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.
Exoticisation: The Currency of Trauma
I am currently completing an Undergraduate degree in Social Work at a Sydney-based university. Part of our degree includes undergoing two placements. A strikingly popular preference amongst the students is to secure an internship with STARTTS: the NSW Service for the Treatment And Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors.
Of late, I’ve been wondering as to why this should be such a popular choice. After all, working with such profound trauma, commonly inflicted by large-scale violence, is not something to be taken lightly.
The stories you are likely to come across has the potential to be profoundly disturbing, grotesque, emotionally draining and complex to say the least. Even more so the case if part of a survivor’s experience of conflict was the systematic divisions put in place as a strategy in propagating societal violence.
For example, having spent some time in the previously conflict-torn province of Aceh in Indonesia, I was made aware that one of the strategies employed by the Indonesian military was to plant a ‘cuak’ or ‘spy’ in any particular Acehnese community to report on the activities of the local villagers. This resulted in a blanket culture
of suspicion of one’s associates and had extremely fragmenting consequences for the social fabric of many Acehnese communities.
Such a history results in, amongst other things, the potential for issues of ‘trust’ to arise when trying to establish a working relationship with someone who has undergone these divisive practices.
Briefly stated, this is no easy field to go into.
So why the attraction? I ask this question in particular when I learn of fellow students, who (at least as far as I am aware) have never even come close to going through the pain of forced migration and have what I would call, an ‘under-developed’ understanding of the politics of race and its relevance to such work.
This is especially important to consider when as a social-worker-to-be you already occupy a position of relative power to your ‘client(s)’. Throw in there the societal privileges you have access to by virtue of being white and/or male and/or upper-middle class and voilà! Therein lies the need to have a political awareness
and a political context to your work, beginning with not taking for granted the power accorded to you and working to actively deconstruct this position of power, for the benefit of your individual client as well as for the eventual demise of social inequalities.
Anyway.
The only answer I can come up with is that this attraction stems from an exoticisation of other people’s sufferings. I always wonder if I am in the right to say this, but I do get the sense that, surrounded by mainly white middle-class peers many of whom have a compassionate Christian motivation for enrolling in Social Work (often at the expense of having a political Christian motivation), there is a
sense of excitement at the prospect of working with ‘courageous-inspiring-non-white-people from the far reaching and unfamiliar [read:exotic] parts of the world’.
This ‘use’ of other people’s stories functions as a type of currency, demonstrating how ‘inspiring’ you are, as a social worker but also as a white, middle-class person of privilege. The more terrible stories you have access to, the more shares you own in the stock-market of global suffering and the richer of a person you are!
If I am not completely missing the mark, then I find this situation profoundly disturbing. It demonstrates to me a lack of respect of how real people’s sufferings are, how people do not choose to become ‘refugees’ and how sometimes when life turns sour, it is neither particularly courageous nor brave to push on, but it is simply a
matter of survival. The exoticisation of torture and trauma survivors, could be seen at the surface as a benevolent attempt to engage yet at the same time it has the potential to be a de-humanising process.
And I am not unblemished in this area. Throughout 2005-2006, I actively organised and participated in community visits to Villawood Detention Centre. Following my withdrawal from these visits, I came to realise that I had started to see the people we visited first and foremost under the label of ‘detainees’ and only to a lesser
extent as real people.
De-humanisation is a grey area. Benevolence, compassion, the benign process of ‘other-ing’ and an unconscious ‘racism’ makes it even harder to hold one’s focus and prevent ourselves from de-humanising a real living breathing feeling human being.
As an aspiring social worker, this means that I need to constantly be aware of when I am neglecting to keep my eyes, ears, mind and heart trained on the person whose journey I am hoping to share. This cannot firstly be about me (without neglecting practices of self-care) and how I am enriching my life, but I do need to be aware of how I am approaching this worker-client relationship, if I am to remain focused on the needs of my ‘client’.
What responsibilities does ‘exoticisation’ bestow upon you?
Written by Rani P Lukita on November 2nd, 2008. Thanks to Rosi Aryal for insightful conversation on the topic of trauma and exoticisation.
Thanks for such thought provoking discussions and insight into benevolent racism.
