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.

The Tyranny of the Geopolitical

Last week, at the Adelaide Festival, we went to this thing called ‘Breakfast with Papers’. It is an open-air amphitheatre-like space where you go relatively early in the morning, have a croissant and coffee and listen to journos discussing political issues. 

I enjoy listening to political journalists. The proximity they have to politicians translates into a unique form of cynicism that marks journalistic culture. At the same time, I dislike the way some journalists, like many academics in this regard, discuss politicians with a hardly repressed belief that they are better at politics than the politicians they are discussing.  A totally unwarranted belief if you ask me. One that always minimises the nature of the acrobatic act that politicians must engage in as they struggle to make decisions while juggling with an inordinate number of issues and negotiating an equally excessive number of interests. More productive time can be spent reflecting on the presuppositions and trends that mark journalism at a specific time in history and the reasons behind it.

These were the thoughts that came to me when hearing the ‘Breakfast with Papers’ the morning we showed up. That day, the host, Tom Wright had Katrina Sedgwick, Colin James and David Marr who all had many perceptive things to say about the many issues affecting us these days, Scott Morrison and the forthcoming federal elections. What made me want to hop on the stage and show my critical incisors was when Tom Wright interrupted the discussion happening between them to read out a select number of news items which included the Russian army closing in on Kyiv and the Saudi government executing a record number of people (around ninety) in one go.

When Tom Wright read out the Saudi news, one of the journalists on the stage asked: ‘why were they executed for?’. Tom Wright replied something like: ‘I don’t know some religious transgression or another’. Then he explained that there is a choice of being executed by beheading or by hanging but all those executed were hung.

To me what happened at that moment was a quintessential demonstration of one of the most serious problems that plagues the print and the televisual news media today: its reliance on freak show happenings, and on making a freak show out of what is happening.

Firstly, Tom Wright was wrong. The people who were executed in Saudi Arabia were not mainly executed for religious transgression. Some were convicted of serious crime such as rape and murder but most of the executed were in fact classified as political extremists by Saudi regime in connection with their politics regarding Syria, Iraq and Yemen. By failing to deal with this and highlighting instead an orientalised freak-show dimension of the execution where the macabre and the religious meet, it was a missed opportunity to discuss something of great importance for us in Australia, something that also connected these executions to the news regarding the invasion of the Ukraine. This has to do with the way local national political aspirations become entangled with international geo-political imperatives. This is important to talk about because the current government has an unprecedented desire to entangle us with geo-political manoeuvres. While, as is well-known, many Australian governments have involved us in Western wars in the past, this government has a propensity to insert political spats with international political actors right in the midst of national politics like no other government before it. This has been very clear whether in the way it has recently reacted to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, or the way it has almost enthusiastically fostered a climate of international duelling with China. 

Let me make it clear that I am not interested here in questioning who we should be allied to in international politics. It is more the way we do so that interests me.

I was born and raised in a country which has seen the national political aspirations and desires of its citizens crashing many times over on the rocks of geopolitical interests and manoeuvrings. This is what I have termed the tyranny of the geopolitical. This is not the tyranny of one international political actor or another but the tyranny of the geopolitical order as a whole: its capacity to make geopolitical imperatives over-ride the local imperatives of a national population. In Lebanon the way geopolitical imperatives articulate themselves to local antagonisms plays an important role in producing both the social and economic crisis the country finds itself regularly in and the sclerotic governmentality that is unable to deal with it.

A similar tyranny of the geopolitical contributed to the impasse Syria finds itself in today. The democratic desire of the population clashed with the imperatives of the dominant forces of the international order who acted to protect a dictator and a dictatorship because it was in their interest to do so and at the expense of the democratically inclined forces of the country.

Likewise in Egypt where the local revolution deposed an old dictator and managed to bring to power a democratically elected government. The new government was allowed to make changes to the internal structure of Egyptian society but not to touch its position and politics within the geopolitical order. In particular, in relation to Palestine and the siege of Gaza. The new government remained under the watch of the Egyptian army whose interests remained aligned with existing geo-political order. No sooner had the elected government start dabbling with international politics that it found itself deposed. The geo-political order of things imposed its primacy in the figure of Sisi.

Saudi Arabia today, like Israel before it, has become indirectly, in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, and directly in Yemen one of the main shapers and protectors of the existing geo-political order. This is why it was important to highlight the geo-political dimension of its mass assassination /execution ‘program’ rather than its ‘freak-show value’ by the journalists meeting that morning. Especially as we are witnessing one of the most violent expressions of the tyranny of the geo-political in Ukraine today. The aspirations of a whole nation for democracy and for the freedom to align itself with whomever it wishes frustrated by Russia as it feels entitled to prioritise its geo-political interests over the Ukrainian national interest.

How does playing geo-political games ends up affecting local politics is a conversation that is important to have here in Australia. Some would say that the tyranny of the geo-political over the national democratic process has already manifested itself here with the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the subsequent continued subservience of national governments to American geopolitical interests and our participation in its warring ventures. But it remains a fact that, as noted above, no Australian government has made itself an active participant in the antagonistic geo-political games that oppose the United States to China and Russia the way this current government has. As an elected government, it has every right to do so, but we have every right to discuss the ramifications of making the tyranny of the geo-political hover explicitly over our political culture and how it ends up affecting us.