Catholic schools celebrate "A Proud Race"

Australian Aborigines are not only allowed to be a race, they are allowed to be a proud race:

Proud Race is the unique initiative from the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry Victoria capturing the attention of school communities across Australia. Since Proud Race was launched in June over 105 schools have signed up to take part in the program.

...The National 'Proud Race' campaign is initiated and supported by the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry for Victoria and sponsored by Reconciliation Victoria and Reconciliation Australia to develop the project.

But if we admit that an Aboriginal race exists, then doesn't that mean that other races exist too?

And if it's good for an Aborigine to be proud of his race, then isn't it good for others to be proud of their race as well?

A thought on welcome to country

Overseas readers might not be aware of this but in Australia a custom has arisen in which at the start of a meeting a welcome to country ceremony or acknowledgement of country speech is made.

Sometimes Aborigines perform these roles, but often the person in charge of the meeting will open with something like the following:

I would like to acknowledge the Dharug people who are the traditional custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the elders past and present of the Dharug nation and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.

I hear something like this about twice a week. At first I thought it was yet another manoeuvre by the left to bury the Anglo heritage of Australia.  But I think now that it goes deeper and is perhaps more sincere.

It is part of human nature to want to dignify and make solemn the proceedings you are a part of and identify with. Given that most of our institutions are now run by the left and modelled along leftist lines, it's to be expected that the left would want to add an element of solemnity to proceedings.

This used to be done with a brief Christian prayer. But it makes sense that a secular leftist would prefer something else, and the welcome to country ceremony is perhaps intended to fill the role.

The problem is that such moments are supposed to draw an assembly together, to remind them of a common commitment to a shared faith. But when we are told that we are being welcomed to country by an Aboriginal elder that suggests that the audience don't really belong but are merely guests.

It sets up a conflicting response. The solemnity of the moment draws the audience together emotionally, but the message divides the audience intellectually.

And the more the words are repeated, the more formulaic they become and the less likely they are to persuade emotionally.

Why did the left choose the Aborigines as the focus of such emotional bonding? It has to do, in part, with leftist notions of solidarity. There is a tendency on the left to believe that solidarity has little to do with shared roots, or relatedness, or loyalty. Instead it is thought to be based on compassion for the marginalised other. If you are looking for such an "other" in Australia you might well choose the Aborigines. This then means that the natural human instinct toward solidarity becomes focused on identifying positively not with one's own tradition but with the Aborigines.

And if we are not seen to be positively identifying with the Aborigines? Then we might be thought to be breaking the group solidarity, even if we are not Aboriginal ourselves.

If you're a white person, and you follow along with the leftist version of solidarity, then the most "other" kind of person is likely to be a black person, preferably one you can feel compassion for - which sets up a preference for believing that such a person might be marginalised or oppressed or downtrodden.

Finally, and perhaps even more controversially, I don't want my Catholic readers to be too complacent about the status of thought within the Church on such issues. Catholic thought is increasingly overlapping with liberal thought when it comes to an understanding of solidarity, even if there are somewhat different origins for the two lines of thought.

The Catholic view seems to go this way: Christ was on the side of the poor, therefore it is Christian to think of solidarity as being with the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed and so on.

And so it's not surprising that you can have a welcome to country ceremony read out at a meeting hosted by the Australian Catholic University at which a Catholic bishop speaks of "compassion and solidarity" whilst he shares the stage with a former Liberal PM, Malcolm Fraser.

I'm not doubting here that compassion is a virtue, nor that the Church should work charitably with those who need help. But as part of the natural law there are significant forms of solidarity which are not based on compassion but on forms of relatedness and the specific duties and loyalties and identities which flow from such particular relationships.

It is not ordered for a human person to be emotionally blunted to these natural forms of solidarity and the particular loves and commitments which flow from them.

A failed experiment

There was an article in The Age this morning about the attempt to recruit two Aboriginal boys back in 1849 to become missionaries.

The story is interesting because it highlights how varied the attitude to Aborigines was in colonial times. In this case, there was too high an expectation placed on the two Aboriginal boys:

On January 8, 1849, filled with hope and eager expectation, Francis Xavier Conaci, 7, and John Baptist Dirimera, 11, left Perth with Rosendo Salvado, the energetic abbot of the Benedictine monastery at New Norcia, 160 kilometres north of Perth.

This extraordinary journey was part of Salvado's great mission, conducted over more than 50 years, to enculturate the Aborigines into Christianity. He lived and camped with them, wrote dictionaries of their language and lobbied for them with colonial authorities.

Conaci and Dirimera were from the Yuat tribe, and had begged Salvado to take them to Rome. The Benedictines hoped to train the boys in European ways and send them as missionaries to the Aborigines of Western Australia.

In Europe, the Aboriginal boys were lionised:

In Rome, they met Pope Pius IX, who presented them with their distinctive black woollen Benedictine habits, and told Conaci: ''Australia needs a second Francis Xavier; may the Lord bless this boy, and make him into one!''

Salvado presented them to the king and queen of the Two Sicilies, and then to meet the king and queen of Naples at the palace in Gaeta outside the city...

Both boys were granted patents of nobility by the king and admitted to the College of Nobles.

Things went well at first, with the boys doing well at their studies. But as with so many attempts at assimilation, the experiment ultimately failed:

But in March 1853, the abbot at La Cava warned the Vatican about the poor health of the Aboriginal novices. Doctors, including the Pope's physician - believing that the boys' illnesses were exacerbated by homesickness - advised that they should be sent back to Australia.

Conaci spent two months in a Naples hospital, then moved to the abbey at St Paul's Outside the Walls to recuperate. But his condition worsened and he died on October 10, 1853. Dirimera arrived back in Australia in May 1855 a broken boy. Salvado had a hut built for him in the bush and visited him regularly, but Dirimera died in August. ''They pined away,'' Hayes says.

The Benedictines were demoralised by the deaths and never again sought to recruit Aborigines to the order. "It may be that Salvado lost all hope or got depressed by the whole idea," says Peter Hocking, archivist at the New Norcia monastery.

The problem was not a lack of idealism but an underestimation of how difficult assimilation would be.

Not so stolen generations

Should we Australians be ashamed of our past? For years we have been told that we should be ashamed of the treatment of the "stolen generations". The claim is that Australian authorities forcibly removed whole generations of Aboriginal children from their parents with the racist aim of breeding out the Aboriginal population.

Keith Windschuttle has written a new volume of his important work The Fabrication of Aboriginal History which investigates these claims in detail. He has presented some of his findings in a brief newspaper article, which is well-argued and well worth reading in full.

I'll try to summarise some of the key information. The historians who originally set up the idea of the stolen generations made some key assertions, including:

• that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed
• that authorities aimed to seize children as young as possible with the aim that they should lose their Aboriginality and never return home
• that the children were forcibly removed solely because they were Aboriginal
  
  

Windschuttle quotes some leading historians of the stolen generations making such claims:

In his 2008 parliamentary apology, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd endorsed the estimate by Peter Read, the university historian who first advanced the concept of the Stolen Generations, that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed in the 20th century.

Read had written that governments removed children as young as possible and reared them in institutions isolated from any contact with Aboriginal culture. "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal," he said, "intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."

The majority were allegedly babies and infants. The SBS television series First Australians claimed most of the 50,000 were aged under five. Henry Reynolds explained the rationale: "The younger the child the better, before habits were formed, attachments made, language learned, traditions absorbed."

But are these claims true? Windschuttle provides some strong evidence that they are far from being true. First, it's not true that most of the children removed from their families were aged under five. Windschuttle looked at the NSW records and found that only 10% were under five, most were teenagers.

Second, it was not "generations" who were removed from their families. For instance, at the Moore River settlement in WA, only about 10 children per year were removed at a time when the Aboriginal population of the state numbered 29,000.

Third, the children were not removed "because they were Aboriginal" but because of concerns for their welfare:

Rather than acting for racist or genocidal reasons, government officers and missionaries wanted to rescue children and teenagers from welfare settlements and makeshift camps riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse.

In NSW, WA and the Territory, public servants, doctors, teachers and missionaries were appalled to find Aboriginal girls between five and eight years of age suffering from sexual abuse and venereal disease. On the Kimberley coast from the 1900s to the 1920s they were dismayed to find girls of nine and 10 years old hired out by their own parents as prostitutes to Asian pearling crews. That was why the great majority of children removed by authorities were female ...

Government officials had a duty to rescue children from such settings, as much then as they do now.

The prevailing policy of the time was not assimilation but the racial preservation of the Aborigines. It's true that there were two regional officers who did propose assimilation policies: they wanted to marry half-caste Aboriginal women to white men. But they did not have government support for these plans. The plan was rejected in cabinet in 1933 and in 1934 a commonwealth minister declared in parliament that:

It can be stated definitely, that it is and always has been, contrary to policy to force half-caste women to marry anyone. The half-caste must be a perfectly free agent in the matter.