I’m interested in a more sinister version of this benevolence. Recently, i was working in a media organisation where one of my colleagues told me that they liked a particular religious community from a particular country because they did things quietly and were sort of like a ‘multicultural success story!’
This person was probably the most blunt about their views, but others who worked there and maybe weren’t as blunt, wouldn’t have had a problem with what was said. And that’s at the more enlightened end of the media!
I think it’s why we have no forums for discussions about race that are intelligent and free of ghastly opinions about how ‘nice’ one group of immigrants are and how ‘ bad ‘ another is. I’ve always thought that one way around that would have to be the way journalists and other media professionals are educated. Although limited in its ability to create change, it ’s a great start. the other one is being able to call journalists and media organsiations on their racism. but that, i find is the toughest thing to do.
I’d be interested in hearing what you think about changing the way individual journalists as well as media institutions talk about race.
CrankyO
I’m not sure I agree with this exoticisation theory – that there is a certain currency in the pain of others’ experience. It seems very cynical to me and I think people are often too quick to dump on those in the community who want to and do help. We saw with the Howard government how easily people are swayed by racist agendas. The majority of Australians turned against their better nature and moved toward hate, nationalism and neo-fascism. We should encourage all people in the community – whether white, middle-class and “privileged” – to care, because we have seen what happens when people don’t care. Many white people, including Christians, showed courage in fighting against the Howard government. Just think of the Jesuit social justice groups who were so outspoken when others were not. It’s too easy to lump all “white” people and all “middle-class” people into some mass category of privilege. I am not a Christian but I am a migrant and I have lived for a very long time in an ethnically diverse area and from what I see many non-white people are also only interested in their homes, their cars and their consumer goods and have no interest in helping others. Often in history it is the settled migrants who are against further migration. One only has to look at the policies of countries like Japan, Malaysia and Singapore and their attitudes to migrants and refugees to see that Australia is pretty good with its intake of migrants and refugees.
With all due respect you’ve missed the point! It seems that felafel is being mixed with pot roast…people are not “swayed” into racism…it’s inherent in people’s existence. Howard’s “straya” simply gave impetus to active racism that was already there, Howardians could now speak freely racist without fear of retribution…they weren’t swayed they were always here…”privilege” must be looked at by all of us…there are all types of privilege and yes migrants can be racist too…none of us are immune in examining our own privilege…”whiteness” is an under examined term…dear artemus to be white in this world is to be privileged…there are those who understand their white privilege and are pioneers, and there are those who are unaware of their privilege of whiteness whose “good intentions” are a two-edged sword…artemus’ comments really demonstrate a lack of understanding of the complexity of what is being said… as for cynical … well, it is a survival strategy you know….
Artemus,
I’ve been getting some very interesting responses to that bit of writing on exoticisation. One of my lecturers also commented that mine was a very cynical point of view.
One way in which I disagree with this is that, if I were TRULY cynical, I would not have bothered writing these thoughts down, let alone begin sharing them with people. I would not have seen the point of doing so. But instead of behaving so cynically, I decided to post to this blog and my intention was (similar to what Paula Abood is attempting to do through this blog) to initiate dialogue. And here we are! In dialogue!
I will just quickly comment on this bit of your response:
‘We should encourage all people in the community – whether white, middle-class and “privileged” – to care, because we have seen what happens when people don’t care.’
I did not say in any shape or form that we should NOT care, nor that we should discourage people from caring. My point was, instead, that we should examine the reasons for which we DO care.
That said, a critique I found most useful was offered by a lecturer in anthropology of race/racism at Sydney University. He pointed out that my analysis could be seen as cynical, since it reduces people to ’self-maximisers’ and this is exactly what proponents of economic rationalism would have us believe: that people ultimately only care about themselves.
The difference in this case is that instead of maximising self-gain by way of accumulating material capital, what I can be seen as saying is that people self-maximise in emotional capital.
How interesting! I had no idea that this could be one way of interpreting my analysis and let me tell you I am no fan of the self-maximisation theory of human nature.
Any thoughts?
(Thanks to S.J. for insightful conversation.)
At last! A blog that actually makes clever jokes about racism.