The term "People of Colour" (POC) in an Australian context

This essay is a work in progress. I intend to provide links to cite sources for some of my historical and political claims. I will repost as I get to these.

I have written this essay on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation, in the urban centre of Melbourne, Australia. I acknowledge that my presence is the result of the targeting of the owners of this land for genocide, and I acknowledge the responsibilities I have as a migrant settler to change this. I acknowledge all Aboriginal elders, past, present and future, particularly to any Aboriginal person who may be reading this essay. May any merit generated from this essay be in the service of racial justice for all people of colour locally and globally, and may I be held accountable for any mistakes I have made along the way.

---

POC in Aus

I find the identification with “person of colour” simultaneously empowering and fraught with political tension, not only in relation to a white majority in Australia (who may or may not find the term confronting in its reminder of white racial culpability for colonial and genocidal crimes), but also in relationship to a dominant U.S.American sensibility.  I mean this not only in terms of the design and implementation of racist and capitalist superstructures (which the USA is well-known for internationally), but also in international resistance movements.

More simply:

As a gay man of Malaysian Chinese heritage living as an Australian citizen in Melbourne, Australia, I am a “person of colour” not only because of white supremacy, but also because of American supremacy in delineating the contours of my anti-racist struggle in Australia.

To all my American friends, family and allies: This is not an admonition or a “blaming”. As I’ve mentioned early on in this essay, I find the term “person of colour” empowering in many ways. It intends to demarcate a category within which a diverse range of racialised people can respond to white supremacy. What I think it may suffer from, as a category, is in its primary construction of race as being related to colour which is true in many dominant conversations on race in an American context for multiple generations of African-descent communities, many of whom can trace ancestry to slavery and who are known by “blackness”. The term “people of colour” is more fraught as a designation when it comes to thinking about multiple forms of racialisation which are related to colour (and white supremacy), but are not necessarily bound by it. For example, I consider indigeneity in settler societies (such as Native Americans in the USA, First Nations folks in Canada, and Aboriginal Australians), or the oppression of Muslims (Islamophobia) and multiple forms of language-based oppression. All of these, while properly referred to as being about race and racism, are not necessarily strictly about colour, and the people who are most affected by these forms of racism and colonization may not necessarily choose to organize on the principle of colour.

Here is what I am NOT saying…:

I am not speaking on behalf of all racialised people. I am simply mentioning some of the people that I may unwittingly exclude from any term at all, and choose to focus on the term “people of colour” because of my own critical investment in its potential for ongoing work in Australia to challenge racism and white supremacy.

In my Australian context, I notice that the term “people of colour” seems to center on the struggles of racialised migrant settlers, largely, in my sphere of awareness, of South Asian and African descent. I rarely see other East/Southeast Asian people who connect strongly with this term in Australia, nor indeed, of Aboriginal Australians either, except for those of us who have lived in the USA (such as myself) or who connect strongly with an American-dominated blogosphere. It also does seem to be visibly age-segregated, with younger people more likely to identify with the term, compared to older people.

One thing I like about the term “person of colour” is its adaptability, about its invitation to multiple meanings which are contextually dependent, and which themselves are evolving and changing. One thing I find fraught about it is that, in a call to coalition within an Australian context, we are dealing with an unfortunate history of racism which is both similar to and actually quite distinct from a North American context. In Australia, the terms “black” and “blackfella” (racialised terms which reference colour) are largely synonymous with discussions of indigeneity and the colonisation of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people, whereas these two terms (“black” and “indigenous”) would be differentiated in the USA.

