Some problems that prevent anti-racist consolidation and transmission and some suggestions on how to avoid them

It is common for both conservative and anti-racists in Australia to say something like ‘every newly arrived wave of immigrants will be subjected to racism in the same way as the immigrants of earlier waves have been subjected to racism’. This is not entirely true, of course, since every Racism towards Asian immigrants, towards Arab/Muslims, towards Indians and towards Africans is not the same. Each wave of immigrants generates forms of racism that are specific it. Each wave brings forth, so to speak, a local Australian version of a long history of Western racism born out of the history of slavery and colonialism. Nonetheless there are similarities in what each wave is subjected to. And as I read about the various forms of racism that African immigrants are subjected to and that are the centre of our attention this afternoon, I cannot help but wonder: to what extent are Africans able to benefit from the experience of those who have been racialised before them and from the various anti-racist struggles that countered this racialisation? 

 

The above question is partly rhetorical since it is clear to me that they don’t, or, at least, that they don’t as much as they should. Nonetheless, it is a question that is worth asking since it leads to reflect on the more substantial question which is: why is this so? Why is racist culture able to reproduce itself and ensure its inheritance by younger generations while anti-racist culture isn’t? After all, anti-racist struggles mark Australian history just as much as racism itself. Generation after generation of racialised people, with many committed, sincere and courageous allies from among the white population, have fought Australian racism in its various forms. But there seem to be very few social institutions and mechanisms that are able to condense and transmit this history. There is of course a quick answer as to why this is so: while racism is structural, and can benefit from existing institutions to give it continuity and power, anti-racism is marginal, with no structural back up: its history remains a series of events. The only anti-racism that finds itself into White institutions is of a benevolent type. White Australians are inordinately in love with the ‘helper position’. They rightly see it as better than the ‘hater position’ but cannot see how the ‘helper-helped’ relation when not seen as transitional, can become a relation of power and dependency, and often ends up being a form of racism in itself. The history of ‘helped’ immigrants and Indigenous people who become the target of animosity when they signal that they do not need help but need to be left alone to thrive remains to be written. Even institutions that were won through struggle are transformed into benevolent institutions and their history is written as if they are the product of white benevolence. Many multicultural institutions, and multicultural histories as they are taught at schools, are a prime example of this. A newly arrived migrant how looks at this history as it is presented to the by state institutions will not find a genealogy of struggle by people who have been in similar position to them. Instead of struggles for power, they’ll find a history of idealised White governmentality. As I write this we are, this very week, in the midst of trite celebrations of ‘harmony’ we are witnessing the Labour Party is once again harmoniously parachuting a White candidate into a multicultural electorate to ‘represent it’.

 

Some forms of anti-racist education contribute to this by highlighting the importance of ‘educating’ white racists. This emanates from a false belief that racists are so because of their ‘ignorance’. While there are often cases of racism that are due to ignorance, it is a mistake to see ignorance as a prime force in the reproduction of the racist structures of society. Racists are primarily moved by a desire to hurt and it is this desire to hurt that circulates in the culture and the structure and give it its lethal power. Racists don’t need to be educated they need to be disempowered. I believe that concentrating less on educating White Australians about the ills of racism and concentrating more on educating racialised people about the struggles of those who preceded them is more important in creating a transmittable anti-racist tradition. Furthermore, White racists, among many problems they have, often suffer from a desire to be centred. An educational anti-racism that tells them: yes you are the centre is not necessarily the best way to approach things.

 

Despite the common circulation of the idea that ‘racism is a structure’ in wide anti-racist circles many people fail to understand the significance of the utterance. It is very routinely accompanied with a still an ongoing belief that racism is something that Australia needs to rid itself of. There is not understanding that ‘racism is a structure’ means that racism is foundational both historically and structurally, that Australia can only be what it is thanks to racism, and if you get rid of racism Australia will stop being what it is. Instead, people utter this sentence and engage in practices and say things that are structured by a deep myth that is very hard to shake: Australia is lovely and racism is an aberration, a blot on the landscape that can be dealt with by educating the racists among the population.

 

Another feature of anti-racism among immigrant populations and their helpers that militates against a transmittable anti-racist culture is that many immigrants are very particularist about their anti-racism. In the best of cases, they just want to protect themselves from racism and they don’t care about what is happening to others around them. In the worst of cases, they are themselves racist and happy to join with other racists to racialise others. It is what I have often referred to as racist anti-racism. The need to highlight what Angela Davis refers to as the indivisibility of the struggle for freedom from racial domination is important. One cannot be anti-racist when it comes to Vietnamese or Lebanese but not care what is happening to African or indigenous people. It is clear that particularist anti-racism is non-communicable by its very nature. One way to deal with this that we have here in Australia is to articulate and subordinate (which is itself an anti-racist gesture) all anti-racist practices around the anti-racist struggles of the Indigenous population. If Australia has a structuring racist core, its racism towards Indigenous population is the core of the core. No anti-racist culture can be enduring without a centring of the indigenous population.

 

 

I have this fantasy that one of these days, as the government subjects those who want to migrate to Australia to all kind of suitability tests, we will be able to provide the prospective immigrants, at the same time, with an ‘Racism survival kit’, ‘essential to assimilate into a country that does not want you’ which has a brief history of Australian history, examples of the things newly arrived immigrants will be subjected to, the overt racism of the scoundrels who have nothing much but their racism, the more covert but more lethal racism of the institutions, how to deal with ‘the Australians who like to help’, how to deal with middle class people who translate the relaxed attitude they have towards immigrants and that is based on their condition of material ease into a higher morality to feel even more superior to the rest of the population, a list of places where people can go etc… all in one package. I think that there are already many anti-racist practices that are moving in the directions I have indicated above. Perhaps the greatest effort is one of aggregation, co-ordination and condensation as a preliminary to dissemination.