Hey Hey It’s Racism!

Published on October 31, 2009 in Culture. 4 Comments

Hey Hey It’s Racism!

 

                                   Me sing all day, me sing all night

                                   Me have no care, me sleep is light

                                   Me tink, no what tomorrow bring

                                   Me happy, so me sing.

                                   ‘The Bonja Song’ (c. 1820) (Nederveen Pieterse 1995:133)

 

This song is typical of the Minstrel show, a genre originating in the nineteenth

century in the United States. The minstrel, a white performer, painted his face

black and performed song and dance routines that parodied African-descended

peoples. As the above song demonstrates in its broken-up ‘negroe’ dialect (1),

the Black subject is infantilised by a seeming carefree/ness and eagerness

to sing, no doubt for the white master’s satisfaction. The spectre of the minstrel,

or ‘blackface’, as minstrelsy has come to be known, is steeped in race politics,

and so a genealogy seems necessary given the level of ignorance in multicultural

Australia, c. 2009, about what this racist throwback signifies.

 

In his illuminating study, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western

Popular Culture, Jan Nederveen Pieterse traces how this racist trope was inhered

with meaning:

 

                  On the “Middle Passage” slaves were encouraged to dance and sing

                  for the sake of their physical as well as moral condition.

                  ‘Dancing the slaves’ was the usual term, and it often involved the

                  use of the whip. In plantation society, entertainment served as a

                  means of reducing friction. Were cheerful slaves not happy slaves?

                 … Performing thus was an essential part of slave existence.

                                                                         (Nederveen Pieterse 1995:132)

 

And so, from the slave boats to the prison camps that were plantations,

‘dancing the slaves’, or more accurately, terrorising individuals to perform

in the face of real time violence, represents the beginnings of this story

about race, white supremacy and popular culture. Nederveen Pieterse maps

how the ‘blackface’ figure emerged as a white imitation of so-called

performative ‘black’ culture. He writes:

 

                  The minstrel was in the North of the American Republic what the

                  slave entertainer who performed in his master’s house, in church,

                  at fairs, horse-races, dances and so on was in the South. In the

                  North the stage replaced these venues, and whites in black-face

                  replaced the performing black slave – as they did after slavery had

                  been abolished in the Northern states. Thus the Minstrel tradition

                  had its origin in a kind of imitation of slavery, with imitation blacks,

                  for Northerners who had to manage without slaves or slavery.

                                                                                                      (1995:132)

 

Significantly, the Minstrel show became popular precisely at the time when

slavery was being challenged by slave resistance and abolitionist activism (2) 

(Nederveen Pieterse 1995:132). This temporal conjunction grounds minstrelsy

firmly in a racist frame, as race historians have argued that ‘a fully fledged

racialised ideology did not appear amongst the slave-holding classes (and

their supporters in Europe) until slavery was seriously challenged by the

Abolitionists’ (Hall 2002: 242). Thus, the minstrel emerges in the nineteenth

century as a tool of culture in this ‘propaganda war with the abolitionists’

(Frederickson (3) quoted in Hall 2002:243), to infantilise (‘Old Massa to us

darkies am good’), to animalise (‘coon’ songs), and ultimately to demonise

and demean African- descended peoples. (4)

  

                   ‘In the beginning, there was an Uncle Tom’

                                                                         (Bogle 1997: 13).

 

Into the new century, the appearance of ‘blackface’ in the very first reels of

US film ensured that this trope continued to inflect mainstream US culture.

Donald Bogle, who has scrutinised African American screen characterisations,

argues that early film merely reproduced the racist stereotypes that ‘had existed

since the days of slavery and were already popularised in American life and

arts’ (1997:13). Bogle tells how in 1903, a mechanic-turned-movie-director

named Edwin S. Porter produced a twelve-minute motion picture calling it

Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bogle registers this as the ‘American movies’ first black

character’, the great paradox being that Tom was not black at all. He was a

‘nameless, slightly overweight white actor made up in blackface’ (1997:13).

