Warning This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language, and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise. Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded. As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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I'm reviewing The New Jim Crow here because much of what it says provides storylines for lots of excellent TV series, and also because this review will explain some of my views on Australian politics as it affects Indigenous Australians.
The premise of the book is simple:
When slavery was abolished in the U.S. it was replaced with Jim Crow laws. In turn, as Jim Crow laws were slowly dismantled, this system of race discrimination was replaced with Mass Incarceration.
Australian politics is heavily influenced by what politicians do in the UK and the USA.
Very often the ideas we import from other countries are inefficient because Australia's location, environments and eco systems, political history, infrastructure and even our low population density are unique.
Very often, the political policies and other ideas we import are not just unworkable, they are wildly offensive. Even terms like “political correctness” or “colourblindness” are imports that have a truly sinister origin and function.
When it comes to looking at foreign stuff in order to understand Australia better, one of the most impressive books I’ve read recently is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (revised in 2012).
“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have redesigned it,” says Alexander.
The New Jim Crow is an eloquently written book, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to kill the prose here and give you an example in note form of just one consequence of the Mass Incarceration system:
Constitutional intentions aside, this is how the right to vote has been consistently denied the members of just one African American family:
1. Slaves cannot vote (Great Great Grandparents)
2. KKK murders a Black person trying to register to vote (Great Grandparents)
3. KKK intimidates a Black person trying to register to vote (Grandparents)
4. Poll taxes and literacy tests prevent a Black person voting (Parents)
5. Now a criminal record prevents a Black person voting
“Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans”… A Criminal Record legalises discrimination in employment, housing, voting rights, educational opportunities, access to food stamps and more.
The problems plaguing communities of colour are not just the result of poverty, or culture, or motivation or genes.
In the United States,
locking up people of colour for so called crimes
effectively makes them non-citizens,
and this practice took off with the 13th Amendment which ended slavery in 1865.
The “War on Drugs” was a big con, but its impact has been phenomenal. (If you read this book’s description of the War on Drugs you’ll see why I found the situation with the bad naughty demons in Buffy The Vampire Slayer so problematic.) The New Jim Crow illustrates how law and order elections are simply coded attacks on racial equality.
The US now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world - higher than Russia, China or Iran, and locking up more black people than South Africa at the height of Apartheid. People are 6 times more likely to be jailed in the US than in other industrialised nations.
On current trends, one in 3 African Americans will serve time, yet this is widely accepted to be a criminal justice issue rather than a race issue. Why? Partly because it is intersectional, and partly because of the lie of colourblindness.
When we criminalise people, we deny them some parts of their citizenship and personhood, we other them, and rob them of hope and the chance to do the very thing we ask of them – which is to play the “anyone can succeed if they have character” game.
Before I move on to parallels with Australia, let me share some quotes from Cornel West’s Foreword to The New Jim Crow:
"In fact, the very discourse of colorblindness – created by neoconservatives and neoliberals in order to trivialize and disguise the depths of black suffering in the 1980s and ‘90s’ has left America blind to the New Jim Crow…
"But it is also true that if young black middle- and upper-class people were incarcerated at the same rates as young black poor people, black leaders would focus much more on the prison-industrial complex…
"Martin Luther King Jr called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable."
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Australia
In contrast to the United States, committing a crime in Australia does not necessarily bring an effective end to "citizenship".
For example, in Australia, committing a crime does not necessarily disqualify people from voting.
On the other hand, Indigenous people are jailed in disproportionate numbers in Australia. Worse, Indigenous Australians die in disproportionate numbers in Australian jails and most of the time (though not always) 100 % of all youths locked up in the NT are Indigenous. If this involved white kids it would be front page news
Australia’s criminal justice system, though slightly different from state to state, is quite simply a system of
government sanctioned murder
Trolls and ostriches claim or believe the “where there’s smoke” theory, but it would be wrong to conclude if Indigenous Australians are being locked up in larger numbers, it's because they are committing more crimes. The New Jim Crow provides an opportunity for us to “sense” with some detachment (cos it’s there, not here) how criminal justice systems manage to discriminate.
Here's an Australian example of who gets locked up, and for what: A few years ago, a young boy was jailed in WA for stealing a packet of biscuits. This was a mandatory sentence under a three strike rule.
Because of living conditions, cultural practices or even indifference for white values, the social or legal “crimes” of Indigenous people are sometimes highly visible. Or, to rephrase that; Indigenous people are sometimes less obsessive than whites are about hiding what they do – shouting or drinking or arguing are not harmful in themselves, they are just things few white people would do in public.
A white sense of shame is a luxury not everyone can afford.
Of course, there IS a double standard at work. Australian white culture has inherited a British taste for alcohol. (For centuries, beer consumption kept the death rate low in some European countries because it's manufacture killed water-borne toxins.) Public drunkenness is not socially acceptable in Australia except when it is part of some community celebration. Or, for example, when pubs closed at 6 o'clock and the swill resulted in large numbers of drunken sots being chucked onto the streets right on tea time.
Like many minor offences, public drunkenness is rarely about protecting the drunk person from themselves, or protecting the community. Minor laws are rarely enforced unless some agenda is at work. (Witness, for example, prosecutions for possession of minor amounts of marijuana during the 60s and 70s when people were protesting the Vietnam War.) Minor laws afford a means/ or piss poor excuse for social control.
Public drunkenness is often just an excuse to lock up Indigenous Peoples. Why did this lady get locked up, when cops will walk past white people sniffing glue without blinking an eye?
White people do not get locked up when drunk.
Ms Day was presumed drunk but actually had a head injury.
No doubt she was taken into custody "for her own safety".
There is nothing safe for Indigenous Australians about being in custody.
Very many years ago I lived in Port Lincoln for a while. Some white drunks liked to bitch and moan because Aboriginals would sit on the grass on the foreshore to get pissed at night. I pointed out that a) it was cooler at night outside than in pubs (which in those days had no A/C) and b) publicans always had “reasons” for barring Aboriginals from drinking inside pubs.
(I got the “you don’t know what it’s like to live with them” speech a lot, before I finally left town.)
Different life opportunities might also help explain some arrests of Indigenous kids. Back in the 1950s, when it was rare for even white families to own a car, a cousin of mine (then 12 years old) borrowed the family car and smashed it into a neighbour’s fence. He was not punished by the legal system, instead his father worked out a punishment and repayment plan. He was never criminalised for his misadventure.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Ferris wags school and borrows Cameron's Dad's Vintage Ferrari
Naturally Ferris & Cameron accidentally trash the Ferrari
They do NOT get arrested
Today, many of the white people I know have fascinating stories about the stupid things they did as kids, and none of them were ever criminalised as a result. Certainly, any white kid caught stealing a packet of biscuits from a shop in the 1950s or 1960s would likely get a smack over the back of the head from the shop keeper and escorted home to discuss it with the parents.
In what kind of warped mind could it seem reasonable - in the 21st Century - to jail a kid for stealing a packet of biscuits?
As Eva says in Freedom Writers “it’s all about colour”.
Today, if some Indigenous kid steals biscuits from a shop it’s possibly because his/her own family don’t have a credit card for him to “borrow” to buy shit on the internet with, or in other ways, he /she lacks white opportunities to be naughty safely.
(Of course the question of who is in Australia's jails and why is much bigger than this post seems to suggest - I'm simply trying to make the point here that a criminal record is not necessarily evidence of criminal behaviour requiring us to run around in a flappy panic asserting "It's OK to be white!".)
As highlighted in shows like The Fosters – once someone is criminalised it’s hard for them to redeem themselves. Teenagers are impulsive and secretive, and going through puberty is a bit like going through The Terrible Twos all over again. Yet
criminal responsibility in the NT
starts at the age of 10
If the Territory government is reluctant to adjust this, the only possible explanation is it’s because they believe it’s okay to lock up Indigenous kids and destroy their lives forever. And criminalised people are more likely to have children in circumstances that limit life opportunities for following generations - the impact of criminalisation is transgenerational.
------------------- Back to the Book
Australia has a crap constitution, and it’s easy for me, as someone who consumes US media but doesn’t actually live in the country, to get the impression the US Bill of Rights actually protects its citizens. The truth, however, is that many U.S. Constitutional Rights have been eroded to the point where they are meaningless. (But not, it seems, the right to bear arms.)
The New Jim Crow provides lots of insights into the way the law in any country can be circumvented – and a lot of the methods are being used here now, or imported or proposed.
Chapter 1 Rebirth of Caste – outlines the history of social and racial control in the US.
