Racism is a phenomenon responsible for much hate, death and destruction throughout history. As such it is easy to associate something like virtue or strength of character with the struggle against it. But to associate the anti-racist struggle with joy might strike one as insensitive. Why should one experience anything remotely joyful in the face of the kind of hate, violence, death, viciousness, pain and misery that racism produces? I think there are good reasons why anti-racism should generate joy despite all this.
Let me stress that when I think of joy, I do not equate it so much with ‘enjoyment’ in the sense of ‘having a good time,’ though I don’t discount the possibility of having a good time while engaging in anti-racist work: there is a good time to be had in the collective struggles and forms of solidarity that anti-racist work entails. When I speak of joy I mainly think of the idea of ‘augmentation of being’ advanced by Spinoza: joy as an experience of feeling morally and physically uplifted, of feeling that our capacity to inhabit the world has been enhanced. Let me explain in what way anti-racist practices can be associated with such a heightening of the viability of our lives. To be clear, I am only concerned here with the non-violent, ideological, political and institutional anti-racist practices of the type that activists engage in within the legal spaces offered by democratic states.
In one of the many objectionable statements made by Israelis amid the destruction of Gaza and the mass murdering of its inhabitants, I was struck by a woman who, talking about Palestinians, explained to the person interviewing her: ‘we kill them, we kill them. They just don’t know how to die.’
I think this classification of Palestinians as people who ‘don’t know how to die’ tells us something very important about the nature of colonial racism today and about the ground on which anti-racist practices operate. It is particularly important for us here in Australia because I have often noted a similar form of racist classification directed at Australia’s First Nation people.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this classification lies in the feelings of irritation and exasperation that are behind it. They highlight the way the colonially racialized today are seen as people who are refusing to disappear despite all the attempts made by the colonists to disappear them. They are post-genocidal remnants and debris that are not only just not dissipating but that are reconstituting themselves as a social and political force.
If you want to understand what the colonists’ experience in the face of such remnants is like, think of someone who has just deployed the best that pest-control can offer to get rid of cockroaches in their house. They think that they have done an as thorough as a job can be and they want to have what they think is a well earnt rest. They open a can of beer and are ready to slump in front of the TV, and suddenly a cockroach makes its appearance between them and the TV.
In the eyes of the settler-colonialists, the colonised today embodies the figure of this surviving cockroach. Perhaps the racialized themselves don’t see themselves as cockroaches, but in the name of inter-species solidarity, I have no problem of becoming such a cockroach myself. I have found a word to describe such genocide-resistant beings: obstinants. Obstinant ChatGPT informed me is an obsolete form of the word obstinate. But I was surprised to know that it is etymologically a fusion of Obstinate (stubborn) and Thanatos(death) and ‘it conveys the refusal to die in a stubborn, defiant way.’
To see all the native survivors of colonial racist genocide as obstinants is to see them as being at the same time the proof of the genocide that has or is unfolding, and the proof that the genocidal drive is never as conclusive as it is fantasised to be by the colonists.
As I argued in my book Is Racism an Environmental Threat? white settler colonialism shares with the human domestication of nature a modernist fantasy of omnipotence over the space it yearns to control. The obstinant, like those parts of nature that prove themselves to be undomestic-able, punctures that fantasy of omnipotence. It does not challenge the dominance of the coloniser, but it instils in them a sense of insecurity that disturbs their sense of power. White racists today always think of themselves as lacking strength and power when comparing themselves to their racist predecessors whether those are imagined as slave owners, as Nazis or as members of the Ku Klux Klan. Whether their predecessors were ever as powerful as they think is another matter, but what is clear is that this sense of lack makes white racists today frustrated, anxious and self-doubting. Unfortunately, this also makes their racism more vicious, cruel and vindictive. And there is nothing like the obstinant dimension of racialized people to unleash these negative affects.
