Weblog

I wrote this piece sometime at the end of 2008 and did not post it then as it seemed pointless.

Anyway … here it is now.

I normally do not have much difficulty in finding topics and issues from the world around me, whether in my daily interactions, or in media or political issues of the day.

Instead, I have a strange sense of invisibility – that something has disappeared or is absent, that there is nothing of relevance to write here.

This is a very odd experience this sense of disengagement, a sudden passionless existence.

I do not know whether the issues ‘about diversity’ are less contentious in Australia at present than in the recent past, for example, the treatment of asylum seekers, or the military interventions in the name of protecting women and children in indigenous communities in the remote north of Australia.

Or whether the only ways that ‘race’ is played out in Australia is in big, contentious stories while the underlying inequalities and stereotypes fester away ‘underneath’, and therefore become less visible.

This was certainly the case before I left for the UK in November 2007, possibly because the Australian Government then led by Prime Minister John Howard was constantly in the news about issues related to policies that directly related to diversity in the Australian population.

For example, military interventions in remote indigenous communities ostensibly to address child sexual abuse, or the treatment of asylum seekers.

Is it that Labor (centre left) parties tend to play up their ‘progressive’ agendas and hide the more ‘controlling’ aspects that are usually associated with conservative (centre right) parties?

For example it has been recently reported that the Australian Government led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Australian Labor Party, have made much of their softening of the draconian laws against asylum seekers that were the hallmark of the previous Howard-led national government.

However they did not reveal that they are not reversing the policy of excising islands off shore to prevent asylum seekers claiming asylum as if on Australian soil.

Since my return to Australia in July/August 2008 with the Australian Labor Party in government, I have been struck by the absence of substantial issues related to race apart from landmark moments, such as the long-awaited apology by the Rudd Government to the stolen generations of indigenous Australians, or the recent convictions of several Muslim men as supporting terrorism.

This latter event has been cause for contention and debate as the charges and convictions have been based on talking about terrorist activity, rather than any proven acts of terrorism in the community.

www.theage.com.au/national/benbrika-found-guilty-20080915-4gov.html (accessed 22 September 2008)

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/15/2364753.htm (accessed 22 September 2008)

www.hrlrc.org.au/html/s02_article/article_view.asp?article_id=308&nav_cat_id=152&nav_top_id=63 (accessed 22 September 2008)

newmatilda.com/tag/abdul-nacer-benbrika (accessed 22 September 2008

www.watoday.com.au/opinion/legalities-of-talk-set-dangerous-precedent-20080920-4kg2.html? (accessed 22 September 2008).

However, the general sense is that it is business as usual, where economic and environmental issues are centre-stage and the more fundamental questions of inequality underpinning questions of race and ethnicity have disappeared or are less polarising than they were during the Howard years.

We have moved our blogging activity to http://ondiversity.com Please update your links!

During the US Presidential campaign, Mr Obama radiated a sense of ‘goodness’.

As an outsider, an Australian resident observing the US Presidential campaign, I was concerned by how Mr Obama was (or had to be?) represented as perfect, this seemingly expected by his supporters and detractors.

As a woman of colour, I could understand why this was necessary – at least for Mr Obama’s chances of election within an electorate that implicitly and explicitly would excuse behaviour from ‘white’ candidates that they would never accept from Mr Obama.

Women seeking public office have similar experiences, where they are expected to be better than the men they compete against to the point of perfection – as witnessed by the way Hillary Clinton was treated by the media and her detractors.

Therefore I found comments made in some Australian newspapers disturbing.

For example, on 19 January 2009, Gordon Farrer began his review in The Age newspaper Green Guide of a television programme, ‘Made in Chicago: The Making of Barack Obama’, with the words: ‘More hagiography about the Black Messiah.’ (http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/tv--radio/tv-reviews/tv-highlights-monday-19th/2009/01/13/1231608713137.html) (retrieved 24 March 2009).

Yes - at one level we were inundated by such programmes and as a reviewer, Mr Farrer was clearly making an important point.

However, the point was also being missed about the politics of race and racism constituted around ‘white’ and ‘black’ because such critiques assume a superficial equality between candidates seeking to win such a powerful position.

Yet one is haunted by accusations of political correctness – that one is unable to make legitimately critical comments and as a critic, to be able to treat one programme the same as another.