The method is safe from effective criticism because it is intersectional. The people at the top are often clueless about the lives of people at the bottom, and the system pits poor whites against poor blacks. And it keeps poor blacks poor.
Movies like Hidden Figures, The Help or documentaries like 13th all show us how Jim Crow worked. And any drama that looks at the operation or impact of the prison industrial complex is important – even the dramas that feature mainly white characters.
If the system can destroy the lives of individual white people who get caught up in it, imagine what it’s like when whole families of POC get trapped.
(As I suggested in a previous post, drama helps us gain an emotional insight into stuff we might otherwise only know "intellectually".)
Chapter 2 The Lockdown – looks at the structure of the Mass Incarceration system.
It highlights how the War on Drugs was a con, and how it has managed to make a joke of Constitutional rights. It “follows the money” to explain how it all came about and why it will be hard to fix.
A criminal justice system should, hopefully, have three functions:
1. to deter crime,
2. to punish crime and
3. to rehabilitate people.
In the US, the system exists primarily to punish and then exploit. I wouldn’t want to live there for quids, and I’m white. (On the other hand, if I were Indigenous, I wouldn’t feel too safe in Australia, either.)
The US system relies heavily on hitting people with a lot of charges, then backing them into a corner where they more or less have no choice but to plead guilty. The doco 13 TH provides great insight into how this works against innocent people.
The best dramatic portrayal of this system I’ve seen is in season 6 of The Good Wife, when Cary is set up and finds himself arrested. He is white and works for a prestigious law firm. He has might on his side but still lives through a Kafkaesque nightmare as a result of his arrest, bail hearings, parole process and more.
Season 7 of The Good Wife then looks at the system from the point of view of a white lawyer who finds herself trying to make a living in the morning court sessions where arrested people try to get bail. (This theme is explored further in some episodes of the spin-off The Good Fight.)
Chapter 3 The Color of Justice – looks at how the system described in Chapter 2 works to ensure the people locked up are predominantly People of Colour.
The system is supposedly race-neutral, so if POC are being locked up in huge numbers, does this mean they are more criminal? This chapter says NO, and explains how we can be sure it is not race neutral.
As early as the 80s we were hearing about racial profiling (The movie Soul Man, for example, relies on a lot of stereotypes and doesn’t challenge any of them, but if a racist movie acknowledges profiling exists, who are we to say it doesn't?) Even a show as politically bland as Supergirl has made a point of discussing it briefly.
(If you have not seen Season 7 of The Good Wife you've missed seeing how well a show can take the piss out of stereotypes.)
Profiling is real, and US dramas are slowly learning to incorporate it into their “dramatic scenery” as a matter of course.
Chapter 4 The Cruel Hand – looks at how the system continues to punish people after they have supposedly paid their debt to society.
Any drama that looks at what it is like for people with a record trying to get back on their feet shows that the punishment and stigma never really stop. The challenge begins with trying to find a job.
Social security in Australia is steadily being eroded, and replaced with the myth that if you try you will definitely succeed, but it’s not as bad here as in the U.S. (yet). Again, I know it’s a soap, but check out The Fosters.
Chapter 5 The New Jim Crow – explores parallels between Mass Incarceration and the old system of Jim Crow.
Yes, more about
legalised discrimination,
segregation (prisons),
stigma (racial/ criminal),
slavery (cheap labour).
This chapter also looks at illogical arguments like “these policies are supported by African American leaders” so they can’t be wrong. Duh.
I love the comment “… mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable – unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy – while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor.”
Season 3 of Orange is the New Black has fun with the idea that prisons are a source of slave labour, but the comment above highlights the fact that even shit jobs are disappearing.
Prison is becoming the modern equivalent of the rotting hulks that were a feature of Georgian England, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for housing unwanted, surplus labour.
The next step backwards, as conditions inside prisons continue to deteriorate (Season 5 of OITNB looks at privatisation) might be when prisoners will be invoiced for the cost of keeping them locked up.
Chapter 6 The Fire This Time – where do we go from here?
I commend this book to any of you who are "readers".
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Finally, one last US sampler, from a different source:
(I wish I could see an Australian version of this)
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language, and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise. Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded. As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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This is Part 3 of what began as a quick “about me”. Some of it assumes you have at least read Part 2.
PART 1 (The First Post) The Best Stuff Suits The Hippy In Me: God,: Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude; Cultural Identity; Military Forces; Nationalism; Government; Law Enforcement Agencies;Gender; Sex; Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular, & Sex Toys;
PART 2 (The Previous Post) Non or Anti-Racist? About Sets and Systems; What Does SYSTEMIC Mean? (Systemic Racism) Part 1; What Systemic Racism is Made of Part 2; More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3; People Are Motivated by Needs; Needs and Australian History; Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour; The Me Too Movement; Trial by Media; Feminism; Intersectionality; Systemic Sexism; White Privilege; Race as a Social Construct;
PART 3 (This Post) Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences: Choices; Compulsory Unit; Censorship and the Single Story; Cultural Appropriation; Blackface; White People With Dreads; Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art; The W word and the N word; The Hip Hop Lyric Thing; White Saviour Narratives; White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher; White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid; White Saviour and the Grateful Slave; White Saviour as Anti-Hero; Fact or Fiction; Crossing the Line; Other-Ness
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Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences
Choices
All fiction is an abstraction from reality. A smiley face is an example of an abstraction from reality –
it tells you just enough to convey a message “I want you to think of a person smiling.” : )
Another example of an abstraction from reality is a cartoon or a simple drawing. (The 21st century equivalent of a simple cartoon is often a meme).
Yep, it's by Leunig
There is no way to tell all there is about anything, so we pick the bits we think are the most important to us, or the bits we think will have the most impact. Or enough to make a point.
We try to influence audiences with our choices about what we leave out as much as what we leave in. We choose amongst styles of storytelling, such as documentaries or fiction, film language or sound. And we choose the bits we want an audience to see sitting side by side, for comparison.
We also influence audiences with the bits we aren’t aware we are choosing to leave out.
When we choose what to put into a story, we start with assumptions about what the audience already knows, or takes for granted, or is likely to understand. This is the main reason I ended up writing such a long "about me"- in my reviews I want to be able to assume readers know what I mean by things like "non-racist" as opposed to "anti-racist", or even just whether they might trust I mean well.
Compulsory Unit
I’m going to provide a link at the end of this section to a YouTube clip. I’ve titled this part “Compulsory” because I think watching this clip is the single most important recommendation in this whole post.
The link will take you to a talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled The Danger of a Single Story, but in her talk Chimamanda talks of many things relevant to many things. It would be a mistake to think her talk has only a single point to make.
If you enjoy reading novels and have read none of hers, I would recommend them. I’m not a great fan of novels, but Americanah is especially relevant to any country grappling with issues relating to detention of stateless persons, immigration and so on.
It has something to say on the matter of “place”.
This talk is relevant to many reviews of film … and other things – Chimamanda is a great writer and an intellectual giant. Please watch this clip for yourself – not just because I refer to it constantly.
Here's the bit where, amongst other things, I say what I think about racism in drama. This is not cos I think I know better than people of colour, but possibly cos I just love the sound of my own voice.
On the other hand, if you have something constructive to say, I am open to genuine learning experiences. It's because I'm learning all the time that I constantly edit these pages.
Censorship and the Single Story
I’m tired of people jumping up and down and bitching about where other people have failed.
Yes, I’m all for an exchange of ideas, but I’m tired of seeing people taken outside, put up against the wall and shot for not being perfect.
Here’s the conclusion to my review of the brilliant mini-series Guerrilla:
It would be a pity if the boycott campaign’s misguided idea that Guerrilla should be limited to a history of the BBP [British Black Panthers] and nothing more stopped people from watching it – it’s brilliant, necessary, informative, thought provoking and would tell people a lot of truths about the past if it were given a chance.
One good work of fiction is worth a thousand dry documentaries; Working collectively, Black Britons could produce 20 good works of fiction rather than just one and change people’s perception of history forever – but the key here would be working collectively. This does not mean they have to collaborate – it is only through the collective weight of many individuals telling and re-telling their history that the narrative currently owned by the ruling class can be re-written.
Most stories have something positive to offer, and are worth watching for the good bits or at the very least for the discussion they generate. Certainly, unless they are dangerous or damaging, there is no cause for censorship.
Sense8 is an example of a series that is flawed on many levels, but is probably one of the best things ever made (in my lifetime, at least). Nothing in nature is perfect in the way humans have come to expect art to be perfect, and I think we need to re-capture the sense of wonder we once had before over-editing became a technological possibility.