 

It is almost impossible to avoid mentioning D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation

in the context of racial casting. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that within

Hollywood cinema, Euro-Americans have historically enjoyed the unilateral

prerogative of acting in “blackface”, “redface”, “brownface”, and “yellowface”,

while the reverse has rarely been the case’ (1994:189). They make the point

that political considerations in racial casting were quite overt in the silent era

and in Birth of a Nation, ‘subservient black characters were played by actual

African Americans, while aggressive, threatening Black characters were played

largely by Whites in Blackface’ (Shohat and Stam 1994:189). Further to that,

two of the female characters, Lydia (the mulatto character) and Mammy were

played by white actresses in blackface (Bogle 1997:21). Cultural theorist

Valerie Smith notes that this film is considered by many to be ‘the symbolic,

although not literal, origin of U.S. cinema, [and] is frequently offered up by

film critics and historians as the inaugural moment of African American

cinema as well’ (1997: 1). Perhaps because, as Bogle argues, white

characterisations of Blackness dominated film narratives for the next half

century (1997: 14), ensuring that African American actors, when they finally

made an appearance on screen, were boxed into performing  roles defined

by white subjectivities (the ‘tom’, the ‘coon’, the ‘mulatto’ – usually tragic,

the ‘buck’, and the ’mammy’). These gendered racialised subordinate roles

made the cross-over and represent the ‘astonishing persistence of the basic 

racial “grammar of representation” … with many variations and modifications

allowing for differences in time, medium and context’ (Hall 2002: 251). 

 

Then in 1927, ‘the first feature-length Hollywood “talkie” film in which spoken 

dialogue was used as part of the dramatic action’ (Dirks), Al Jolson, a Jewish 

American actor playing a Jewish character in The Jazz Singer, croons

‘My Mammy’ to his Yiddish mother in ‘blackface’.(5)  Contemplating the

black-faced Jolson and the countless others who went before and came after

- Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936), Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes

in Arms (1939), Bing Crosby in Dixie (1943), Joan Crawford in The Torch

Song (1953), and most recently Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic  Thunder (2008),

to name but a few – it is not hard to begin to see why the minstrel visage,

‘the caricature of a caricature – has become the most enduring of black 

caricatures ‘(Nederveen Pieterse 1995: 135).

 

                  If we are to understand racial politics and inequality in non-

                  phenotypic, nonessentialised terms, then we must attempt to

                  comprehend the meanings of race against the canvas of space, time,

                  and history.                        

                                                                                        (Hanchard 2001: 281)

 

In reprising the historical specificity of the ‘blackface’, I aim to re-establish

the racial terrain within which this figure operates and indeed takes its meaning.

Race is constitutive of the ‘blackface’ performance: that is, it cannot be read,

understood, ‘enjoyed’ or indeed enacted without its historical import being taken

into account. So when the ‘blackface’ skit mimicking the Jackson Five was played

out on an Australian commercial TV station in October 2009, the blogosphere

went viral with an overwhelming majority of posters defending the performers

from culturally diverse backgrounds  in the face of an international cringe.(6) 

The cultural lag between US race sensitivities and the Australian laissez-faire

attitude to all things racial could not have been more stark.

 

In The Australian, the conservative national broadsheet’s online blog,

‘Astounded’ asks, ‘How far can this political correctness, false hand wringing

and crocodile tears go?’; Cheeza demands, ‘Get over it, it was ment (sic) to be

funny, stop taking the world so seriously and laugh for the sake of laughting 

(sic) not everything has a hidden agenda’; Alien believes ‘We should all loosen

up a bit. In fact I am of the opinion that we should have a program on so called

“racist” jokes so that we all understand that they are just that JOKES’; then

there’s Smudge who thinks that, ‘Whilst the politically correct seem to have

found the skit offensive you can bet that the vast majority of the audience

viewed it with humour – remember the prime audience is the working class

Australian not the PC intellectuals & ethnic minorities’; and Ian who feels

the need to channel Chopper (the celebrity ex-crim) with: Lighten the f***

up Australia! People are way to (sic) sensitive these days. So what even if it

was racist. Get over it’; and Emily wants to know, ‘since when is painting your

face racism?’ (The Australian 2009).

