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Friday, October 25, 2013

Seroconvert!

From a self, prior, uncertain, forgetful
to one who commits to ancestral memory,
blood awareness

Thursday, October 24, 2013

a brief Ontology of Race

"Race does not exist [biologically]"...
And in a (small 'l') liberal worldview, that is why we do not talk about Racism. Instead, we talk about culture, of language, of religion, of ancestry, of geography, of migrant status. We skirt around issues of Race and Racism, conflating the empty signifier of Race (i.e. its biologically indeterminable nature) with total non-existence.

I'd like to try...:
"Race does not exist [biologically], and yet..."
...Yet... it is ontologically real by virtue of its being a socially meaningful way in which we categorise one another. A lived reality for all of us. Race is a strange residue of the unfolding of human culture and history, the vestiges of power and a lack thereof imprinting themselves upon our bodies. Any recourse to "predictability" (as regard to a person's physical characteristics, assumed or otherwise, and their psycho-spiritual character) posits the meaningfulness of a person's body (and therefore their presumed ancestry) as an indicator of personality or behaviour. Even "unpredictability" is a falsehood, even if it is universally applied to both dominant and marginalised racial groups. Unpredictability itself assumes a blank-slatedness to human character, a non-relation between Bodies and Culture which is as much contingent on falsehood as racialised predictability is.

Presented with the empty vessels that are "Race" and racial categories, I choose to notice how they have been filled by language, by misnomers, by violent avoidance. I acknowledge that I see Race, though not clearly; Racial categories are ever-shifting... They come in and out of being... As non-existent yet hypnotising as waves crashing upon a reluctant shore...

Even in avoiding them, we give rise to new racialised terms... For example, "Ghetto" or "CALD" (culturally and linguistically diverse), which purport to primarily reference class and culture, but are, indeed, deeply steeped in racialised assumptions of normalcy (i.e. Middle-Class White Citizenship).

Race does not exist. Yet Racism is real, the lived experience of Race is real, and it is Racialisation which undergirds our avoidance. Some of us surf upon the proverbial waves of this ephemerality (of Race).

Others of us drown.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

On human rights


Human Rights are not an infallible piece of intellectual technology to address the ills and sufferings of the world... After all, when we pronounce certain groups of living beings as Less-Than-Human, then constantly reiterating the importance of respecting "human rights" is a flawed political strategy for changing the course of our conversation. After all, if I am consistently seeing some group of people as "not-human" or "less-than-fully-human" or indeed, even "irreparably flawed human" (i.e. too broken for use), then Human Rights need not possibly apply fully to these beings...

Do I offer an alternative?

Experiment. Experiment with a discourse and practice of human rights as it exists and as it evolves,
And experiment with noticing how we treat all living beings whom we do not regard as human... Dogs, cattle, chickens, birds, rats, roaches, poisonous spiders, beetles, squid, bears, wolves,
or creatures of our imaginations, like dragons and phoenixes and gnomes and fairies
and still, notice how we react...
and notice how we notice. Then I ask myself, "how am I choosing to see the world in any given moment?"

"And to what extent have my choices been shaped, liberated, or constrained because of my circumstances, of my background, of my ancestral baggage, of my inheritance, or my lack of an inheritance, of my physical ability or disability, of my sex or my gender or how I choose to do sex or gender, or because of what I have consumed, eaten, drank, during the course of my life til now that has shaped my body, my face, my health, my energy, my virility?"

How would having answers determine the fate of our historical moment and our future, in determining the choices I could or will make?

In asking these questions, I release my need for answers...
I simply wish to ask the questions
and allow the life I lead
to also be the inquiry.