Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy

"Instead, as I have also argued, we may wish to rearticulate our understanding of white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. I would argue that the three primary logics of white supremacy in the US context include: (1) slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war."

[...]


What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced by the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-black peoples are promised that if they conform, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And black and Native peoples are promised that they will advance economically and politically if they join US wars to spread “democracy”. Thus, organising by people of colour must be premised on making strategic alliances with one another, based on where we are situated within the larger political economy. Coalition work is based on organising not just around oppression, but also around complicity in the oppression of other peoples as well as our own."

- Andrea Smith, 'Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy', from Global Dialogue Vol 12 No 2, Summer/Autumn 2010 http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488

BOOK REVIEW: Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise

This book is nothing if not charming. I picked it up in Kinokuniya, one of Singapore's last surviving large bookstores (somehow bookstores have not proliferated in the same way as malls. Somehow.) which still allows you to browse books. I opened it in the middle of a comic story about the author as a young boy, discovering that the "itch" inside his shoe that he had been worrying at all day was in fact a cockroach. It's a very short comic (in both senses) story, that perfectly captures a certain innocence and the intensity of the emotion of disgust when one is very young, along with its lingering effects.

Other stories in the book are more fantastical. A story about a man obsessed with obtaining a new "thingy" would be heavy-handed in its allegorical moralizing, but for the well-paced advancement of the story, and extremely appealing artwork. The author, who goes by "drewscape" for this book, sometimes veers into the banal (the first story's conclusion, in particular, I found particularly weak), but the drawings and quirky little ideas or semi-self-conscious observations (one of my favorites were a young narrator's asides on the merits of a pink water bottle for boys) more than make up for any lapses.

This book is not (yet!) available on Amazon, but is probably at various local Singapore bookstores, along with, of course, Kinokuniya. Here's the publisher's page.

just show up

on Vocation

What is my life's work?

This word: Vocation

According to wikipedia:
"A vocation (Latin vocātiō - a call, summons) is an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified. Though now often used in non-religious contexts, the meanings of the term originated in Christianity."

I am expressing this curiousity...

What is my life's work? What "occupation" am I drawn to for which I am (uniquely?) suited, trained or qualified?

To what extent am I already doing my life's work? To what extent am I already being financially compensated for what I am doing? To what extent is financial compensation important as part of the definition of "legitimate" vocation?

If my material needs are being met, then what else is there left? To what extent are concerns about an abstract future in which I am completely and utterly reliant on resources acquired and amassed from my own labour playing a part in how I think of work and vocation?

Here are some...:

Vocation is about friendship, justice, creativity, healing woundedness, catalysing knowledges which begin from wholeness (i.e. "I was / We were never really wounded")

Vocation is about...

completing unfinished business, with grace, mindful attention, flexibility, patience...

The unfinished business of the ills unleashed by colonialism, capitalism

Vocation is meditation & washing dishes

Vocation is every moment as "free time", time freely used to do whatever it is that I am doing, not doing whatever it is that I am not doing, being whoever it is I am being, and not being whoever it is that I am not being.

Vocation is in education, exploration, learning

Vocation is on unlearning, keeping still

Vocation is also all the icky stuff:

Impatience, annoyance, anger, betrayals, disappointments

Vocation is the work in integrating all these 

(and seeing, perhaps, how they are already perfect articulations of that which is already integrated).

Vocation, my life's work... Is vocation a luxury?

I am a religious man, sometimes... Religious, intentionally, triggering revolt from my Rational-Atheist self that decries New Age nonsense (and is sometimes femme-phobic, averse to colour, desperately fearful of mistake, conflating all error with utter failure)


I want to start a Business...
My Business is already started! I am in the middle of my daily business, it is none of your business, it is All of your business.

My business is partially allowing deepening, broadening awareness of all the business of the world, and about knowing my capacities and limitations, knowing what is possible and not-yet possible, seeing the arbitrariness of these impositions, and then choosing to act anyway. Or not act. Or assisting others in acting.


So here:

Vocation is:
Availability as an assistant.
A catalyst.

Balancing the fine tipping-point line between innovation and tradition.
Assisting others in their already-excellent work.

Vocation is:
Pouring tea,
putting labels on envelopes,
calling a friend, saying
"I don't know, what do you think?"

Offense

Just cuz I'm not offended...