 

 The commentary at The Sydney Morning Herald’s online blog is tidily summed

up by Nathan: ‘It would seem 90% plus of readers who have commented do

not think it was racist at all’ (The Sydney Morning Herald).’ Uncannily, posters

at the Sydney tabloid  The Daily Telegraph expressed sentiments not unlike

those found in readers at The Australian and The Herald. Stef wants those who

found the performance offensive to ‘get a grip it was a skit and if your (sic) to

(sic) thin skinned to see that you need an injection of sense of humour’; May

of Sydney, perhaps more aggressively screams, ‘GET OVER IT’ (her capitals);

Shell of QLD: ‘stop this madness…..’; Londo of NSW, ‘for goodness sake, can

nobody take a joke anymore ??? POLITICAL CORRECTNESS has gone too far……

Ligten (sic) up everyone. IT WAS A JOKE…’; Amanda Charnock worries that

‘Australia is becoming so bloody serious and ludicrously politically correct’;

and Wake Up wants us to wake up to the fact that ‘This a warning on the

Human Rights Charter. You will be told what to do and what to say by people

who have no connection to this country!’; Val of Melbourne also thinks ‘People

need to lighten up and get their sense of humour back’; and Bert of Sydney

asks: ‘Where has the Australian Knock about humor (sic) gone…; and finally,

a dissenting voice in the blogging wilderness, Stewart of Sydney offers, ‘This

is not about being PC, its about respecting people.’

 

Perhaps most telling is, ‘Sick of this subject’ who confirms what many of us

already know: ‘Here we go again with this racism crap.’ However, it is Sean

of Goulburn who gets to the heart of the rhetorical mazes deployed when having

to ‘state racial views without opening yourself to the charge of racism by 

considering all sides of an issue’. Here Sean of Goulburn takes the

‘Yes and no, but…’ approach (Bonilla-Silva 2001: 154):

 

                  Fair Dinkum. We are not the States. The so called “black face” doesn’t

                  carry the same connotation here as it does in the U.S. When the act

                  came on I thought nothing more than it was a send up of the

                  Jackson 5. Harry Connick, rightly so, felt uncomfortable because

                  of his countries history with the oppression and slavery of African

                  Americans. He was entitled to voice his disapproval as well. 

                  However, the act should be seen in the context it was meant to be.

                  A piss take, not a racial slur. Next they will tell us Red Faces has to

                 be renamed because weve (sic) offended the Native American Indians.            

                                                                                           (The Daily Telegraph)

 

This selection of comments demonstrate how dialogue around race is fraught

with glib lines like ‘lighten up’ (ironic in context of the subject of ‘blackface’)

and ‘get over it’ (as if the legacy of slavery and the effects of apartheid

segregation don’t have material effects into the present). These responses,

like that old familiar turn of phrase ‘political correctness’, are intended to shut 

down dialogue. It is not hard to imagine that had it not been for guest judge

Harry Connick Jr’s condemnation of the ’Red Faces’ skit and his insistence on

an on-air apology, the episode would barely have attracted a national focus,

let alone international attention. The demand that humour be quarantined is

particularly prevalent in the respondents’ comments, as if jokes and ‘Aussie

humour’ should somehow be exempt from the right to racial respect. 

What exactly is funny about mocking people of colour? And why on earth

would anyone mobilise a trope so deeply mired in racial suffering and exclusion 

for a cheap laugh on a slow Saturday night? No matter what ‘variation’ culturally

diverse locals may apply to the skit, the trope of ‘blackface’ is not Australian 

humour. This figure has a specific context, and that context is slavery, violence,

invisibility and erasure. That this racist parody is ported to other places does

not mean it loses its register of meanings.

 

The question that needs to be asked is why do performers and social satirists

need to resort to racist cosmetology in 2009 to get a laugh, or indeed in the

case of John Safran in his ABC TV series Race Relations, to get an insight into

what it is like to be Black in America? Why can’t we hear what African Americans

have been saying (and are saying) about racism and ‘post-racial’ America?

Why does it still take a white Jewish subject in ‘blackface’ to offer a predominantly

white audience a ‘humorous’ lesson about race? What is the utility of such a 

performance? Might it be that Safran’s ‘blackface’ is fundamentally for

entertainment value, just as other white and non-white performers have done

in the many incarnations of this contested figure. And like many a white minstrel

before, singing and dancing are part of the racial repertoire that Safran calls up

in his attempts to mimic the idioms of African American culture, or more 

accurately, his white imitation of black culture.

