Australian-Invasion Day, and Aboriginal Custodianship

the Federated states and territories of Australia

"Australia Day"
is annually held on the 26th of January, and is celebrated as Australia's "National Day"
commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet of the ships that left Great Britain carrying convicts and settlers to this land, arriving at the port which is now Sydney.

So begins the national day of this country, commemorating Anglo settlement and colonisation.
Also known as Invasion Day and Survival Day.



This Invasion Day event on Facebook explains it best:

"The 26th January commonly known as "Australia day" is sold as a day to celebrate the 'lucky country' the date chosen to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet, the 'discovery' of the Great Southern Land. The raising of the Union Jack symbolised British occupation of the eastern half of the continent claimed by Captain James Cook.

This date is more appropriately known to most First Nations people as Survival or Invasion day. It is also a day of mourning, we mourn the loss of land, culture, languages, we mourn the loss of freedom and abundance, and we mourn for the people who have, and continue to suffer under this disconnected, insatiable, violent and destructive imposed Capitalist system. Australia remains without Treaty, consent or compensation, the Stolen generation, stolen wages, dispossession, racism, assimilation, land theft continue."






Nearing this day,
I want to reflect, but briefly, on the issue of custodianship of the land.

the many Aboriginal language groups and nations of Australia

It seems to me that a major part of my cultural cringe in this country (a cultural cringe that I share, incidentally, with many other Australians as well) has to do in part with the way that we, as a country, not only relate in an ill-way to our country's Aboriginal inhabitants, but also to the land.

In Australia, settler peoples (this includes recent immigrants like myself) tend to hug the urbanised coastlines of Australia (e.g. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin), existing quite literally at this country's periphery, while claiming cultural hegemony and urban "centrality". Most the country's centre is desert, which is typically seen as more dangerous and uninhabitable, which of course reflects a certain... Euro-climate-normative idea of inhabitability...

Of course, Aboriginal people from diverse linguistic groups and nations have, for 40,000 years, wandered and lived across all of Australia's land, and, despite 3 centuries of displacement and genocide, necessarily retain a unique cultural custodianship over the land that we inhabit.



Here, I must necessarily set aside any rationalist biases, and come to embrace something quite a bit more "simple", in the encounter with Aboriginal custodianship as a political aspiration, as well as a lived cultural reality for many Aboriginal people (separate from the concept of land ownership)...

There is magic in this land that I am not, have not been, and perhaps cannot ever be privvy to... both as someone who is not ancestrally linked to this land, and as long as we, as a nation, do not reconcile ourselves with the ongoing ghettoisation of our Indigenous peoples...




Prior to 1967, Aboriginal people were not even allowed to vote
and indeed, were not even legally recognised as Humans.

Aboriginal people were classified under the Flora and Fauna Act.



I hold a lot of grief around this... Grief, so much grief for this land, and its desert "heart", and the heart of a government that deserted, no, til recently did not even recognise our Aboriginal people as people.

Through this grief, I also come to a place of quiet joy and gratitude, a place of wonder and awe, a place of hope.



A lovely poem,
Hate He Said
by Aboriginal Australian "malafella" on youtube
exploring grief around Australia Day...





... and for me?

to "belong" here...? What is my prerogative in this?
Me, global nomad, indigenous to nowhere for many generations.

I carry with me the spirit of wandering and chance upon this country as a clearing through global forest, and this is what I see.

I want to learn more...

Good article on race and sex for gay men

http://hellnogaycism.tumblr.com/post/39200903754/the-queer-politics-of-hooking-up-a-racial-analysis

Pet Peeves

1. The assumption that monogamy is superior to polyamory
2. The assumption that polyamory is superior to monogamy
3. Defensive prescriptions of one or the other for other people's relationships

4. That gentrification is promoted as an unequivocal good
5. That gentrification is lambasted as an unequivocal evil

6. Accepting everything at face value
7. Problematising everything at face value

8. Lists of pet peeves... how misanthropic
9. People who uphold equanimity as a goal, leaving no room in a life of spirituality for moments of indignant crankiness

(Buddhist) Meditation & Social Justice

The Buddhist Story

In the need to qualify the heading of this piece, I first admit that this is a response to the strange tendency toward a particular type of fundamentalism (partially a type of stereotyping), when we consider the extreme limitations of any group of people.

