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.