Doesn't mean I don't understand why it's offensive
and it doesn't mean I don't understand why others ARE offended,
and it doesn't mean I won't want to hold the person/people/organisation accountable for behaving in insensitive and offensive ways
and it doesn't mean that I don't want to support you/them work through the difficult experience of feeling offense

It may just simply mean:
I'm not offended.

Masters of Integrative and Transformative Studies

I will be starting a Masters of Integrative and Transformative Studies 

next week at the Oases Graduate School.

From their website:

*****
As A Participant In The Program You Will:

- Develop frameworks for social, environmental and personal sustainability.
- Work with and influence processes of social change.
- Engage multiple ways of learning and knowing, through the mind, imagination, heart and body.
- Become more conscious of the choices you make every day and reflect on their ecological, aesthetic, social, spiritual, ethical and other implications.
- Maintain integrity in situations that challenge your convictions and assumptions.
- Sustain spirit in the midst of potentially dispiriting social and ecological realities.
- Create learning moments in your everyday life.


At the core of the program are ongoing Integrative Conversations, creating spaces where you debrief, engage with, reflect on and share your learning and practice with other course participants and course facilitators.

Four other interconnected units (each of 4 days) in first year provide entries into the core foundational pools of knowledge which weave through all other units:


- Ecological; Remembering, discovering and enacting our part in nature
- Aesthetic; Becoming alive to the senses and wonder
- Social; Revisiting relationship – how did we become the way we are?
- Spiritual; Renewing and transcending our inner worlds

*****

My current intention is to do a systematic exploration, over the course of my Masters, of Developmental Justice.... that is, to explore waves of possibility around the metaphor of "justice" that include and go beyond materialist formations of justice... in other words, to include materialist formations (e.g. social justice discourse around economics and the regulation of bodies), AND also conceptions of justice which involve the (interplay between the) psycho-spiritual (e.g. the evolution of consciousness through its various states and stages of manifestation and dissolution), the ecological (e.g. the "world" of the cosmos and its history, which conditions and is conditioned by our sociality), and the aesthetic (e.g. the justice that is enabled through the radical practice of music, art, play, and not simply through a retrospective discourse on these)...

Assimilation // Integration

I am thinking about the differences between Assimilation and Integration.


Assimilation


Etymologically, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Assimilation comes
from Old French assimilacion, from Latin assimilationem (nom. assimilatio)

"likeness, similarity"

Here, I describe cultural and political Assimilation as the ways in which groups of people who are politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised (e.g. new migrants, colonised people) within a broader polity start to adopt the customs, language, and political ideals of dominant groups. To achieve as much as possible within existing normative frameworks of citizenship.

I describe Assimilationism as ways in which Assimilation becomes concretised as a goal for politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised groups of people. In other words, the goal of Assimilationism is not to challenge the dialectic of Assimilation nor to critique normative frameworks, but rather to succeed within them. To become "like" and "similar to" the dominant.

For a long time, I have self-described as "Anti-assimilationist". Anti-assimilationism is itself one possible attitudinal position I could take within a multicultural perspective. In other words, for me, and for a long time, the goal was for these individuals and groups of people to explore self-determination and develop their own frameworks and notions of success and community, beyond normative ideals, and capitulation to the demands of the dominant.

All that said, my stance has shifted somewhat...

Integration


Etymologically, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Integration comes
from French intégration and directly from Latin integrationem (nom. integratio)
"renewal, restoration"

Here, I describe Integration as the ways in which individuals and groups of people, both those of us who are politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised AND those of us who are privileged beneficiaries of our enfranchisement/citizenship actually shape one another.

I would thus describe Integrationism partially as the way that this process of shaping one another (both the dominant and marginal groups) becomes more aspirational, and indicative at least of the possibility for "renewal" and "restoration" of one another in this very shaping. One example could be the ways in which asylum seekers, through participation in broader host cultures, experience a "renewal" and "restoration" of their own self-capacity to maintain traditions or livelihood that would have been politically dangerous or unfeasible in their countries of origin, and simultaneously, that the host culture necessarily enlarges its own capacity to literally hold "the Other" within its self-concept.

Integration is also where the "Centre" and its "Periphery" (Other) both dissolve; are integrated.



Integration, from a few perspectives

In a sense, an Integrationist approach also includes the possibility of the Anti-assimilationist perspective. After all, the very frameworks of "self-determination" and "community" and so on require at the very least:

1. An inculcation into these values as part of an existent political possibility within the diversity of normative political frameworks within a polity.

2. A common language with which people can communicate with one another on these, and thus be also recognised by others as doing and enacting these very values.

