: preliminary assessment and prospects’ in ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (eds.) Welchman L. and Hossain, S Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

Chakravarti, U (2005) ‘From fathers to husbands: of love, death and marriage in North India’ in ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (eds.) Welchman L. and Hossain, S Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

Dobash R.E. & R.P Dobash (1998) ’Cross-Border Encounters: Challenges and Opportunities’ quoted in ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (2005) (eds.) Welchman L. and Hossain, S Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

Findlay, M. (2010) ‘Wobbly underbelly hides criminal truth’, published April 21

2010.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/wobbly-underbelly-hides-criminal-truth-20100420-srk8.html cited 21 April 2010.

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language Pantheon Books New York.

Gibson, J. ‘Sexist migrants create legal problems’ published April 16, 2010.http://www.smh.com.au/national/sexist-migrants-create-legal-problem-20100415-shs6.html cited 20 April 2010.

Gibson, J. ‘Honour killings coming to our courts: top judge’ published April 16 2010. http://www.watoday.com.au/national/honour-killings-coming-to-our-courts-top-judge-20100416-shx0.html cited 20 April 2010.

Hall, S. (2002) ‘The Work of Representation’ in Representation: Cultural Represetations and Signifying Practices (ed.) Stuart Hall Sage Publications London.

Khouri, N. (2003) Forbidden Love, Bantam Books Sydney.

Moghissi, H. (1999) Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis Zed Books London & New York.

Phillips, A (2007), Multiculturalism without Culture Princeton University Press Princeton & Oxford.

Sen, P. (2005) ‘ “Crimes of honour”, value and meaning’ in ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (eds.) Welchman L. and Hossain, S Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

Siddiqui, H (2005) ‘ “There is no ‘honour’ in domestic violence, only shame!” Women’s struggles against “honour” crimes in the UK’ in ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (eds.) Welchman L. and Hossain, S Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

Spigelman, J. ‘When laws clash with culture’ published April 16, 2010. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/when-laws-clash-with-culture-20100415-shfy.html cited 20 April 2010 and   http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/when-laws-clash-with-culture-20100415-shfy.html cited 20 April 2010.

Van Dijk, T.A. (1991), Racism and the Press Routledge London.

Webster, K. (2007) Preventing violence before it occurs : A framework and background paper to guide the primary prevention of violence against women in Victoria Melbourne.

http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/~/media/ProgramsandProjects/

MentalHealthandWellBeing/DiscriminationandViolence/PreventingViolence

/framework%20web.ashx

cited 20 April 2010.

Welchman L. and Hossain, S (2005) ‘Honour’ Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women Spinifex Press Victoria, Zed Books London & New York.

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[1]I use the term ‘episteme’ in the Foucauldian understanding, that is, ‘characteristic of the way of thinking or the state of knowledge at any one time , [that] appear[s] across a range of texts, and as forms of conduct at a number of different institutional sites within society’ (Hall 2002: 44).

[2] Headlines express the most important information about a news event and exert a powerful influence on the interpretation of a news report according to media theorist Teun van Dijk. His study Racism and the Press (1991) indicates that the information in the headline is the information that is best recalled by readers. Loaded with ideological implications, headlines are the first and prominent textual categories of news (van Dijk 1991: 61), their function necessarily implying an opinion or a specific perspective on the events (van Dijk 1991: 51).

[3] Spigelman’s position is that of the liberal multiculturalist; his authority to speak is grounded in his past anti-racism activities. Liberal white multiculturalism is as problematic as ever as it elides the possibilities for a critical multiculturalism because it takes up so much space when an opportunity for dialogue presents itself. The limited positions of liberal multiculturalism range from cosmopolitanism to harmony and tolerance, hardly cognisant of the ethos of equality since they are all dependent on the majority culture’s deciding on what is cosmopolitan, tolerable and harmonious.

[4] This would be the same ‘majority culture’ that incarcerates Aboriginal men and women at a rate that tops per capita lists in the world. The same culture that systemically tolerates Black deaths in custody, and serially violates the human rights of refugees by incarcerating women, children and men, to placate white paranoia around border control and national security.

