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.

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.

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)

Coloured Paper

My original post on this is on the Melbourne Colouring Book

A few days ago, the Australian Government released
The White Paper : Australia in the Asian Century, which "sets out a strategic framework to guide Australia’s navigation of the Asian Century."


The official website says more:

"The scale and pace of Asia’s transformation is unprecedented and the implications for Australia are profound. Australia’s geographic proximity, depth of skills, stable institutions and forward-looking policy settings place it in a unique position to take advantage of the growing influence of the Asian region.

The Australian Government commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century to consider the likely economic and strategic changes in the region and what more can be done to position Australia for the Asian Century"



An example of an action that the paper raises is around a long-term investment in "Asia literacy", including mandating that schools across Australia will teach at least one of four priority Asian languages (Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese).

This, of course, has interesting implications for our national identity. Australia has, colloquially, tended to be referred to (by others, and also self-referentially), as a "Western country," despite being more accurately geographically situated as an island in the South Pacific (Northwest of Aotearoa New Zealand, and mostly actually Southeast of our closest continental neighbour: Asia)...

The word "Western" is very loaded, of course, and I interpret this to mean that Australia tends to trace its national heritage to European, U.S. American, and Anglicised continental roots, while paying lip service to our indigenous Aboriginal heritage. Another connotation of the word "Western," beyond cultural legacy, is of course the suggestion of Whiteness...

There is something quite powerful, as a statement, about nationally committing ourselves to being more geographically honest, in this regard, while also being most economically feasible as a long-term national and cultural investment in this sort of regionalism, in Asia...

A wonderful essay has been written in the Sydney Morning Herald which explores some of these implications...:

Australia's Asian-ness is barely visible

by Tim Soutphommasane




Now, I am no politician nor economist, but as a layperson, and as a citizen, I write this post as mere conjecture:
As a queer Asian-Australian man, the thought of an "Asian Century" intrigues me.

The phrase itself speaks to the part of me that is perhaps embarrassingly parochial... Since I was 3 years old, I have not lived in a country in which I was a citizen, nor, since my adult life, one in which I was part of a racial or ethnic majority... I am, of course, simultaneously critical of the ways that nationalist identities can and do reinforce certain forms of racial and cultural supremacy. Extreme nationalism to me has often been suggestive of violence, and at least in the context of the USA and Australia, a subtle and not-so-subtle White supremacy.





And then:
There is something in here, in the metaphor of the "White Paper" and the "Asian Century" which interests me, from a queer perspective.


First, to play with this:
What of a metaphor of Coloured Paper?
(as a metaphorical canvas upon which we could explore policy as well as culture?)

What of a Queer Asian Century?

What does multiculturalism look like, outside of a "Western" framework?
What room is there, given the explicit use of the term "Asian" (as opposed to, for example, "Eastern"), to raise issues not just of multiculturalism (such as Australia has done thus far), but also of multiracialism (e.g. in the case example of Singapore)...? What are the implications of including this explicit discourse of race, given the racially-charged name of the "Asian Century"?
As Soutphommasane has written, where are all of the Asian people in this country already, in terms of being featured in positions of civil service?
What would it mean to inherit a British Parliamentary system, including a number of the cultural 'advancements' that we have made as a country for example around the decriminalisation of homosexuality, when we contrast this with other countries in Asia (or the Asia-Pacific region)?

What happens when a baton is passed, from an Anglo-normative government to a pluralistically Asian-normative government?
Is this actually going to happen?

And what will race look like in such a context?
What will racism look like in such a context?

Say my name, say my name

Reading this post in PERIL, linked to on a previous post by shinenigan, got me thinking more about something that happened to me yesterday.

A friend (and colleague) and I were talking about the many situations in which schools will allow a student to informally change their name, without having to go through some process of filling out forms and getting approved by the school bureaucracy (or even more burdensome, having to go to court to get an order of name change).

This was in the context of making the case that if schools allowed students to easily change their names, they should not be singling out transgender or gender non-conforming students for especially burdensome name-change requirements when they requested to be called by their preferred name.