The prevailing policy was expressed by J. F. Bleakley, the chief protector of Aborigines in Queensland and the author of the commonwealth policy of the 1920s and 30s, when he wrote of Aborigines that:

"We have no right to attempt to destroy their national life. Like ourselves, they are entitled to retain their racial entity and racial pride."

This is the opposite of genocide. It is a clear statement that the government of the time wanted Aborigines to continue their own distinct ethnic existence.

There's much more in Windschuttle's article, including evidence that those Aboriginal children who were placed in welfare institutions were not cut off from their families or their Aboriginality and were treated in a similar way to white children in similar circumstances (e.g. sent out to complete apprenticeships).

We're fortunate that Keith Windschuttle has made such a determined effort to write authoritative books on Aboriginal history. He may not be a traditionalist conservative (he's more of a right-liberal) but he's provided an important contribution.

The right kind of immersion?

My old school now offers cultural immersion tours for Year 9 boys. No, they are not being immersed in their own culture, they're being sent off to live with South Australian Aborigines for a week.

What did the boys learn from the experience? In short, that white Australians were evil and violent, in contrast to the nature loving and spiritual Aborigines:

The most positive thing I gained from the journey was an insight into the amazing, undiscovered, indigenous culture ... The ways the Aborigines respect nature at such a spiritual level ... Our whole group was transformed ... We learned about the horrors which occurred in the early settlement of Australia. At one stage the group was very disturbed, and we were fighting back tears of sorrow. Our indigenous tour guide Quenten told us that some indigenous elders were forced to dig their own graves before they were shot and buried in them. We also came across an old barn where aboriginal men, women and children were herded like sheep, and massacred like lambs to the slaughter.

At other times we were fighting back tears of joy. We became a part of spiritual dances and rituals ... I will never be able to forget that week which saw me and the rest of the group come right out of our comfort zones ...

As I've written previously, this kind of thing is dangerous. There are conscientious whites who lose a sense of their moral status and authority in society when they accept such vilification of whites as the truth. Their path to redemption is then to break ranks and to identify against their own tradition in favour of the other. As I wrote in a recent post:

Such people will want to speak with moral authority in society, but how can they as white oppressors? The path to redemption is, again, to break ranks and to identify with the non-white other in opposition to other unenlightened whites.

This helps to explain why some liberal whites are so obsessed with an anti-white/pro-other agenda. It comes to express their self-concept and identity. It lies at the heart of how they see themselves and the ground on which they stand.

And what of the massacre claims? It's not likely these took place. I searched a list of claimed massacres of Aborigines during the period of settlement and there is no mention of such events in the Yorke Peninsula. The claims of massacres often turn out to be false when they are properly investigated.

Keith Windschuttle is one person who has undertaken such investigative work. I'll give just one example from his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Sir William Deane, as Governor-General, once apologised on behalf of the nation for a massacre by whites of Aboriginal women and children at Mistake Creek in the 1930s.

However, when the massacre was investigated it turned out to have taken place in 1915 and to have been perpetrated not by whites but by Aborigines (the outcome of a dispute over an Aboriginal woman).

What those Year 9 boys should really be taught is to ask for evidence before accepting claims of massacres. They should also be made aware that frontier violence did not go all one way. I wonder, for instance, if they know of the Maria massacre of 1840, when a group of whites was shipwrecked off the coast of South Australia and then massacred by Aborigines, their bodies being later found stuffed down wombat holes.

Do the boys know of some of the less environmentally friendly practices of Aborigines? Such as the deliberate burning down of forests to flush out animals which transformed the type of vegetation cover over much of Australia?

Are they taught to appreciate the great nature poets and landscape painters of their own tradition? Why not, for instance, immerse them in Wordsworth?

And why should they be taught to associate Aboriginal culture with spirituality rather than their own? Particularly since they are attending a Catholic college. Doesn't Catholicism have something to do with spirituality? Or doesn't that count?

I'm not at all against the Year 9 boys learning to appreciate what Aboriginal culture has to offer. But it should be from a strong, confident, positive awareness of their own culture that they engage with others. Otherwise their school is failing them.

Battles of the Aborigines 1846

Here is an 1846 account of an Aboriginal battle in what is now suburban Melbourne (in Coburg North or Fawkner):

Battles of the Aborigines: A pitched battle took place between a tribe of the Melbourne and the Goulburn blacks. The scene of warfare was in the vicinity of Sydney Road, about seven miles from town; about 80 blacks on either side placed themselves at a distance of about ten yards apart, two ropes placed at that distance, separating them from each other; the more courageous of either party occasionally advanced within the open space intervening, and were immediately selected as targets by their opponents.

At a short distance from this scene, some forty or fifty women and children, belonging to the respective tribes were also engaged in a similar occupation.

Mr Robinson, the Protector, upon being informed of the circumstance hastened to the spot, and immediately despatched a messenger to town for Dr Thomas, who upon his arrival found between thirty and forty wounded, some dangerously, and one man, belonging to the Melbourne tribe, hopelessly so, having received a spear in his breast, which had penetrated a considerable depth, inflicting a frightful wound. A lubra, belonging to the Melbourne tribe, also received a dangerous wound on the cheek with a boomerang.

Mr Robinson's horse was speared, and when our informant left, the courage and animosity of the belligerents appeared unabated, notwithstanding the severe injuries received on either side. (Bell's Life in Sydney, February 7th, 1846)

I found this little item some years ago when I had the opportunity to browse through the colonial papers held in the State Library of Victoria.

The Aborigines appeared to have had a ritualised kind of warfare. If I remember correctly, similar battles, with the warring tribes lined up at a set distance from each other, were still taking place in the Northern Territory in the 1930s. The injury rate from these battles was considerable; in the case of the Melbourne battle, 30 or 40 were injured in a battle involving 160 men and 40 to 50 women and children.

Young Australian readers should take note of the response of the white settlers. The Aboriginal Protector, George Augustus Robinson, was summoned and he rode close enough to the battle for his horse to be speared. He called a doctor to treat the Aboriginal wounded. The newspaper report is sympathetic both to the courage of the combatants and to those who sustained injuries.

A Deal? Maybe not, Andrew Bolt.

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is about as right-wing as it gets in the mainstream media here in Australia. And yet he is clearly a liberal rather than a conservative.

This is most obvious whenever he writes about race and ethnicity. In his most recent column, for instance, he complains that Aboriginal activists who attack whites are often considerably of European descent themselves.

It's a fair point and one that is likely to appeal to the conservative rank and file. However, Bolt also uses the column to push the idea that race is artificial, trivial and should be made irrelevant.

For instance, he writes of Tara Jane Winch, who is of mixed ancestry but identifies as Aboriginal, that:

She could call herself English, Afghan, Aboriginal, Australian or just a take-me-as-I-am human being called Tara June Winch. Race irrelevant.

His comment on the phenomenon of mixed race activists identifying as Aborigines is this:

It's also divisive, feeding a new movement to stress pointless or even invented racial differences we once swore to overcome. What happened to wanting all of us to become colour blind?

He finishes this way:

... let's go beyond racial pride. Beyond black and white. Let's be proud only of being human beings set on this land together, determined to find what unites us and not to invent such racist and trivial excuses to divide. Deal?

Sorry, Andrew Bolt, no deal.

It's important to understand where Andrew Bolt is coming from. Andrew Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines for wanting to hold onto some historic artefacts. He told the Aborigines that by identifying with their own communal tradition they were forgetting,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

This is standard liberal autonomy theory. According to this theory, we are made human by our ability to self-determine who we are. Therefore, we are supposed to reject as impediments to our individual autonomy anything significant to our identity that is inherited rather than self-created.

It's a theory with radical consequences. It means that we can't identify as men and women as our sex is a "biological destiny" rather than something we select for ourselves. And it means that we can't identify with our own race or ethny or nation as we are born into these.

We are not allowed to belong to distinct, particular human communities. Only to a single human one.

This is just about the opposite of a true conservatism: if the term conservative has any meaning it refers to the aim of conserving a particular tradition against the onslaught of liberalism.

Andrew Bolt has not always been so dismissive of ancestral identity. He himself is a Dutch migrant to Australia. As such he did not feel as strongly connected to the mainstream Australian tradition. This changed when he married an Australian woman. He once thanked his two Anglo-Australian grandmothers in his column for granting him this gift of an ancestral connection to country:

I do now have a deep bond to this country, its history and its culture, and a sense of belonging for which I am intensely grateful. Even better, my children have roots that dig deep in this soil. I thank my two Nans for this - for helping to make me and mine feel at home. (Herald Sun 20/10/2000)

This is more the reality of things. No talk here of a single human identity or trivial, invented differences. Bolt here admits the importance of ancestry, history, culture, roots, home and belonging.

Bolt in his more recent columns asks us to give up too much - stable forms of identity and belonging and a deep connection to country - for the sake of a radical political idea, an ideology.

We have to think beyond the limits of Andrew Bolt's right liberalism if we are serious about conserving our own tradition.