 

In the face of criticism, the ‘blackface’ performers of the skit Hey Hey It’s Saturday

used their culturally diverse backgrounds (Indian, Lebanese, Greek, Sri Lankan,

and Italian) to deflect charges of racism. Dr Suresh DeSilva, the spokesperson

for the group claimed that their multicultural backgrounds distanced them from

being racists, stating, ‘If we had our time again we would wear different make-up

and wigs and of course we regret we did it’ (The Daily Telegraph). Safran uses

his Jewish identity in the same way. Subtly (and not so subtly) invoking one’s 

ethno-religious background as a rhetorical shield to deflect questions around the

ethics of performing ‘blackface’ is a refusal to recognise that racism is about power

and to understand how racism works.  In so doing, Safran’s act fails miserably to

deliver a meaningful insight into anything, other than reproducing the 

same old  routine. 

 

While the dominant or hegemonic racism in Australia is white racism, there are

many other racisms at work in multi-racial, multicultural Australia. Racism is

not confined to one group.  Indeed, you certainly don’t have to be white to

practice, or indeed reproduce racism. Racism is a social relation and is

endemic in our cultures, regardless of where we come from or our level of

formal education. As Shohat and Stam argue, ‘In a systematically racist society, 

no one is exempt from a hegemonic racist discourse, including the victims of

racism … racism circulates laterally … [and] since racism is a discourse as well

as a praxis, a member of an oppressed community can adopt an oppressive 

discourse’ (1994: 19).

 

So if we are to understand the performance of ‘blackface’ as a racist parody

that has a register of meanings that remain viscerally real into the present,

then regardless of the ethnicity of the performative equation – brown imitation

of white imitation of black culture – Hey Hey it’s still racism!

 

Notes

1 ‘Broken speech places the ethnic other outside the American mainstream’

(Denzin 2002 23).

2 In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began his newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston,

proclaiming the cause of immediate abolition. By the middle of the 1830s, riots

directed against abolitionists took place in the North and in the South.

(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/slavery/es_abolition.html)

3 George Frederickson writes ‘there is something startling about the rapidity’

with which various beliefs and ideas about racial difference (primitivism,

licentiousness, cranial inferiority, etc) were ‘brought together and organised in

a rigid polemical pattern, once the defenders of slavery found themselves in a

propaganda war with the abolitionists’ (quoted in Hall, 2002: 243).

4 Nederveen Pieterse argues that the ideological background of ‘Jim Crow’ was

the white backlash against abolitionism, a term linked via song to the

minstrel (1995: 33).

5 The complexity of this racial conundrum is subject to critique, with Dirks

asking in parenthetical brevity, ‘is this act ‘symbolic of [the Jazz Singer’s]

assimilation into the culture, or a way to mask his ethnicity?’

(http://www.filmsite.org/jazz.html ). For an exploration of the racial dialectics

of this, see Shohat and Stam (1994: pp 227-230).

6 For the backstory to the Hey Hey It’s Saturday skit, see

http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/tv/2009/10/15/1255195859145.htmlhttp://

www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26186302-952,00.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/14/sawyer.blackface/index.html

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/comm

ents/hey_hey_thats_racist/

 

References

Bogle, D. (1997) ‘Black beginnings: From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Birth of a

Nation’ in V. Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video

London The Athlone Press.

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001) White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Boulder London Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Denzin, N.K. (2002) Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence

London Sage Publications.

DeSilva, S. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydneyconfidential/

livid-kamahl-has-had-enough-of-hey-hey/story-e6frewz0-1225784508813

Dirks, T. (2009) http://www.filmsite.org/jazz.html Downloaded 26 October

2009.

Hall, S. (2002) ‘The Spectacle of the Other’ in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural

Representations and Signifying Practices London: Sage Publications.

Hanchard, M. (2001) ‘Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics and the African

Diaspora’ in P. Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities Durham and London:

Duke University Press.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (1995) White on Black: Images of Africa and Balcks in

Western Popular Culture New Haven and London Yale University Press.