This piece is a response to a stereotypical, often middle class community expression of Buddhist meditation. I think of people who may be sitting serenely and calm, but who are simultaneously dis-engaged from the vissicitudes of life. In more extreme cases, communities of Buddhist meditators may espouse ideas which suggest the compulsive use of meditation as an excuse to deny the validity of political and social engagement entirely, citing as our gurus and teachers famous recluses, hermits, and renunciates such as Bodhidharma (the alleged, and mythical fore-patriarch of Zen) as our emblems of "correct" personhood.

Of course, Shakyamuni Buddha himself, in the totality of his personhood, was both "of the world" (as a prince) as well as a "renunciant" (when he left his palace walls to become a wandering ascetic)... At the same time, the hagiography of the Buddha always includes the fact of his disillusionment with both the extremism of mindless social conformity, as well as of mindless, self-mortifying asceticism (that, indeed, both are not so much "opposites" as mirrors of one another).

Nearing death from a harsh, self-imposed discipline of starvation and meditation, it was only after he accepted the sweet milk pudding of the village girl Sujata that he began his final journey to Awakening under the Bodhi tree.

And of course, the story does not end there:
Buddha Shakyamuni "returns" to the world, and famously begins all of the discourses which make up the classical and canonical stories of the Buddha, in service to the world.



The Limitations of the Buddhist Story

At the same time, what the Buddha was doing, in terms of assisting others in alleviating their suffering, does not exactly fit the idea of social justice as we may understand it coming from a post-Marxist tradition of rooting our awareness of suffering in material systems of extreme economic inequality. It is not enough to simply give a man a fish (as the Buddha himself would have done), nor even to teach the man to fish (as a classical well-meaning managerialism might suggest), for as David Loy has written in his excellent book The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory:

"The dismal record of the last fifty years of development reveals the cruelty of the usual slogan: when we have taught the world's poor to fish, the effect has often been that they deplete their fishing grounds for our consumption..."

We cannot, therefore, end our political consciousness at being "well-meaning", or through the immediacy of interpersonal action alone (giving a starving man a fish), without considering the systemic reasons which drive particular material forms of disenfranchisement and suffering of the people we want to "help".

But that's kind of my point. Because...



...Buddhism is more than Just Meditation...

In a sense, the Buddha himself wasn't "Buddhist".

"Buddhism" is a post-colonial invention, co-created by Asian Buddhists and their (our?) contact with European languages; we may trace our spiritual/religious practices and heritages to some supposed historical figure of Shakyamuni, but even then, not all Buddhists have done this, and many Buddhisms bear hardly a family resemblance to one another in the dizzying smorgasboard of practices and doctrines and cultural commitments.

Part of moving out of a hyper-relativistic and apathetic postmodernity then, is to consciously choose to step into the shoes of political engagement, without necessarily seeing that this is diametrically oppositional to the intrinsic relevance of meditative traditions in that very endeavour.

After all...



...Meditation is more than Just Sitting

My gorgeous friend Trish has written of this in her post Meditation as Political Activity, where she asserts:

"Profound political activity becomes more available to us by practicing... awareness of awareness, because those structures that had previously prevented our right action become more apparent to us, simultaneously evoking the possibility for their ultimate dissolution. The polarity which once had us in its grip no longer has such firm hold over our internal space or our interactions with others. We’re more easily able to discern the differences between opinions and truths, and understand outcomes and possible consequences of action, generating a deeper awareness of our own participation in causal processes in the world.

As we begin to transform ourselves, bringing contemplative awareness into every moment, an ever widening concentric circle of influence grows as we become active and set sparks amongst all folks with whom we are connected in our lives. Both subtle and direct positive influences rain equally upon all people with whom we come in contact, which helps to removing obstacles to communication between us, enriching a place where, with deepened discernment of each others needs a new type of flourishing becomes possible."


To return to the story of the Buddha, we remember that the fundamental power of his presence had not only to do with his meditative power or his immediate vocational capacity to ease the existential ailments of each person he came into contact with, but also that he is, in his very meditative presence, a catalyst in the transformation of systems.

The Buddha spoke to Kings, as much as beggars.
It matters not, in other words, if we are the King, politician, activist or beggar in the struggle to reform our political deadlocks.

It does matter if we can be an agent, in whatever way, to effect change within the hearts and minds of these very Kings, politicians, activists and indeed, even beggars. One of the ways in which we can do this, and indeed, one of the insights of postmodern relativism, is by noting that being a catalytic change agent can occur in some truly profound ways, whether we are the President, or the "wife" of the President.

