I received an interesting response to my last blog entry ("Smiling Liberal Faces") from Douglas Hawthorne of Australia. After regaling me with an interesting Jewish parable that matched (I think) the argument I made about racism in that entry, Mr. Hawthorne made an intriguing comment on the (I think) understandable preference of many people to forget terrible historical experiences of discrimination and oppression. After I related an example of such understandable forgetting in East St. Louis, Illinois, Douglas wrote back with some chilling narration and reflection on a recent fatal racist incident and its aftermath in Australia. He has interesting and eloquent things to say (sounding a bit like Jonathan Kozol, which is a wonderful thing in my opinion) on white liberal privilege and the need to give that privilege away "so that the children might live."
Some of this blog's readers (and I have no idea of how extensive that "audience" might be...this is an experiment) may have read an overseas respondent's comment (on my blog posting on US. racial school segregation, titled "The Schedule for the Correction of Grievances") to the effect that the United States sounds like a very ugly and racist place and the only reason he'd ever visit is to take in some of the natural scenery.
Well, I observe that the horrific ugliness of class and race (and other related and interlocking) hierarchy is present in basically every nation and society at our current stage of planetary pre-history and that the U.S. is singled out for special disdain by many non-Americans because its particular savage homeland inequalities (economically the greatest in the industrialized/post-industrialized world) happen to be situated at the hegemonic eye of the world-capitalist hurricane ...because our homeland injustice shapes and is in turn shaped by unmatched imperial power, which in turn reinforces international and intra-national inequality across the world.
This is understandable, but some leftists overseas would occasionally do better to focus a bit less on all of us supposeldy ugly Americans and a bit more on their own divided and hierarchical homelands. Douglas Hawthorne has some dark reflections on some very ugly Australians and the social order that produces them. My sincere condolences to the family and friends of the late Thomas James Hickey.
DOUGLAS HAWTHORNE WRITES: :
When I was handing out leaflets for a pro-refugees rally, a middle-aged Greek Australian came up to me and said that Australia was not a racist country. I was taken aback by this because I knew, from my own experiences, that the immigrants from Southern Europe were persecuted at school and work for their "foreign ways." I asked repeatedly about the racism he must have encountered during his younger days. It took awhile for the memories to come back. I could see the pain in his face as he walked away silently. I felt like a real bastard for waking those memories in him. I suppose he had found comfort in the present by denying the past abuses against him. Since he was not persecuted now, he must not have been persecuted in the past.
STREET: Those are very interesting reflections. The memory process sometimes works to block out pain for good reasons I would imagine. Recently I was speaking with one of my colleagues, a distinguished African-American woman in her 50s who grew up in East St. Louis, a desperately poor black town on the southwestern tip of Illinois. She had never heard of the 1917 "race riots" there, when the local white population basically perpetrated a massacre on blacks, killing well into the hundreds, some burned to death in their tenements. There is at least one whole book on this atrocity (by Elliot Rudwick) and I once had a white student from Southern Illinois who told me that his great grandfather still referred fondly (I am sad to report) to "the great nigger kill [I am not making this up] of 1917." My black colleague grew up in East St. Louis in the 1950s-1970s and never heard a single reference to this incident. Too painful to process perhaps, for the local black community...? Better to let sleeping dogs lie for reasons you suggest...the anger can kill you.
Didn't you Australians just have some big racial incident relating to a police chase and a kid being killed? Can't remember the specifics but it seems like I read something about this somewhere. Yesterday the Chicago police ran over two black kids on the city's west side "by accident" in a police chase....
Hawthorne Responds:
I would guess that the elders of East St. Louis decided to suppress the truth so that their young people would not die in a fruitless attempt to avenge the massacre. I remember asking some elder in my youth about the persecutions we Irish-Australians suffered. His reply was to the effect that these things would only stir up trouble. This was in the 1960's. The blatant sectarianism directed against the Irish-Australians had abated in the previous decade after lasting about 150 years.
The event in Australia was the death of Thomas James Hickey (1986-2004) on 15th February. The local liberal paper has a web site on the death and aftermath at http://www.smh.com.au/specials/redfern/ . I went to his memorial service held where he died impaled on a cast-iron fence after falling off his bicycle as he tried to elude the police. His uncle could not contain his rage at what had happened there. He shouted, "Kill them all! Kill them all! We are not animals!". Later on as we marched past the local courthouse, there was a line of grinning police officers watching us go by.
There is currently a government inquiry into the events leading up to the riot that followed Mr. Hickey's death. The local police are now saying that the riot was not about Mr. Hickey but about protecting an AUD 18 million
(p.a.) herion trade run by the local Aboriginal crime gangs. The right-wing columnists are railing against the harm-minimization program for drug users in Redfern because the needle-exchange program hampers police efforts to clean up the drug trade.
When the march returned to the ghetto, I was struck by the contrast between the two sides of the railway line: one side had new modern apartment blocks (min. price AUD 250,000 ); the other side had run down tenements from the late 1800's.
I was also appalled by the behaviour of the young white protestors after the
march: they talked while the Aboriginal tribal elders spoke; even worse, they turned their backs to the elders. This is even more grating because this type of insult was made to our Prime Minister by various Aboriginal activists over his stance on Aboriginal issues. Bad manners does not a revolutionary make.
About six (6) weeks later at a Tariq Ali meeting, an Aboriginal activist railed against the liberals who come along to the protest marches, sign the petitions, and go home to their comfortable lives while Aboriginal children are dying. She challenged the white audience to give up their privileges so that the children might live. No one responded to her challenge then or later as far as I can tell.
Douglas Hawthorne
Posted by Paul Street at May 21, 2004 07:01 PM