Luhrmann's low act

Why isn't this considered vilification? Consider how Baz Luhrmann portrays race relations in the early 1940s in his film Australia:

Nullah is a part-Aboriginal boy stolen from his white guardian, a British artistocrat played by Nicole Kidman, by corrupt police acting under a racist law that a pitiless mission official tells Kidman’s character is designed to breed out Aborigines.

As Nullah (beautifully played by the magnetic Brandon Walters) is marched down Darwin’s docks with other captured boys to be sent by boat to the Garden Point home on Melville Island, a sneering white boy holding a joey (yes!) stops and abuses him: “Creamy, didn’t your mother want you?” A racist white kid holding a kangaroo in a film called Australia - could there be anything more archetypally us?

To add to the white sin, the Japanese army is sweeping towards Australia and the boys are being sent to an island that one character notes “will be the first place the Japs hit". White women and children are being evacuated from Darwin in the background, but here the Aboriginal boys are being sent to their deaths by racist white men. To really grind in his point, Luhrmann has the Japanese not just bombing the children’s home at Melville Island (which they didn’t) but invading it as well.

Bear in mind that the film is sold in captions at its beginning and its end as based on historical truths, and is being reported as such, too.

But it's not the historical truth. Andrew Bolt goes on to explain:

But what of this story that Aboriginal children were callously and deliberately sent into danger at Melville Island, while whites were evacuated south?

In fact, Aboriginal women and children were evacuated from Darwin and nearby settlements - including Garden Point - and sent as far south as the Blue Mountains.

So Luhrmann is making stuff up to vilify the white Australians of the 1940s.

If you want a more balanced account of race relations (from the early 1960s) consider the story of Cecily, as told by herself.

She is a member of what has become known as the "stolen generations" - though she wasn't actually stolen.

Cecily tells us that she was abandoned by her Aboriginal mother as a baby, and then raised for a time by her grandmother and an aunt. However, the aunt moved away and the grandmother began to abuse alcohol.

The grandmother arranged for Cecily to be raised in a white foster home. Her life wasn't perfect: she was teased by other Aboriginal children for living with a white family and she felt different as an Aboriginal child living in a white environment.

As a teenager, questions of identity became stronger and she decided, with the support of her white foster mother, to return to live with her Aboriginal mother and siblings. However, she witnessed a shocking incident of domestic violence and went back to live with her foster family.

However, at the age of 17 "the pressure within me started mounting again. I was trying to establish my identity."

She finally returned to live in her Aboriginal community near Nowra. She met her Aboriginal uncles and put some of the missing pieces of her life together, so that "I felt like I belonged".

What does Cecily's story tell us? It can't be used to support the right-liberal assimilationist view, given that Cecily chose to return to her Aboriginal community because of the importance to her of her Aboriginal identity and kinship.

Nor does it support a Baz Luhrmann portrayal of white Australians as evil racist oppressors. This is what Cecily herself has to say of her white foster parents:

I know a couple of Kooris who were fostered by Koori families. They would say to me “I’m glad I wasn’t fostered into a white family”. I smile at these people because they don’t realise how lucky I was to be so loved and wanted. I was fostered for 12 years by a lovely white family in Bega on the far south coast of NSW. Overall I was grateful and I have always respected my foster family ...

Yes, the ideal thing would be for Aboriginal children to be fostered within their own communities, so that children like Cecily would not feel alienated from their own culture and people. But this doesn't mean that the fostering of Aboriginal children by white families was an act of racist oppression.

What has Baz Luhrmann done? He has fabricated an event in the past in order to malign his own countrymen - and then claimed it to be an historical fact. It is a low act.

Why did Luhrmann make Australia?

I wasn't exactly overjoyed when I found out that Baz Luhrmann was making an epic film set in Australia in the 1940s. When the Australian political class turns to our history, it's usually to follow a narrative in which whites feature as racist oppressors and Aborigines as noble victims.

It seems that I was right to be apprehensive. The actor Hugh Jackman let slip in a recent interview that the real purpose of the film was to highlight the "stolen generations", with other more glamorous parts of the film serving to bring in the audience:

But, Jackman adds, "Baz said if we made a very didactic and earnest story about the Stolen Generations, we'll have about three people watching the movie." Hence, the romance, the drama, the Japanese bombing of Darwin (an actual although little-known event) and a treacherous cattle drive through the desert.

Australian readers will already be familiar with the "stolen generations". For overseas readers, it is a controversial claim that racist white authorities stole generations of Aboriginal children, particularly half-caste children, from their mothers in order to bring them up as Europeans and to breed out the Aboriginal race.

It's difficult, though, to know how much truth there is to this claim, if any. When individual cases are investigated, a different story often emerges. For instance, in the case of activist Charles Perkins it turned out that his mother had begged a Christian boarding school to take him in to give him a better future (he went on to become the first Aborigine to head a government department).

Similarly, Zita Wallace grew up believing she had been stolen, but when she eventually returned to visit her mother it turned out that she had been abandoned:

Said Wallace: "It really hurt me badly. I thought, she doesn't want me, I won't worry about her. It was a really big thing to be rejected by someone who was supposed to be your mother."

Inquests conducted in Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory have found that there was "no formal policy for removing children".

So what is the evidence for the stolen generations? The only definite evidence I'm aware of is a note from A.O. Neville, who was a chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s:

Every administration has trouble with half-caste girls. I know of 200 or 300 girls, however, in Western Australia who have gone into domestic service and the majority are doing very well. Our policy is to send them out into the white community, and if a girl comes back pregnant our rule is to keep her for two years. The child is then taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two years the mother goes back into service so it really does not matter if she has half a dozen children.

This is the right-liberal, assimilationist attitude to Aborigines - a view which is still around today. For right-liberals what counts is not preserving ethnicity, but adherence to a set of universal liberal values. Right liberals generally support the idea of the European and Aboriginal populations merging together within a universal liberal culture.

Peter Howson, for instance, was the Liberal Party Minister for Aborigines back in 1971-1972. A few years ago, he wrote a newspaper article celebrating the fact that 70% of Aborigines had moved into towns and had married non-Aborigines. He wanted measures introduced to push the remaining Aborigines out of their own communities and into the mainstream.

If the right-liberal view has credibility it's because the separate Aboriginal communities aren't always great places for the raising of children. Levels of drug abuse, alcoholism and violence are high in some of these communities, which are often reliant on government welfare.

So even today there are large numbers of Aboriginal children who are removed from their families:

Welfare workers in NSW are removing Aboriginal children from their homes in numbers far greater than during the Stolen Generations, and the recruitment of Aboriginal staff has done nothing to stem the tide.

... The Australian can reveal that a staggering 4000 Aboriginal children are now in state care in NSW.

This compares with about 1000 Aboriginal children in foster homes, institutions and missions in 1969.

Black children are being removed at 10 times the rate of white children, despite a tripling in the number of Aboriginal welfare workers.

The total suggests that about one in six Aboriginal children in NSW is now a ward of the state.

The alternative to the right-liberal assimilationist policy has been a left-liberal separatism. Left-liberals often look up to the traditional Aboriginal culture and lifestyle and compare it favourably to Western societies. This has led to a policy of supporting separate Aboriginal communities, but to a lack of practical concern with how these communities might adapt and survive in the modern world. The communities are often left to survive on government welfare, which then encourages social breakdown - and the removal of children which the left is so outraged by.

In some ways, the idea of the stolen generations is part of the culture war between left and right liberals. The right-liberals use the breakdown of social norms in Aboriginal communities as an argument for assimilation; the left-liberals have countered by portraying assimilation as a racist attempt to force Aborigines to live as Europeans, up to and including stealing Aboriginal children from their mothers.

The evidence seems to suggest that Aboriginal children who were removed from their families were not stolen. There was no formal policy of removing Aboriginal children and when individual cases are examined the removal was usually for welfare reasons - just as still occurs today.

Willing to believe the worst

We had an Aboriginal speaker visit my workplace on Friday. His theme was the challenges facing young Aborigines today, but much of his speech was a rant about the treatment of Aborigines in colonial times.

I use the word "rant" deliberately. There was little effort to be factual or balanced. The picture he presented was of settlers who had genteel parties at which shooting or poisoning Aborigines was a favoured past-time. I was most angry when he claimed that at some of these parties the white settlers buried Aboriginal babies up to their necks and then kicked off their heads to see who could make them go the furthest.

Where does this extraordinary claim come from? I looked up Keith Windschuttle's book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and found the answer on pp.41-42. The claim about babies was made in a PhD thesis by a student named Rhys Jones in 1971. Jones was no unbiased observer - the relevant chapter of his PhD thesis about the establishment of a British colony in Tasmania is titled "The arrival of the Yahoos".

Jones claimed in his thesis that the settlers were psychopathic sadists and he listed the head-kicking of babies to prove his point. But he never mentioned where or when such incidents happened and he never cited any documentary evidence. In a 1978 TV documentary he repeated his claims and finally pointed to his evidence: letters presented to the 1830 Committee for the Affairs of the Aborigines.