As some background, my colleague is White. We were talking with another attorney who was Chinese (like me). My colleague and I were quickly listing the contexts in which non-transgender students might ask for, and routinely get, an informal name change: in the case of a divorce, a student might change their last name to the custodial parent's; a student might prefer to use their middle name; a student might prefer to use an abbreviation of their full name (e.g., John instead of Jonathan, Nick instead of Nicholas). Then my colleague added that a student with a non-Anglo name might choose to take on an Anglo name.

This brought me up short. I was a little stunned, to be honest. I don't think that my colleague was intending to bring up the entire background of "othering," of Asian people feeling never quite at home in a country (indeed, because of colonization, a world) full of Anglo names. I wanted to say: let's be clear - informally taking on an Anglo name is not a preference, it is almost necessarily a (somewhat bitter) compromise. The deal is: I'll take on a less "foreign" sounding name, and you accept me as fully a member of this school community. Unfortunately, of course, since racism persists (yes! even among schoolchildren!), the deal is never made good on.

Anyway, that's sort of what was running through my head, but I didn't say anything at the time. Partly because I didn't feel that strongly about it right then (or am I numb to the pain of racism?), and partly because I didn't want to get into a whole discussion about it at the time (it was lunch!). Today, I decided to send an email to my friend about it. Here's what I wrote:

I just wanted to drop you a note about one of the examples you used when we were talking informally . . . about situations in which students get a school to acknowledge and respect a preferred name. You gave as one example that some students with non-Anglo names would adopt a name that's easier for people to say. I totally agree that this is a not uncommon practice, and that you are right that many teachers probably are almost even relieved to make the switch to the more Anglo name, but I wanted to let you know that it brought up the whole history of racism and xenophobia in this country for me.I didn't feel THAT strongly about it at the time (or I would have told you right away, of course!), but it did make me somewhat uneasy, and when I was thinking about this later, I thought I'd let you know. Part of me feels like, even though it's actually a great example of a common reason for students to use a preferred name over the name given at birth, that it risks bringing up that whole history for someone in the room. We were talking about it informally in a small circle of friends, so that was obviously less risky!However, I think that if we use this example in public (and I kind of want to at some point), we should acknowledge that part of what's going on there is a kind of compromise with a racist society, and that this is something people of color do all the time to have some safety or to not constantly be overtly "othered". I'm sure there's some less "heavy" way to acknowledge that, of course, and would love to get your ideas.I thought that you did a great job acknowledging a related issue with gender identity and medical intervention (that some trans people decide not to change their bodies in a particular socially-prescribed way, acknowledging that it's society that has a problem with their bodies, not them, and that all people deserve respect for their gender identity whatever medical intervention they have or have not had).

Education!

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.

Manissa McCleave Maharawal, over on Racialicious

http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/03/so-real-it-hurts-notes-on-occupy-wall-street/

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore - Part 2

Work/Merit

I received various messages about the purpose and nature of work when I was growing up. One important idea was that work could, and should, be meaningful. It could be challenging, interesting, and, importantly, make a difference in the world. "When you grow up, you need to make a mark," my father would say to me, as a way of motivating me to study harder, or to try to get into a "top" school.

Which brings me to a second set of messages about work - that personal responsibility mattered, meritocracy prevailed and that this was a good thing. I learned that if somehow you failed to get meaningful work, that it was your own fault for not trying hard enough. This fit well with the idea that the world should (and did) reward merit, and punished mediocrity, and that this system was a good one. Along with that was the idea that merit could be measured relatively objectively, and was separate from "politics," as in office politics, which both my parents, to my recollection, spoke of in disparaging terms.

My parents did acknowledge that some people did not have the same opportunities as others to succeed under the existing system, but the solution was to give them those opportunities while maintaining the meritocracy. In other words, to make the system more meritocratic, and minimize what I think they thought of as accidents of birth. Both my parents had gone to college in the U.S. on scholarships, and my father, especially, was very grateful for having had the opportunity to do so.

