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Here are some wonderful resources for promoting human rights and human diversity.

Item one: Suzy Freeman-Greene, (2010) ‘Pricking the culture’, The Saturday Age, 6 March 2010, A2 section, page 16, http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/articles/2010/03/05/1267291946881.html

‘Multiculturalism is seen as “a kind of favour from white people”, say Aamer Rahmen and Nazeem Hussain’.

Their claim is reminiscent of Ghassan Hage’s (1998, Pluto Press) thesis in his book, ‘White Nation’: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society’.

Hussain has a graduate position with a commercial law firm, Rahman is a youth worker, and both are active in the Muslim community.

They also do stand-up comedy.

Freeman-Greene reports on her experience accompanying Rahmen and Hussain in doing a project exploring racism in Melbourne, Australia.

She says of their visit to a cafe,

… As we walk away, the duo burst into laughter.

''Did you realise those people, when I asked 'Why do you hang out in this cafe?' they all said, 'It's really eclectic, there are all these different people from different backgrounds?' '' says Rahman.

''But the missing word was 'white'.

They're all white people.''

I hadn't noticed.

But when you're in the white majority, you tend not to see things through the prism of skin colour.

For Rahman and Hussain, however, race is a constant theme - even when it's not mentioned. …

Freeman-Greene says that ‘… they've been funded by VicHealth [Victorian Health Department] to work on a three-year project exploring racism in Melbourne.

… As part of their research, they've filmed interviews with community workers, student advocates and taxi drivers and done vox pops such as that cafe ''hit''. Much of this footage, along with some incendiary mash-ups, is being posted as an online video blog.

Later this year, they'll do hip-hop workshops with young people from the western suburbs on the theme of racial discrimination.

Ultimately, they hope to make a show inspired by this material and tour it.’

Item two: You couldn’t make it up: True tales from the outer fringes of planet terror, New Internationalist, November 2009, pp. 12-13
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/You+couldn't+make+it+up+true+tales+from+the+outer+fringes+of+planet...-a0213232499, see especially The Transparent Man, an excellent story of how one man dealt with the constant profiling of him as a ‘terrorist’.

Item three: New Internationalist (http://www.newint.org) has excellent articles on a range of issues including diversity of individuals, groups and communities.

They recently published (2009) in conjunction with Amnesty International, an excellent book of poetry, Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights.

A poem from this book by Hubert Moore, The ultimate rendition, has been published in the November 2009 issue of New Internationalist. See http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+ultimate+rendition.-a0213232502

Over several months now, since around the middle of 2009, there has been a spate of assaults mainly in Melbourne against Australian residents of Indian ethnicity – some of whom are citizens, and some visitors/students.

These assaults have generated public debate in print and electronic media as to whether the assaults are ‘racist’.

This debate has increased to the extent that the Victorian police and politicians now immediately state that an assault is ‘not racist’ as soon as the incident is reported in the media.

More recently, the Premier of Victoria has been at pains to point out incidents where ‘Indians’ were the perpetrators in a murder of another ‘Indian’, or that an ‘Indian’ taxi driver who claimed he and his taxi had been set alight in an attack was later charged with setting the fire himself for an insurance claim.

Such claims that incidents are ‘not racist are probably as contentious as claims that the incidents are ‘racist’, when everyone is working with limited information.

However, while one has to let the police investigation take its course, including establishing the nature of ‘what happened’ as a criminal act, and the identities of the ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, as a reader I am struck by the following observations.

(1) How does one explain the overwhelming number of ‘Indians’ as victims of the reported violence?

Does this constitute a pattern as opposed to treating each incident separately?

The Police Commissioner recently commented that they do not record ethnicities of victims anyway so they are unable to assess any overall pattern.

(2) Is there something more problematic about public officials making statements as to the ‘non-racist’ intent of the incidents compared with many victims making statements that the incidents are ‘racist’?

(3) The range of views espoused by a range of individuals as opinion pieces, letters to the editor and news items in categorical terms as to whether the incidents are or are not racist.

These views do not necessarily state what the individual’s definition is for them to make such claims, as it assumes a shared meaning.