[5] Sen argues that ‘crimes of honour’ have become ‘emblematic of the backwardness of oriental cultures that exemplify the oppression of women (2005: 46). And while ‘honour killings share a number of features with other forms of violence against women’, they also have a number of characteristics that mark them out from other practices’ (Sen 2005: 50).

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If you come as softly

as wind within the trees

you may hear what I hear

see what sorrow sees.

-Audre Lorde

On the occasion of the 221^st anniversary of the colonising project in Australia, Aboriginal human rights advocate and community leader, Professor Mick Dodson, was named Australian of the Year.* In responding to a media-initiated question after the announcement, Dodson made the salient point that the day ‘celebrated’ as Australia Day is hardly inclusive considering what the day represents. This day edifies the raising of the Union Jack at Sydney Cove – or Warrang, its first name - in 1788 and augurs the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Australia. In bringing Aboriginal sensibilities to the fore, vis-à-vis how this day is both viscerally and psychically felt, Dodson reminds non-Aboriginal Australians what this day means to the First Peoples.

Rather than waving the flag like a two-dollar shop patriot, is it possible that we might waive the right to be benignly forgetful, wilfully indifferent and artfully antagonistic for a moment and afford those whose ‘world came crashing down’** on that day some respect? To do otherwise is to dance on the graves of all who have been massacred, raped, forcibly removed from their families, corralled into slavery and imprisoned into the abjection that is dispossession. The idea of changing the date is a first step towards unfinished business. For those who reject the idea outright (as both national leaders of the major political paries in Australia have), what would their response be to the suggestion that we have a national knees-up – that is, balloons, bikinis and booze – on Anzac Day or Remembrance Day, on All Soul’s Day or Good Friday if you are Christian in faith? Oh so you think it inappropriate to celebrate wildly on a day when people seek solemnity to remember the dead?

If you come as lightly

as the threading dew

I shall take you gladly

nor ask more of you

Australia Day in its current formation does precisely that. It is a day of nationalistic flag-waving and triumphalist posturing privileging an exclusivist white version of history. This day was born of violence and to violence it inevitably returns. And post–Cronulla 2005, we have to endure the annual spectacle of white supremacy running riot under the auspices of Australia Day celebrations. This year, racist thugs terrorised people of non-white appearance in the centre of Manly - Kunná – a popular beach and tourist locale in the northern suburbs of Sydney. A crowd of mostly young white men chanted racist epithets as they ran through the town centre wrapped in their comfort blanket, the Australian flag. The usual institutional disavowal of white racism followed. First came the mayor preferring the term ‘moron’ to that rather harsh word ‘racist’. Then came local police Commander Dave Darcy proclaiming that they ‘were no worse than a rowdy “old cricket crowd”’ (Robinson 2009), except of course if you were one of their brown targets. Darcy goes on: ‘I personally gave them a good looking over, just assessing them. There was an intensity there that no doubt would be confronting to some but at that stage they hadn’t crossed the threshold of criminality’ (Robinson 2009). What is racial terror if not criminality? Aren’t these individuals classifiably white terrorists? Where’s the anti-terrorism legislation when you need it?

Now let’s imagine what the Commander’s response would have been had this rampaging horde of young men numbering well over 100 not been white, but instead a group of Aboriginal or Middle Eastern or Pacific Islander men. Imagine. The racial double standards are not hard to figure if you pay enough attention or happen to be a man of Aboriginal or Middle Eastern appearance for that matter.

The disavowal and the minimisation of racism when perpetrated by whites is the normalised response in the white nation. Remember former Prime Minister John Howard after the Cronulla riots insisting: ‘I do not accept that there is any underlying racism in this country’. A little further back, I remember being one of the interviewees on Radio National after the fire-bombing of a mosque in Brisbane (an Australian response to September 11) and the then Police Commander put this act of race-hatred down to the actions of a larrikin. The minimisation of racism is what race scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva sees as a central frame of colour-blind racism. This new formation is deployed precisely because ‘in the postmodern world few claim to be “racist” except for Nazis and Neonazis and members of white supremacist groups’ (2001: 140). Bonilla-Silva argues that the thinking behind this -‘There are racists out there but they are few and hard to find’ (2001: 141) – is a denial of the structural character of racism (2001: 142). Measuring Bonilla-Silva’s theory against the responses to Manly would verily suggest that a culture of colour-blind racism pervades the institutional centre.