Shohat, E. and R. Stam, (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism

and the Media London and New York: Routledge.

Smith, V. ‘Introduction’ in V. Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness: Issues in Film

and Video London The Athlone Press.

The Australian

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/comm

ents/hey_hey_thats_racist/P25/) Downloaded Oct 14 2009

The Sydney Morning Herald

http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/your_say/022184.html?page=fullpag

e#comments Downloaded 14 October 2009

The Daily Telegraph

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/livid-kamahlhas-

had-enough-of-hey-hey/story-e6frewz0-1225784508813 Downloaded Oct 14 2009.

 

*Thanks Rawan for this link to ‘How to tell people they sound racist’

 

 

Era[c]ing Pasts :: Re-inscribing Presence

Published on January 31, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

 

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 221st 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 beginning of 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 

 

 

 

 

Let’s Talk about Race

Published on October 29, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments Tags: .

 

Yo, I don’t think we should talk about this.

Come on, why not?

People might misunderstand what we’re tryin’ to say,

you know?

No, but that’s a part of life.

Come on

Let’s talk about [race], baby

Let’s talk about you and me

Let’s talk about all the good things

And the bad things that may be

Let’s talk about [race]

Let’s talk about [race]

Let’s talk about [race]

Let’s talk about [race]*

 

A thousand apologies to hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa for altering the lyrics of their 1990s hit ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’, but it seems like we have been talking about sex** for a long time now. 2008 presents an opportune moment in the culture of time and politics to move on to a subject that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, but affects us all in markedly different ways.

Race is a topic that sends people scrambling. It is a guaranteed conversation stopper. It makes people defensive. It polarises.  It makes people angry. It makes them dissemble. Standard middle class practice in polite multicultural society is to avoid the topic altogether, and should it come up, all systems go into shutting it down before the genie escapes from the unperfumed bottle. Certainly, a lot more energy goes into not talking about race, than into thinking about how issues of race might be approached.

As the lyrics in the song about sex (in a pre-Sex and the City world) indeed demonstrate, there is a fear that ‘people might misunderstand what we are tryin’ to say, you know’. If we are talking about race, the fear of being misread is perhaps a legacy of the post-civil rights and anti-discrimination eras whereby  the sensitivities about race and power are at least acknowledged. But then, there are always those who have no fear of being misread when it comes to race, those who pound podiums and let loose with their racetalk in defiance of race vilification laws. Those who dismiss race as a shibboleth of the politically correct. The latter perhaps best describes the last decade in Australia where discourse and debates around race, gender, and sexuality have been fought as front line battles in the struggle that has come to be known as the culture wars. The last decade has rendered talking about race mostly in adversarial terms. 

If we don’t have critical conversations about race and how it is experienced – especially with and by those who don’t have the power or space to speak back to the race ideologues who more often than not, monopolise the floor and broadsheets and broadcasts of public discourse – then we are destined to perform the same old routines of snap and retort. So, rather than sex, let’s talk about race.

Race and the City is a site for interactive dialogue. It is borne out of years of community-based activism and cultural work around issues of race, gender and representation. It is an intervention into the public domain using the medium of the portal to engage with a community of thinkers and thought that doesn’t reduce race to the usual suspects, but rather produces critical commentaries about power, inter-communal relations, identity, history and culture.

Race and the City is not an Oprah-style intervention that aims to make anyone (particularly white liberals) feel relaxed and comfortable because they can. Rather this blog is an attempt to create a site that draws out the complexities that go beyond the black and white. This site is especially for those who have something to say about race but feel the spaces to speak are both limited and limiting.  This blogging project is fundamentally a response to the way the Australian media is devoid of a diversity of critical opinion. In this way, the blogosphere is an important public space for dialogue because it allows for a more democratic approach to writing about subjects like race precisely because it is not constrained by populism or corporate concerns, and very much inclusive of marginalised voices. 