No single movie, no series with several episodes, and not even a series that runs for years can show us every important thing we need to know about a topic. We can be disappointed about the style of show chosen or the premise or the character - we can be disappointed about the creator's priorities or more... but we should not be too quick to stop people from telling stories at all. Yes, we can ask them to do better and to tell more stories, but no single show can be all things to all people.
Cultural Appropriation
“Cultural appropriation is the misuse of a group’s art and culture by someone with the power to redefine that art and, in the process, divorce it from the people who originally created it.”
We could break that down into Necessary and Sufficient conditions, because I think it’s an excellent working definition for anyone who struggles with the concept. One of the key necessary conditions here is
“power to redefine” and another necessary condition is
“divorce it from the people who originally created it.“
Let’s go back to the original article where I found the definition, because Ijeoma Oluo’s example is simple to follow;
“… a shitty black rapper is just a shitty rapper who fades away into obscurity, leaving behind nothing more than a trail of never-played mixtapes dispersed outside of nightclubs. A shitty white rapper wins Grammys and is held up as an example of what good rap is…”
If there are shitty black artists, why can’t white people be shitty artists too? In a fair world, that would be fine. Sadly, the world is not fair. In the real world, the work of the shitty white artist will be valued more than the work of the good black artist… and the work of the shitty white artist becomes the new definition of “good”. This is cultural appropriation in operation. If you have a sense of justice, you will not support it.
Blackface
In the U.S. the birth of and the rise of Blackface and Minstrelsy coincided with the adoption of the 13TH amendment to their constitution. Briefly … (because repeating this is becoming tiring – only an idiot argues with an idiot so why am I still trying?)
If you have a glut of A) black labourers and B) white labourers and you don’t want to pay much to either group, divide them to conquer them. Give the poor white trash permission to treat the poor black trash like shit by dehumanising the poor black trash and use Blackface and Minstrelsy to do this. Then, pay the poor white trash 3/5ths of bugger all, and criminalise the poor black trash, lock them up and use them as unpaid slave labour because criminals are the new slaves as per the clever sneaky loophole in the 13TH amendment that got rid of slavery. Got it?
(Okay, we didn't really want the white trash either, but it would be dangerous to make easy targets of people who look like those of us who matter.)
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND HATE OR ANYTHING TO DO WITH BIZARRE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY...
There are heaps of sources that equate a black face in one form or another with a face that is not to be treated humanely. The precise form or timing is irrelevant.
Just because blackface was progressively and incrementally sanitised by the U.S. entertainment industry does not alter its history or its inherently offensive nature. Just because its offensive purpose was not widely understood or blackface was naively accepted or used innocently in Australia or just because some of us had golliwogs 50 years ago and did not know better or mean anything evil by it and did not understand the history til recently does not make it okay today.
Fifty years ago poofter bashing, backyard abortions and hiding children with handicaps from the world were also deemed okay.
Just because some Dutch people have a tradition of blackface separate from the U.S. tradition does not make it okay – that also had its origins in bitching about the mooted end of slavery in Europe.
The message coming loud and clear from the Black Pete defender in the video is that
• chimney sweeps always behave badly;
• chimney sweeps can only be corrected with a beating; and
• beating chimney sweeps is innocent fun that benefits everyone including the sweep
Further, rather than accept responsibility for his own beliefs, this person hides behind children who could not, logically, miss wearing blackface if they never did it. Is he incapable of finding any substitute way to give children fun? (Would he correct his own, white children by beating them?)
Blackface is one of those “historical event” things in the grey area of the systemic racism diagram we looked at in Part 2: Blackface is part of Systemic Racism, a craze designed to create and support and sustain and perpetuate negative ideas about POC. It also normalises the past. The only way to eliminate systemic racism is to change the stuff in the grey area.
Yes, eliminating blackface means being “politically correct”. None of my other posts will ever be this long, and I won't make this longer by getting into the topic of Political Correctness, but it's simple, really;
In a fair world, some things are harmless, but the world is not fair.
I’m sure the man in the video believes he wouldn't be knowingly unkind to a POC if he met one. But being asked to think about the historical and social significance of colour, he might be less likely to UN-knowingly be unkind to a POC, and more likely to contribute to the unravelling of systemic racism. Most importantly, if he stopped dressing in blackface that would be one less visible sign of support for the local neoNazi troop to feel good about.
You might know one or two people of colour who are okay with golliwogs or blackface today but that does not mean it will not offend other people of colour. We don't know anyone else’s story but our own.
If you are tempted to dress up in blackface - please don't. Stop supporting whingers who feel hard done by about stuff that really doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things, get a life, and grow up.
White People With Dreads
Is this a form of cultural appropriation or blackface? When I first saw hip young white dudes with pony tails and matted clumps of what looked like coconut fibre woven into their hair I was really jealous, but mainly because my own hair is shit. I’m genetically tortured with little wisps of downy fluff on my pate instead of a crown of anything impressive – it’s so fine that if a hair falls down to my face when I’m sweating it can take ten minutes of insane washing and wiping to even find it and in the meantime the tickle drives me crazy. So no, I don’t envy the coconut fibre dreads I envy the dudes who have enough tough hair on their scalp to which fake dreads might safely be attached.
My only other response to white dudes with matted fibre dreads is to scratch with an automatic “nit-nest response”. People of colour have been braiding, plaiting, straightening, dying and putting pot plant holders in their hair since time began, but I don’t see why they should have a monopoly on self-decoration. Caucasians have been doing similar shit just as long. If someone cares to explain how Lana Wachowski’s pink mop-top celebrates the dehumanisation of POC I shall re-think my position, but until then I’ll maintain it just shows two things: a) she has the same hair genes as me and b) she has a sense of fun.
Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art
Indigenous Australians have been and continue to be treated poorly by non-Indgenous Australia. This sucks. I personally want no part of the appropriation or exploitation or abuse of Indigenous culture. I don’t want to participate in any Indigenous cultural practice without the express approval of individual Indigenous Australians affected.
Did you know that not all Indigenous Australian cultures used the didgeridoo, but that amongst the peoples who did traditionally use it, it is a sacred instrument? For this reason, its use by non-Indigenous people could be offensive.
The fact that I have Australian citizenship does not entitle me to align myself with or to make light of any specific cultural or spiritual practice of any other individual Australian, Indigenous or otherwise.
Many Aboriginal artefacts produced for sale to tourists are made by non-Indigenous people (including people overseas), and I find the notion of exploiting someone else’s culture or spiritual beliefs for gain offensive, especially if most of what is produced is, in the long run, only going to contribute to environmental destruction or increase landfill.
A great deal of what is sold as Indigenous Art is fake, and this reduces opportunities for people who are not necessarily fully Westernised but who are often criticised for not being financially self-sufficient. If you are visiting and want to buy Australian Art, please consider buying from a co-op owned and operated by Indigenous Artists or from a reputable gallery.
New Day, Sally Morgan 1989
If you are considering travelling to Australia in order to climb monoliths like Uluru, please don’t.
Just come to look instead.
I was raised a Catholic and while I don’t believe in God I was disturbed to see the number of people eating and shouting while walking through places like The Vatican – I think people can visit each other’s homes and sites without being disrespectful.
The W word and the N word
In the past, in Australia, the word “Wog” was widely and consistently used as a pejorative and in a hurtful way. One of the greatest cultural revolutions of my lifetime was wrought by three young Australians; Nick Giannopoulos, Simon Palomares, and Maria Portesi who wrote a stage play in 1987 (Wogs Out of Work) and took ownership of the word Wog. They not only took the sting out of the word, it became a word that celebrated a whole range of wholesome values – especially family.
Nonetheless, the best news of all is that because the “Wog” play and TV show franchise became so successful Nick Giannopolous actually Trademarked the word “Wog” and has been able to stop several companies from using it in a negative way to sell products and services (though he lets people use it if they continue to use the word in a positive spirit).
Something similar happened in the U.S.A. when African Americans took ownership of the “N word”, the history of which was a lot more hateful and consequential than the Wog word in Australia.
The W word and the N word are words people within a community are entitled to use when talking to each other. They are not words for outsiders to use.
The Hip Hop Lyric Thing
If you are white and you like to sing along to your favourite songs, do NOT sing the N word. Well, okay, it’s impossible not to try to sing along to good songs. But just because someone has included the N word in the lyrics this is not carte blanche for white people to be rude. Hip Hop did not evolve with white audiences as the primary target demographic – we are not the centre of every universe.
