Publishing by request: This is the speech I gave at the Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair on the 12/8/17, complete with adlibs and edits included on the day. I want to thank the MAB for giving me this space and to all the wonderful people who attended on the day. In solidarity - CL
Before
I begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the
lands on which we meet today: The Wurrundjeri people of the Kulin
Nation. I would like to acknowledge their ancestors and pay my
respects to their elders; past, present and future. I would also like
to state that the Wurrundjeri have never ceded their sovereignty and
that we are on Stolen Lands for which a treaty or sovereign agreement
has never been negotiated. I therefore wish to acknowledge the
victims of massacres, rapes, land clearings and other such
governmental policies and I call for the due acknowledgement of these
atrocities and for compensation to be paid.
I
also introduce myself as an Arrernte woman whose lands include Alice
Springs and a good portion of the surrounding area. I come from an
area of “caterpillar dreaming” and this is evident through the
unique shapes of the McDonnell Ranges which surround Alice Springs,
stretching out in all directions. I acknowledge my grandparents:
Harold Liddle and Emily Perkins who are both kwementyaye (or no
longer with us) of which my father was their 7th child. I
also though acknowledge my mother’s side of the family who are
non-Indigenous staunch working class people who made up some of the
first mad Collingwood supporters in Melbourne. My grandfather worked
for the Carlton United Brewery for around 40 years, as did many of my
extended family.
Finally,
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the news yesterday of the
sad demise of the Recognise campaign. Many in the community are going
to miss the partnerships with human rights abusers such as Transfield
and nearly every mining company, the faulty survey results released
to the media stating that 87% of Aboriginal would vote yes to be
recognised in the invader constitution despite there being no
decisions at that point about what we’d actually be voting on, and
the fact that the government spent millions on a campaign designed to
assimilate us and negate our sovereign rights while concurrently
cutting half a billion dollars from our health, legal, and
educational programmes and further diminishing native title. I think
we should have a minute silence to remember Recognise....
So
I’m not good at off-the-cuff unless I am speaking to mob and I
apologise for that. The title of my talk today was deliberately
provocative and there are many reasons behind it. For starters
though, I wanted to point out that when I first started my blog and
had my first article published by Fairfax not six weeks later, I had
never heard of the term “intersectionality”. As my writing
continued to be published, demand continued to rise and I suddenly
seemed to gain traction though, I started seeing myself referred to
as an “intersectional feminist”.
So
how was it even remotely possible that I could go from not even
hearing about a concept to becoming some sort of expert on it? I hate
to say it, but initially it was actually a more socially-acceptable
form of racism along with a simplistic narrative around class. I was
intersectional merely because I ticked several boxes of oppression
due to my race, sex and gender, and my class background so it was a
way of naming, and at times “othering” my politics.
The
thing is though, I have never had any other way to conceptualise the
world. I’ve never been anything else but Aboriginal and if I had
the hide to forget it at times through my own perceived knowledge and
achievements, I was dutifully reminded by someone. I have never been
anything except for a woman and girl and though I actively rebelled
as a younger one against what I felt were the trappings of forced
femininity, again society would tend to pull me back into place. And
not only do I come from a working class family, but I have been
independent from the time I was 18 years old and mainly funded myself
through uni working and accumulating massive student loans which I
only really paid back a few years ago. So my life experience is drawn
from this, as are my base politics and it has been via my
interactions with others as well as through my journeys in higher
education where I developed the language to express these ideas and
experiences.
So
if I was going to be framed as an intersectional feminist, I had to
work out what the hell that meant to me. It could not be as simple as
being othered as a radical left voice who is also Aboriginal and a
woman. It could not be as offensive as a way of further marginalising
the marginalised voices in this country. But it also could not
dissolve into shallow identity politics where the ultimate prize goes
to the person who can identify as many groups outside the social
default of white, wealthy, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-aged
men. Because it’s never a prize. It’s a radical politics of
liberation based on the principle that the advancement of those on
the bottom rungs of society ends up benefiting others because to do
so requires the bottom-up systematic dismantling of the structures
which oppress.
My
first clue about intersectional thought came not from reading massive
chunks of texts about the kyriarchy or other terms which I’d also
never heard of, but from two simple passages from the Combahee River Collective Statement. This statement was written by a group of
radical black lesbians including the likes of Audre Lorde; a woman
famous for also coining the phrase “the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house”. The first passage is the
introduction and goes as follows:
We
are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together
since 1974. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process
of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing
political work within our own group and in coalition with other
progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement
of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively
committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and
class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of
integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major
systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these
oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we
see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the
manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
The
second passage reads as follows and struck me in particular due to
its final sentence:
In
"A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood," Michele Wallace
arrives at this conclusion:
We
exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for
the moment, working independently because there is not yet an
environment in this society remotely congenial to our
struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no
one else has done: we would have to fight the world. [2]
Wallace
is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists'
position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic
isolation most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom,
however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black
women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be
free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the
systems of oppression.