When I am in a room full of other people of colour in Australia, as one example, communicating Anti-assimilationist viewpoints, the other presumption is that we are already integrated enough in existing normative frameworks that we could, for example, choose to speak with one another in English (which likely was not the mother tongue of many of our immediate families/ancestors).

With English as an inherited colonial language, which has also become my lingua franca (for better or for worse) in communicating political ideals, it necessarily means that all ideals are communicated within the liberational potential and limitations of that language. In other words, all ideals, along with the colonial English language medium itself, are "integrated" in their very expression, as well as in their intelligibility and coherence to others.

The other point here then, is that an Integrationist approach would also, by necessity, include an Assimilationist approach. In that: I have assimilated enough of normative cultural expectations of me (to, for example, engage the dominant political system, or to speak its language simply to survive), that I am enabled to then also challenge assimilation.



The "Problem" with Integrationism

For strict Assimilationists, Integration is unintelligible, and likely extremely confronting, to choose to hold onto value systems that are not kindly regarded within dominant society. Why choose to fight that battle, when you can play the existing game well and see enough role models of "success" that you could then escape conditions of bare survival? Here, Integration would be likely conflated with Anti-assimilationism, and disregarded as elitist.

For strict Anti-assimilationists, it is likely to be perceived as a cop-out to allow for political engagement to rest on the ways we have already assimilated... Far more viable, particularly for vulnerable and marginalised communities, to focus on the ways that dominant culture has to become more accomodating of difference and diversity, than to acknowledge that this very demand for accomodation is precisely a negotiation which, at its most powerful, compelling, and creative, involves mutuality in transformation and change. Integration would be conflated with Assimilation (the demand strictly for the marginalised person/group to change) and may be disregarded as "scab"-ish.

Another problem here as well is that the term "integration" is often used as synonymous with "assimilation" (so that to "integrate someone/a community" is equivalent to saying to "assimilate someone/a community into dominant society['s norms and values]".

Within an Integrationist perspective, Integration would also have to account for accomodating and integrating its very negation. In other words, a polity which is truly pluralistic and with the potential for integration of large groups of incredibly diverse and sometimes seemingly paradoxical cultural drives, must necessarily accomodate both Assimilationist and Anti-Assimilationist criticisms of Integration, while also necessarily protecting the sanctity of this very accommodational drive which conditions the possibility that such divergent views can even be in dialogue with one another.

In other words, not that X (marginal-individual/community) is "integrated into" Y (dominant/hegemonic-culture/community), but rather:
X & Y are integrated



Integration, Again

This very accommodation of divergent views, therefore, and indeed, the ability for a polity not only to "wrestle" with divergent views, but also to "accommodate" them (while strictly protecting the sanctity of the freedom for accomodation) is the very expression of Integrationism...

** Note: I have throughout this essay meant the word "accommodate" to connote "provide shelter for", rather than its other possible connotation of "merely tolerate"

In other words, Integrationism is not necessarily a "view within" or a "perspective on", but is an "orientation to" cultural politics. It is also a dialectical process that does not belong either exclusively to hegemonic groups nor to marginalised groups.

To "integrate" is to breathe with one another, to hold one another's views, to make room for them, to sleep on them, to make decisions of mutual benefit and with sincerity and a baseline recognition of our common humanity and common drive to alleviate our suffering in our lives.

Integrationism, to me, thus necessarily moves beyond the discursive... into the breath, the body, the bodily tensions and releases which are themselves "digestive" and integrative of diversity and universalism, divergence and convergence.

HIV Prevention for Gay Men (in Australia)

I wrote this piece October 2010...

So the situation around the industrialised world
is that HIV seroconversion rates are generally rising again
in gay men (and other men who have sex with men, or "MSMs," to use HIV Educator parlance...)

I reckon that HIV prevention work has become stuck in a bit of a defeated, lethargic deadlock...
Our work needs to become more 'holistic'...
in that, even though we understand that the biological transmission of HIV
occurs within the context of specific ACTS,
and often confined disproportionately to specific 'at-risk' groups of people (MSMs, injecting drug users, sex workers (though not so much in Australia), and migrants from high-prevalence countries),
we cannot remain oblivious to the contexts and social circumstances
which condition the possibility for these acts to occur,
and indeed, precipitate the emergence
of even the desire to act in the ways we do...