Windschuttle made the effort to read through every document placed before this committee and found no mention of the kicking of babies' heads. So Jones's claim has no evidence and would appear to be another fabrication.

This is exactly what a reasonable person would have expected. Although some of the convicts sent to the colonies were violent men, the settlers themselves were both Christian and cultured. To believe that they would have cheered on a game of baby head-kicking shows a monstrous lack of understanding of the past. (Windschuttle also states in his book that you would have to be "unusually gullible" to believe this particular atrocity story).

When I spoke to my colleagues after the speech to gauge their reactions, I found that they had no feelings about the issue. They were emotionally detached. When I asked them directly if they thought it might be true that settlers had baby head kicking competitions, they shrugged and said they didn't know. They didn't share my indignation.

If you feel a connection to your own ancestors - to your own family going back in time - then you're likely to feel anger when they are unjustly maligned and accused of inhuman crimes they did not commit. It is a natural reaction to have.

I have to assume that many of my colleagues have lost this particular point of connection in life; that they don't see themselves as having a history stretching back through the generations.

Perhaps this is their way of coping with all the claims about colonial wrongdoings. If so, it's a poor strategy. It's better to insist on a more balanced account of colonial history, rather than to divest yourself of any emotional involvement in the issue.

Responding to Greer's rage

Germaine Greer has published an essay, On Rage, in which she blames white men for the domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

The essay is yet another example of an ethnic double standard. Greer is a radical liberal in her attitude to white Australian society, but a traditionalist when it comes to Aborigines.

For instance, Greer complains that the effect of white society on Aborigines has been to set men and women against each other and to undermine the traditional male role, thereby marginalising Aboriginal men within the family. This, she argues, has fostered the rage of Aboriginal men which then leads to domestic violence.

Greer quotes an Aboriginal woman who laments that,

Our communities are like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other. (p.56)

Greer also voices disapproval of the effects of government welfare in increasing the autonomy of Aboriginal women to the detriment of the male role within the family:

The fact that government welfare payments are often made to women ... means that more and more women can live independently of men, and are doing so.

... When hunter-gatherer societies begin to break down, it is invariably the gatherers, the women, who combine to hold them together, but in doing so they further marginalise their menfolk, including their own sons. (pp.75,76)

To give you some idea of how Greer treats the Aboriginal family and the male role within it, here is part of her discussion of the issue:

According to anthropologists RM and CH Berndt, traditionally "the most cherished possessions of men were women, children and their sacred heritage," in that order ... The Aboriginal man's wife was not simply a woman he met by chance and fancied, but a kinswoman ... it is the level of avoidance which signifies just how fundamental, how absolutely shattering this loss and humiliation must be. (pp.56,57)

It's curious to find a Western feminist writing in this vein. After all, Greer led a movement to achieve in her own society the very things she is so dismayed occurred in Aboriginal society.

Take the complaint that Aboriginal societies have been left "like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other".

This view of society, in which men and women are set against each other, is built into the feminist theory championed by Greer. In feminist patriarchy theory, men are believed to have organised a power structure in society in order to protect an unearned privilege gained at the expense of oppressed women.

In this world view, the traditional male role within the family is a source of oppression to be overthrown; men are motivated by a desire to assert power over women; women must therefore compete with men for money, power and status.

Millions of Western girls have been brought up to follow this world view, almost like a religion.

The more radical feminists even go so far as to assume that men, by having organised society to oppress women, must be assumed to hate women. Greer herself, in her influential book The Female Eunuch, goes to great lengths to describe male hatred of women.

Nor has Greer overcome this negative view of men. As I'll describe a little later, Greer is all too ready to vilify white men in her essay on rage - the same essay in which she laments the setting apart of Aboriginal men and women.

It's a similar story when it comes to the issue of autonomy. Greer is terribly concerned that Aboriginal men have been emasculated and marginalised by the decline in their provider role (and in their leadership role); this may have made Aboriginal women more independent, but to the overall loss of cohesiveness of Aboriginal communities.

Yet it is exactly a radical individual autonomy which has been most keenly sought by Western feminists, regardless of the larger consequences to society.

There is another aspect to Greer's ethnic double standard. Greer is a traditionalist in wanting Aborigines to survive as a people, as an ethny. For example, when she discusses the problem of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, she is concerned not with issues of patriarchy or gender equity, but with the survival of Aborigines as a race:

What is now undeniable is that violence towards women and children across the same spectrum has reached the level of race suicide. (p.91)

When Greer writes about Aborigines, traditional attachments are held to matter. She tells us that Aborigines have lost "what makes any human life worth living". What does she include in this category? Well, she holds that Aborigines have lost "all the important things" including "their families, their social networks, their culture, their religion, their languages and their self-esteem". Furthermore, Aborigines, instead of living in their own tribes, have been forced to amalgamate and live in "polyglot assemblages" (pp.30, 31).

So for Greer it is a terrible fate for Aborigines to live in "polyglot assemblages" as this destroys "what makes any human life worth living". Yet isn't "polyglot assemblage" just another term for "diversity". Is Greer willing to apply her principle to Westerners, just as she does for Aborigines?

I suspect not, as Greer vilifies whites frequently throughout her essay. She claims that Judy Atkinson "puts it as delicately as she can" when she writes of "marauding white males" (p.58); she uses terms like "Australian racists"; she claims that the rape of Aboriginal children by white men "prevailed on a massive scale across the continent, wherever the white man penetrated, in the words of Strehlow's superior, "all the time"" (pp.49-51); she writes too that "From the beginning of white contact in the 1780s ... the white man has considered Aboriginal women his for the taking" (pp. 39-40).

At the end of the essay, the derogatory treatment of whites hits a low point: she uses the term "Whitey" in an openly hostile way:

People now talk of establishing an annual sorry day, as if it would do Whitey good to remind himself how magnanimous he was on 13 February 2008. More useful would be an annual angry day, when Whitey would get reminded of just what he has done for Australia. (pp.97-98)

Little concern here for the "self-esteem" of her own race, despite having previously described it as one of the qualities "that makes any human life worth living".

What is happening here with Germaine Greer? The key thing is that Greer cares about Aboriginal society. She identifies with it and wants it to survive as a distinct entity. Therefore she does not apply liberal concepts to it. She takes instead a traditionalist view.

It's important to understand this, so I'll rephrase it. Here we have a leading figure of left-liberalism, who has expressed on many occasions her alienation from her own tradition and her concern for Aboriginal society. It is no coincidence that she pushes liberalism on her own tradition but refrains from doing so when it comes to Aboriginal society. She wishes to conserve Aboriginal society and therefore takes a conservative, rather than a liberal, stance toward it.

So the question then is why she cares for the survival of Aboriginal society but not her own. I can only speculate as to the reasons why.

Perhaps it has to do with a certain understanding of equality widespread on the left. If you assume that our status as humans depends on our autonomy (our power to enact our will), then an imbalance of power means that some people are human at the expense of others. Therefore, you have to either accept that some people aren't fully human (not a palatable option) or else claim that the inequality in the balance of power is the result of an unjust, unnatural, "racist" organisation of society. The group doing the oppression then loses its legitimacy - its moral status.

As whites were the dominant group for a period of time, it's easy for the left to regard them as the illegitimate, oppressive party - and to prefer to identify instead with a non-dominant minority.

Greer has, in fact, throughout her life identified with an ethnic minority. As a young woman she chose to believe that she was Jewish, despite little evidence of Jewish ancestry. More recently she has sought an Aboriginal identity; in one essay (Whitefella Jump Up, 2003) she wrote of Australians declaring themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".

In her essay on rage she also emphasises the powerlessness of Aborigines ("utterly powerless"), whereas white society is represented by "racist authorities". It fits the framework of a majority organised illegitimately around the oppression of a powerless minority.

The framework itself deserves to be criticised: it assumes that human equality is contingent and is to be measured by an autonomous power to enact our will; it makes any majority tradition illegitimate; and it falsely assumes that a majority tradition is organised primarily as an act of oppressive dominance over others.

The framework also distorts Greer's understanding of the real situation. She seems to believe that whites are so powerful that their existence can be assumed to be perfectly secure, whereas Aborigines are so powerless they are on the brink.

If anything, the position of Aborigines is advancing, whilst that of whites is declining. Aborigines are becoming more numerous; there is an increasing amount of land set aside permanently for their own use; they are free to celebrate their own existence and there are considerable government funds at their disposable to organise themselves as a community.

In contrast, whites have declining birth rates; are being relegated to minority status throughout the West by immigration; and do not have the same freedom to celebrate their own existence.

That Greer doesn't see this suggests to me that she is still working through the theory I described above. The distance of this theory from reality, and the double standard it encourages in Greer's own writing, are reasons for younger Australians to question the politics of an older generation of left-liberals.

What gets recognised?