And
there I had it: the idea that true intersectionality is a
revolutionary movement. That it was based in the analysis of
structural rather than individual oppression. And if I was going to
be labelled as an “intersectional feminist” then I damn well
hoped it was the type that configured my theories in these particular
ways.
There
are obviously a couple of problems with taking this statement and
passage as a starting point from my perspective. For starters,
blackness in the context of this landmass forcibly called Australia
in an act of historical erasure via the declaration of terra nullius
is interwoven with Indigeneity. Yes, there are other black people in
this country and their experiences of racism in this country have
been abhorrent. But all beyond the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander people benefit from the denial of sovereignty of First
Peoples and this is the reality, regardless of how people found
themselves here. Hell, as an Arrernte living on Wurrundjeri lands, I
too am a beneficiary of these genocidal practices while concurrently
being a victim of them elsewhere in this country and this is the core
reason why I have long dedicated myself to the Indigenous struggle.
To
go back a little bit though, Australia’s unique history with
racism, to the point where it founded itself on a complete lie, is
the bedrock which forms all racist structures in this country. From
white entitlement, to current imprisonment rates to the continual
moral panics which happen when a new group of asylum seekers reach
these shores (if they are not sent to concentration camps first)
after we have assisted in bombing the crap out of their countries.
And let’s not forget the battles every single Australia Day.
I’ve
additionally long argued that awful government-made policy has a long
history of being trialled on Aboriginal people before it is rolled
out to other populations. Would we, for example, have Manus and Nauru
now if we had not had Rottnest or Palm Island or pretty much every
other Aboriginal mission ever created? What’s worse is that our
country has had the hide to partially inspire some of the most
repugnant laws across the world (for example, apartheid) then turn
around and criticise those regimes. Australians are awfully good at
telling me that America is so incredibly racist because of how they
treat African American people yet neglect to notice that Aboriginal
people are the most incarcerated people in the world and a Royal
Commission held into deaths in custody nearly 30 years ago has
essentially gathered dust as none of the recommendations have been
implemented and people like Ms Dhu are still dying; a domestic
violence victim who the police should have been assisting but instead
end up imprisoning because she parked her car wrong a few times.
Racism
dialogues from other countries do not translate well here. We are
pretty unique in the way we’ve approached racism. When lining up
against the American experience, Aboriginal people share the
dialogues of land theft, disease, massacre, colonial rape, rounding
up into missions, forced sterilisation, denial of knowledges and so
forth with the Native Americans. We share slavery, child theft,
exorbitant criminalisation, ghettoisation and so on with African
Americans. This is a simplistic and non-exhaustive list but in short
I am trying to say that the Indigenous experience here is framed both
by global experiences of Indigeneity and Blackness and Australia
exists due to our erasure so any racism experienced subsequently by
migrant groups, any entitlement felt by white people, is down to
this. An intersection between blackness and indigeneity – now
there’s a concept. It probably also explains why we can get twice
as many people to a Black Lives Matter in solidarity with the
American movement than we can to a rally on Indigenous incarceration
two weeks later. Race politics ends up one rung above on the ladder
if it’s not addressing the original racism here.
But
these are the intersections I never hear about. Almost exclusively,
when I hear talk about intersectionality, it refers only to feminism.
And while feminist thought has provided most of the theoretical
framework around it, it most certainly should not be a consideration
which resides only within the feminist movement. Because feminism has
been at the forefront of these discussions on intersectionality;
going all the way back to conversations held by the Combahee River
Collective or even here when arguments were breaking out between
white second wave feminists about abortion rights and Aboriginal
feminists countering with the fact that they were not even allowed to
keep the children they had to begin with; it does do it better than
most other movements. Apart from Indigenous spaces, women’s
gatherings were some of the first places I started to hear
acknowledgement of country as a matter of process, for example. When
I first started my blog, I was pretty convinced that the only people
who would read it would be other black women. I was surprised
therefore that it drew a broader feminist readership so quickly and
black men were reading it as well. Discovering one day that it
actually also managed to have a rather large anarchist readership was
another surprise, and as I’ve said before it was a penny-drop
moment for me as to learning where my politics actually sat apart
from left, Aboriginal and feminist.
