Is not our current debate about the extent of our “compassion” towards refugees precisely what we ought to expect from a “post-racial” Australia? We’re essentially arguing over how Australia should deal with refugees as an unwanted surplus, without sounding racist.
The rhetoric of the debate is driven by an unstated, disingenuous demand: because we are the compassionate ones, we can demand a return on our generosity. That means we get to openly decide who is a good refugee and who isn’t – Christians are good, Muslims, not so much – without being accused of racism.
With this disavowal in place – of course it’s not racist to sort groups of refugees into deserving and undeserving – the debate suddenly becomes about who is truly marginalised and the virtues of Australian compassion. Such coding allows rightwing politicians to sidestep their usual conversation about whether Islam is toxic and suspect, and to instead talk about “compatible” cultures.
This is post-racism at work: a move beyond, and disavowal of, racism. So racism, while being a creature of the past we’ve left behind, has simultaneously played no role in shaping the refugee crisis we see today.
In many respects this post-racist mode of relating to refugees is a variety of what Paul Gilroy calls the new “culture talk” of the post-9/11 environment.
“Culture talk” is the “old racism talk” dressed in today’s politically sanctioned language about legitimate and illegitimate refugees, about jumping queues, and officially-compiled lists of what does or does not constitute “Australian culture”.
Instead of race being an indicator of “nature”, everything is about their culture, which becomes a marker of threat and inferiority in the same way coloured or black skin marked the old racism’s language.
“Culture” turns individuals and groups into bearers of a separate and menacing collectivity: for Australian Muslims, their nature is their culture. For instance, according to a recent piece by Australian columnist Henry Ergas, Muslims’ “racist beliefs are reproduced, day after day, in the home and in the bile distributed, with complete impunity, through mosques and social networks”.
The telling aspect of the post-racial is that presents itself as having drawn its lessons from the real racially-driven conflicts of the past. It actually has a distinctively anti-racist feel to it. As Ergas wrote:
Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland may fight, but their quarrels never invoke 16th-century differences on transubstantiation. Every day, however, Sunnis and Shi’ites butcher each other over who, in AD632, was the rightful successor to the Prophet Mohammed.
In reality, the Irish were considered to be a racially inferior people by the British. But this points to another post-racial trait: the foreclosure of history. Every complexity about the Other – history, politics, economics – is collapsed into “culture”. As Salman Sayyid argues, could we reduce the reason for the second world war to the British not liking Germans?
Of course not. But, that is precisely Ergas’ orientalist logic at play; an entire history of religion and complex regional politics reduced to the caricature of dense violent Sunnis and Shias disputing their identity in utmost intolerance, which then for Ergas is the training ground for Islam’s demonisation of non-Muslims, especially Jews.
The figure of the Muslim is vital for today’s post-racial racism without racists. As we are told again and again, Muslims are not a race; thus all openly-stated politically sanctioned discrimination directed at Muslims becomes thinkable and doable.
Because Muslims are not a race, “discriminating” against them when they become refugees is not racially motivated. Because Muslims are not a race, most themes we associate with previous expressions racism of can be brought back into style.
Because Muslims are not a race we can read an article that essentialises a group of people – “fanaticism”, “destructive spirit”, “the carnage hatred has created” – but places the word “moderate” in scare quotes when referring to Muslim clerics.
Because Muslims are not a race we can rehash the age old racist logic that, as the latest folk devil, they stand in the way of our “peace and security”. We can do that without being racist, while asserting that keeping Muslims away from our shores is “the government’s highest responsibility”.
In protecting the purity of the nation we recall the old antisemitic caricatures of evil Jews, whose suspect nature can be demonstrated merely by the depiction of Jewish food, music etc – more “culture”. Except that in the post-racial moment, such a character can be Muslim by name, in an argument about the essential nature of the Muslim’s anti-semitism.
The problem with all this is that the symbol of the refugee crisis that provoked our discussion over compassion, Alan Kurdi, is a Muslim. That too has been largely ignored, because not that long ago we were mired in a debate over, as Tony Abbott put it, the threat of Muslims flying over here and refusing to play for Team Australia.
For years Muslims have been relentlessly scrutinised for signs of “disloyalty” or alien attitudes to the point where it is acceptable to openly discuss ending or restricting Muslim immigration, or to raise spurious links between Halal certification and terrorism – or even refugees and terrorism, as was the case during the Tampa crisis.
All that seems to have been forgotten by all but the hardest rightwingers. Perhaps the “culture talk” is a kind of reaction, a defence mechanism, a way to convert the continual ugly rhetoric and wishes or old racist impulses about the Muslim threat into a debate about our nation’s opposite behaviour: our humanitarian compassion.
We thus discuss the refugee crisis and the situation in Syria and the Middle East not in the language of responsibility or consequence, nor international law, nor of history or even politics, nor through a self examination of what our role was (large or small) in helping create the conditions of the region, through our support of the “war on terror” and the Iraq war.
No, we have to forget all that. In the post-racial, we foreclose how much of our politics is premised on an us/them binary. That includes our compassion, which still contrasts the culturally inferior them against the superior, compassionate us.
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