The Rudd Government has announced that the Myall Creek massacre site is to be heritage listed. Back in 1838, 28 Aborigines were murdered at the site; seven convicts were later hanged for the crime.

The heritage listing of the site is part of a longer term trend in which one aspect only of race relationships in colonial Australia is recognised, namely white violence toward Aborigines.

I spent a number of years reading colonial era newspapers and it gave me a fuller picture of the reality of the era. The most common attitude of white settlers toward Aborigines was one of curiosity, particularly about Aboriginal language and customs.

As for violence, the situation was more complex than is usually recognised. Yes, there was violence by whites towards Aborigines on the newly settled frontier. But there were also occasions when whites helped to prevent violence between different groups of Aborigines. There were some Aborigines who helped rescue white settlers. There were other Aborigines who murdered white settlers.

The last point usually baffles those white Australians I mention it to. They find it a difficult thought to process as they are so used to the idea that violence went the other way. So I'll give just a few examples of Aboriginal violence toward white settlers to help illustrate the situation.

In colonial Tasmania, in the short period of time between January and October 1828, there were 68 separate attacks on white settlers by Aborigines, resulting in 26 European deaths (including women and children).

The records of the Adelaide Gaol show that between 1843 and 1861 there were 12 hangings, all for murder. Of these, three were cases of violence between whites. Of the other nine, only one was a case of white violence against an Aborigine. The rest, the large majority, involved Aboriginal perpetrators and white victims. There were 10 white victims altogether (5 men, 3 women and 2 children).

After one of these hangings of an Aborigine for murdering a white, a newspaper editor used the occasion not to demonise the Aborigines, but to express doubt about the use of capital punishment:

If transportation for life is the full penalty in England more ought not, we think, to be inflicted here...

The above list of white South Australians murdered by Aborigines doesn't include the victims of the Maria massacre. In June 1840 the brig Maria hit a reef; the passengers and crew were evacuated safely in a life boat. They negotiated with a local Aboriginal tribe to escort them back to Adelaide; however, this tribe wouldn't go further than their tribal boundaries. The shipwreck survivors were handed over to the neighbouring tribe who massacred them, stuffing the bodies down wombat holes.

Twenty-five white settlers were killed in the Maria massacre, including five women and six children.

There has been a filtering of Australian history which has created a false picture of the times; there is a one-sided account of race relations in which it is only white violence against Aborigines that is recognised and in which only the most negative and unsympathetic of white attitudes toward Aborigines is publicised.

A different dividing line

Does the existence of an indigenous minority make the mainstream national identity illegitimate? Not according to David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian. This is his perspective on the situation in America:

The people of a nation must never be denied the expression of their natural love for their country. Without love of country, no nation can exist for long. It will become rather a heartless business convenience, a lusus naturae [joke of nature] of mean greed.

Okay, so America presents a bit of a problem. America is now multicultural. America has many races, many religions - and many ideologies, actually. What is in fact the country? Is there something that we all love? Is there something that is tangibly American?

My view as an American Indian: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants created this country. What is it that they love? What do they consider to be the country?

As an American Indian, I seek their opinion. Their view is the one I want to consider. I am bound to them in blood, war, and treaty. My history is theirs, and theirs mine. I have looked to them for the health of the country.

I must say, they seem quite lost now. They are either afraid of who they are, or ashamed. If they are indeed not proud of who they are, yet continue to constitute the polity they created, they throw a curve ball to the world.

... George Soros equates nationhood to "tribalism." Naturally, he is most interested in bringing down the greatest nation — America. And because of America’s multi-cultural conditioning, it appears an easy enough task. He wants an "Open Society," with closed doors to the basic, historic elements of human existence: religion, ethnicity, and nationhood. He wants a world that can be perfectly controlled, one without these pestilential differences.

This could stand alone as an eloquent defence of traditional nationalism. It has an added significance, though, coming from an American Indian. We are accustomed to white liberals using indigenous affairs to further demoralise the mainstream. David Yeagley refuses to play his part in the script and speaks instead to encourage white Americans to uphold a national existence in the US, for his benefit as well as theirs.

Hat tip: Brave New World Watch
Original article: Vdare

Why does the left treat us differently?

Why do white liberals accept the traditions of other cultures but not their own? Why do liberals associate any expression of white identity with supremacism?

It's not easy for traditionalists to grasp the answers to such questions. I want to to suggest in this post how liberals arrive at such positions, but to do so it helps if I begin with the liberal approach to gender.

Put briefly, liberals believe in autonomy as an overriding good. They believe that to be fully human we must be self-determining agents. We do not determine our sex for ourselves and therefore our sex is treated by liberals as something unnatural and restrictive, from which we must be liberated. Sex must be made not to matter.

For right liberals this means that the past, in which there were distinct sex roles, is to be regretted, but that as a matter of "progress", these sex roles will become defunct, particularly in terms of labour market participation, which for right liberals is a central social function.

Left liberals take things further. They too see the male career role as the premier one, and they ask why, if sex roles are artificial, there has existed "discrimination" and "inequality". Their answer is that a group of people have formed a social construct, "men", in order to dominate, exploit and oppress the "other", those categorised as "women".

Once left liberals take this view, a number of other positions logically follow. First, it isn't just a question of patiently waiting for "progress" to deliver the goods; instead, male "privilege" is to be aggressively attacked and whatever helps to form and uphold male loyalties or a masculine existence is to be deconstructed.

Second, a sense of active hostility to men becomes justified. For the more radical of liberal men, it begins to make sense to act against, and identify in opposition to, a traditional masculine culture.

When it comes to ethnicity there is a similar distinction between right and left liberals. We don't get to choose our ethnicity, and therefore liberals believe that it should be made not to matter.

Right liberals tend to take this as a universal principle. For them, all people are to assimilate into a culture based on liberal political values. Right-wing journalist Andrew Bolt does not even make the usual exception for Aborigines; he once complained that a group of Aborigines who wanted to retain control over an historic artefact, by acting as a tribe, were flouting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

Similarly Bolt has written that he doesn't like there being a category of Aboriginal art at the National Gallery because such categories "drive us back into our racial prisons".

Right liberals might well regret forms of racial discrimination in the past, but this is likely to be seen as a measure of the time, which progress toward liberal ideals is erasing. There is no particular reason for right liberals to feel an animosity toward their own race, so they tend to combine a belief in non-discriminatory mass immigration, often justified in terms of market needs, with a positive view of their own tradition. John Howard, for instance, has described his own position as follows:

It's perfectly possible for an Anglo-Celtic Australian who sort of has a lot of reverence to the traditional institutions of the country, and the traditional characteristics of Australia, and to want to hang on to those, to be completely tolerant and colour-blind and so on.

This is the awkward position you arrive at when you accept as a universal principle the idea that ethnicity is not to matter, but when you have not lost your self-regard.

For the left, it's a different story. They once again ask the question of why there was once "inequality", in which whites were dominant in the West and, for a period at least, in colonies overseas.

Their answer follows the same train of thought as the one they give for gender inequality: they assert that a group of people organised themselves into an artificial category of race in order to dominate, exploit and oppress the non-white "other".

If whites are an artificial construct who oppress others in order to gain unearned privilege, then it is whites who stand in the way of the emergence of freedom and equality. This explains:

a) The apparent contradiction that white liberals seek to undermine the very societies most dedicated to ideals of freedom and equality in order to achieve freedom and equality.

b) The leftist insistence that white communities are aberrations whose existence is to be considered illegitimate. It is especially illegitimate for a community to exist in which whites are a majority and in a position to exercise power.

(Jennifer Clarke, a teacher at the Australian National University, recently described Australia as a "regionally anomalous white enclave run largely by white people to our own advantage", in which anti-discrimination laws should be applied more effectively so that "a majority of Australians would no longer be of northern European ethnic heritage".)

c) The apparent "self-hatred" of left liberal whites. If the whole purpose of a white identity is to oppress and exploit others, and to hinder the achievement of equality and freedom, then it is logical for left-liberals to turn against their own identity and tradition. In fact, it becomes logical for left liberals to fiercely seek to undermine whatever continues to hold together a white communal existence.

If white communities are, as left-liberals assert, artificially constructed to uphold privilege, and if this explains the existence of inequality, then certain other seemingly irrational positions taken by the left can be better understood. These include:

a) The idea that Australia's prosperity somehow holds back or keeps down the living conditions of people elsewhere. Jennifer Clarke, for instance, writes that:

"the Australian way of life" itself may encapsulate undesirable social values, if that phrase extends to the idea that it is legitimate for those of us who live here to continue to monopolise more than our fair share of the earth's resources, while people who live in African refugee camps and Javanese slums must get by on far less.

The assumption is that we are prosperous not because of stable governance or a strong work ethic, but because we have monopolised the world's resources for ourselves. (As it happens, there's a story in today's paper which begins "Wars stripped $284 billion from Africa between 1990 and 2005, which is roughly equivalent to the entire amount of aid money given to the world's poorest continent." Perhaps there are better explanations for poverty in Africa than the efforts made by Australians to develop our own continent.)

b) The association of white nationalism with white supremacy. When individual whites assert their own communal loyalty, left liberals often describe them as white supremacists. This makes sense if you assume that the very purpose of "whiteness" is to establish dominance and privilege over others.