Now let’s discuss great tunes/songs like Breathe and Stop by Q-Tip., or You Can Do It by Ice Cube. It would be an exaggeration to say every second word is the N word, because they also include rude words for body parts. Maybe only every third word is the N word. Songs like these are also available in instrumental form if we don’t like the lyrics. Let’s be honest, the internal rhythm of the words and the voice are an essential part of the total sound, and the instrumental versions are fairly crappy compared to the vocal versions.
Here’s my white person solution (cos I’m an Anglo Australian) – I just replace the N word with the word DIGGER. Similarly, for rude words because I am Australian (old school), I just use rhyming slang.
For example, I absolutely love the four letter word beginning with C, but most people don’t tolerate it well. In rhyming slang this would be “A drop kick and a punt”. On the other hand, a word that other people don’t seem to mind but which grates on me – a word that starts with T – is sometimes referred to in rhyming slang as “Brace and bits” so I just use rhyming slang for that.
This way I can sing along accordingly to any song I jolly well please (if I can keep up – which usually I can’t) without offending anyone. "Don't stop, Digger, hit it (I will) ..."
Word substitution is not a silly idea – Cee Lo Greene’s hit F*** You was released with a clean version “Forget You” and it still works (though since watching The 100 I now sing Float You).
But here's the key part - I don't sing stuff that is not mine in public. No, not just because I was cut to the quick at school 50 years ago when the singing nun told me to sit quietly in the corner and do my homework during singing lessons, but because there's a line I would just feel uncomfortable crossing. When I use words like Digger or rhyming slang to sing along to hip hop (or whatever I'm supposed to call it) it's because that's the absolute worst I'm prepared to get caught doing by accident.
White Saviour Narratives
In economic terms (Remember, it's all about the money) it is fair to say “Empire is theft”. From about 1500 onwards several European nations populated mainly by white people got into the business of sailing the rest of the world looking for “savages” in need of civilising.
Saving/ civilising savages usually involved several steps:
• taking control of their land and resources
• killing, maiming and/or stealing people
• imposing foreign ideas and values
• refusing to go away once the "saving" was finished
• a lot of self-congratulation
Rudyard Kipling took the self-congratulation to lyrical heights in 1899 when he penned an ode to The White Man’s Burden. The title alone sounds like the exhausted sigh of some skinny white pratt wearing a pith helmet while he watches a swarthy native carry a chest laden with jewels down to the pier for a journey back to the old country. “Lucky the natives who get saved by this tosser, eh what?”
Animal Crackers
Everything I know about history I did not learn from watching Marx Bros movies. (These dudes carrying the good Captain into Mrs Rittenhouse’s reception look like they’ve been snaffled from the set next door where filming of some Egyptian Bible story is underway.)
Western culture has seen this kind of “bullying hero” narrative as normal since the year dot, literally, and anything that challenges it is still so recent it looks odd.
While I grew up watching a steady stream of cowboy movies or TV shows in which white heroes shot “obviously” evil “redskins” – the Indigenous peoples who had the gall to occupy the North American land mass before Hollywood arrived – black cowboys were presumed non existent.
By 2018 we’ve seen a correction of sorts; occasionally we now see Indigenous Americans or Black cowboys on our screens, but for the most part those who screen films seem to have just thrown everything in the bin and made a few “truer” stories to fill the vacuum. But that amounts only to a “correction of sorts”.
World War II marked the beginning of the end of the Age of Empire.
The British Empire 1903
(Ironically, the Britbits are marked in red)
We could separate former colonies into roughly two distinct groups. The first of those would be predominantly white or European controlled settler societies – like Australia. The White Saviour narrative remains a core part of the national “history”; the country has been saved – past tense - no further negotiation or discussion will be tolerated. The second group of former colonies would be those who never had more than a small white presence; their sole purpose was colonial administration and the theft of resources and labour. In modern narratives, countries in this second group are often treated as “still in need of saving”.
Of course, not all stories are about entire countries – most often they are about parts of countries: States, or cities, or towns, or even neighbourhoods. The hero of a story is very often white, by default.
The “White Saviour Narrative” is often an accident because the people most likely to have the money or the connections or the confidence or the audience (i.e. market) to get a story told are most likely to be white and they are sometimes the least likely to question whether the hero of the story ought to be white.
Drama criticism can be a bitchfest that creates animosity and fosters resentment, or it can be an opportunity for a genuine exchange of ideas. I don’t believe it ever needs to be personal. No, the world doesn’t need more stories in which the white person is the only person competent to solve a problem. And no, people of colour are unlikely to be entertained by even more stories suggesting they are useless and can’t do a thing unless some white person comes along and offers a solution.
But not everything that seems to fit into “yet another fail” category is necessarily bad.
White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher
As an example, let me offer the movie Freedom Writers. Teachers who are POC have been helping disadvantaged students for as long as there have been schools. Why is it that stories of inspirational teachers are only worth making a movie of if the teacher is white?
OK, I get it. I understand why people were peeved. It seemed Freedom Writers qualified for dismissal under the White Saviour rule – why couldn’t we have had a POC as the teacher? Just cos the original teacher was white doesn’t mean the story had to be told that way. But here’s the thing – this particular movie was not just about the journey of the students – it was also about the journey of the teacher. I would like to think I have always been something of a SJW but if you read my review of that movie you will see that without it I still would not understand “white privilege”.
Yes, those of us with various types of privilege have a moral obligation to educate ourselves, but it is easier if we actually have opportunities to do that.
White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid The Blindside? Throw it in the bin. Absolute rubbish. Stop taking Black children away from poverty – fix the poverty. Stop creating poverty.
White Saviour and the Grateful Slave The Help? No, this movie does not fail under this rule, but of course, this is just an opinion. Read my review.
White Saviour as Anti-Hero Three Billboards. Sorry Frances, that nagging feeling you had that something was wrong was right.
I must confess I love anything with Frances McDormand in it, so when I saw the trailer for Three Billboards I was salivating. Here was a story about a strong woman who hated the establishment as much as I do, she was pissed off and she was ready to fight back. And the people she was going to stick it to were guilty of every ism under the sun. But Sezin Koehler is absolutely right – there is an anti-hero trope in movies where white people are a protected class. No black person in their right mind would even consider half the stuff Mildred Hayes does in Three Billboards – it’s pure fantasy. And the movie is the embodiment of white privilege in action because ultimately it does not challenge racism at all, just accepts it as a "normal" part of the environment.
Fact or Fiction?
Let me return again to the question I raised earlier about how white people might come to understand their privilege. A willingness to gain insights into the lives of others is necessary, but on its own probably not sufficient. For someone like myself, rarely encountering people of colour, any insight to be had via an emotional experience will usually come through drama.
When I wrote my review of Hidden Figures, I focused on a very real conviction that all of the women in that story were heroes; that by "following their bliss" they created the conditions that forced white people to act – the white people in the story might have formalised change, but without the women change would not have happened at all. Hidden Figures is a universal story because, although it is about race on the surface, it is first and foremost a brilliant story about heroes.
I later found a comment from a woman of colour who was annoyed the subplot about segregated bathrooms deviated from the truth as originally told in the book on which the film was based. In her mind, this was a case of Hollywood once again bleaching a story to make the white manager look like a hero, for de-segregating bathrooms.
This bathroom subplot as shown in the movie did not lead me personally to think of the character of the white manager as a hero ( I just thought he was a dick). One of the benefits of telling the story the way it was told in the movie, for me, was that it led to a discussion with a white friend of mine about the idea of “people who don’t see colour”. Yes, I’ve made it about white people, haven’t I? But my point is that every project starts with a clear idea of its objectives. A producer might want to make something primarily to connect with POC, and that would be fine. Or a producer might want to make something that will somehow connect with whites. Or a producer might want to try and do both, like I believe Hidden Figures has.
Not my dollar, not my decision… I’m just laying out possibilities here.
There is no single, absolute correct point of view in cases like this. My own take is that stories must be told and re-told over and over so that each succeeding generation learns history independently of those who set school curricula. The best way to do this is through film, and the widest audience will be reached through fictionalised truth rather than through documentaries. This will require the sacrifice of some historical detail for dramatic effect, but if the integrity of the piece remains intact, the point of the original story need not be lost. And it's not just about history.
In the end, it won't matter how good a job we do of telling a story, we will never have absolute control over what people make of it.
The Special Case of Africa (This bit's a work in progress... hopefully life will soon stop interrupting my flow.)
Crossing the Line
There is only one crime on this earth greater than having an obnoxious point of view, and that’s falsely claiming membership of the “I’m allowed to say that because I’m X” club.