A second item in The Age, Opinion Pages, on 19 January by Steve Harris, was titled ‘Obama can move beyond skin labels’. http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/obama-can-move-beyond-skin-labels-20090118-7jye.html (retrieved 24 March 2009).

Mr Harris makes the claim that ‘it is time to recognise the shallowness of black-and-white think.’

He comments that ‘Skin colour can be a superficial clue to the truth: people with black skin can have predominantly white ancestry; people with pale skin can have predominantly black or mixed ancestry; people who look Indian, Asian or Aboriginal can have predominant ancestry that belies the label.

A skin label is not the full truth, and in fact, perpetuates untruths.’

Mr Harris is well-intentioned in his preoccupation with dismissing skin colour and physical appearance as ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’, as he espouses the need to promote ‘global connectedness’, ‘commonality and interdependence of all’.

However, I suspect he is a ‘white’ man himself as he is unable to see the world as people whose bodily differences make them visible within discourses of normal (usually white) bodies, and whose opportunities are shaped by how they are literally seen and engaged with by others.

Such perceptions of ‘colour blindness’ inhibit awareness of the entrenched forms of inequality whereby white men rule the world, and ‘white’ nations tend to have most of the world’s wealth and best opportunities and outcomes.

Two separate articles in the newspaper in past weeks have come together in interesting ways for me.

The first, an edited extract ‘The truth beyond the facts’, from Bernhard Schlink’s book GUILT ABOUT THE PAST, appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, 10 January 2009 (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/guaranteeing-truth-and-avoiding-it/2009/01/09/1231004287042.html?page=2).

The article is a complex one.

I was struck by the arguments relating to the contradictions of norms set in law.

Schlink discusses how in German law, Holocaust denial is a criminal offence.

This is a legal norm.

However Schlink comments that ‘One unintended effect of the norm is that those who set out to deny the Holocaust don’t do it bluntly any more.

Rather, they minimise what happened in a skilled, subtle manner.’

Schlink uses an example of an article that minimised the Holocaust but no one including the police could ‘do anything because the denial was too subtle.

Instead of blunt Holocaust denial, it asked questions [that were too subtle to dispute.] …

Here the effect of the norm is not a will to provoke, since a provocation would be punishable, but something else similarly undesirable: a distortion of the truth that is not easy to detect and refute.

There is always a social price for norms that limit what one is allowed to say.’

Initially, I was interested in these views as they seemed to give another perspective on the issues of silencing and invisibility that I have canvassed on and off recently.

However, a second article gave a further insight into the everyday practices of skilled and subtle minimisation in regard to racism.

This second article referred to the presentation by President George W Bush of the Medal of Freedom to former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard in Washington (http://www.theage.com.au/world/star-role-for-the-bushman-of-steel-20090114-7h0n.html).

Mr Howard was reported to have commented on the historic win by Mr Obama, the US President-elect: ‘To have an African American president must be a wonderful thing if you are part of that section of the country …’

I was quite shocked to read such a blatant form of minimisation that at once captured Mr Howard’s skilfulness and subtlety in his racist practices.

My questions are: part of what section of the country?

Is it only a wonderful thing for African Americans to have elected an African American as President?

Is it not such a wonderful thing if you are NOT African American?

Why would he not comment in a similar way when George W Bush was elected – does this mean that a white man can always be seen as a universal representative?

Moreover, the overall comment indicates just what Schlink meant – that Mr Howard can no longer express racist ideas more directly or provocatively because that would breach a norm – thus in silencing his overt racism he has, like many others, learnt to express it more skilfully and subtly and so maintain racialisation while at the same time being able to deny he has said anything racially provocative at all.

Extracts from a book review by Gaynor Macdonald, Senior Lecturer and Consultant Anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, in the recent issue of D!SSENT magazine (Summer, 2008/2009, pp. 13-19). http://www.dissent.com.au/

The book being reviewed is DRAWING THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE: WHITE MEN’S COUNTIES AND THE QUESTION OF RACIAL EQUALITY, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, Australia, 2008, by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.