As a child raised for most of my life in the middle class, I was told that I had every opportunity, and that, if I failed to take advantage, and to make something of myself, I had nobody but myself to blame if I ended up... someplace bad. It was never said explicitly in our nuclear household - I think both my parents were too liberal to repeat the cliched Singaporean/Malaysian warning that if I didn't work hard, I would end up a roadsweeper - but I think that this unspoken (unspeakable?) fear was of ending up in poverty or working a "mindless" job, or both - to become somebody to pity and/or despise.

I internalized this message strongly. At the age of about nine or ten, a partner at my father's law firm who was visiting from the U.S. asked me what I thought of affirmative action, and explained (inaccurately, and certainly incompletely) that it was a system of giving preference to candidates for colleges based on race. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to trumpet my meritocratic ideals, and emphatically denounced such a system. This drew some delighted laughter from the visitor. I don't know what his intention was in asking such a question of a child, and I don't know what impact my answer had on my parents, both of whom had attended college in the U.S. as Asian people in the 70s and may have themselves benefited from race-based affirmative action, whether they knew it or not. If they objected to my answer, they held their tongues.

I also learned how to wield these ideas as weapons. Once, upset at my father for lecturing me about some bad grade or other, I threw the idea of meaningful work being the reward for industriousness back in his face. "What change in the world does your job accomplish?" I spat, "you're just a lawyer who helps companies make a lot of money!" In essence, I was questioning his credentials - who are you to tell me how to live my life, when you have a job that doesn't measure up?

Both my parents were professionals with prestigious advanced degrees. My mother was a professor of science, having received her higher education in the U.S. and the UK. Most of her career was at the National University of Singapore. My father got his education also in the U.S. and UK, taught in a University for a while, then returned to University in the UK for a law degree, and became a lawyer. He worked for most of his career with a large firm.

I idolized my parents for their intelligence and hard work. In the universe of possible meaningful future careers, academic and lawyer were pretty much at the top of my list. They still are today.

Rarely did my parents talk about how difficult it was to make their way through college as foreign students who had been raised working class and poor. I think that doing so would have threatened both the idea that the world was at least relatively meritocratic, and that there were neutral standards of merit out there. However, there are a few memories that stand out from my childhood as a clue to how hard it was for my parents.

My mother once told me how hard it was for her to leave home. It was strange to her to think of there being a "good" school so far away. She did not know how to decide which schools were good or not. Once she had been accepted to the school of her choice, her mother, my Amah, objected strenuously to her leaving - from her point of view, she was losing her daughter, and for what? My Ah Kong, my mother's father, however, was a teacher, and supported my mother's desire to get a good education. My mother ended up going to that school and now, as an alum, helps to recruit and interview young women in Singapore and Malaysia for her alma mater.

My father would sometimes allude to the racism of white people, specifically certain partners in his law firm (this was before he made partner himself), and professors in the US and UK. "They think they're smarter than me just because they're white," he said. He told me he had to work much harder, and be much smarter, than his white counterparts, just to prove he belonged, and deserved to be there. Even after he made partner, he told me, some white partners in the firm would treat him with condescension and hostility, especially refusing to credit him for his ideas for directions the firm should take.

As I reflect on work now, I want to hold on to the idea that work can be meaningful, but let go of the idea that there is a hierarchy of work, that only certain people (hardworking, smart people) deserve to do meaningful work, and that anyone who works at a job they dislike does so because they didn't try hard enough or weren't smart enough to do anything else. It is very difficult to let go of this idea, however. Not only was I raised with it, but it is constantly reinforced now. It's an easy thing to fall back on too, when my ego is shaken by the daily indignities of living in this society - I may have it bad, but at least I'm smart enough to not be working at that guy's job.

It is important, as a mainly raised middle-class child, that I did still get some glimpses of my parents' insights and experiences from being raised poor and working-class, even if they came with a heady chaser of meritocratic ideology. I think that I would also like to talk with them more about their experiences becoming middle-class, especially to see if they feel like they have lost something in the process. I know that I feel a sense of loss having left Singapore to come to the U.S., in order to go to a "good" school, and then "make it" in a major center of capitalist power.