In other words, we need to question the biological reductionism/determinism
implicit in hegemonic forms of HIV prevention,
which pay only lip service
to the idea that interventions should come in ways
that would be 'culturally appropriate' for the communities targeted

We know:
Unprotected anal sex with casual partners is increasing among gay men...
This is correlated with a rise in HIV infections,
though they have stabilised in the past few years here in NSW...

There is a lack of vision, I believe,
among the 'old guard' of HIV educators,
who see a reduction in HIV seroconversions as too lofty a goal
and who are content to celebrate the stability of seroconversions
at a rate that is EXTREMELY low, by world standards.

Yet, I believe:
If gay men are increasingly choosing not to use condoms,
our JOB as HIV educators is not only to help look for or name
other methods of HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS)
to assist these men in making safe(r) choices about their sex lives
given their CURRENT sexual decisions in the contexts and cultures they exist...

It is ALSO our job to question and interrogate
the cultures in which unsafe behaviours become desireable
the cultures which precipitate and give rise to the
desireability of these behaviours...
in particular, and especially
unprotected anal sex with casual partners.

No, our job is not to be moral police, of course...
However, we do need to start talking ethics.
Our work needs to be informed by ethical conversations.

Should we remain forever amoral about gay men's sexuality?

I suspect that many of us have become wedded
in significant and unacknowledged part
to the continuing existence of HIV
to justify continuing in the line of work that we have become most familiar with.
many of us have had the experience of being sexually active gay men
synonymous with HIV
and, as such,
may well perceive the discontinuation and eradication of HIV
as a legitimate threat to community.

I write this not to mock or to belittle
...
this is not a cultural trend that is unique to gay people;
it does not make us uniquely pathological...
the experience of victimhood-as-identity is a real, complex reality for many of us,
and indeed, there is even an intelligence in this:

For one, and this is the most obvious one,
we have been and are often still victimised...!
We are victimised by homophobia, internal, interpersonal, and institutional
that make it such that the unique health concerns we have
are stigmatised, marginalised, or ignored completely.
For some of us, perhaps even a whole generation of us,
many of our partnerships, friendships, and even the experience of full participatory citizenship
have been based on organising around this victimhood, and in spaces that existed BECAUSE we were marginalised.

There are REAL, psychological traumas that we can and will face
should we be willing to question this weddedness...
Though I believe that the time is right to do just this,
and rigorously,
we need to do it with a lot of patience,
naked honesty, compassion.

Should we be able to do this,
and by this, I reiterate to mean:
rigorously addressing our ressentiment identities with
patience, honesty and compassion;
we may arrive at some interesting insights.
I will share some that I have come to:



1. As gay men, we are male-socialised

This means that we are socialised into patterns of self-understanding and behaviour
which often take on the form which we believe
will legitimate our claim to rightful masculinity
this can look like
having a lot of diverse sexual experiences
with a lot of different people
which we may associate not only with physiological pleasure,
but also with masculine-gender approval... and these two pleasures
are not necessarily separable...
Some of our risk-taking behaviours
may conform with our own deepest notions and expectations
of ourselves as men...

At the same time, there is an increasing over-reliance
on certain types of technologies and discourses
in order to bolster this sense of our gendered selves
which may actually, in my opinion,
be becoming incredibly toxic.

For example, the increasing abuse of viagra to treat erectile dysfunction,
the chronic abuse of alcohol and other mind-altering substances in order to engage a sexual freedom/release from the social constraints that hold us back from what we believe to be our gendered/animal-authenticity,
in order to be and remain hard,
in order to associate our "presence" in sex to be deeply associated with hardness,
vigour,
athleticism,
etc.

Yes, these lead to high risk behaviours.
I believe we need, AS HEALTH PROMOTERS, to interrogate and question the ways that our culture has been forming around androcentrism, misogyny, and an unhealthy over-fetishism of hard, racist and sexist masculinity.
It is not enough to simply state, "these are the acts that men are engaging in... now how can we ask them to do it more safely?"
It is important for us to ask questions of Why?
and to not accept that the typical qualitative responses of "for pleasure" are enough...
We must be willing to dig deeper,
"And what is the role of pleasure in our lives? What, if any, is our entitlement to pleasure? Where does that come from? Is pleasure the most central goal in our sex lives?"


If we interrogate ourselves in this manner, we may find out some things, which will require further interrogation...:

a. As human beings, we are typically fettered by our attachments to pleasure and avoidance of pain. For gay men (in Sydney), these attachments express themselves in certain patterns unique to our experience here... We can trace patterns of consumption, attitudes, behaviours that may well indicate the nature of these attachments.