‘DRAWING THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE opens up a new path within the conversations about race, nationalism, equality, multiculturalism and identity which characterise the history of modern English-speaking nation-states (the White Men’s Counties of the title). …

There is a celebratory feel to the writing which stems from the authors’ strong belief in the power of liberal democracy to bring about an equality free of the stigma of racialising. …

The most powerful message stems from the ways in which these authors have brought into the open the discourses of power which have been complicit in crafting histories which are not merely similar or even parallel but working in tandem with each other to maintain the superiority and right of those of (white) English-speaking origins to rule, and to take what steps were necessary in order to ensure this hegemony. …

Yet the triumphant sweep of this book is disturbing.

It’s as if the authors feel they have discovered a conspiracy that they can now reveal to the world.

To some readers this would be revelatory …

It is an important story, and will undoubtedly be influential – and thus its contradictions are all the more troubling. …

What is ‘whiteness’?

This is a question the book does not take up.

It is assumed that it is about skin colour (and speaking English), and yet it is clearly about the exclusionary tactics of those who hold political and economic control. …

This study vividly demonstrates how immigration policies were used to control the composition of each nation’s population. …’

Under ‘Reservations’, Macdonald states that the book is ‘ambiguous in its intentions as it is ambitious. …

The celebration of the end of power held by people who define themselves as white is premature.

One of the most powerful strategies of on-going racist attitudes and policies is the refusal to acknowledge they exist, that prejudice, exclusion or injustice can be explained through other means. …

Race is one of the most enduring and successful of all concepts devised by humans to legitimise a particular politics of inclusion and exclusion, reward and exploitation. …

It has been an essential ingredient of the structures of capitalism, an economy still controlled by “white” English-speaking nations. …

And they might have more honestly looked at the enormous price which South Africa now pays for its refusal to remain “white”.

Decolonised at last, South Africa is no longer in the club.

It is a poor, struggling, BLACK nation alongside many other poor, struggling black (or not quite white) nations of “the South”.’

I attended The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) conference on 2-5 December 2008 held at the University of Melbourne, Australia, on the theme, Reimagining Sociology. I attended the Keynote address by Professor Ghassan Hage who is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. His most well-known publications are White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism. I was especially interested in his address that differentiated between political and sociological meanings of racism. He gave examples of practices by one group or individual against another. From a political meaning, we would and could describe such practices as discriminatory and even racist. However, Professor Hage questioned whether a political meaning of practices as ‘racist’ and discriminatory necessarily contributed to a sociological understanding. For example, while practices towards someone may be perceived as racist, does the ‘receiver’ of such practices necessarily experience them as such? Could the converse also be possible – where someone’s practices may be perceived as discriminatory or oppressive but there has not been an intention to do so? Is this ever the case? From my reflections on this issue, how does one separate or connect intention and outcome? Is it possible to misconstrue intentions and experience practices as oppressive? Does someone’s denial of intention to oppress necessarily mean they are minimising the other’s experience? What do others think?

This carries on from the message I posted on 14 October 2008.

(Thank you to the colleague who emailed me in response to that message, and who said that it was similar to her experiences.)

This must be an important and pressing issue because it continues to preoccupy me, and I have been writing bits of this at different times, when I have a moment.

Some might argue that it is all ‘just my perception’ of events and experiences, and in fact there is no material reality to any of it.

This expectation that there has to be some form of discernible conduct, in words or deeds, to be able to convince myself, let alone others that my experiences are more than imaginary ….

How do you explain the hypersensitivity to micro-practices that others may not even notice or attribute much importance to?

Are these experiences the same as those?

Is the context sufficiently different to suggest a different set of possibilities of meanings and identities in the interaction?

How to explain the emotional ‘sleights’ that are so subtle that they seem to convey nothing and yet convey the oppressive power to silence, to control by changes of topic or dismissal of one’s experiences as (just) imaginary, (just) perception, (just) oversensitivity?

Here are some of these puzzles:

(1) A ‘white Anglo’ student who espouses with passion the need for decolonizing and emancipatory practices towards indigenous Australians, who befriends international students, especially students of colour, and who at the same time is openly hostile to me as her lecturer, is suspicious when I give similar marks for assignments to her and to students of colour she has befriended … what does this mean?

(2) A young 'Anglo white' woman who I engaged by phone and email as a Research Assistant for a project I am Principal Researcher for.

We met for the first time when my co-researcher (white Anglo man, much younger than I) and I went together to see her at her workplace.