1. Commander Darcy from Manly Local Area Command: ‘To suggest that there were racial overtones is … I think, way over the top’ (Robinson 2009).
2. The Manly Daily’s headline: ‘Ratbags: YES Racists: NO’ (Phillips 2009).
3. The Federal politician Tony Abbott: ‘Some people seem to be suggesting there was a racist element to it. My instinct, as someone who has just read the reports, is that I think alcohol was to blame, not racism’ (Phillips 2009).

The Daily Telegraph, not especially known for its race-sensitivities, called it for what it was: ‘Groups of men jump[ing] up on cars chanting race hate to the terrified passengers within … What started as chants of “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at 1pm had in an hour developed an ugly overtone’ (Vallejo 2009). The state Premier, Nathan Rees, for his part went straight to the heart of it: ‘To use an Australian symbol or the Australian flag to promote racism is to fail to understand what those symbols mean. This kind of bigoted behaviour has no place in NSW’ (Robinson 2009). While refreshing to hear a Premier of NSW actually utter the ‘r’ word, an insistence on defending the props so steeped in colonial baggage ignores their agency as instruments of white power. Those who use the flag to promote racism clearly understand this history and that is precisely what makes the flag theirs. The Union Jack in the upper left corner is the same Union Jack raised at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1778. In short, the very livery of Australian-ness as played out in this spectacle are the institutional props that have systematically and psychically been deployed to exclude, to control, to marginalise, first and foremost Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives and communities, and then to a much lesser extent, consecutive waves of non-white migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the following years.

You may sit beside me

Silent as a breath

And only those who stay dead

Shall remember death

Manly, and indeed Cronulla, can be thus read as theatrical representations that belong in this continuum of violence. The white bodies on the beach and the street chasing down ‘ethnics’ are simply recreating real time race drama; by reasserting their dominance, dressed shirtless like Tarzans atop some terrified victim’s Toyota, they embody the very ethos of Australia Day as it is, White Australia Day. Though we endeavour hard to be a forgetful nation, the patriots with their sunburnt chests are an annual reminder as to why we need to critically appraise the day, and indeed, to change the date.

Professor Dodson’s response to this question of change should therefore not be reduced to some abstraction of the culture wars. He speaks for many, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who emphatically refuse to celebrate Australia Day for the reasons of history, because of contemporary realities. He speaks for those who conscientiously object to e[rac]ing the past, for those who reject the idea of celebrating dispossession.

If you come I will be silent

Nor speak harsh words to you-

I will not ask why, now,

Nor how, nor what you knew.

I am reminded of erasure as I searched for the presence of Native Americans in the memorialising of nation at the moment of Obama. Known for his erudition and attention to history, Obama failed to correct an oversight that continues to escape the notice of the forgetful nation. During a speech remembering an event in another place some two hundred and twenty one years ago, the then hopeful Senator was forced to speak back to the criticism of his long-standing association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor branded anti-American and anti-white for his speaking-truth-to-power sermons. Obama invoked a biblical line that deserves critique. Here is the text of what he said:

‘Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787 … The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery…’ (March 18, 2008)

The spectre of slavery in the United States is a traumatic and harrowing narrative, but if we are to be critical about the past, then the term ‘original sin’ surely belongs to the dispossession and destruction of the Native American peoples. It is well documented that Native Americans have endured a systematic process of extermination that enabled the making of the American nation. In modern times, we use the term genocide to describe what transpired in the Americas. Like Australia, the Americas (both North and South) are soaked in the blood of Indigenous people. To erase this originary violence renders the genocide complete; that is, the victims are at once invisible and forgotten. At the inauguration celebrations, a token appearance and a token mention were all Native Americans were afforded. In the euphoria of history making, forgetfulness continues to shape the rebooting of nation.

‘Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.

Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequesthed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, “Never! Never!”‘

- Tecumseh of the Shawnees (1990:1)

Acclaimed people’s historian Howard Zinn writes: ‘There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States’ (2003: 23). In tracking the history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and those who have been omitted, Zinn provides us with a window to understanding modern America. In the case of Australia, we might ask where today are the people of Warrang and Kunná, the people of Mararwong, Arrowanelly, and Wallumatta?