Are there institutions, spaces, and health promotion ideas that can be uniquely suited for gay men to address this issue in a safe way?


b. This interrogation is OUR JOB IN OUR OWN LIVES AS GAY MEN. We need to do this for ourselves first and foremost, and in an ongoing way, before we can even consider this as a viable stance for others.


c. This is also our job as HIV Educators.



2. The strategic mobilisation to promote the use of condoms among MSMs was revolutionary.

This revolution was based on a number of different circumstances:
--> People were dying of AIDS(-related illnesses),
and this was debilitating and confronting...
--> Condom use was NOT ALREADY NORMATIVE in our sex lives
--> Culture at large was not particularly accepting of homosexual sex in the first place.

Mobilising around condom use amidst these circumstances has led to several equally revolutionary outcomes:
--> Fewer and fewer people getting infected with HIV
--> The concept of the gay community increasingly being taken seriously by government (at least in Australia)
--> The concept of "gay health" being more accepted as a legitimate concern not only to public health officials, but also to gay men ourselves (that our health was worth thinking about and mobilising around)
--> A proliferation of the discourse of gay sexuality and non-normative gay relationships being taken more seriously

Given that this original mobilisation around HIV/AIDs and condom use was disproportionately headed by gay men ourselves (along with our wonderfully supportive allies), this was truly the synthesis and formation of a powerful new ethics and politics of sexuality.

We noted:
Our sexual behaviours, in their current, unfettered forms,
are killing us.
We need, thus, to CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOURS
and fuck what society thinks, we NEED THE MONEY TO FUND THIS MESSAGE.


Now that is some powerful stuff.

However, at this point, at least here in Sydney, I believe we have grown lethargic and complacent, even "impotent" in our efforts.
Now that HIV is less of a death sentence,
and, at least here in Australia, free/extremely cheap and highly subsidised anti-retroviral treatments mean living longer, healthier lives with HIV,
this is correlated with increasing risk-behaviour among gay men...
More and more gay men are engaging in unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners (UAIC) at least some of the time.

In Australia, although seroconversion rates have remained stable since 2007 (around 1000 a year),
they are about a third higher than they were at their lowest point in mid 2000s (the highest ever was in the mid-1990s).

What we do know is that gay men have been engaging a wide variety of different non-condom-based HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS) to inform our sexual decision making around unprotected anal sex.

These include:
Serosorting (choosing partners of the same HIV sero-status as yourself)
Negotiated Safety (HIV negative partners choosing to have agreements in their relationship to have unprotected anal sex with just each other, conditioned also by getting tested both during and after the window period of their last unsafe sexual encounter, and with a commitment to ongoing communication and re-negotiation of the agreements in their relationship)
Strategic Positioning (choosing to top instead of bottom, as this poses a marginally lower risk of getting HIV)
The use of Undetectable Viral Load (in HIV+ guys),
and Withdrawal from fucking before ejaculation
in order to lower the risk of a seroconversion happening between partners.

This is all fine, and good, and important to engage and talk about as health educators.

But I believe that it is pathetic that we imagine, as health educators, that this is going to be either especially revolutionary, or even especially efficacious in our efforts.

Why?

One...
Gay men have been doing this from the beginning, albeit without naming these strategies with the 'industry' terms as I have defined them above. By simply naming these strategies as a reality, we are not exactly calling for a shift in behavioural patterns en masse into lower risk behaviours.

Two...
While the correct use of Risk Reduction Strategies may lower our collective risk for another explosion of seroconversions in our communities, I do not believe that this is a brave enough goal. Nor, if it is true that gay men are ALREADY employing these strategies, is this even a GOAL for HIV educators.

Of course, I recognise that circumstances have changed since we first mobilised around condom use:
--> Fewer and fewer people are getting, let alone dying of AIDS(-related illnesses) in Australia
--> Condom use IS NORMATIVE (a majority of gay men use condoms a majority of time with a majority of their partners)
--> Culture at large is increasingly accepting (though not fully) of homosexuality

It is NO SMALL FEAT that seroconversions are not only stable in New South Wales, but also at an incredibly LOW level... (at a rate of about 1:14, when we compare with what is going on in the USA)

Still, I believe we can have loftier goals for HIV education.

When Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director to UNAIDS, came to visit Sydney recently, he praised the Australian response to HIV for both our grassroots movement as well as our government's swift cooperation with gay activists and commitment to harm reduction.