(4) Should such incidents be considered as a complex of intent, action, consequence, rather than narrower notions of action and consequence?

It is only through activism that the gendered nature of domestic violence is now understood within the criminal justice system.

What needs to happen for possible ‘racial’ dynamics without necessarily treating all such incidents as ‘racist’?

Is there potential for a more complex understanding of what is and is not racist – so that there is a better public understanding beyond the ‘academic’ and the ‘political’ arenas?

Some useful weblinks to Australian print media on the current debate on racism in Australia as discussed in the related blog, What is racism? A contemporary Australian debate (1) placed on this site today.

Brennan, F. ‘Being the best we can be’, The Age: Insight, Saturday, 23 January 2010, p. 5
www.cathnews.com.au/.../01/Frank%20Brennan%20Australia%20Day.doc

Markus, A. ‘Wrong-footed by rapid migration change’, Comment and Debate: The Age: Insight, Saturday, 23 January 2010, p. 7; http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/wrongfooted-by-rapid-migration-change-20100122-mqus.html

Editorial, ‘To fix a fault, first face the facts’, Comment and Debate: The Age: Insight, Saturday, 23 January 2010, p. 6; www.theage.com.au/...fix-a-fault-first-face-the-facts/.../1263663162298.html

Editorial, ‘Don’t taint national pride with prejudice’, Comment and Debate: The Age, Tuesday, 26 January 2010, p. 12; www.theage.com.au › National Times

Dowrick, S. ‘A nation of humanity’, Comment and Debate: The Age, Tuesday, 26 January 2010, p. 13; http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-nation-of-humanity-20100125-mudr.html

Day, G. ‘Wish someone a happy Republic Day today’, Comment and Debate: The Age, Tuesday, 26 January 2010, p. 13
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/wish-someone-a-happy-republic-day-today-20100125-muds.html

Obama still has vocal doubters, article by Anne Davies, in The Age, Saturday, 8 August, 2009, p. 15 raised a number of intersecting issues related to embodied identity.
About 11% of the US population, described as ‘birthers’ ‘refuse to accept that President Barack Obama was born in the US’.
It seems Mr Obama published an official certificate during his election campaign of his date and place of birth to prove that he was eligible to run for President.
The legitimacy of birthplace is necessary because the President of the US has to be born there.
Mr Obama was born in Hawaii.
The myths surrounding Mr Obama from groups opposed to his presidency include ‘Obama is a secret Muslim’ and now ‘Obama is a foreigner’.
The birthers claim to have an original birth certificate from the Republic of Kenya which shows a different year of birth, for someone with the same first, middle and last names as President Obama.
Critics of the birthers’ conspiracy theories have discredited the purported birth certificate on various grounds including that the Kenyan hospital that supposedly issued the birth certificate has no record of the birth.
President Obama is unable to provide an original birth certificate from Hawaii where he was born, because the hospital now only has digital records and issues print outs with the state seal.
However the main points for me of this story are how bodily markers and artefacts of identity, such as names, can be transformed into disputed sites that challenge the legitimacy of an individual’s claims to identity and equal opportunities.
In this case, it is very high profile, being associated with people who wish to express their racism in new ways.
It shows how an individual’s bodily difference marks him or her as forever ‘foreigner’, ‘Other’, and ‘outsider’.
Even if that individual changed his/her name to allow easier passage into the dominant group, it is impossible to change many aspects of appearance, particularly skin colour.
We saw the tragedy that was Michael Jackson, born in the USA, who attempted such a border crossing into whiteness all the while denying he was doing so.
He remained a marked man in a borderland, a joke to many white people, and a sad example to those of us who understood.
So Mr Obama will have to work ever harder to prove that he is a saint; saintliness can overcome outsider status as ‘(dangerous) Muslim’, or as ‘(black) foreigner’, unentitled to what he has earned legitimately.
At a more mundane level, for those of us who recognise such patterns of racism, we may be both hopeful and despairing.
Hopeful because such a high profile example of the everyday experiences of many people of colour draws attention to such tactics of white power.
Despairing because it is so insidious, difficult to challenge or change, when white entitlement draws on existing resources to destroy those who seek the same opportunities, just to be equal.

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.

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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?