If white story tellers have more money or greater access to markets than any other group, there will continue to be more white saviour stories, because white story tellers are going to be too shit scared to cross the “I’m not allowed to say that because I’m not X” line.
Yes, white storytellers could get people of colour, people of different religious, cultural, political, sexual, ideological, artistic or other persuasions to write or portray characters for them, but someone would still be pissed off. I don’t see how anyone is going to be happy anytime soon.
Once again, let me hold up Sense8 as an example of a show that was great on a lot of levels and sought very hard to do the right thing cross-culturally, but still managed to get up a lot of noses. Despite its flaws, the world is a much richer place for its having been made than if it had not been made at all.
Other-Ness
Most of the media content I see in Australia is made for an English speaking market, and comes from the United States. A “normal person” is shown to be a White Male Heterosexual Judeo-Christian (WMHJC) who speaks English as his first language.
Anyone else is “other”, and less valuable than the white male. Women are other. Genetically non-Anglo/European people are other. Non-heterosexuals are other. The list of “not-normal” or “other” people is endless. More people in the West are “other” than “normal”.
Although the norm does not represent the majority of people, thanks to a jumbling of jargon, humans tend to think in simplistic terms of "normal=proper" and "not normal=deviant".
The norm was not democratically chosen, but the fact such an absurd definition of “normal” is the default definition in film and TV simply reflects the influence WMHJCs exert over financial and political decision-making in the West.
Hard to argue this doesn’t define a preferred social class.
Most of us have some notion of what it is like to be "other". For example, just some of the ways I have experienced being an outsider is growing up in relative poverty, grappling with mental illness, and being a female in a sexist world. Just some of the privileges I've had are never experiencing war first hand, being born the dominant colour in a racist country, and having access to reasonably good health care.
Although I cannot know what it is like to be black, I have two eyes, two ears, imagination and a voice.
Depending on the personality we are born with and the circumstances of our birth or early years, we absorb the opinions of our primary carers to a greater or lesser degree. In our formative years we are entrusted to the care of a range of people, including some toxic dickheads. Thus prepped, we head out to take our place in a world run by (mostly) more toxic dickheads.
As we go through life, some of the many messages we receive will be negative. The worst of these tell us that we are, in some way, "other" - that we are defective.
In Episode 05x15 of The Fosters, Stef talks to a therapist about being ostracised by her father when she told him she was gay. The therapist explains:
Unlike guilt which is the feeling of doing something wrong shame is the feeling of being something wrong. And this assault on the self… it can cause deep depression and severe anxiety.
The Fosters was a consistently awesome show on several levels, but this exchange pins down how toxic “otherness” is, in all its forms. It would be pointless and stupid to try and rank advantages or disadvantages or combinations of “otherness factors” – otherness is not a competition, it simply is what it is for each of us. That said, there is no question the "otherness" of racial constructs is a multi-faceted, complex, universal health hazard for People of Colour. How could even the most balanced and well adjusted personality in the world not be affected by such an omnipresent, enduring and adaptable form of toxicity?
"othering" people
is always an act of violence
Most Pride Movements are not about claiming superiority, they are simply about refusing to be shamed.
We must each find what is unique and precious in our selves in order to celebrate our selves - and it IS important that we celebrate our selves. At the same time, we must refuse to be defined by anyone else.
--oo0oo--
The Media Market
I go out of my way to look for stuff that is different, because humans are endlessly fascinating, but it is not always easy to find stuff that is "not average" or made for an audience that is assumed not to exist in Australia. For example, I know "Black-ish" exists and I can buy it through iTunes but it's stuff I have to search for otherwise what I am exposed to is limited. I'll probably never buy any episodes unless the price drops dramatically, because I have no way of knowing whether I will like the show's values.
Even a predominantly white show like Wynonna Earp (from Canada) has a cult following and is available on iTunes in the U.S. but the latest season is (so far) unavailable legally in Australia by any means I can uncover - even though I wrote to SyFy to ask WTF is going on. The rights to sell the show in this region belong to some company that is not interested in using them, but SyFy doesn't seem to have any legal way of buying the rights back (or interest in trying). This, in turn, affects final viewing figures and decisions about whether to renew the show. Killjoys is another good Canadian series - only the first season is available on Netflix Australia, though 4 have been made altogether. Fortunately, all 4 are available on iTunes Australia.
I found Treme on DVD in a local store, but only because it appears to have been "dumped" here, which in turn made it cheap to try/buy.
Let me leave you with this clip someone has cut together to create a song-length moment: (You can count the continuity glitches in the final edit while you enjoy the music. )
This is Part 2 of what began as a quick “about me”.. a brief summary of contents
PART 1 (Previous Post) The Hippy Shit:God,: Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude; Cultural Identity; Military Forces; Nationalism; Government; Law Enforcement Agencies;Gender; Sex; Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular, & Sex Toys;
PART 2 (This Post) Non or Anti-Racist? About Sets and Systems; What Does SYSTEMIC Mean? (Systemic Racism) Part 1; What Systemic Racism is Made of Part 2; More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3; People Are Motivated by Needs; Needs and Australian History; Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour; The Me Too Movement; Trial by Media; Feminism; Intersectionality; Systemic Sexism; White Privilege; Race as a Social Construct;
PART 3 (The Next Post) Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences: Choices; Compulsory Unit; Censorship and the Single Story; Cultural Appropriation; Blackface; White People With Dreads; Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art; The W word and the N word; The Hip Hop Lyric Thing; White Saviour Narratives; White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher; White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid; White Saviour and the Grateful Slave; White Saviour as Anti-Hero; Fact or Fiction; Crossing the Line; The Other-Ness.
..--oo0oo--..
Well, I'm not from Canada, America or "Trashcanistan", I'm Australian.
Max Berry, also an Australian, recently wrote an article for CNN in which he explained:
Australia is the nicest racist country you will ever see. It is racist in a blithe, jokey kind of way, where nobody is supposed to take anything too seriously, and nobody is too aware of historical or cultural contexts. There is racial violence in Australia's history, but not a lot of it, compared with many other countries, and it's not very recent.
I disagree about his take on history and strongly disagree about what is happening today but apart from that I'm inclined to agree with his assessment of Australia as a country - we are nicer than most.
I have a very real conviction most of us are not racists at heart, we just don't understand the whole systemic racism white privilege stuff or bother to notice that Indigenous People are dropping like flies, and why would we?
Every time some U.S.ian assumes we know blackface or Black stereotypes are offensive they are missing the point - South Africa's system of Apartheid closely resembled the Queensland system of Protection because this is the country that sort of wrote the book on planning not to mess with messy race mess. How on earth would we know about the significance of blackface or Black stereotypes unless it was part of some Cosby Show episode?
Non-Racist or Anti-Racist?
The truth is starting to filter through, though, and we are slowly learning. Slowly, because we are non-racists rather than anti-racists - the difference is clarified here by Marlon James.
Yes, there are one or two haters, but if we white folk are
basically decent, how is it bad things keep happening to black people?
The best solutions “fix the problem, not the person”. When
it comes to bad things happening to black people, the problem is
"Systemic Racism".
What IS systemic racism, and how do we fix it? It's actually
quite simple.
It's actually quite simple.
About Sets and Systems
A set is a number of things that belong together,
or are thought of as a group
All sorts of stuff belongs in groups or sets – sets of drawers, chess sets, sets of teeth and so on.
One of the significant things about a set of stuff is that it doesn’t do much except just sit around existing.
What would happen if we put more than one set of stuff together? For example, leave a chess set on top of a set of drawers for eternity? The answer is, the chess set would probably get dusty and covered in cobwebs.
The elements of a set never really change: Unless someone interferes or there is a dramatic intervention like maybe an earthquake, sets tend to remain static.
I’m not an artist and I lack the patience to search for a picture of a dusty chess set sitting on a set of drawers.
Here is a diagram of a set of Hydrogen atoms and another diagram of a set of Oxygen atoms at a party. The Hydrogen atoms are outside hanging around the barbecue. The Oxygen atoms are inside watching something on the TV in the lounge room. They are not interacting. It’s a boring party.
A system, on the other hand, is not static, it is dynamic.
A system is what results when
two or more sets of stuff change
if you put them together
The chess set and the set of drawers did not become dynamic when we put them together, but if we put all the Hydrogen and Oxygen together in the same room at the party… something changes.
No, I did not consciously set this up so I could make strained jokes about atoms meeting at a party and creating puddles – I was just trying to find a simple example of a few atoms existing statically at a micro level, staying with their own set, minding their own business and not making a conscious decision to change, like the H and O in the first diagram.