I want to highlight the figure of the obstinant because it’s double sidedness as both a figure of extinction and a counter-figure of survival, a space where a genocidal tragedy has unfolded and a space of resistance and possibilities, points to the above mentioned double dwelling that marks or at least ought to mark anti-racist practices as purveyors of joy. Think of how depressing it is to have anti-racists who simply dwell on tragedy, whose discourse is a continuous uninterrupted form of wailing. Such anti-racists never manage to uplift the racialised. Quite the contrary, they uplift the racists who watch them and see in them a confirmation of their fantasised unlimited capacity to inflict misery. One the other hand, there is something tragicomic and unethical when someone engages in unlimited celebrations of survival and victory unmoored and detached from the genocidal tragedy that is surrounding them. It is only in so far as anti-racist practices can occupy both the domain of tragedy and the domain of possibility that they can aspire for being joy-instilling.
As I am writing this text, I became conscious that the night before I presented it as a conference paper at the Carumba Institute in Brisbane, I was taken by the well-known Indigenous artist, my friend Vernon Ah Kee, to see an installation of one of his artworks at The Queensland University of Technology. The artwork is a textual aestheticization, for which Vernon is known for, of the words: still here.
It dawned on me that this anti-racist artwork is actually an excellent representation of the state of ‘obstinance’ I am talking about. While an indigenous person will see it as a celebration of survival, racists will see in it the cockroach that survived genocide speaking to them. It is also an excellent example of the anti-racist double dwelling I am referring to. Indeed, the words 'still here' dwell in both tragedy and possibility. They allude to tragedy in that 'still' by itself points to something of the order of ‘Despite what has happened,’ while in combination with 'here' it points more to survival and possibility. I am suggesting that such double dwelling is a characteristic of good (joyful) anti-racist practices in all domains of struggle. I’ll give two quick examples of other domains.
Anti-racism involves protecting the racialized from the effect of racist cultures, structures and practices. This is especially so in a world where the racists are still overwhelmingly powerful, and even aiming for what they see as the restoration of lost power. Finding ways of shielding and protecting the racialised from the effect of this domination is crucial. However, if all one does is ‘duck for cover’ one can end up digging oneself in a hole. Anti-racism has to also involve attacking the racists such as to stop them from doing what they feel empowered to do. Recently, I felt this very strongly when I was attacked by German Zionists. I had many people come and offer to support and protect me. But after some time, I start feeling that too much protection can be suffocating. I needed more than protection, I needed people who helped me ideologically and institutionally attack my attacker. I felt that strategizing to attack my attackers was essential for my well-being. In much the same way, an efficient and empowering anti-racism has to know how to dwell in both the politics of protection and the politics of counter-attack.
Another domain I can briefly mention has to do with the politics of anti-racist narcissism. Racism always involves a continual attempt at the de-valorisation and humiliation of the racialised. Thus, it makes total sense that the countering of such racism involves, indeed necessitates, a strategic narcissistic valorisation of the self. Such a politics is strategic in the sense that it has to involve a capacity to know, control and limit itself. If one lets such a narcissistic politics take over and develop unchecked without equally developing a politics of solidarity and affinity with, and care for, others, one ends up with a pathological valorisation of the self at the expense of others. This can easily become a form of racism in itself. Thus, dwelling in both narcissism and a capacity to care for others than oneself is essential. Zionism is a good example of where one ends if one lets the politics of narcissism dominate over all others.
There are many other seemingly discordant political spaces where anti-racist politics has to learn to dwell in order to be a politics of joy: the politics of love and hate is one. The politics of negative opposition to a given reality and the politics of creating new realities, what I call alter-politics, is another. To learn to dwell in those and similarly antagonistic or opposing universes is not a mere matter of merely occupying two spaces. Joyful anti-racism is an artful practice that requires a continual strategic play on where, when, and with what intensity to dwell in one space more so than in another, and sometimes to even learn how to oscillate between them and with what frequency.
This is not so written with the sense of giving advice on how to do anti-racims as much as with the sense of clarifying and spelling out certain processes. For I genuinely feel that the great majority of anti-racist work that is being done is on the side of joy in the way I have described.