Meditation seems like a training in pure, catalytic potential; one which can be in the service of justice or injustice (such as Japanese Kamikaze pilots ("suicide bombers") who did Zen meditations before flying off to suicidal and homicidal doom, all in perfect equanimity...).



Of the catalytic power of meditation, housed in a commitment to justice, a great case example is explored in this incredible essay here:

Meditation as A Subersive Act

The author, Sarah Coakley, is a White woman and Anglican priest who teaches at Harvard Divinity School. Her essay explores her experiences teaching meditation in a male prison mostly consisting of incarcerated men of colour, in Boston, Massachusetts. She explores meditation as an act of political subversion, as much as it is an act of alleviating the men's immediate experiences of suffering within the prison, subject as they are to their own interior mental turmoils, as well as being under constant surveillance and the threat of sexual violence. Coakley includes a critical inquiry into race and racism, sexual violence, and mental illness.

While Coakley specifically explores Christian meditation, I find her essay an especially good resource in thinking about meditation as being not-apart from justice and atonement... This is a language which Buddhism has unfortunately almost categorically lacked, but that I am nevertheless eager to find critical correlates for.

An Anthropology of Whiteness

Some of the most empowering models to deepen my critical race consciousness involve adopting an ethical stance around the importance of radical revisionism on the basis of race (to undermine White supremacist racist hegemony) while simultaneously being able to "keep my cool" living in normatively White cultural spaces.

I want to explore this latter aspect, around "keeping my cool". Aside from resistance, I want to explore an anthropological approach to Whiteness, not just in terms of locating (for the purposes of problematising, undermining and disrupting) White privilege, but also in terms of "objective" (i.e. dispassionate) explorations of Whiteness and its many variations... The way that "White discourses" and "White cultures" function, not just, by definition, because of the dispossession/marginalisation of people of colour, but also because of the nuances of White people doing Whiteness (whether overtly or covertly racist, "doing good" in anti-racist spaces, or in critical awareness of privilege). What sorts of Whiteness are produced and reproduced?

Lastly, as a tentative inquiry, I want to explore the ethical stance of "innocence", which is a narrative uniquely generated within cultures of Whiteness (and particularly projected upon constructions of childhood). I particularly want to see if there is any "wisdom" behind an innocence that is sometimes (or ordinarily) deployed defensively and in reaction to accusations of racism, and what it is we may learn from such normatively White formulations (about presumed racial innocence).



Some considerations of "Good White People"

1. Hippies, Quakers, Jews, Europeans,
and so on...
are not the same.

2. For example, hippies in the USA emerge as an ethnically mixed, middle-class White culture, partially as a reactionary response to their inherited colonial, neo-colonial and settler mentalities (counter-(dominant )culturalism).

3. Quakers emerged as a dissenting group of English people in 17th century England, breaking away from the Church of England. They were consistently anti-war, anti-colonial and anti-slavery, and thus driven out of England as migrants seeking religious freedom, significantly transforming their consciousness as a religious diaspora on the American continent.

4. Jewish folks within White settler societies such as US/Canada largely exist also in response to anti-Semitic persecution within Europe, migrating out of Europe in significant numbers to seek a better lives for themselves... Ironically moving increasingly into spaces of White, economic, and cultural privilege through their visibility in (post)modern American popular culture.

5. "Indigeneity", in Europe, is necessarily inclusive of Whiteness, and other Euro-White colonial projects on indigenously European peoples.



Additional Thoughts:

a. Discrimination on the basis of race (and perceived racialised characteristics) is something that occurs among (that is, perpetrated by and against) people of any and all cultures and races.

(Lia writes wonderfully about this in her piece "Against analogy":
"Modern liberal thinking offers discrimination as a metonym for all oppression, with prejudice as its cause and individualisation as the solution. But while prejudice is arguably problematic in its own right, discrimination is only one aspect of oppression. (As a start, others might include erasure, marginalisation, fetishisation, tokenism, appropriation, exploitation, segregation, assimilation …)"

... Her piece is worth reading in its entirety

b. Discrimination alone, then, in this context, is not sufficient to constitute what I mean by Racism. I must necessarily factor in issues of class, and of course, race privilege (of which White privilege is, at this historical moment, hegemonic in my Australian national context, and in many other global contexts).

