Last year,
following the terrorist attack in Nice, I met a European friend and colleague at
a conference in Milan. I asked him how his Palestinian boyfriend was, a lovely
man I have grown to care about. My colleague visibly upset informed me that his
boyfriend has had a series of mishaps: a few weeks ago he was racially attacked
by skinheads and was hurt seriously enough to need hospitalisation. While in
hospital, he was watching the news on TV when he saw the Nice terrorist drive
his truck through the crowd. He was so affected that he had a violent seizure.
Still
feeling fragile and not fully together because of his racial bashing, the Nice
event, beside its immediate awfulness, must have signified to him the prospects
of more anti-Muslim bashings. This had a shattering effect on his psyche. This
gives us an important window into something we should never lose sight of when
discussing racial verbal or physical attacks. Racism is a centrifugal, shattering
force.
We humans
are always struggling to ‘pull ourselves together’. Our capacity to do so
varies from individual to individual and some of us sometimes simply falter and
we become ‘all over the place’ as it were. What is clear is that we are all
traversed by both centrifugal and centripetal forces and we are continuously
struggling to pull ourselves together. It is clearly an endless struggle. But
just as clearly it is not just a matter of individual will. This is where
racism comes into the equation. The structures of power and exploitation in our
societies, our social position within them, and our social history, all play an
important role in shaping both the nature of the centrifugal shattering forces
that we have to deal with and the nature of the centripetal resources, psychological
but also social, cultural and even economic, we have at our disposal to pull
ourselves together as much as possible. Racism is one of the mechanisms for the
distribution of these centripetal and centrifugal forces - there are other
mechanisms, like class for example. It makes both the kind of injuries we have
and the capacity to deal with them not only a matter of individual will but
also a question of inheritance.
Let me offer
another anecdotal moment that can help understand this question of inheritance
of shattering forces. A Muslim man from Auburn in Sydney’s west related to me
this story about himself. He told me how for a long time he could not
understand why he would get very uptight and ‘all cramped up’ every time he
crosses a white person when walking on the footpath. That was a lot of cramping
up, and he could not fully understand why it happened to him. One day, however,
he was walking up the street with his wife when two things happened. A white
man passed him and he, sure enough, cramped up but at the same time his wife
who was talking to him put her hand on his shoulder. Suddenly the mystery of
the origin of his cramping up became clear: when he was a kid his mother used
to walk along the footpath beside him with her hand on his shoulder and her
hand used to cramp up on his shoulder every time she passed a white man. His
cramping up was the bodily transmitted inheritance of his mother’s racial
injuries (which after knowing her I found out were quite substantial). Racial wounds
are more often than not historically inherited wounds. This is why it is wrong,
indeed racist, to assume that we are all offended in the same way and with the
same intensity, that we understand what the effect of an insult is by measuring
this effect according to how it insults us: my white friend might be insulted
if I called him an ape. But it is nothing short of racist to assume that my
black friend will be insulted in the same way by the same insult. Being called
an ape for a black person opens a wound that incorporates in it a historically
accumulated inheritance of wounds made still alive by the very structures of
society. The same insult has a far greater shattering effect on the psyche. Psychological
fragility, sensitivity to taunts and insults, capacities to be humiliated are
not equally distributed in our society and they are not just an individual
matter. This brings us to the other distribution of centripetal forces that can
actually help us ‘pull ourselves together’ mentioned above.
To say that
racism is a shattering force does not mean that every time someone receives a
racist insult they are shattered. To stay with the example above, being called
an ape works on a historical wound and has a shattering effect but it does not
mean that the person on hearing the racial insult actually shatters. It simply
means that this person has to exert a far greater effort to ‘pull himself or
herself together’ than a white person needs to or can ever experience. Likewise,
an indigenous person who ends up with a good enough non-remarkable but satisfying
job, is not someone who has not been subjected to shattering forces. She has.
That is what makes her achievement quite remarkable. It is important to realise
that any ‘normality’ achieved by racialized people is a form of heroism that is
accomplished against a field of forces that is continuously pitted against them.
But it is equally important to also note that the cost of this normality is far
more enormous than non-racialised people can understand. To ‘pull yourself
together’ reasonably successfully when you are subjected to a greater number,
or more intense, shattering forces is an arduous task that requires a far greater
expenditure of psychic energy and ends up being wearing. ‘Normal’ racialized people
end up way more exhausted and even drained by the end of the day than other ‘normal’
people. This is a form of racial injury in itself. Still, it remains important to
remember that society is not divided between people who are shattered, all over
the place and who can’t pull themselves together and people who do. What is crucial
is the difference in the degree of effort needed to keep yourself together
given the inequality in the shattering forces you are subjected to. This
depends on those centripetal forces that society makes available to us like
anti-racist legislation. But these also vary individually and socially. It
matters if we have grown in a loving family but it also matters what class
background and how much educational capital we have. Differences in gender and
sexuality are also clearly important.
Given all
of the above, the sight of white parliamentarians debating and assuming
themselves to know all about what is and what is not offensive, and how
important the impact of an offense is, is in itself offensive. Racism often
works by highlighting a person’s difference when it is irrelevant and when they
ought to be treated just like any other person. But it also works by treating racialized
subjects like just any other person when their difference clearly matters. This
is at the heart of the perversity of racism: it makes people visible when they
want to be and need to be invisible, and it makes them invisible precisely at
the point where they need to be visible and when their experience matters. It
is in such a context that making invisible by not taking seriously the specific
intensity of the racial experience of what ‘an offense, an insult or a
humiliation’ is, is nothing short of outright racism. Indeed, it is clear that
those who are trying to modify 18 C's anti-racism today care more about what they purport to
be a white experience than they care about non-white experience. It is telling
that when 18C was conceived arguments for and against it were made using
examples of what racialized people experience. The arguments were about whether
or not it can help curb the negative effect of such an experience. Today, those who are trying to modify 18 C are
totally consumed by what they claim White people experience, in the form of ‘look
what 18 C did to poor old Bill Leak’.
White racism
today has a nostalgic slave imaginary. That is, like all nostalgia it yearns
for older times and like all nostalgia it imagines these older times as far
less contradictory and way more perfect than they ever were. In this nostalgic
slave imaginary, white racists ruled supreme, they controlled everything about
the racialized, and the racialized knew their place, did what they were told
and were thankful and grateful for little white mercies.
Because racialized
people today are far from this ideal, White racism has become an increasingly
anxious racism, a racism that is always facing the fear of its failure to
achieve anything like its nostalgic fantasy. This anxiety is behind the
ultra-right movements of ‘white restoration’ we are seeing around the world
just as much as it behind the less dramatic but still important White attempts
at watering anti-racist legislations anywhere it is possible.
So, for
those Australians who continue to be racialized today, and/or who still bear
the trace of their racialized mother squeezing their shoulder, the politics of
white restoration that is at the heart of the attempt to dilute 18C is clear. In
doing so this government is acting like a White supremacist ‘prince’ who thinks
of anti-racist legislation as a kind donation they are making to racialized people.
Someone in the prince’s entrourage has convinced them that this donation was ‘too
much’ so they are proceeding to reduce it. Anyone who thinks that this is not
part of the politics of ‘White Restoration’ that we have been going through
since Howard is badly mistaken.
Needless to
say, there are many white Australians opposed to this politics of restoration.
Some are in parliament. Some are even in the Liberal party. Still, the continuity
between the unsophisticated ravings of One Nation and Turnbull’s cosmopolitan grin
and everything that falls in between cannot be ignored.