Sidibé ended his speech by suggesting a goal for New South Wales:
To completely eradicate seroconversions.

I take this very seriously.

Is this possible?

Let us dream this.

What would it take?

It would take a revolution in our community, and this is, as I said before, not only about addressing sexual behaviours, but also interrogating the cultural reasons we are wedded to specific behaviours as some of the most authentic expressions of selfhood.

I am expediently taking the stance:
OK, let's not immediately make a commitment to behavioural change as a community.
But let us promote and FUND dialogue, not just in our gay communities,
but with EACH OTHER as health educators,
around the issue of ethics and pleasure.
Let us stop fetishising either extreme of sexual conservatism or sexual liberalism as inherently appropriate approaches to sexuality. We also know that condom-based harm reduction alone is no longer the middle way for health promoters.

So now what?

I believe we need to start focusing on advocating for many other things.
HIV should be one of a whole gamut of health concerns that we should consider in a broader umbrella idea of "gay health."

This means we need to address, AS HIV Educators, not only high risk BEHAVIOURS,
but also high risk CONDITIONS & CIRCUMSTANCES.
We need to dare to devote a lot more of our $ that is being designated to HIV prevention into SOCIAL JUSTICE and holistic health needs.
We need to address bullying, homophobia, legal barriers to full equality (in marriage, military, property laws, etc.).
We need to address our drug addictions, our sex addictions, our ressentiment.
We need to address ongoing oppressions from within and from without our own community, including homophobia, transphoba, sexism, ableism, adultism, racism, classism, and so on.
We need to address white supremacy, male supremacy, capitalist/bourgeois supremacy, etc.
We need to listen to the voices of young gay men
who are saying, quite loudly,
that we want not only the sexual freedom and liberation that we are grateful to previous generations for having won for us, in terms of the liberalisation of sexual choices,
but we also want emotional security, friendship, intimacy.
We are upset about the ways that urbanised, consumer gay culture is intoxicated by sex. We are upset about how young men's beautiful bodies are exploited for marketing and selling us gay badges. We are angry about entering a working world which demands our physical, emotional, and intellectual labour but promises us not satisfaction but exhaustion and intoxication.

If we are serious about HIV prevention
we must recognise that preventing HIV is only of marginal interest for most gay men in our lives. HIV no longer = Death, which is AMAZING.
At the same time, No-HIV does not = MORE LIFE either.

Far more important to me, as an HIV Educator
to promote a life worth living,
not just a disease worth preventing.

in San Francisco...

this is an old piece I wrote when I was visiting San Francisco, on June 13, 2011

In San Francisco ...

In San francisco, I feel playful.

One of my best friends in the world picks me up from the airport... and then suddenly the city sprawls before me like a lucid wet dream;

Testament to local investment in cool politik, the walls of almost every district are replete with effervescent murals showcasing the very finest of contemporary American urban psychedelia and art-activism. San Francisco is easily one of the world’s most muraled cities… A legacy which gifts the city's residents with their own ever-changing art gallery on their way to work and play, everyday.

Here, my heart beats calmly with the slightest tinge of melancholy, for I am both indigenous of and tourist to this land. I have ‘grown up’ here (in my unapologetically spiritualist rendering of the term: as a young adult coming into my own emotionally, sexually, intellectually, spiritually), and so the Bay Area is my HOME…

But I also am legally a tourist, without rights of residence, employment, healthcare, and so on… and then, and then… but still, but still…

In San Francisco, I feel desireable.

I need not leave anything out of my speech, my sway, or my strut: I am artist, poet, queer Asian man, boy, hippie, poseur, superstar, post-loser, young activist, musician, global immigrant. I can take identity politic or I can leave it, but I am blessed with options. On my first night out in the Castro, I am sweetly spoken to by a gorgeous 20something Latino man from central California, whom my compadres had previously checked out while I had been my usual, silently dismissive self…

“Him? A guy like him? He’d never go for a guy like me," I sullenly muse to myself, avoiding his gaze.

He walks up to me and buys me a drink.

And then a few more.

The next morning, we wake up in each other’s arms in an overpriced motel. We hold our foreheads and laugh with each other at the spoils of our drunken frenzy… I remember, a deep, bodily memory: How much I love this brand of foolish freedom. I relish the freedom of enjoying my body not being so rancidly racialised by fucked up, Euro-centric conceptions of masculinity or beauty, or exoticised ideas of who I am because I am Asian;

My skin is smooth. My eyes are black.