The blog is particularly germane for a creative intervention like Race and the City because it blurs the lines between the public and the private. This especially appeals to the idea that when talking about race, there are public and private conversations. There are intra-racial and inter-racial conversations. In blogville, the boundaries are less secure. Publics are able to respond in ways that traditional mainstream print media cannot control. But of course this has its flip side.  As Jonathon Freedland of the The Guardian, commenting on whether the blogosphere needs a code of conduct,  writes: ‘If the topic touches, even indirectly, on race or religion, then you’d better brace yourself’ (Freedland) 2007:23). Here Freedland refers to the potential for abuse, perhaps facilitated by the anonymity of the web. This blog does not indirectly touch on race, but is all about race. So are there rules for when talking about race? Does imposing rules ‘undermine the essential freedom of the medium’? (Freedland). 

If we are to dialogue, regardless of the cover provided by the web, respectful interchange is how we might proceed. But what are the actual terms of engagement when we talk about race? How do we avoid the rhetorical shields and qualifiers that have become the standard prefaces to talking about race? How do we enter the terrain of the ‘too-hard-basket’? How do we open up to critical thinking rather than shutting it all down? These are just some questions that come to mind in considering the possibilities for dialogue in an intensely racialised society that is mostly in denial about how deeply ideas of race penetrate the psyches of so many individuals, groups and communities across the suburbs of virtual Sydney and beyond.

And if we are talking about race in Australia, inevitably, we have to talk about racism. And if we talk about racism, we have to talk about the elephant in the room. The white elephant. We have to talk about whiteness and how it works; how it gets its authority and valencies; how it is maintained and sustained. 

With the appearance of Barack Obama on the political stage in the United States since 2007, race has been a regular talking point in globalised political commentary. Opinionists, strategists and activists have been forced to explore the question of race and whether it will or won’t be an issue for a racially stratified US public when voting. Indeed, what has been most interesting about the Obama phenomenon is a term that has entered the lexicon. Some commentators have argued that Obama is indeed possible because the US is a ‘post-racial’ society. But what does this mean? How can that be if certain constituencies are voting along racial lines? Even here in Australia, the term has crept into the headline of an editorial in the conservative broadsheet The Australian, in context of the politically explosive Northern Territory ‘intervention’. It reads: ‘Answers are neither black nor white: We need post-race policies to advance social equity’. How on earth did we get there?

Is post-racial like post-feminism? Does that mean it’s all over red rover? Does it mean ethnic descriptors and racial profiling are relics of the past? Does this mean I never have to hear the term ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ again? And what does post-racial mean for Aboriginal communities whose life expectancy and every other index to living is so so far below that of all other Australians? What does post-racial mean for Somalian and Sierra Leonean women living in Western Sydney? For Muslim women holding onto their heads for dear life in fear that their scarves be yanked off? For young Sudanese Australians who get shoved around by everyone? For those asylum seekers now refugees who endured Australian-style border panic politics via the detention-prisons of Villawood, Port Hedland and Woomera?  Post-race Australia: are we there yet? 

These are questions that posters to this blog can perhaps answer. So, let’s talk about race, and as the song we started with goes on to affirm, ‘don’t decoy, avoid, or make void the topic, cuz that ain’t gonna stop it, cause, it keeps coming up anyhow’. 

 

Notes and References

* “Let’s Talk About Sex” is the name of the hit released by the American hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa. It was released as a single from their Blacks’ Magic album in 1991, achieving great success in many countries, including Australia where it was a number one hit. < http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/saltnpepa/letstalkaboutsex.html> (accessed August 21 2008).

**I am using the term ’sex’ here in the same context as the song suggests – the act of ‘having sex’ – rather than the other less ’sexy’ meaning of gender. Had Salt-N-Pepa intended their song to be read as ‘Let’s Talk about Gender’, well, that would have been fabulous! But this was a song of its time, and its impact was not lost on young women then. For my part, by insisting that we talk about race, it is not my intention to be read as splitting race from gender, or indeed, severing gender from race, as if they can somehow be experienced as separate identities and talked about as parallels rather than intersectionally. The intersectionalities of race, gender and sexuality underscore the very idea of this blog as they do in our lives outside the cybersphere.

Freedland, J. (2007) ‘The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males’ The Guardian Wednesday April 11 p. 23.

The Weekend Australian (2008) ‘Answers are neither black nor white: We need post-race policies to advance social equity’ October 18-19 p. 18.