At a macro level, when they were required to co-exist in the same space and interact, something bigger than themselves caused the H and the O atoms to combine in a dynamic way to create molecules of water.
Water is H2O - Hydrogen two parts, Oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and for a long time nobody knew what it was. The answer is the electrical charges of the atoms causes them to combine. There was more to the story than was first obvious.
You’ve heard someone – many someones – say “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” or, more correctly,
the whole is OTHER than the sum of its parts
It doesn’t matter whether we are talking chemistry or economics or philosophy or psychology – or race: the principle is the same.
When we put two or more sets of certain variables together, something changes.
Ordinary, well-meaning white people go about their business not wanting to harm black people…
so how is it when white and black people are combined we can end up with negative outcomes of various kinds against black people?
The answer is "Systemic Racism". The Individuals in this story have not changed. The white people are still mostly well-meaning people.
But the whole is other than the sum of its parts. Something more than the intentions of the individual white people is influencing what happens when the white and the black people come close together.
Here are two sets: White people and Black people. Separate and apart and at a micro level they are fine. No, I am not proposing Apartheid.
Now let's put them together.
What does SYSTEMIC mean? Part 1
Just as with Hydrogen and Oxygen - when a third thing (electrical charges) – caused the two sets to change into something else altogether and become water, when we put white people and black people together in most countries of the world we get a result called
systemic racism
and the extra thing that causes this, the “electrical charge” if you will, consists mainly of
1) historical events and
2) the questionable attitudes of one or two coalholes.
With Systemic Racism, the mostly historical bits that make the whole other than the sum of its parts are numerous and go way beyond any individual conscience or any single moment in time – systemic racism is not just dependent on the number of chill people in a room. This is why it will take more than chill attitudes to fix. Hence the saying, in some Quality System Engineering circles, "Fix the Problem, not the Person".
The only way to fix Systemic Racism is to fix all of what is in the grey area: -
The results of history, not just
Bad attitudes.
ANTI-Racism is needed, which means things like fixing bad laws, or correcting myths, or spotting where we went wrong and learning from our mistakes, changing unconscious bad habits - anythingbut assuming there is nothing to fix but attitudes.
Here’s something that should concern any white citizen of the United States. The 13TH Amendment to your constitution is a shameful pox on your history. As a white person you are affected by it too, not just Black people. For example, because of the 13th amendment passed in 1865 many of your 21st Century jobs can now be offshored onshore. This means jobs white people might have a chance of doing are being given to jailed people of colour. The most criminal part of it all is most of these jailed people are people that no other country on earth would call criminal.
(LIKE I ALWAYS SAY - IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE BIZARRE BEHAVIOUR OF HUMAN BEINGS, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY...)
Here’s something that should concern any white citizen of Australia. Section 51 of your constitution is a shameful pox on your history.
Seriously. I am not just taking the piss now, I really want to know - in how many other countries on earth is there a constitutional provision giving the government the right to make laws with respect to:
"The people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws".
Every time someone tells me the government gives a free Rolls Royce and other special treatment to Indigenous Australians I wonder in what fucking sane universe they imagine everyone who is Indigenous even ticks the box on forms? I know one shire where I used to have some workmates who were Indigenous yet the Census figures said there were none in the area at all.
Yes, there have been and sometimes still are one or two schemes that did not apply to whitefellas.
The earliest of these focused on rounding the Indigenous People up and murdering or torturing them. In more recent times, some of them were kinder or even favoured Indigenous People.
There have been and sometimes still are one or two scheme that do not apply to blackfellas, such as when rich private schools get money to build things like auditoriums or pools. Just a few years ago this happened in my electorate while the local public schools - also attended mostly by whites - got a tied grant to fix their toilets. Discrimination always has been and always will be practised by politicians - it's how they buy votes or feather their own nests. Should we blame the rich non-Indigenous schoolkids? Vilify them? Assault them? Hate them for these policies?
Mostly, today, benefits paid to Indigenous people simply have different names from the same benefit paid to the rest of us - this is usually an accounting thing with some government advertising thrown in.
To our shame, there are also "non-racist" government programs aimed at "all" Australians that are only ever tested in areas where huge numbers of Indigenous people rely on benefits, like the Indue Card program. And "tested" repeatedly.
We have such a deficiency of provisions in our constitution for anything that matters, but s51(xxvi) this gobsmackingly blatant piece of racist engineering, survives! It could be used for good...
In Australia our Systemic Racism is not hidden or hard to find - it is right there in black and white in our laws as much as in the outcomes these laws deliver.
But the whole of Section 51 of our Constitution is not just about making laws with respect to Indigenous Australians - this section is so bad on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin - it certainly gives an enormous amount of power to a handful of undemocratically elected people who rarely do anything to inspire trust. What checks and balances? "Tradition" you say? Excuse me while I go to the bathroom so you won't notice I just PMSL.
What Systemic Racism is Made Of Part 2
The grey area of the racism diagram - the systemic racism part - is chockers. It’s full of things history gave us like crappy state constitutions and bad state laws.
Systemic Racism includes the attitude of that racist coalhole sitting next to us on the bus, the one we don’t challenge because we are getting off at the next stop. Or the one we don’t know about because she/he hides his/her racism like my mother used to. Attitudes that have been deliberately shaped and crafted over time by people with a vested interest in telling us Indigenous Australians are “less than”, but never corrected.
Or it’s a politician who openly presents a motion to Parliament saying white people should be pitied, supported by a bunch of inexcusably indecent white fucknuckles who vote yes and pretend they didn’t know what they were voting for (as if that should not itself be cause for shame).
It’s the person who is sick to death of hearing that African youths are causing trouble in the suburbs but never wonders
a) why we keep hearing it
b) who keeps saying it or
c) if there is a problem is it something WE are doing wrong? Is there something we can do to help?
More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3
Don’t ask me to describe everything in the grey area of the diagram, it’s a bottomless pit …
Just remember that
• one W alone is a member of a set:
• one B alone is a member of a set:
• a B and a W together in a room are part of a system.
• the whole is other than the sum of its parts
All that is necessary for Systemic Racism to flourish is that there be something more than indifference influencing the behaviour of the different elements when they get together - something they don't always have direct control over. A lack of direct control is not the same thing as no power at all.
Both Australia and the United States are Federations. In both countries we tend to think of Federal Constitutional rights but forget the ENORMOUS influence of State Constitutions or powers, and the influence of history at a Federal, State and Community level.
In Australia, different State laws have a different impact on Indigenous death in custody rates. It's a simple fact. The Federal Government has the power to fix this, but not since 1975 has there been a Federal Government with the political will to give a toss.
The system makes this possible.
This is systemic racism in action.
Sadly, only individuals acting collectively have the power to change the system. Sadly, many individuals who are otherwise good people don't seem to understand systems, don’t care enough to try to understand what is actually happening, or why, or how they might fix it.
Only the people in State X have direct power over what happens in State X unless the Federal Government intervenes. Federal Governments don't give a Flying Frack. Australian Prime Ministers sometimes only need about 40 something thousand local votes at the ballot box to get into parliament, that's all - none are elected by a national vote. In real terms, Prime Ministers are chosen in Party Room deals by a handful of faceless, gutless career coalholes, not by voters. They are rarely effective leaders because they have no real power.
Most Australians think they live in a democracy, but democracy is something people do, not a system.
People Are Motivated by Needs
Why don’t State Governments admit Indigenous People die needlessly while in their care? Why are Indigenous People taken into custody so often, anyway? What motivates people to be racist?
Forget governments, what drives the everyday decisions ordinary everyday people make?
“We got new evidence as to what motivated man to walk upright:
to free his hands for masturbation.”
TRUDY
Lily Tomlin - The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
There are lots of ways to define needs – I don’t claim to have any special insight into the world’s problems. Nothing is simple. It might be true everyone just wants an answer to the question “What’s in it for me?” but I doubt that.
"If we want to understand the world, we need to understand economics" is a philosophy that works for me, though it's not for everyone. No, I'm not a raving Marxist who is all about redistributing the means of production, I simply believe if we want to understand the bizarre behaviour of human beings, it's usually enlightening to follow the money.
Let's start with the standard torture of all ill-designed economics courses: - “the economic problem” –:
a) what should we produce ?
b) how should we produce it ?
c) how should we distribute what is produced ?