My accent is an amalgamation of being raised upper middle class in Anglicised Singaporean and international schools, Americanised by rural New Hampshire, and then Aussified by new citizenship. My tattoos are black and red colours that stand out against the negative space of a gentle tan. THIS is my race, THIS is my ethnicity: several generations diasporic Hakka Hokkien Cantonese Chinese, my thoughts appearing and disappearing in English, my politics maybe Anglo-phonic, but wedded to no nation-state, and my heart singing their constant praises to the beautiful men whom I have loved.

I walk around the grid-planned streets of the Mission and Castro districts sipping on a cup of Philz coffee (with cream and mint), a quintessentially San Franciscan experience… The commodification of drip-coffee cool.

Then I jam electronica with one of the most important people in my life: my ex-boyfriend and ongoing compatriot. We zone for two hours going nuts at his place, doing percussion on electric violin, orchestrating rhythms on synth keys, overlaying the voice of Slavoj Zizek on phat base beats, singing nothing in particular (and then renditioning Sufjan Stevens) while rapping syncopating fingers on nylon-stringed guitar...

I remember 2008, when we were sweeter with our music, so much more languid in the lush comfort of his home in the hills of Berkeley… where it was just me on acoustic guitar and him on violin. We made music as a correlate to how we made love; The strums, the plucks, the bows, our diaphragms sore with relentless outpourings of joy…the subtle intimacies that would grow and erupt from the practiced feel of our instruments that only we will ever understand.

And the sorrow of leaving…

But that was so many years ago, when I was just as foolish as I am now, but not quite as wise... This evening, I am calm and home alone in my brother’s place in Rockridge, Oakland, sipping chamomile tea and smiling...

"I am so lucky."

And yet another fresh, chilly summer's day in the Bay draws itself to a close.

photographs

Photographs are interesting.
What a powerful medium photography is.
To be able to "capture" a still of something that you have literally seen
or perhaps that was "viewable" from some vantage point
that your own eyes might never have otherwise met
such as microscopic imaging, or a view of the sky from Mars...

Photographs...

One evening, I was cuddling my lover, when he held out his iPad and scrolled through some pictures of things that intrigued him. It struck me how incredible it was to be able to "see what he is seeing", from what he is able to conjure from his own mind (tapping into the generative collective minds of everyone else who contributes on the internet) and then to make manifest on a screen so that I could now see too...

Of course we can drop into deeper philosophical trajectories (oh how do you know that you are seeing what he is seeing? perhaps one or the other of us is colourblind, or that he is himself a projection of my own seeing of the world and hence how can I ever really know for certain that there is an objectively existent man who is independent of my own thought? I am always at least partially implicated in my own thought of him for his existence (which is not known apart from the thought of it)).

the Four Brahma-viharas

This is a great list for me to keep in mind as I explore the contours of my spiritual and political explorations, commitments, and practices.



Four Brahma-viharas (Highest Attitudes/Emotions)

Heavenly or sublime abodes (best home).

"Near enemy" is a quality that can masquerade as the original, but is not the original. 

"Far enemy" is the opposite quality.

1. Lovingkindness, good-will (metta): 
• Near enemy – attachment; 
• Far enemy – hatred 
2. Compassion (karuna): 
• Near enemy – pity; 
• Far enemy – cruelty 
3. Sympathetic joy, Appreciation (mudita), joy at the good fortune of others: 
• Near enemy – comparison, hypocrisy, insincerity, joy for others but tinged with identification (my team, my child); 
• Far enemy – envy 
4. Equanimity (upekkha): 
• Near enemy – indifference; 
• Far enemy – anxiety, greed 

from:
http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/dhamma-lists/

The evolution of Urinals, in concert with Homophobia

1. Piss on the same wall... piss dribbles down into a collective basin at your feet.




2. Piss into individuated urinals, installed into the walls.





3. Piss into individuated urinals, which now "cup" your crotch as you urinate.




4. Piss into individuated urinals, which cup your crotch, and which are separated from one another with dividing walls.





Voila!
The cock has been banished from public view.

Is this the end of an era?

Jeff Kripal: The Impossible Becoming Possible

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.

on "Where are you From"?

I sometimes get asked "Where Are You From?"

This question is asked of me by people of many different backgrounds. Sometimes they are White/Anglo-Australian, sometimes they are European, sometimes they are Aboriginal Australian, sometimes they are other people of Asian descent.