But we shall sit here softly

Beneath two different years

And the rich earth between us

Shall drink our tears.

Ali Behdad argues in his book Forgetful Nation that the United States ‘is an amnesiac nation that disremembers its violent beginnings’ (2005: 23). At present, Australia Day is a national day of disremembering. For others, it is Invasion Day, Survival Day, a public holiday. Migrants and refugees of all backgrounds for their part are emphatically encouraged to join the party in disremembering. In this way, demonstrating your ‘Australian-ness’ is as easy as painting a flag on your brown face. The SBSTV news report on the night of 26 January proudly trumpeted diversity, focussing on a Vietnamese woman on multicultural parade in Melbourne. She had made her ao dai from an Australian flag, and as subversive as this is in another context, given the racialised reception Vietnamese communities have had to cop over the last 30 years, it also is a picture-perfect representation of the superficiality of official multiculturalism. Then, as always, we watch the staged shots of the benevolent state bestowing citizenship upon its most recent arrivals in ceremonies around the country. Whilst this is indeed an important and euphoric occasion for many, most especially for refugees who have escaped the traumas and violence of conflict and displacement, ironically, this day is painfully heightened by those very realities in Aboriginal communities around the country.

This is an opportune moment for migrant and refugee communities (notably those from non-English speaking backgrounds) to intervene as active participants in the national conversation that Professor Dodson has begun, lest it be dominated by white (migrant) voices. At once sporadic, solidarity with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders could be expressed via support for a change of date. It is in the interests of those who are committed to a critical multicultural democracy to ensure that a plurality of voices are heard in the new century. The first step is easy: we recognise that the raising of the Union Jack at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 represents the beginning of the disenfranchisement of the First Peoples that continues to this day. So instead of mouthing the platitudes of the anthem and inscribing an abaya into the flag, perhaps we could offer a heartfelt cantata to the dispossessed as a gesture to narrative remembrance. Each and every community could find the words to express sorrow and respect via the lexicons of the multilingual nation. It’s time now for a brand new day. It’s time to change the date.

Notes:

*This symbolic gesture provides Professor Dodson with a public platform that has been denied to him over the past decade. Dodson was unashamedly marginalised by the former neo-conservative government in its oppositional zeal to the politics and discourses of self-determination. De-facto assimilation, or new century paternalism was their preferred poison. Dodson was co-author of the landmark Bringing them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children form Their Families (1997), undertaken by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission).

**Mick Dodson referred to 26 January 1788, the day when Governor Arthur Phillip formally annexed the land as ‘the day on which our world came crashing down’. Quoted in a Sydney Morning Herald editorial titled, ‘Stirring the possum on Australia Day’, 27 January 2009, p 10.

References:

Behdad, A (2005) Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, Duke University Press Durham & London

Bonilla-Silva, E (2001) White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Lynne Rienner Publishers Boulder London

Lorde, A (1987) ‘Memorial I’ in Ain’t I a Woman: Poems by Black and White Women, (ed.) Illona Linthwaite Virago London.

Obama, B (2008) ‘A More Perfect Union’ <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077.html> Accessed 30 December 2008.

Phillips, J (29 January 2009) ‘Ratbags:YES Racists:No’ The Manly Daily <http://manly-daily.whereilive.com.au/news/story/ratbags-yes-no/. Accessed 29 January.

Robinson, G (27 January 2009) ‘Manly ‘morons’ rampage were racist: academic’ The Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/manly-morons-racist/2009/01/27/1232818417563.html Acessed 27 January 2009.

Vallejo, J ‘Manly erupts in Violence on Australia Day’ The Daily Telegraph (26 January 2009) <http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24965973-5006009,00.html> Accessed 27 January 2009.

Tecumseh of the Shawnees in Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, (1990) Vintage London.

Zinn, H (2003) A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, HarperCollins New York

Related Links: Watch Natalie Tran’s fabulous response to the ‘Your (sic) not Australian’  @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivkw27k9J0c