Some people prefer to filter the world primarily through a religious framework. Without deliberately setting out to be offensive, let me offer an example of the economic problem in a Christian framework;
a) here are some loaves and fishes
b) I’m going to miraculously multiply them
c) you are going to share them equally without worrying about race, colour, nationality, political affiliation, sexual orientation, whether the person next to you has worked as hard as you etc simply because it is the right thing to do/ the world would be a nicer place if…
Many forms of religion provide the “how to distribute” portion of an answer to the economic question, but do not always focus on the first two parts. Further, the usefulness of religion in controlling behaviour is generally limited by the requirement that people have faith. We can demand that people have faith, but all we will get for our trouble is people who would have faith anyway, and other people who just pretend to have it. Like any value system, religion can give us good ideas to consider, but rarely provides a perfect blueprint for a free society.
The economic question – what sort of pie should we bake, what shall we bake it with and who should have the biggest slice? – is an assessment tool we can use for distinguishing not just between different economic systems but different political systems.
The classic folk tale of The Little Red Hen supports most political systems including both capitalism and communism because both assume (amongst other things) that anyone who doesn’t work shouldn’t eat.
As well as offering advice about how we treat each other, the Bible both reflects and encourages a culture where the accumulation of wealth is seen as a good thing, especially the Old Testament. This begins with the very first story where Adam (man) is told he shall have to work to eat.
Some of the earliest forms of writing seem to have been for accounting records kept by temples. Work, wealth and worship seem to fit together naturally.
Now allow me one simple observation: In many parts of Europe, Hell itself freezes over for several weeks or months of the year and, once upon a time, if you didn’t store up food in advance of winter you could starve. Theft became an alternative to storing food in advance. Even parts of Europe and the Middle East (not suffering severe winters but also not protected from invasion by mountain ranges or other geographical challenges) thus developed an early obsession with stored wealth, especially portable stores of wealth. Many of these notions made their way into religious rulebooks, and are at the heart of Western Culture.
Over time, cultures tend to merge religion, politics and economics into some sort of Gordian knot, like the one that prevails in Australia today.
Name an issue, any issue, and ultimately money can explain a great deal of how things happen. Even when we resort to using moral judgments as the basis of our choices, money is rarely far away.
Actually, Ms Dhu was not in prison, she was being held at a local cop shop in a holding cell. To some of the people responsible for her care she was “just an Aboriginal”.
What I cannot wrap my head around is this – not that someone calls the Police for help with domestic abuse and ends up dead -- but that the silence in this country is so deafening every time this happens.
Indigenous Australians are dying in obscene ways because our parliaments are mostly full of "non-racists"
Needs and Australian History
Why, of all the peoples of all of Britain’s former colonies, have Indigenous Australians been so spiritually shattered by colonisation? Yes, there was occupation, murder, disease, theft, massacre and the usual litany of horrors which I do not dismiss lightly, but the outcome seems to have been psychically worse here than in many other countries.
The single greatest lie the West ever forced on the Indigenous Peoples of Australia is this: the presumption that Western solutions to “the economic problem” were universally superior to those already operating here. Indigenous Solutions were, at the time of colonisation, part of the oldest surviving living cultures in the history of this planet.
Allow me to pose a simple question: How do you hitch a plough to a kangaroo?
It’s just one small but pertinent question, because agriculture is a big part of the Western obsession with creating and storing wealth. It's even a bit of an obsession in the Bible.
In Australia, Western style savings of the type that meant
producing a surplus; and
storing wealth; and
fighting off anyone else who came near
would have been a certain guarantee of failure. And before the introduction of Western fauna or flora Western style agriculture to produce that surplus was simply not possible. Which is not to say there was no agriculture here before invasion ...
For 50,000 years Indigenous peoples cooperated with nature and each other to maximise cycles of abundance, only taking what was available or needed as appropriate.
When my forebears arrived and started clearing the land for cultivation they did not “see” how carefully and deliberately the locals had, over time, sculpted the landscapes around them – in the example shown here, for firestick farming. Instead they saw what they wanted to see; people who often sat around doing nothing. It suited my white forebears to assume the locals were lazy and useless because the concept of efficient sufficiency was outside their cultural worldview.
Everything about Australia’s unique location, native fauna and flora and sets of ecosystems made every assumption of Western culture counter-intuitive and counter-productive for survival. Driven not just by greed but unspeakably short-sighted arrogance, my forebears arrived and systematically set out to ignore and destroy the peoples, cultures and ecosytems that were already here and, to this day, we are mostly still too stupid to see what we have done.
But my forebears and those of us who are their offspring haven’t just done the usual kill/maim/steal routine here: –
Our ongoing refusal to acknowledge
what was here before us, and what we have done since we arrived
amounts to gaslighting.
The problem is not that Indigenous Australians are struggling to adapt it’s that we still don’t honestly act like we want them to be part of our community.
So what’s the problem, are we idiots and just too fucking stupid to know it? Or is it that we just don’t give a shit?
I’m hoping there’s a third explanation: That we are actually decent people and, if only we knew how rotten “the system” is and what to do about it, things would change.
Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour
Some people are just plain selfish, while others try to do the right thing for no other reason than doing the right thing is the right thing to do.
There are a lots of different motivators, really, and that’s what makes people-watching such a fascinating hobby.
The Me Too Movement
We need to talk about women's issues, for a moment. Why? Because
Discrimination against women
affects people of all races and cultural groups
it affects people of all classes
it affects children regardless of gender,
because women are often carers
and sometimes the sole providers
discrimination against women helps to keep under-classes
like people of colour
struggling and compliant
discrimination against women
is a major cog in the machinery of systemic racism.
Most (tho not all) of the women I’ve talked to over the years – enough years, I think, to have formed an opinion on the matter – for the sake of transparency I should say most of the women I've talked to over the years are also white, have either the same cultural background or are of Mediterranean families.
At least half have some horrid tale of at least one instance of being raped (beyond any reasonable doubt).
I can't begin to imagine the shit Indigenous Australian Women endure but I do know for sure that some coalholes think they don't deserve the respect white women get, and that is not a very high standard to begin with.
The rules of logic tell us we should not assume anecdotes are evidence of anything. Just because we know someone who experienced something doesn't mean everyone goes through it.
The Me Too movement is not
"arguing from the particular to the general" but saying
"excuse me, don't think you are fooling anyone
... we all know what's really happening here".
I was once beaten by a partner who was angry because he wanted to shoot me and I would not tell him where I’d put the parts of a gun I had dismantled. When a bystander dialled triple 0, a young policewoman followed me down a street late at night and told me it was not a safe area to be out on my own and I remember feeling awful after I laughed at her. (There were as yet no such things as refuges). I waited about an hour before returning to where we were staying (working away from home) because I thought things might be calmer – only to be raped. (Rape in Marriage legislation was passed in South Australia the next year).
Of five of my aunts by blood or marriage, two were consistently beaten by their husbands. Later, when social security was easier to obtain for women who left a marriage, I met fewer women who stayed in bad situations, but it still happened/ happens, and this includes women beaten by sons, abused by adult siblings and so on. And yes, I know it’s not all “men bad women good”.
I have been in a bad marriage, and I know how hard it was to leave, and I know if I’d had children it would have been 100 times harder. (Please don’t diss anyone who finds it hard to leave a bad situation. You can’t fix them, and you don’t have to enable them, just let them know you are waiting.)
If I was using public transport at night when I was young men of all ages would put the hard word on me at tram stops or any opportunity, as if they would be letting the side down not to “try” and that included offering me money. Because I was so small, when I was 26 years old tram conductors were still asking me if my fare should be half or full, so I wonder what were all these men who put the hard word on me... paedophiles?
What is that about? Are men really such slaves to hormones that they can't stop embarrassing themselves? Frightening women and children? Slaves to peer pressure? Just arseholes, perhaps?
Most of the time a half-joking “rack off” would sort it, but I always felt the need to be passively appeasing when I refused.
not all men, but it only takes a handful
to mean this sort of behaviour is inescapable
There is also a widespread culture of acceptance that can't be denied. And it is a culture that is not just supported or promoted by men.
The biggest impact sexual harassment had on my life was in the work force – I left a minimum of eight jobs over the years because I was being groped. If you are thinking this had anything to do with me being desirable you are missing the point – I oozed vulnerability and a very small handful of creeps are predatory. Again, I say a small handful, but it only takes a handful to ensure they are everywhere.
Because my work history was unstable, I always appeared unreliable to prospective employers. (As if dealing with mental illness wasn't challenging enough.)