By way of example, a Black person calling a White person "cracker" does not have the same material weight (or history) of a White person calling a Black person "nigger".

While both are discriminatory, (only) the latter is indisputably racist.



c. To differentiate between White people is not to excuse White people of their White privilege, but rather, to contextualise and differentiate nuances of accountability for ongoing race privilege and racial oppression. How did different people (disproportionately, though perhaps not exclusively, of European heritage) start to "become White" in certain national contexts? How does their Whiteness differ from space to space / country to country? What sorts of racial accountabilities can/should one expect, for example, of a newly arrived Swedish migrant to the USA, compared to a British migrant to Australia, compared to a Croatian migrant to New Zealand, compared to an Anglo-Australian woman who has grown up in Shanghai, compared to a 5th generation Irish-Canadian woman in Quebec, compared to a fair-skinned Honduran Latino man living in Singapore, compared to a 2nd-generation Greek Australian in Melbourne, compared to a Dutch person within and indigenous to Holland?

How do differing patterns of migration, into countries with different legacies of racism, affect the production of White cultures? Are there patterns we can notice? And are White (national) cultures therefore always to be regarded as criminally suspect?

(I immediately draw a distinction between White-dominated settler societies, such as Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand, and "indigenously White" societies where many of the people who may have political power are also indigenous to the land (many European countries).)




In a more contemporary sense:

In the USA, I suspect largely because of the cultural power of cities like New York City, many Jews, Italians, and Greeks have similarly "become White" in American consciousness (that is, are perceived as racially White, and thus, adequately "Subjectivised" in the national imagination as citizens). This is different in Australia, where it is specifically people of Anglo-Celtic heritages who are still culturally and phenotypically dominant in constructions and portrayals of Whiteness and citizenship.

I am witnessing a slow, generational change in the inclusion of more Greek and Italian faces... but for the most part, Greeks, Italians, and many other people of Southeastern European descent (e.g. Croation, Serbian) as well as Middle Eastern / Arabic descent (e.g. Lebanese, Iraqi) are racialised as "Wogs".

Sort of "off-White".




Problematising White Privilege

I am less and less convinced by the utility of narratives which iterate White privilege as the globally hegemonic form of race privilege, true as this may be in this historical moment. The reason I am less and less convinced by the utility of this narrative, even though it may be true, is because:

1. It is an expedient discourse but pretends universality in Anglophonic spaces (and is thus wedded, perhaps unwittingly, to American hegemony in racial discourse).
--> the irony of meeting many Queer People of Colour here in Melbourne who romanticise cities in the USA as bastions of cultural power for QPOCs, because of its hegemonic creative potential around "radical" discourse...

2. There are variations on who receives race privilege in different cultural spaces... To speak of White privilege as globally hegemonic itself privileges a certain vision of the reaches of globalisation.

3. The emotional content of discourses on White privilege and the oppression of people of colour sometimes unabashedly morph into strictly (and reductionistically) materialistic and dualistic frameworks
(e.g. White people = Oppressors // People of Colour = Oppressed...
therefore Whiteness = In need of rehabilitation // People of Colour = not responsible for White people's rehabilitation process).

4. This dualism precludes intimacy (both a product and a perpetuation of Racism).

5. We forget or ignore the culpability of colonialism within people-of-colour socities as, at least in part, highly racialised narratives in themselves, many of which set the precedent for the continued dispossession of our own people today (a dispossession that today globally disproportionately privileges White people... but these historical referents have varied...)

6.  There is also the ever-increasing cultural and economic power of people who are racialised and/or acculturated as Chinese / East Asian, particularly in countries in Southeast Asia.

That last point needs to be taken seriously, in any attempt to universalising accounts of racial justice, even if these accounts acknowledge their limitations (in this case, I am writing in the English language for an English-reading audience).

If the most spoken language in the world is Mandarin, then we can postulate this much: That the cultures and worldviews expressed in Mandarin are the ones that are globally hegemonic for the most numbers of people, or at least are likely to become much more so.

It could be helpful to preemptively consider Chinese constructions of race and ethnicity, in shaping the near future of race and racism globally, even in national contexts such as the USA and Australia, where Whiteness and European-ness are still hegemonic.

