The Us and Them of Racism

A racist is a therapist’s carnival. As the music drifts into the distance and before the last balloon pops and the final streamer flutters to the ground, you’ve got repression, suppression, oppression right there in giant technicolour and often as a last minute float entry, depression to keep you entertained. But the confession caravan is always a no-show. To admit it would involve some self-awareness and honesty; you would have to admit to your fear.

 I have always been strongly opposed to racism (Well aren’t we all? Apart for that one understandable exception; Asian drivers/ Indian salespeople/ American evangelicals/ Australian drunks/ Muslim ‘fundamentalists’/ Finnish sauna radicals/ ...

 It is sometimes an inexplicable dislike, more often a preposterous stereotyping and always an unforgiveable breach of human rights. It is that shameful hearkening back to the days of tribalism that so ruthlessly involved ‘us and them’ and if they were ‘them’ then they got a spear through their gullet licketty split and splashetty gush the threat was neutralised and you could return to your ruminative chewing of the mammoth shank in peace.

 I can’t make a call on racism because I don’t fully understand what it’s like to face it. I faced “religionism” growing up with taunts and abusive graffiti as we ran the gauntlet to our separatist school through the ranks of the state spawn. My mother was a “foreigner” and so I caught the more subtle forms of it; because she had an accent she was obviously stupid as she couldn’t speak English “properly” which was the hard and fast rule of thumb when asserting white Anglo supremacy when I was growing up. It was at the tail end of the White Australia Policy and the dominant culture were finding it difficult to maintain this staunch standard and gradually it became watered down to well, they’re not Anglo, but well, they are white… well, white-ish, fucking wogs, but well,…better than the blacks… well harrumph, what the hell colour do you call that? I don’t know, is that ok? Is that a tan?

It is simplistic to try and narrow down racism to that elusive but undeniable “one thing” that Billy Crystal and Jack Palance alluded to in City Slickers. What exactly is it? I thought the new theory was that there was no such thing as race. Historically, the white, upper class scientists who wrote the novel things called books that the rest of us couldn’t even dream of reading because we were busy working 80 hour weeks to feed the family and the wife’s mother (never mind the schnauzer- that went into the pot in July to feed the wee sick babee) and never learnt to read anyway, were very keen on classifying things.

Hence the lovely loophole that allowed Britain to seize the terra nullis that was Australia because the bipedal creatures found there were no more than animals according to the  Definitive Classification Book of Human Types, vol 1 of 1765 that explained unequivocally that they didn’t have houses, (as recognised by the Houses of Every Civilised Race Ever Known Including Upper and Lower Deltan Structures of Mudbrick Vol III) or behave in any discernibly civilised way and good heavens they were naked for goodness sake AND black! They were therefore considered un-human as well as non-human and open season was promptly declared with a 21 gun salute and a shout of “Tally ho”.

Much of this good natured and good mannered, patriarchal concern for lesser races who either needed genocidal disciplinary measures or corrective chain enslavement until they understood their place in the economic scheme of things was based on the God-given right of the unsullied white (read purity, new birth, hero, holiness) race and its irrefutable, undeniable testimony from God- the great book of the bible- that stated in plain black and white (no pun intended) that white was the master race and black (read dirty, death, baddy, evil) was the inferior. I do like here to compare (and I mean no disrespect, but he is small and no Cary Grant) Wallace Shaw with say, Will Smith and maintain a straight face that white people are superior to black.

That the literal Eve, as in first woman, from whose DNA all humans can be traced, was a woman whose stature was so dimunitive as to be more hobbit like than we’d care to admit and as an added kick in the pants for the Klu Klux clan, undeniably from outer Zambia and indubitably black is glossed over by bigots. Whose your mama?