I have known men who lived with as much fear of rape as I did, because they were gay, and poofter-bashing was until recently something of an Olympic sport in this country. I also knew or worked with both men and women who were not gay but were at risk of bashing because bigots are fuck-knuckles who believe stereotypes.
I have known both men and women who had, when young, been sexually violated by adult parent-figures. And many who were let down by the adults they turned to for help.
I have not personally had any male tell me he was, as a child, molested by a Priest or Brother, tho I have one cousin who went to a boarding school and says he used to lie in his bunk at night feeling bad because he felt relieved it wasn’t him.
I knew one male who often joked he went to Catholic Schools and not one of the Christian Brothers found him attractive. When he was about 20 he was arrested and after 3 nights in a remand centre (which he did not discuss) I never heard him scoff at any report of sexual assault again. I suspect people who scoff at the idea of sexual assault do so because they have never been the victims of assault. My own experience is that men are more likely to scoff at the idea of assault than women are.
Sexual assault is all about power. On dates, men who exert pressure on women to come across are not necessarily guilty of assault, but have serious issues just the same. I’m not sure they really see women as people.
So, when women put their hand up and say they have been assaulted by a celebrity or someone who abused their power, is it likely to be crap or not? Is assault something that happens to women and they mostly don’t bother talking about it, or is it something women make up to destroy the lives of innocent men?
Let me give you another quote from Chimamanda – talking about one of the important cases involving someone in a position of power. “Large numbers of people seem to believe that many women will wake up one day and just decide to lie about having been sexually assaulted. And apparently they want to do this because they want to be famous. I know many women who would like to be famous; I don’t know one single woman who would like to be famous for having been sexually assaulted. … To believe a culture is full of women who lie about these things is to fundamentally think of women as not being fully human. (This idea) makes sense only if you think women are fundamentally stupid.”
The truth in most jurisdictions is that the people making these claims do not get massive jury payouts. The United States is the only place where a jury decides the amount of damages, and in places like the UK or Australia libel and slander laws are totally different, the burden of proof is different and more. People getting rich from something like this is an exception, not a rule. Far from getting rich, they usually end up in deep financial doo-doo trying to get validation.
Trial by Media
To be fair, I would also like to quickly mention the accusations levelled by some anonymous woman against the comedian Aziz Ansari. While my own life experience is that people can and do abuse positions of power to gain sexual favours all the time, this accusation against Ansari seem to be a different creature altogether. (I wouldn’t even mention him by name except not naming him would probably just make the accusation more interesting.)
“Grace” (not her real name) related a story to a journalist of a bad date she had with Ansari. To be honest, it reads like the date from hell.
Even I, who have been a textbook victim all my life find it extraordinary that Grace didn’t leave sooner.
Let’s be clear: I think women and men should both have the right to withdraw consent at any point and this applies no matter whose apartment they are in. I don’t for two seconds buy into the idea that men's testes will erupt and suffer permanent damage if they have to finish the job themselves. It's as popular and spurious a notion as the idea that masturbation causes blindness.
As much as I loved the series Master of None, that is not the reason I am criticising "Grace" here.
It is easy - too easy - to try someone by media, making anonymous accusations without providing any evidence or public testimony or publishing the text messages or … it just stinks. We have no way of knowing what was initially agreed. It damages the Me Too movement and demeans decent men.
Killjoys 02x06
As for conduct on dates when one person has no economic or other power over the other; no decent person should have any trouble with the concept of consent. Anything less than an enthusiastic YES is NOT consent.
Any person who is so desperate for sex they will be happy to have sex with someone who doesn’t really want them should just pay a sex worker. How is wearing someone down til they just give up in any way satisfying unless the aggressor has serious problems?
On the other hand, I’m a realist. It does not matter what the world should be like, we all have to survive in the world the way it actually is while we are trying to change it. Personally, I never went on a date with someone I could not contemplate having sex with (which means I did not go on a lot of “dates”).
Feminism
The goals of feminism are quite simple:
Social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
I do not for the life of me understand how anyone can argue that the goals of feminism are wrong. Certainly these goals have been misrepresented or misinterpreted in an endless number of ways, but they are transparent to anyone who wishes to assess them rationally. The statement does not incorporate exceptions.
The thinking of many 2ND wave feminist theorists was feminism would benefit everyone: As all women rank lower than men in all groups; and As all marginalised groups include women Lifting up all women will lift up all men
A rising tide lifts all boats.
We sort of got that wrong...
During the 1960s-80s women were like any other progressive lobby group and failed to acknowledge that conservatives already have what they want; it’s those who seek change that are at a disadvantage, and easily divided. Women achieved a great deal but failed to achieve and maintain a united front.
A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats.
The rising tide theory only works
if we concentrate on boats stranded on the mudflats at neap tide.
Systemic Sexism
Let’s divide the world into roughly two main groups; women and men. We’ll put all the women in one area and all the men in another. There is no conflict between the two groups. Separate and apart at a micro level, they are fine.
Now let’s put them together.
I hope you knew I was going to say this: just as with Hydrogen and Oxygen – when a third thing (electrical charges) - caused the two sets to change into something else altogether and become water, when we put women and men together in most communities, we get a result called systemic sexism, and the extra thing that causes this, the electrical charge, if you will, consists mainly of
1) historical events and
2) the questionable attitudes of one or two coalholes.
Remember, systems theory does not suggest all men are coalholes or all women are coalholes – the bits that make the whole other than the sum of its parts, the bits that cause outcomes to be different at a macro level – go way beyond the chill attitudes of any individual or any single moment in time.
Systemic problems are caused by all the bits few individuals have any direct control over.
(Though a lack of direct control is NOT the same thing as no control or power or responsibility).
The only way to fix the problem of any “systemic ism” is to change the stuff in the grey area – the laws, traditions, habits and attitudes that are the system. Instead of crying "not all men", men who care could prove it better by being anti-sexist.
White Privilege
As I cannot experience what it is like to lack white privilege, I am unlikely to be aware I have it unless I gain an insight by some exceptional experience – usually an emotional experience, and (I’m guessing) that will most often be a) personal interaction with a POC or b) through drama.
It is one thing to tell me that as a white person I experience things differently from people of colour, but quite a brave thing to use a word like “privilege” to tell me so.
Remember first and above all that the word “privilege” is itself an emotive word. Do you need time to let that sink in? If you want me to change, remember that I already have what I want, and that is a collection of comfortable, automatic responses to every word you can throw at me in whatever language is my first.
One of the funniest things I ever heard was a government minister - who had been chauffer driven to an expensive private school as a child - asked if he really understood what it was like for people who were poor… and the man genuinely, cluelessly responded that he did not think he’d had a privileged childhood.
As someone who can honestly say she did have what was – for a white Australian – a relatively poor childhood (not just financially but emotionally)
I was astonished by his ignorance. For all that I had a totally phuct childhood I was still aware that
a) I wasn’t the only one and
b) it could have been much worse…
Let me return to my initial point – as I cannot experience what it is like to lack white privilege, I can only gain an insight into the existence of white privilege through some emotional experience.
The sort of emotional experience that allows me insight into white privilege will most likely be through a) personal interaction with a POC or b) through drama.
But how is a white woman like me, growing up in a white suburb in a white capital of a country with a Whites Only Immigration Policy going to be aware of white privilege through a personal interaction with a Person of Colour? Okay, Australia is not exclusively white now, nor was it exclusively white when I was a child, but for many of us, it is true that we rarely encountered any people who were not white. When we did, I promise you, the last thing they would have been brave enough to do is discuss race.
And so to the possibility of gaining insight about my privilege through drama. Yes, I did stumble across the article “unpacking the invisible knapsack” more than once and on a logical level it made sense. But it did not mean anything emotionally until I saw Freedom Writers. Only then did I re-visit the wording of Invisible Knapsack and finally understand the point it was making. If we do not understand privilege, we will never understand why Black Lives Matter. Just sayin'. https://nationalseedproject.org/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack
Race as a Social Construct
It doesn’t matter whether science supports the concept of race or not, what matters is that people like to believe perceived differences in physical appearance or abilities are significant. All people.
In historical terms, people more or less always have, and probably always will place significance on perceived physical differences. We do it because we use heuristics to simplify decision-making, and this makes it easy for groups to use perceived physical differences to create a class barrier to gain or maintain privilege over others.
The most impactful explanation I’ve encountered is offered by Dr Charles Mills. A few minutes with him on YouTube would not be a waste of anyone’s time:
I'm reviewing The New Jim Crow here because much of what it says provides storylines for lots of excellent TV series, and also because this review will explain some of my views on Australian politics as it affects Indigenous Australians.