This is especially important given the increasing obsolescence of the rational Nation-State as being the final arbiter of our meaning-making as "citizens"... Global citizenship (for those of us who have the race/class/gender etc. privilege to conceive of such a thing) requires an active engagement with racial and linguistic concerns beyond Whiteness.




Innocence

My interest here is not to indict people of colour and to defend White innocence.
(indeed, part of an anthropology of Whiteness would be to precisely include analysis of White cultures or White-dominator discourses which hold people of colour disproportionately responsible for our own oppression and suffering while simultaneously absolving themselves of any culpability... or who use colourblind approaches and narratives around racial justice).

I of course acknowledge that White people need to intentionally increase their awareness of and take responsibility for their White privilege. I intend to historicise how this has come to be, and where this may go, and I acknowledge that Whiteness and English are still hegemonic as the face and language of global capitalism.



So no, I am not here to indict people of colour and to defend White innocence.

Rather, I am claiming:
All of us need to claim our innocence.

In anti-racist discourse, I often encounter the narrative of complicity...
"All of us are raised in a racist society, therefore there is no such thing as someone who isn't racist... We need to ALL take responsibility for our racism..."
etc.

But I think there is a unique "wisdom" in innocence. And I am suggesting:
White people should not have a monopoly over this innocence.

We are all innocent, because discriminating on the basis of perceived racial difference is something that happens to all of us, developmentally, as we move through the world.

I am not saying:
"White people are (uniquely) innocent".

I am saying:
"All people are (generally) innocent".

I am also saying:
That as we discriminate on the basis of race, while the material differences on aggregate are stark (if you are White, compared to if you are a person of colour), the spiritual consequences are similar. Racial discrimination necessarily involves a disavowal of a part of our own selfhood and personhood.

The part of the White person who is, for example, also "primitive", "ugly", "poor", or "cultural"...
or "sexist" or "homophobic"...
characteristics sometimes projected onto people of colour...

and the part of the person of colour who is also "dominant", "colonial", "normal", "ignorant", "oppressive"...
characteristics sometimes projected onto White people...

...Also: "innocent"
"Innocent", because all of us, in whatever we do, are bonded in our shared struggle, to deal with our suffering, our fears of old age, sickness, and death.

When we are angry, when we use our ignorance to hurt others, maliciously or ignorantly, when we become perpetrators, when we are hurt by others' ignorances and, victimised, become victims... When we are held back from courage to speak out because of our fear, when we fall-back on being do-nothing bystanders, when we jump the gun on social justice, when we make harsh and punitive or eternally and prematurely forgiving judgements, all this, I suggest:
Are all expressions of our own common innocence as human beings, fumbling our way to make sense of how we can, should, or must relate or not relate to one another better. To survive, to thrive.

A wisdom that may come from race privilege, perhaps (or at least enough privilege and space to breathe through the pain of racial oppression), but a wisdom that I'd like to see available to all of us, is the engagement with this very "innocence" that belongs not to White people nor to people of colour, but is a common developmental stage of our all-too-humanness.

Our propensity to discriminate is not inherently pathological. It is "innocent" of the systems which render it either benign or devastatingly tumorous.

For What We Are About To Receive

Not eating sugar, or even eating it in moderation, in the U.S. is a challenge. This is a society geared towards pushing sugar (especially refined sugar) on people. According to a document from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, "Two hundred years ago, the average American ate only 2 pounds of sugar a year. In 1970, we ate 123 pounds of sugar per year. Today, the average American consumes almost 152 pounds of sugar in one year. This is equal to 3 pounds (or 6 cups) of sugar consumed in one week!"

Part of how this plays out is the cultural demarcation of certain, usually extremely sugary, foods as "treats" (with the implication that all other food is dull drudgery). Once this demarcation is accomplished, all food-related discourse takes on a moral dimension, whether one is trying to avoid treats (penance, asceticism); having a treat as a "reward" for some other kind of food-related or exercise-related success (justice); "allowing" oneself a treat in difficult or stressful times (mercy); having a treat because one deserves it just for being you (goodness); or having a treat with self-consciously no justification (moral failure, self-indulgence).

I am curious if it is possible, through the forswearing of sugar, to break from even the "penance/asceticism" model of eating, and instead re-imagine one's relationship to all other food. Just as the former or potential drug addict may want to re-construct herself as being "high on life," perhaps there is a way of thinking of ALL food as a treat, and all nourishment as a delight.

On a related note, here's an old Guardian blog piece asking if there's a secular way to say grace.