There is a sadly long and disgraceful precedence in ‘scientific’ findings such as phrenology, that support racial superiority of one race over another; predominantly whites that is; being the more mature and rational race and the one in need of impressing such rights as ‘terra nullius’ for example.  Murtaza Hussein writes about this strange scientific basis for racism and he suggests in the 1800’s it was mainly “ used to justify the socio-political institutions of slavery and colonialism against African societies.” He goes on, “The level of institutional racism masked under scientific study reached a particularly horrific apex at Paris' infamous "human zoo" - where peoples of different races lived their lives for both scientific observation as well as the enjoyment of the general public.”

Hussein points out how this racism now aimed at Muslims is absurd. Islam, a stateless entity, is ‘raceless’ and so generalisations are ridiculous. “At the forefront of this modern scientific racism have been those prominently known as the "new atheist" scientists and philosophers. While they attempt to couch their language in the terms of pure critique of religious thought, in practice they exhibit many of the same tendencies toward generalisation and ethno-racial condescension as did their predecessors - particularly in their descriptions of Muslims.”

In response to a ‘black face’ incident recently Meshel Laurie in Mama Mia said this;

“As a fortunate white woman, I don’t believe I have the right to decide what isn’t racist in Australia. I’m not the one hurt and belittled by it. Honestly, I find the telling of racial minorities that they are over reacting about racism demeaning.

It reiterates the message that their voices are not welcome in our society, that they are outsiders and we will shout them down if they dare to raise their heads above the bunkers we herd them into.

I’ll take you on about sexism, and fatism, and any other ism I live inside of, any day of the week, but I have to accept that for all my cultural sensitivity, I don’t know what it’s like to face racism.”

There was a huge uproar and much debate about whether it was a harmless prank or a genuinely alarming racist attack. Zoe Kupka responded to the celebrity in question’s expedient apology.

Zoe Krupka wrote in New Matilda:

It’s the ultimate crazy-making reversal many of us feel tempted to perform when we’re feeling healthy shame. We send the blame back to the person who pointed out our bad behaviour and tell them they’re being cruel and unusual. We focus on this idea that there are rules and that they’re unfair to us and we skirt around the issue that what we’ve done has caused harm. “It’s not that big a deal man, I didn’t mean it.”

This is part of how we routinely avoid shame. We substitute acting right for living well. We try to bypass the hard bits of the learning and we go for a veneer of understanding. This is because real learning is hard. It hurts. If you’ve ever really learned anything of value then you’ve felt some shame along the way.

Krupka makes an excellent point about racism being mistaken for a simple discourtesy. If we simply say we are sorry for offending said person, we do not change a thing; we do not feel shame for our way of thinking, for our racism. We do not contemplate our worldview and attempt to understand another’s world or experience. We merely apologise for someone being offended which is to say, it’s still not my fault, but the one who was offended was being sensitive. And the way to overcome this awkwardness is to make a quick, if not quite sincere, apology and move on. I think Krupka is right in that we do not wish to be viewed as ‘not nice’ so we apologise; we’re not actually wishing to make reparations to the victim, but to our own reputation. No harm, no foul, nothing changed. Status quo maintained; everyone thinks I’m a nice, fair person.

Alana Lentin wrote in the Guardian addressing the rush of racist public transport attacks that made international news last June;

Yet, the overriding theme of these rants belies something about what Australian racism is. The outbursts are mirrors of a political culture invested, since the abandonment of White Australia, in the presentation of a tolerant and easy going face, while enacting some of the most racist policies of any western country…

It was interesting to me to see one woman in a you tube video (through Lentin’s article) saying at least three or four times that her grandfather was a sergeant in the war as though that gave her carte blanche to treat another human like a piece of shit on her shoe because of the colour of his skin. My father served in the war too. So fucking what? He’s a racist shit too and I’m not proud of it but I do understand it and where he’s coming from. And I DO NOT SUPPORT his point of view. I honour his sacrifice and respect the man. His sacrifice was to free our world from tyranny. My job is not to take over the (historical) German or Japanese position of world domination one train carriage or bus at a time. That’s what he fought for; freedom. For all. I don’t know that the tri forces Oath of Office mentions anything about exceptions to skin colour.