Other differentiations include that, in the USA, a lot of work on irregular or “undocumented” migration centers on Latino/a people who, in some constructions of the US census, are actually constructed as “white”, whereas in Australia, the “peril” of migration still largely centers on Asia, and of irregular/undocumented asylum seekers from Middle East/Central Asia and Africa who are largely Hazara, Somali, Iranian, Ethiopian, Sri Lankan, or the stateless Rohingya people. Migrants are racialised with a particular form of “unbelonging” in the crossing of oceanic borders, rather than land borders, and also with a much more recent sphere of influence. This is given that Australia’s White Australia Policy (various forms of legislation which barred non-European / non-Anglo people from migrating into the country or being naturalized as citizens) was only dismantled in the 1970s. This is in contrast to the USA’s removal of explicit reference to race-based quotas in immigration in the 1950s (while maintaining particular national quotas).

There is at least a full 20-year difference, in this regard, when thinking about Australia’s relationship to racialised migrants of colour in modernity, compared to the USA. In many ways, this is regressing, with the Australian Federal government's explicit disavowal and racist damnation of asylum seekers, some of the world’s most vulnerable people, who happen to arrive on our shores by boat.

An additional factor is that large swaths of the USA were part of Mexico (also colonized by Spaniards) prior to being under the jurisdiction of the American Federation. In other words, there were already a critical mass of Latino people on U.S.American soil even during racist apartheid in the USA when only white men were seen to be citizens. This is in contrast to the relatively small numbers of non-White migrants in early colonial Australia, such as Chinese migrants during the Gold Rush of the 1800s, who, unlike Chinese communities in the USA, largely expatriated from the Australian continent back to Asia after the rush, and small (but significant) numbers of Pacific Islanders who were enslaved and then forcibly expatriated after Australian Federation in 1901.

When thinking about race, Aboriginality, and settler colonialism, I necessarily need to hold the term “people of colour”, in an Australian context, accountable to a range of responsibilities that are not immediately accounted for in existing American-dominant discourse on race and racism. I am wary of a term which, in its current use, centralises the experiences of migrants of colour while not adequately addressing the ongoing displacement and disenfranchisement of Aboriginal Australians.

At the same time, it is worth reminding myself, as a queer person of colour, how people of colour, regardless of our actual “colour” are not only victims of political turmoil, rape, genocide and enslavement, but many of us are also the progeny of love and fruitions of justice because of our ancestors’ struggles and will to survival.

I offer this essay in order to highlight some of the distinctions between organizing in anti-racist coalition in Australia as someone who is targeted for racial vilification or exclusion from many aspects of public cultural production as an Asian-heritage person, compared to the USA. When I call myself a “person of colour” in Australia, and am accepted as such by others here who organize similarly, we are demographically distinct from groups of people of colour who may organize in American settings, and the sorts of racial issues that arise in Australia will need to account for a whole set of issues for which available online American-dominant language on “people of colour” will do no justice for.

We will have to produce and evolve our own languages, and I must cultivate a strategic patience, for the relative lack of political will or critical mass to coalition among diverse racialised communities compared to what I witnessed while I was in the USA. Anglo-specific white supremacy is much stronger in Australia compared to the USA, with some folks of European background, such as Italians and Greeks, who can trace still-present and ongoing generational memory some of the horrors of racism upon arrival.

I want to be mindful in considering the potentially exclusionary nature of a term like “people of colour” to many racialised Australian communities who may be resistant to a simple borrowing or adaptation of American-based anti-racist coalitionary work.

Personally, I continue to love the term “person of colour” and I acknowledge the struggles particularly of black, brown and other Asian folks in the USA who, to my knowledge, are the originators of this term of coalition. I simply wish to highlight the fraughtness of simple “mirroring” American-derived language in operating within an Australian colonial context. There is so much more woerk to be done, and the contexts that we are shaped by and that we shape will need to account for home-grown language that suits (or properly revolutionises) the ecology of our existing environs.

--

Many thanks to J.N., M.S. and R.B. for support and friendship, sharing in anti-racist work with me and for inspiring these ongoing inquiries, and also to N.G., a new friend.

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.

James Baldwin, on loving the innocent...

"The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words 'acceptance' and 'integration'. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."

- James Baldwin
(Extract from 'Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation', taken from The Fire Next Time, Dial Press Inc & John Farquharson Ltd., New York, 1963, p22)