This is how Jennifer Clarke expresses her suspicion of English immigrants to Australia:

Similar questions might arise about some British emigration, particularly by "whites" leaving multicultural London. Antisocial behaviour by white supremacists or European or Christian chauvinists is not always defined or prosecuted as a crime ... but it can be just as destructive for a nation's social fabric.

Even quietly leaving a multiculture is enough to associate you, in Jennifer Clarke's mind, with white supremacism and anti-social behaviour.

c) The belief that the pro-immigration, open borders liberal right are in reality white supremacists.

Leftists see themselves as dissenting outsiders and the right as the power wielding establishment. Since the leftist ideology assumes that power is wielded by whites to uphold white privilege and to exclude and exploit others, it stands to reason that the right (power wielding whites) must be white supremacists.

There are those on the left who persevere in this view even as the Liberal Party has raised foreign immigration to record levels and transformed the Australian professional classes with fee paying overseas students.

Here is Jennifer Clarke expressing such a view about the Liberal Party Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews:

What many Australians, including Mr Andrews, still seem to want - decades after the "white Australia" policy was supposedly abolished - is a little piece of northern Europe at the crossroads of Asia and the Pacific. What they don't want are too many funny-looking people from Elsewhere coming here ...

d) An acceptance of the communal life of the "other". It seems odd that leftists should be so fiercely opposed to any expression of white communal identity, but then accept the same expressions of identity from other groups. Professor Robert Manne, for instance, has defended the existence of traditional Aboriginal communities as follows:

... if the traditional communities are indeed destroyed, one distinctive expression of human life - with its own forms of language, culture, spirituality and sensibility - will simply become extinct. Humanity is enriched and shaped by the diversity of its forms of life. It is vastly impoverished as this diversity declines. If contemporary Australians allow what remains of the traditional Aboriginal world to die, we will be haunted by the tragedy for generations.

When it comes to white Australian society, Professor Manne seems to forget such fine principles. He sticks the boot in as hard as he can.

Perhaps the contradiction can be partly explained by the fact that the left doesn't universalise the principle that "ethnicity ought not to matter" as the right tends to do. There are different categories in the leftist way of thinking about the issue. There are white communities, which represent the oppressive power of ethnicity, which have invented racism and discrimination, and which represent what is artificial in terms of identity.

The non-white "other" must therefore stand as a different category, not participating in such negative aspects of identity. To set up a category of "whiteness" as the source of artificial and oppressive identity suggests that the "other" category cannot be the source of artificial and oppressive identity. The universalism is broken.

Or, to put it another way, leftists have a choice of contradictions. If they view non-white ethnicity as racist and oppressive, it undercuts the theory that such qualities are particular to the construction of whiteness. If, on the other hand, they view non-white ethnicity as positive and natural, it undercuts the liberal idea that ethnicity in general is a restrictive limitation on the individual - in which case, why shouldn't whites enjoy the benefits of ethnic identity as others do?

Finally, I'd like to suggest two reasons why it's difficult for left-liberals to abandon the theory they've adopted. First, the theory assumes that whites are dominant exploiters. Therefore, white left-liberals are likely to have a false sense of security about the position of themselves and their co-ethnics. They aren't likely to sense the dangers to their civilisation as quickly as they might otherwise be expected to.

Second, the theory has a kind of inbuilt defence. If there are whites who challenge the theory, this can be taken as merely confirming what the theory claims; that whites are conditioned to organise to defend their privileged status.

For these and other reasons, the theory isn't easily dismissed. Even so, as it takes ever more radical forms, it tends to alienate those not professionally committed to it, so we ought to keep hammering away at its inconsistencies and at its ideological foundations.

Whiteness studies

I wrote this article for the Autumn 2007 edition of The Independent Australian. It draws on a number of pieces written earlier for Oz Conservative.

Ten years ago there were no such courses. Now “whiteness studies” is being taught at over 30 American campuses. In Australia too there are academics teaching this subject; in 2003 they formed their own whiteness studies association.

So what is it? In short, it’s a field of studies based on the theory that whites invented the idea of biological race in order to oppress indigenous peoples and to benefit from unearned privileges.

An Australian whiteness theorist, Damien Riggs, has summarized the new field of studies as follows:

Whiteness is seen as a thoroughly racialised project that aims to legitimate the authority of certain groups over others by drawing on a legacy of ‘biological’ explanations of race … Whilst this approach starts from an understanding of race as a social construction, it also acknowledges the very concrete ways in which race shapes experiences of oppression and privilege.

What is the effect of these studies on white students? One young Australian woman, Veronica Coen, tells us that her whiteness studies course led her,

to recognise that my privilege as an educated middle-class white woman was directly attributed to my ancestor’s theft of indigenous land and their exploitation

She then,

took a frightening journey into Australia’s violent history … The path was at times very distressing. My study journal was often wrinkled with tears.

Nado Aveling, who teaches whiteness studies to student teachers at Perth’s Murdoch University (it’s a mandatory part of the course) tells us of the students’ reactions that:

responses are often strongly emotional, and resistance, misunderstanding, frustration, anger and feelings of inefficacy may be the outcomes.

A social construct?

So whiteness studies confronts students with the claim that their identity is a false social construct, built around the oppression of Aborigines, and that the lives they lead are built unjustly on unearned privilege.

It’s a significant claim to make, but not one which is intellectually coherent. Even its starting point makes little sense.

Damien Riggs tells us that his approach “starts from an understanding of race as a social construction” and that we should reject “the legacy of ‘biological’ explanations of race”.

So we are meant to accept the idea that a “white race” exists not as a biological fact, but as a social construct – as something simply made up by society for its own purposes.

Why would someone make this claim, when it contradicts the visible evidence of a biologically existing white race? The answer has to do with certain intellectual assumptions existing within liberal modernism.

Liberal modernism asserts that to be fully human we must be autonomous in the sense that we are able to determine for ourselves who we are to be. Therefore, liberal modernists don’t like to recognise the existence of a “biological destiny” in which we are influenced in our identity by our sex or our race (or by other inherited or traditional qualities which we don’t choose for ourselves).

Liberal modernists therefore often prefer to believe that qualities like race are oppressive social constructs whose real existence can either be denied or made not to matter.

Inconsistency

Riggs is therefore following a modernist ideology in claiming that race is a social construct. However, even in ideological terms, this claim is incoherent.

Why? One reason is that whiteness theorists don’t simply want to declare race null and void. They want to pin down whites as guilty oppressors. Therefore, they are concerned to emphasise the idea of “whiteness” as a racial category at the same time as they deny the real existence of a white race.

To make this clear, whiteness theorists are strongly opposed to the idea of whites being race blind. They want to make whites more conscious of their “racialised” existence, whilst still claiming that there is no such thing as a really existing white race.

It’s a difficult distinction to hold and Damien Riggs himself warns that,

It is important to recognise that in talking about race we run the risk of reifying race as a ‘real entity’

Similarly, whiteness theorists dismiss the idea of really existing races and yet they recognise Aborigines as a real entity, even to the extent of claiming that Aborigines are sovereign over other groups (Riggs states that “indigenous sovereignty is the ground on which we stand”).

Then there is the issue of “complicity”. Whiteness theorists don’t want to allow any escape routes by which whites can escape the guilt of their unearned privileges. Robinder Kaur, a whiteness theorist at York University has explained that for whites,
“there is no 'safe space', no haven of guiltlessness to retreat to.”

Therefore, whiteness theorists emphasise the idea of “complicity”: that all whites, even the whiteness theorists themselves, are complicit in white guilt. It is made clear that you are still complicit, even if you renounce all privilege, or choose to identify with Aborigines, or dedicate your life to anti-racist causes. You remain a guilty white.

This may serve a useful purpose within whiteness theory. However, it adds to the intellectual incoherence of whiteness studies. After all, the original purpose of liberal moderns declaring race to be a social construct was to allow individuals to autonomously choose their own multiple, fluid identities. Now, though, we have whiteness theorists, as liberal moderns, talking about whiteness as the most absolute, fixed and inescapable of racialised categories.

Whiteness theorists simply haven’t thought through such implications; they haven’t made a good enough effort to formulate a consistent ideology.

Privilege

Whiteness studies claims that all whites enjoy unearned privilege at the expense of indigenous peoples. How, though, is this claim justified?

Veronica Coen, the student I quoted above, thinks that white Australians benefited from Aboriginal labour in colonial times. This seems an unlikely explanation for the prosperity of modern Australia. Though Aboriginal labour was important in some areas of Australia, its economic importance overall must have been small compared even to white convict labour let alone to that of free settlers.