…And in direct relation to the particular obsession of all the public transport racists, the country that honours its servicemen year in, year out on ANZAC day, still fails to fully commemorate the Aboriginal soldiers who fought and died alongside the mythical white "diggers".

So I’m still left uncertain as to what it is. What the hell had that woman’s grandfather got to do with shouting at a black bloke on a train? Why did she believe that Australians fought to keep “people like you out”? I was unaware that Germans were black. I even travelled through there, granted back when I was drinking fairly heavily on the Australian version of a European holiday but I did not notice a preponderance of black people. In Harare and South Africa, sure, I remember loads…

Why in order to honour the sacrifice of the ‘diggers’ must we perpetuate their (apparent) racism? Why, several generations later, must we hold some other race accountable for the war? What the fuck is it all about? And what the hell is race anyway?

I remember my English pal Mark telling me that he had a white supremist type (you know, skinhead, vile tats [not nice ones] and bovver boots) yelling at him to “Go home where you came from.” [He is of Mauritanian heritage.] His bemused reply in a toffy Oxford accent? “To Aberdeen? Good grief but why?”

I have not a skerrick of a clue as to what it’s like to be a black person. When I was growing up in small town Australia there simply wasn’t a black face to be seen. By the seventies perhaps the odd face appeared here and there but really it was a ‘novelty’; much like my reception in Asia as a blonde (minus the pawing of their hair). I never even talked to a coloured person till I was in my twenties and in England. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a racist bone in my body, but really, I can only ever speak from a white perspective and I realised reading Gary Younge in the Guardian, that that is the greatest barrier.

Gary Younge’s article in the Guardian in June last year discussed this:

"The issue for black people was never integration or segregation, but white supremacy. The paradigm of integration and segregation was a white concern," said Charles Payne… "That was how they posed the issue of civil rights given their own interests, and that was how the entire issue then became understood. But the central concerns of black people were not whether they should integrate with white people or not, but how to challenge white people's hold on the power structure."

All these years when I got upset about racism in America and in South Africa which I visited in the 80’s, I too thought it was all about the abolition of shameful segregation; but I find that was never really the entire issue for those that were oppressed. The crux of the issue of course was power; white power.

I like Ridley Scotts’ Blade Runner and his view of a futuristic world; the language blended, the racism narrowed down to replicants v humans, the flying cars and funky transparent raincoats. But it is sad that it has to be so; sad that it always seems to boil down to an us and them power struggle of MY woman/ mammoth shank/ pot my mother made/ spear my granddaddy used/ rock pillow… It seems we are more chimp than bonobo. An alienated chimp that is reintroduced to its prior chimp clan will be killed. The same scenario with the bonobos and they welcome the missing member back and even welcome total strangers into the clan. For bonobos there is no supremist power only a realisation of a common ancestry and goals; survival, food sourcing, protection, progeny.

It seems to me that the times of the racist are reaching an end. Gone are the days when you can tell where someone has come from by merely looking at them. And the white supremacists need to settle down before they experience the humiliating splattered egg that is at this moment flying towards their pale, pinched faces. According to the New York Times;

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the population of the United States in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

Like my pal Mark, we are an amalgam of ancestral heritage but also our environment and cultural heritage. With the prodigious geographic movement of the modern populace and the multicultural reality of most countries, we can no longer so easily discern the us from the them. Sometimes we are just all Californians, or Raiders, or Australians, or Buddhists, or Parisians, or metal workers.

It would probably take an intergalactic attack of earth by some green aliens before we would come together to realise our common heritage, our common humanity, our common goals. If we were all Bonobos we would welcome each other and help each other in our hunt for food, solace, protection and raising our young. La Dolce Vita. Irrespective of skin colour or cultural heritage. Just happy to be a species together and breathing the sweet air for the short time we’re here.