Arlene Textaqueen, who describes themself as "brown... a non-Indigenous person of colour living on stolen Wurundjeri land in the area also known as Melbourne, Australia," has written a poem about being asked this question on their blog. The poem itself is understandably indignant, self-consciously defensive and naming of some of the potentially problematic assumptions that some people have in asking that question...

"Why do you ask?
Is it your curiosity in the ‘origin of my features’?
Is it your fascination for ‘other’ cultures and what they have to offer you?
Why do you desire to establish an exact definition of my difference?
Why do you assume I desire, and am able, to define this difference to you?
Do you show the same interest in determining the ‘ethnic make-up’ of every white face that you see?
Isn’t everyone from somewhere?
Do you not have a heritage?
Why does whiteness make yours invisible yet my brownness make mine subject to your anthropological investigation?
"

Textaqueen acknowledges that the poem is addressed to white people, and then goes on to articulate how they had performed this poem once at a RISE book launch and poetry slam. RISE is the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, and is based here in Melbourne.

Textaqueen writes,
"My poem is addressed to white people, like most of my poetry, but it’s not for them. Judging from the laughter it received from many people of colour in the audience (POCS made up the majority of attendees), the people I had hoped would get it, really got it. I did see some uncomfortable white people and this was unfortunately acknowledged by the MC, Victor Victor, after I left the stage, when he apologised if anyone was offended, because that wasn’t ‘our’ intention as it was a night about ‘positivity’. Ramesh, CEO and co-founder of RISE, did ask him to take back the apology, which he did the next time he was on stage. Is there any person, especially any white person, who couldn’t do with being challenged on their less obvious (to them) racisms? And how, and why, should I do that without making some people uncomfortable? Especially considering, as a person of colour living in a white-centric world, I’m always adapting to ‘uncomfortable’ circumstances."

They then go on to give excellent critique and commentary about a culture of white "do-gooder"ness which is also predicated, though perhaps more subtly, on white supremacy and entitlement.


****

"Where I am From!"

While I acknowledge the anger and frustration that Textaqueen is articulating in their post around this question, I have a different experience around this.

First of all, recently, at a RISE Festival fundraiser gathering which I was volunteering at in Federation Square, I was asked "Where are you from?" all day long by African men and women, many of whom are from recently arrived migrant and refugee backgrounds. I would, in turn, ask them the same question, at which point I would hear their stories of migration from here to there, Somalia to Ethiopia, Eritrea to the UAE, and the eventuation of our bodies to being here together, in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (on stolen Wurundjeri Aboriginal land).

Our asking these questions of one another was, of course, contextualised by the fact that the whole daylong event was being run by people of colour, and while nominally intended for a broad audience, was disproportionately and visibly attended by other people of colour. That I was asked this question by African folks through the day did not strike me as coming from a place of entitled interrogation, but from a mutual urge to share of our personal history, to share in migrant solidarity, and, in my motivation anyway, in how we might build community together.

Of course, it is different when white people ask me this in white-dominant spaces, but there is a dynamic shift I want to help catalyse; in which this recourse to poetry, as Arlene has written, is less and less needed. Where I can measure the relative worth of a question not only by the extent to which it actively challenges white supremacist and white-normative ways of knowing, but also by the extent to which it is predicated on the shared commitments to learning and sharing of one another (and one another's histories), and to building connection and "country" with one another.

This also means that I am committed to exploring alternatives to addressing pieces on my racial anger toward white people in general. I am interested in building and nurturing a community of other people of colour who value our own subjectivity enough that we would write literature for one another, with one another as an intended audience, not simply in indictment of white people (as important as this may be in its own right), but in mutual inquiry as well.

I honour Textaqueen's anger; indeed, I share that feeling often, but the question "Where are you from" does not belong to white people, and I am personally invested in reclaiming it as a person of colour. "Where are you from" is also a way that people of colour become agents in anthropology (the study of human beings and comparative human cultures), of ourselves, of white people, and of the dominant (white hegemonic) cultures that we are a part of shaping and reshaping.

Personally, while contextually necessary, I am lethargic of a politics of ressentiment, of building personal and communal political identities and movements based primarily on outrage, indignation, and the introjection of our own Otherness. Let's build contexts together in which lethargy and righteous rage are not our modus operandi.

I believe being openly angry at white folks is one way that we "get over it".
(i.e. by naming and directing our anger at white people)

I would like to find some other ways as well, which include discourses, creative methodologies, and ways of being with one another, which go beyond looking for the most powerful ways to stare white people out of the room.