A few years ago, black British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge declared that she would no longer talk to white people about race.
On her online blog she wrote: "I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience ... It's like they can no longer hear us".
I know how she feels. As an Indigenous Australian I would go one step further: Many, if not most, don't want to hear us.
I have been reminded of that this week after a leaked report revealed the Collingwood AFL club had a culture of systemic racism.
The report, by respected lawyer and academic Eualeyai/Kamilaroi woman, Larissa Behrendt, and her team at the University of Technology Sydney, was triggered by complaints of persistent racism by black former Collingwood player, Heritier Lumumba.
What we should have seen this week was real consequences — people held to account — or at the very least, meaningful introspection and discussion.
What did we get? Days of news coverage about the Collingwood president, Eddie McGuire.
McGuire (who still has not formally released the report) claimed a report detailing long-standing, deep-seated racism was a "proud" day for the club. He soon apologised — apparently it was not what he meant. It wasn't the first time McGuire's mouth has gotten him into trouble over racism.
All we got was more talk
Is it possible to be both astonished and yet not surprised that a man who's made his living behind a microphone has so much trouble aligning his thoughts with his words?
Yet the issue of racism became a sideshow to whether McGuire should go.
Despite the most tepid criticism from AFL boss Gillon McLachlan (McGuire's choice of words was "challenging"), McGuire didn't lack support.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews defended his position at Collingwood, saying he didn't think "running away from challenges is leadership". Even Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt said he should keep his job, that McGuire just needed educating.
Where was Daniel Andrews' support for Heritier Lumumba? Where was McLachlan's unequivocal denunciation of racism?
All we got from the AFL boss was more talk about the need for a deeper conversation on race.
It is not our problem to fix, explain or educate
We don't, actually. It is simple: racism is a crime.
You don't need educating to know that people of colour are human beings, too, and should be treated as such. How hard should it be?
Instead, by the end of this week, Heritier Lumumba was again having to explain to white people what racism is. Again he was forced to revisit his trauma for the "education" of others.
Lumumba wasn't the only one. I heard former footballer, Allen Christensen, asked on radio to recount when he'd been racially abused and how it made him feel.
When are journalists going to realise how offensive those questions are? When do we get to stop opening our veins so that Australia might better understand racism?
ABC's Q&A program tried to have the conversation we apparently all need but still missed the point. We get stuck thinking racism is about personal abuse or discrimination, it is much more systemic than that.
We could change change behaviour and enforce all anti-discrimination laws and we would still live in a society founded on racist ideas where Western (white) civilisation and values predominate.
Ending racism doesn’t mean people of colour just get to live more equitably in a white world.
This week has also reminded us that it is people of colour who will have to shoulder the greatest burden to deliver even incremental shifts in racism.
We didn't invent it. It is not our problem to fix, explain or educate. It is as though black people must convince white people of our very humanity.
I am reminded of what the black writer and psychologist, Frantz Fanon, said: "I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am."
Perhaps people of colour should withdraw from the conversation
Race is a fiction, a lie. It is a white invention.
Racism emerged out of the European Enlightenment, supposedly the "Age of Reason". Warped science-rated people on an evolutionary scale justifying imperialism and colonisation.
As British philosopher, John Gray, writes in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia: "The peculiar achievement of Enlightenment racism was to give genocide the blessing of science and civilisation ... the destruction of entire peoples could be welcomed as part of the advance of the species."
People defined as non-white became frozen in time, caught in the crosshairs of the white imagination.
As Fanon says: "The white gaze, the only valid one is already dissecting me. I am fixed."
Black people have been speaking back to whiteness for centuries. The Black American writer, Ralph Ellison, in his book, Invisible Man, wrote "people refuse to see me". Ellison said he had a choice to strike out violently, to hurt those blind others until they could not deny him.
But that was seldom successful, he said. Instead, he embraced his invisibility to "walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones".
One of Ellison's devotee, James Baldwin, said he had spent a lifetime "watching white people and outsmarting them so that I might survive".
As Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, black people are trapped in racism. There is no way to talk ourselves free.
"The journey towards understanding structural racism," she writes, "still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings."
God forbid the black person should appear angry or, she argues, they will conform to the white trope of "angry black people who are a threat to their safety".
Perhaps it is better — certainly, for our sanity — that people of colour withdraw from the conversation entirely.
This week has shown again that it is not worth it.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAyLTA3L2NvbGxpbmd3b29kLXJhY2lzbS1yZXBvcnQtc2lkZXNob3ctdG8tZWRkaWUtbWNndWlyZS1jb21tZW50YXJ5LzEzMTIxMjYy0gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEzMTIxMjYy?oc=5
2021-02-06 18:00:00Z
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