Even the claim that whites are privileged from having taken Aboriginal land has its problems. The prominent Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has pointed out that Aborigines who were never dispossessed of their land experience similar problems to those who were:

the problems are pretty similar between communities that have never been dispossessed of their land – like in the western Cape York peninsula – and those that had been positively uprooted. It wasn’t about poverty, and it wasn’t about land, and it wasn’t about the degree of trauma experienced in history.

Pearson blames the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities not on whites having taken wealth from them, but rather on having given it to them in a misguided transfer of welfare money. He remembers a more intact community in the time before such transfers:

Everybody in Hope Vale of my generation or older grew up in a family, or household, where parents worked hard, the kids were looked after. They were bequeathed a real privilege.

Pearson is exactly right to identify these social norms as being a real privilege. It’s much easier to prosper when you are surrounded by people with a strong family and work ethic. Whites who aren’t exposed to this ethic in their homes or communities tend to experience the same loss of living standard as non-whites do.

There is one other way in which whiteness theorists have tried to explain white privilege. According to Peggy McIntosh, an American writer, she experiences a daily privilege as a white person on the following grounds:

- I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

- I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my own race widely represented.

- I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions

- I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my own race.

- I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my own race.

One way to criticise this approach is to point out that American blacks, who Peggy McIntosh is taking to be the oppressed group, don’t really have that much trouble finding their own areas to live in, or their own music, or food they like, or films and posters in which they feature.

The more important criticism, though, is once again a lack of coherence. White Americans are told endlessly that diversity is a blessing which will enrich their lives. Peggy McIntosh, though, is basing her case that whites are privileged on the idea that whites can more easily escape the effects of diversity than blacks.

In other words, to accept Peggy McIntosh’s argument requires us to believe that it is oppressive to live in diverse areas in which we are no longer the majority race. If this is the case, though, why would white Americans choose to accept diversity, if the consequences are really so undesirable?

In fact, the logical consequences of Peggy McIntosh’s argument go much further than this. If I lived in a country with a million white people, but not a single non-white, then I would not be privileged and I would not need to feel guilt about my existence. However, if a single non-white was allowed to live in my country, then I would be privileged in comparison to them, I would breach the morality of modern equality, and my identity would be called into question.

It seems to me that Peggy McIntosh needs to reconsider her intellectual assumptions as they lead her to political absurdities.

Identity

What else is wrong with whiteness studies? Remember Robinder Kaur? She was the Sikh woman I quoted above who told whites that there was no escape from their guilt.

As it happens, Robinder Kaur is an editor for a magazine called Kaurs. This magazine celebrates the identity of Sikh women as follows:

The magazine will encourage the Sikh woman to rediscover herself in the light of the glorious heritage and current meritorious achievements of the Sikh community.

And how does the magazine think that the Sikh community has prospered? The editor thinks that life is full of challenges, which leads to this advice:

... how to overcome these challenges and emerge as a winner? Hard work, confidence, dedication and, of course, the blessings of the Almighty are a sure recipe for success.

So we have here a clear double standard. For Robinder Kaur her own identity as a Sikh woman is a positive thing, and Sikhs are to think of their past as a “glorious heritage”. If Sikhs have done well it is due to hard work, confidence and dedication. For whites, though, there is only guilt. Our past is to be regarded negatively as a history of oppression of others, and our prosperity is unearned.

Obviously I don’t think whites should lamely accept such a double standard. It’s natural for Robinder Kaur to think of her own ethnic identity in positive terms, and we should follow her lead in regarding our own identity a similarly positive way. What kind of life would it be if we accepted the double standard in which our role, unlike others, was one of inescapable guilt? How could a psychologically healthy life be built on the assumptions of whiteness studies?

Racism

There’s one final issue to deal with. Whiteness theorists would regard themselves as being cutting edge anti-racists. Yet, in one further act of incoherence, it is they who are peddling a dangerous racism.

Whiteness theorists are creating a picture of whites as a “cosmic enemy”: as a force in the world standing in the way of justice and equality. Groups who are regarded this way shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves targeted for removal. Here, for instance, is the “solution” of Dr Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard academic and whiteness theorist, to the “problem” of whites:

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.

... The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition.

... we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed – not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.

... treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

The problem is that it’s not a few radical cranks pushing this line, but a growing academic movement within our universities. This movement has the power to influence the minds of students and to set an intellectual and political agenda. We should therefore be concerned about the appearance of whiteness studies and be ready to take up a political fight against it.

An enchanted world for them not us?

I belong loosely to a group that I would call the pro-Labor social justice liberal intelligentsia.

This is Professor Robert Manne's way of telling us that he's a left-liberal. A popular one, too, as he once topped a poll to decide Australia's leading public intellectual.

One of the other place getters in the poll was Michael Leunig. I discussed a while ago an odd feature of Leunig's politics, namely that he praises the Australian Aborigines for the traditionalism of their communities, whilst loathing the same qualities amongst white Australians.

As it happens, Robert Manne also holds to exactly the same double standard. There is something, therefore, about the left-liberal mindset in Australia which produces this strange inconsistency, in which Aborigines are admired for the very qualities which white Australians are damned for.

Let me give two examples of Manne's double standard. Manne recently defended the traditional Aboriginal way of life by referring to the work of white anthropologists who, Manne believes, observed:

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

It's difficult to imagine anything more out of line with liberal modernism. At the moment the bookshops are full of works by the liberal intelligentsia claiming that religion is a dangerous threat to humanity. Yet here the Aborigines are given a free pass to live in an enchanted world in which there is not only religion, but a world "soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual" and "pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning".

Why isn't the ethos of liberal rationalism and scientism applied to Aborigines?

Similarly, liberals have pressed for an ideal in which we are unimpeded in choosing who we are and what we do. We are supposed to be self-determining individual agents, who aren't constrained by unchosen forms of identity based on gender or ethnicity, or by traditional social roles or patterns of family life.

Again, Manne doesn't apply the logic of liberalism to Aborigines. Not only do they get to keep basic forms of family life and gender identity, they are even praised for having "an intricate social order, in which, through kinship structure, every human held a precise and acknowledged place".

It is almost as if there are two Robert Mannes. The one who faces white Australia proclaims himself a member of the "pro-Labor social justice liberal intelligentsia". The one who ponders customary Aboriginal life is drawn to the most non-liberal vision of society imaginable.

And there's more. In 2001, Manne defended the existence of traditional Aboriginal communities this way:

... if the traditional communities are indeed destroyed, one distinctive expression of human life - with its own forms of language, culture, spirituality and sensibility - will simply become extinct. Humanity is enriched and shaped by the diversity of its forms of life. It is vastly impoverished as this diversity declines. If contemporary Australians allow what remains of the traditional Aboriginal world to die, we will be haunted by the tragedy for generations.

If this is true, and if Manne really believes it to be true, he should apply it to all of the world's peoples, including Europeans. But he doesn't. When it comes to mainstream Australia the defence of "distinctive expressions of human life" simply disappears from view, to be replaced with an ideal of multiculturalism, diversity and open borders.

Again we have the two Mannes. One laments the possible destruction of traditional Aboriginal communities as a loss of a distinctive expression of human life; the other has laboured for, as a matter of justice, the destruction of traditional Australia and its replacement by a multicultural society.

I'll leave a consideration of why Manne's double standard exists to the comments. What I've really tried to show in setting out Manne's views is that left-liberalism must have a profound defect - if it didn't it wouldn't generate such disturbing inconsistencies.

Are we really like that?

In his most recent column, Michael Leunig reminisces about a summer trip he took as an 18-year-old to far north Queensland:

What I saw as we wandered northwards along the beaches and small towns was a beautiful remnant Australia - more innocent and organic and far more slow and peaceful than the land we know today.

Crumbling, yet luminous mental images remain to console and sadden me: a broad, shallow cove lapping into rainforest with indigenous families dragging nets at sunset, lizards and exquisite tree frogs clinging to hotel bars lit by dim bulbs, sugar towns being swallowed by flowering vines - the streets strewn with golden mangoes fermenting, enchanted architecture of lattice, tin and wood - delicately laced with peeling paint and richly jewelled with fireflies and butterflies - frangipani vapours and the slow, warm dripping of time in darkly rotting gardens - all engulfed in a deep, humble and intoxicating peace.

When I first read this I thought perhaps that Leunig was reaching beyond a purely political, abstract, theoretical account of the good, and was expressing something more real: a description of a deeper good as he himself had experienced it.

But abstract politics does intrude. Leunig goes on to lament the loss of the tribal rituals of the Walpuri Aborigines as follows:

Eighteen years more found me weeping alone in a remote cave in the Western Desert ... I had been led there by a Walpuri man who wanted to show me this sacred place where he was initiated into Walpuri law and manhood ... This was his country ... home of a profoundly spiritual people ...

In the cave ... for many thousands of years, young men in ritual had moved their dusty hands along the rock ... This gentle smoothing of hard rock had been going on in ceremony since way before the days of the ancient Egyptians or Moses.