She tried to decide in a split second of our first introductions which of us was the ‘leader’ – I could see her eyes rapidly move between the two newcomers -

Sadly, it was a familiar experience.

Why was I surprised and caught off guard when I caught her look of confusion? or was it dismay?

Was my sense of being let down due to acknowledging my own stupidity for not expecting this to happen?

Or was it that I had approached THIS experience as a new one, with hope, and was again disappointed?

Intuitively and reflectively, trying to make sense - this seemed to pose a conundrum: as I had done the arranging and engaging of her, she possibly initially assumed I was ‘in charge’ or the 'leader'.

When she met my male co-researcher with me, she then could not decide whether I was his assistant and given the task of engaging the ‘hired help’ as he was too important to do so himself.

Had he done the engaging of her, and then we met, would his identity as leader have been maintained with mine as subordinate?

Followed by the internalised psychopathologising, the self-doubts, that echo the actual voices of others if was to share such experiences ...

Paranoid?

Introspective to the nth degree?

Oversensitive? ...

** International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations **
Refereeing of submitted papers for Volume 8 is almost complete. If you are requested to referee, please submit your report by the requested due date. We appreciate the participation of all referees.

There are now four issues published and you may view the contents at:
Volume 8, Issue 1: http://ijd.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.29/prod.643
Volume 8, Issue 2: http://ijd.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.29/prod.654
Volume 8, Issue 3: http://ijd.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.29/prod.685
Volume 8, Issue 4: http://ijd.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.29/prod.716

You may also order the full issue in hardcopy or electronic format, as well as purchase individual papers in both print and electronic formats.

** Would you like to be an Associate Editor? **
All referees will be credited as Associate Editors for the volume of the Journal to which they have contributed (the particular papers they refereed will not be identified). If you would like to referee papers, please email cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com and provide a short resume along with any research interests. If we have any appropriate papers, we will contact you.

** Ninth International Conference on Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations **
16-19 June 2009
Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration (RISEBA), Riga, Latvia
www.Diversity-Conference.com

** Call for Papers **
If you intend to present a paper at the Conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://d09.cg-conference.com/proposal-types. To submit a proposal, see: http://d09.cg-conference.com/proposal-entry-intro. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the Conference.

** Registration **
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, see: http://d09.cg-conference.com/options-fees. To register for the 2009 Diversity Conference, see: http://d09.cgpublisher.com/registration.

** Accommodation **
Accommodation for the Conference may now be booked. Bookings may be made during registration, or for further information,
please see: http://d09.cg-conference.com/accommodation.

** Conference Themes **
For a detailed version of the Conference themes, please visit: http://d09.cg-conference.com/themes.

** Creator Sites **
All officially registered Diversity Conference participants may make their own Creator Website. Please visit the CGPublisher Creator page at http://www.cgpublisher.com/ui/about/for_creators.html.

** Create a YouTube Presentation **
Whether presenting at the Conference or virtually, we encourage all participants to present on the International Conference on Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations YouTube Channel. These presentation recordings will be published to YouTube with a link to your Session Description on the Conference website, and (if your paper is accepted to the Journal), a link to the abstract of your paper on the Journal website. YouTube presentations may also be created for past presentations and published papers. For instructions on how to create and upload these presentations, visit the Conference website at
http://d09.cg-conference.com/online-presentations.

** Conferences **
Second Global Studies Conference
30 May to 1 June 2009, Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
http://www.GlobalStudiesConference.com

Black Knowledges - Black Struggles - Civil Rights: Transnational Perspectives
25-29 March 2009, Bremen, Germany
http://www.caar-web.org/conferences.html

Sharing Cultures 2009
International Conference on Intangible Heritage
30 May to 1 June 2009, Ilha do Pico, Azores, Portugal
http://sharing.cultures2009.greenlines-institute.org/

** Publications **
Socio-Spatial Discrimination in Urban Public Space-Cases from Helsinki and Athens
http://ijd.cgpublisher.com/diary#p:29:154
Order: https://www.taik.fi/kirjakauppa/product_info.php?cPath=26&products_id=106

Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia
www.scribepublications.com.au/book/humanrightsoverboard
Unwarranted Cruelty (related opinion piece)
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24272004-7583,00.html