Before I begin this, I need to state something right from the get go.
I am a white person.
I am not necessarily proud of this fact because of all of the idiots in the past and the idiots in the present who continue to conspire to make me feel angry at their actions. However, I am also not ashamed of this fact either because it is not something that I can change and not something which anyone should be forced to change. Therein lies a problem. People who look like me, both in the past and in the present, have tried to force and continue to try to force people who don't look like me, to change who they are by means of force and violence.
Although you hear people say that they are not responsible for the past, they will continue to perpetuate the attitudes of the past by more subtle means. As someone who lives in the ashes of empire, I am aware that that empire has had a very dark past; which people who are still alive feel the effects of. Pretending that those effects do not exist is cruel and actually adds to those ongoing effects.
For someone to proclaim that they don't see colour either means that they are functionally blind to the point of disability, or a liar.
Before someone has opened their mouth, the first thing that you see is how they look. As unique individuals who have been born into a particular time in history, every single one of us is the physical product of a unique genetic story. Whether that story is one that comes out of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe or either of the Americas, we can no more help where we have come from than we can stop the rotation of the earth. However, to deny that someone is not the recipient of a story is also to be a liar.
As visual beings we overlay cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories over the top of the physical genetic inheritance that we have been given. Again, to say that we don't see colour is to deny all of that; which again makes us liars.
This is why I hate the phrase which is often posted in response to the plea that 'Black Lives Matter' that 'All Lives Matter'. If you have a street and number 6 is on fire, then to go around saying that 'all houses matter' so that you can go back to your cosy existence at number 9 is cruel because it refuses to address the problem that number 6 is on fire. It would be even more cruel if your parents set fire to number 6 or if your relatives who live at number 7 set fire to number 6. The use of the phrase 'All Lives Matter' is a direct statement that the person who has used it refuses to acknowledge the past, refuses to address the present and would be quite frankly happy to let that house burn to the ground; with the possibility that they or their family were the ones responsible for setting fire to it.
While it is true that all lives matter, that isn't something that needs to be said because it should be obvious. Someone who has made the statement that 'Black Lives Matter' is making a category statement, which has been qualified; specifically because there is a distinct problem which requires immediate action which they are asking help to solve. Specifically, they are asking you to change your attitude and change the attitude of other people, by refusing to tolerate racism; well before it produces a fruit of bloodshed and death.
As a white person, I don't need to tell you that 'white lives matter' because the cultural, political, economic, and even nationalistic stories which have been overlaid have made that abundantly clear and have been backed up through the use of force and violence. It would be ridiculous and even cruel at this point to go around asserting that 'white lives matter' and those people who do specifically do so because they want to exact notions of cruelty and violence for their own ends.
While I’m fairly sure that my life matters, I don't need to prove that through the use of force and violence; nor do I need to plead for you to stop using force and violence against me because you aren't. Yet precisely because I am a white male, I automatically get conferred with some benefits, simply because of the physical genetic inheritance that I have been given. That is inherently stupid.
I for instance have the option to walk round near my home without getting shot or choked to death by the police. I am not likely to be spat at by people who look like me for the simple reason that the people who would do that, look like me. All of this seems to me to be some kind of animal impulse which has gone hideously wrong and indicates that someone is defective.
Furthermore, I hate to see the weasel words coming out to suggest that the boil-over of anger in some way justifies the extreme racism on show. The protests which have erupted in America this week are precisely because people have suffered and been shot and have been choked to death by the police. That's not an imaginary complaint but something which is very real and which is the lived experience of people. To deny all of that, yet again makes us liars.
Also, to deny that this is a uniquely American problem, as though it is somehow something far across the seas and doesn't apply to us also makes us liars.
It's not like Australia hasn't spent the last 232 years since Captain Arthur Philip under orders from the Royal Navy staged a military invasion and coup by plonking a flag in Sydney Cove and shooting and bayonetting the first Australians, denying and diminishing anything that didn't look like white people's conception of what civilisation looked like; before replacing what may have been here with a puerile and facile linear narrative of Anglo-Celtic superiority which conflated dominance backed by force with so-called evolutionary fitness and a right to cultural ascendency, which assigns the previous traditional owners of the land with nothing more than museum piece status.
We've been as much of a nation of complete and utter bastards as the United States if not better because we actually did achieve complete and exact genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines. We haven't told ourselves some pathetic myth that we hold certain truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness, before proving repeatedly that we genuinely don't believe that and that we're prepared at the drop of a hat to kill people. No, we've spent most of the last 232 years saying that Aboriginal lives don't matter in some cases and even backed that up by legislation because we'd already exacted force and violence. The Australian story is not one of active denial but one of passively forgetting. As a nation, we don't go around starting wars but we are more than happy to kick heads in someone else's war where we don't belong, because we have carefully cultivated a national character back home where we are cruel to our own first peoples, to anyone who has recently arrived, and anyone who has come across the seas fleeing force and violence and looking for sanctuary.
Only just yesterday morning (2nd June 2020) in Surry Hills an Aboriginal boy of about fourteen was swept kicked so that his legs fell out from underneath him and his face struck the pavement, I have just as much reason to be angry at the police in my own state of New South Wales as the those United States. I note that our Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said exactly nothing on the subject. It says a lot about who we are as a nation because it turns out that we have grown up to be just like big brother America: we are just as cruel and racist.
The police officer in question is being investigated; which sounds to me to be a euphemism for excuse finding. The only reason why this has probably warranted investigation is that the video leaked to the public. We have a history of Aboriginal deaths in custody, predicated on the fact that they are over represented in both arrests and prison, which itself is predicated on a history of dispossession which has been backed up by force and violence.
What does all of this say to me, as a white person who has won the lottery of genetic inheritance and who has been entrusted with power? It is my job to stamp out racism as though I was putting out spot fires. It is not enough to be non-racist because the action of doing nothing doesn't address the issue. Those of us who actually think that Black Lives Matter and are hearing a plea to help solve a problem which eventually results in the use of force and violence, have to be anti-racist.
Society generally and people individually follow the laws of motion and inertia. Objects and people are lazy; they like to keep on doing and will keep on doing what they are already doing unless acted upon by something from the outside. You might not be able to change someone from the inside but you can push them off of the stage. To pretend that you don't see colour or the problems which have been perpetrated as a result of people who not only do but act upon that, means that you are morally blind to the point of inactivity, or a liar.
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