My friend was part of the final group in this line of history to be initiated here; to learn all the truths of the land and masculinity ...

But it all came to an end in his time - and in my time also. The hands moving over the rock, the ceremony, the continuity and story - all ended ...

... a massive wave of grief swept over me as I realised the magnitude of what had happened: the utter tragedy and loss to us all.

This too seems to project a less abstract account of the good. There is a value placed on particular goods which are held to be significant to men: the continuity of a communal culture and identity; a masculine identity; a connection to place; a sense of ancestry; a love of country.

Unfortunately, in Leunig's case we have to assume the sentiment to be, at least in part, bogus. If Leunig really held such things to represent the good, then he would hold them to be good for all men, including his fellow "whitefellas".

We know, though, that he doesn't. Leunig typically presents the mainstream tradition not in terms of the sacred good, but as a uniquely evil manifestation of racism and xenophobia. For us he recommends not continuity and tradition, but a more culturally anonymous existence within a modern, diverse multiculture.

So it's still the case with Leunig that theory is driving the account of reality. This is what I complained to be too often true of liberal thought when I recently discussed why some liberals held traditional cultures to be colourless.

I'm not alone in observing this. In the current edition of Arena, Guy Rundle takes aim at his fellow leftists for precisely this fault. [Goodbye To All That, April/May 2007]

Rundle thinks that too many Australian films and novels are narrow political constructs and therefore fail to engage with how things really are. He complains that they "impose a series of authors' moral fantasies upon a world that varies utterly from it".

This is especially true, he believes, in the portrayal of more traditional peoples, such as the Aborigines, who are all too predictably presented as "people of nature, pre-political unity, and timelessness" - as "knowing grounded blacks" compared to "anxious, rootless whites". (Rundle here seems to catch Leunig out.)

Rundle has a theory for why the leftist cultural class came to miss the reality of things. He believes that from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, there was a successful Labor alliance between a sub-class of left-liberal cultural professionals and the working-class.

Although the politics of the left-liberals tended to cut across the values of the more socially conservative working-class, the alliance could hold early on because the cultural professionals weren't so dominant in Australian society.

However, by 1990 the value systems of the two groups had come into conflict. By the mid-90s the alliance was over, as the working-class shifted its support toward Howard.

But the artists never grasped this, and continued to present a "fantasy" that, rather than being politically isolated, they still represented the wider national alliance in exile.

Their artworks attempted to tell the big story but without recognising how things really stood. Rundle comments:

Reflecting back the world as their creators want it to be, such works can be profoundly embarrassing, impossible to defend ... Ultimately there is a degree of narcissism involved in them, the 'is' of Australian society disappearing before the 'ought' reflected back at the writers, for whom the revival of a national progressive project would also form a route back to a greater influence in national debates.

Without a grand historical project, left-liberalism had no place to put its emotional politics. Pre-modern peoples were turned to for meaning, in part because they represent a "perfect other" as their stable "frameworks of correspondence and meaning" are what is lacking in the life practices of media professionals in whose world "everything can be re-arranged and connected to everything else".

When Rundle writes of the left-liberal cultural class turning to Aborigines as "a key resource whose lives could be mined for meaning", it's difficult not to think, once again, of Michael Leunig. The Aborigines appear, in Leunig's writing, as a counterpoise to what we are not - to what we are missing. This not only involves a certain romanticising of the Aborigines, it also leads him to discount the place of what is traditional and meaningful in the lives of white Australians.

It's not a politics which goes anywhere. To prove his point, Leunig must show the mainstream as lacking the values he asserts in the "other". And then what? It becomes a case of running down the mainstream and building up the other. There's no creative purpose in it for the mainstream and for Leunig there is mostly the unhappy role of charmless critic.

Whiteness theorists hit back!

I've had a response to my recent series of articles on whiteness studies.

The body representing whiteness theorists, the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA), has a forum where the articles are being discussed.

Whiteness studies, you might recall, is based on the theory that the white race doesn't really exist, but was socially constructed as a means to exploit indigenous peoples.

I criticised the theory for its inconsistencies. However, if you read the three comments posted on the ACRAWSA forum so far, none of my specific criticisms are responded to. Instead, the line taken is that my criticism of whiteness studies only proves that I am desperate to avoid recognising my own "complicity": the unearned privilege I accrue from being fictitiously white.

According to whiteness theory, all whites are guilty of complicity. In her comments on the forum, Robinder Kaur, a Sikh woman working (studying?) at York University, tells us that for whites:

there is no "safe space," no haven of guiltlessness to retreat to.

Following this is a comment by an Australian woman, Veronica Coen. She tells us her own personal story of recognising her "complicity": before undertaking an Aboriginal Studies elective she thought herself to be "thoroughly non-racist". Then she discovered that her pioneering family had used Aboriginal labour on their cattle station and she,

began to recognise that my privilege as an educated middle-class white woman was directly attributed to my ancestor's theft of Indigenous land and their exploitation.

She then,

took a frightening journey into Australia's violent history ... The path was at times very distressing. My study journal was often wrinkled with tears

Which leads her to suppose that in resisting whiteness theory I too am struggling with complicity:

Clearly Mark is experiencing discomfort with the contentions about his white privilege.

Which is all a bit of a surprise to me. I'm not a teary kind of person, so I wouldn't feel "distressed" even if I accepted that "complicity" was legitimate. As it happens, though, I think there are good reasons to reject the notion of complicity outright.

Why? One reason is that complicity depends on the idea that the wealth and status of whites was taken at the expense of indigenous peoples. This doesn't seem likely. Aboriginal labour in Australia was only a very minor part of the economy; it was tiny, for instance, in comparison to white convict labour.

One of the most prominent Aboriginal leaders today, Noel Pearson, explicitly rejects the idea that the problems in Aboriginal communities are a result of loss of land or the exploitation of Aboriginal labour:

It seemed to me that the problems are pretty similar between communities that have never been dispossessed of their land - like in the western Cape York peninsula - and those that had been positively uprooted. It wasn't about poverty, and it wasn't about land, and it wasn't about the degree of trauma experienced in history.

Pearson blames a misguided transfer of welfare money into Aboriginal communities for the current level of dysfunction, and describes in comparison the relatively intact nature of the Aboriginal community he grew up in:

Everybody in Hope Vale of my generation or older grew up in a family, or household, where parents worked hard, the kids were looked after. They were bequeathed a real privilege.

And Pearson is exactly right to identify these social norms as a real privilege - something the whiteness theorists don't seem to understand.

Let me put it this way. The whiteness theorists want me to think of myself as enjoying unearned privileges. Yet my daily reality is one of hard work, both at my workplace and in my role as a husband and father. This is what adult men have to adapt to, and it's much easier to succeed in this if you have role models in the men around you.

This is the "privilege" I recognise: that the men in my family have a tradition of hard work, of commitment to family and financial responsibility. But this is not a "privilege" which inspires guilt or tears, but rather pride and admiration.

I admire my grandfather who started out laying railway lines, who pioneered a country town, and who worked two jobs up to his retirement to support a modest lifestyle for his family. I admire my father who has shown tremendous strength and stamina in maintaining long hours of work in a 45 year career.

And what else is a true privilege? Think of what Aborigines want. They want to maintain a sense of ancestral connection to the land and their culture. They want to enjoy a pride in their identity. They want a confidence in their future as a people.

Am I enjoying an "unearned privilege" as a white in such matters? Clearly the answer is no. Whiteness studies itself is part of a process in which such privileges are made illegitimate for whites. How can we enjoy such privileges when whiteness itself is treated as a fictitious category and when all whites are held to be inescapably complicit in an evil history of exploitation?

Which brings me to my final point. The attitude encouraged by whiteness studies is an untrue expression of our natures. It leaves an individual like Veronica Coen feeling hostile and guilty toward her ancestry.

Compare this to the case of Robinder Kaur, who wrote the comment on the ACRAWSA forum about whites lacking any haven of guiltlessness.

She is of Sikh ancestry. As it happens, there is actually a magazine called Kaurs edited by a woman called Robinder Kaur (I don't think they're the same person). This magazine celebrates the identity of Sikh women along the following lines:

The magazine will encourage the Sikh woman to rediscover herself in the light of the glorious heritage and current meritorious achievements of the Sikh community.

And how does the magazine think that people get ahead? According to the editor life is full of challenges, which leads to this advice:

... how to overcome these challenges and emerge as a winner? Hard work, confidence, dedication and, of course, the blessings of the Almighty are a sure recipe for success.

So we have one Robinder Kaur telling whites that they should feel guilty about their heritage and that their success is not due to their own hard work but to exploitation; whilst the other Robinder Kaur tells us that Sikhs should enjoy their glorious heritage and attribute success to their hard work and dedication.

Are we going to fall for the double standard? Will we accept the denatured view for ourselves, whilst others adopt a more positive, supportive stance?

I hope that most of us reject whiteness theory in favour of the more positive, life-affirming option.