But
to return to feminism and intersectionality. Despite the fact that
feminism has been the major movement to embrace and champion the
concept, I honestly cannot say that I believe it is doing it
particularly well. As alluded to earlier, a lot of my experience of
intersectionality within feminism has been just another form of
“othering” and inclusion via assimilation rather than subverting
the oppressive structures, challenging the systems and shaking stuff up. In my
more cynical moments, I start wondering if intersectionality is more
linked to ally status for white wealthy women than it is the
diversification of voices and the exploration of compounding
structural analysis. And like many who reside on the broader radical
side in most of my politics, I am pretty concerned by the
no-platforming and silencing which seems to be inherent in shallow
allegedly intersectional practice.
I
want to take a recent example from my own writing as an intersectional starting
point. It became known through various reports that a number of
Aboriginal girls in remote areas were missing school while they were
menstruating. The part which stuck out to most of the readers of this
article was the fact that menstrual products in these communities can
cost up to $10 which, when you’re from a severely impoverished
large family, can be the equivalent of a couple of canned dinners.
So
on seeing this news and reading my opinion piece on it, many sprang
into action. Lots donated pads and tampons to charities currently
working to provide these products to homeless people and branching
out into Indigenous communities. A few people contacted schools to
arrange deliveries. A Country Women’s Association branch in
Queensland; who had been working in collaboration with impoverished
communities in Africa; made a stack of reusable fabric pads to send
to these remote communities. People were suggesting crowd-funding
menstrual cups and the like. All of these efforts were wonderful to
see.
Yet
unfortunately, in their own way, every single one of them missed the
point by virtue of merely being a bandaid solution. They could
recognise the intersection between Indigenous, remoteness, poverty
and so forth but the answers were merely stop-gap and unlikely to
create better situations beyond a few months.
The
gendered cost on menstrual products making them unaffordable for
impoverished teenage girls and trans boys who menstruate is an important
factor of course. Under capitalism, people have found a way to
profiteer from many of our body’s natural functions and the fact
that they tend to profiteer the most from creating products to deal
with an occurrence that primarily effects women is bad enough. The
same profit margins don’t appear to be on toilet paper or tissues
and so forth. That the government sees fit to also profiteer off this
occurrence by chucking a tax on top of the profit margin is even
worse. That these products then have the prices jacked up further by
remote delivery and limited retail competition in these areas is the
icing on the highly expensive capitalist cake.
Yet
we could solve the problem of cost and provision through government
subsidies tomorrow and the rest of it wouldn’t go away. Why are
people in these communities so severely impoverished in the first
place? If we start with land theft – there has not been any
compensation for these stolen lands and barely any agreements on land
usage which, considering property owners of this country
contribute land tax when they purchase a house is pretty telling. The
time to pay some rent is well overdue, folks. Then we go on to forced
labour and unequal pay for Aboriginal workers which in some cases
lasted until the mid-1980s. That’s if people were paid at all and
of course we still have the fight right now for the return of stolen
wages which mysteriously disappeared into government trusts never to
be seen again. But hey, at least some of my ancestors got some flour
and tea for a hard day's work.
So
you take the inherited poverty and then add programmes such as
welfare quarantining due to the NT Intervention, for example. Now an
already woefully small financial entitlement via our social safety
net is untouchable unless it is being used to purchase certain items
in certain shops which have already jacked up their prices. It’s
easy to see why a $10 packet of tampons might not be as high on the
list for purchase as a $10 carton of milk. But then, we also have the
disgraceful “Community Development Programme” or the special
blackfella work for the dole. Suddenly, the people who are supposed
to be undertaking 25hrs per week of unpaid labour with no workplace
protections such as workcover, sick leave and so on for everything
from local councils to private enterprises are being cut off from
their welfare payments at a rate around 80% higher than everyone else
for alleged infringements which could be as simple as “arrived
late”. I mean, can we really trust private enterprises profiteering
off free labour to not be abusive? So when half the community is cut
off from payments and is suffering from hunger or malnutrition, and
the other half is having to prop up their extended family, exactly
who is going to be able to cobble some change together to buy some
pads?
Then
we come to the question of facilities. It was noted in the reports
that some of the schools these kids are not going to while
menstruating don’t even have functioning toilet facilities with
doors that lock for privacy considerations. This is despite building
works promised by the government under the NT Intervention.
Additionally, it is not uncommon for communities to be without
running water at all, and this is something I myself wrote about a
couple of years ago where an entire community was without running
water for four months. Access to washing machines or facilities to
rinse menstrual cups or soak reusable pads is also not a given
considering that we are, in a lot of circumstances, talking about
communities running on groundwater and mineral deposits regularly
render taps unusable. What’s more, the communities are not allowed
to just go down to Bunnings and fix the problems because their entire
lives are being sanctioned and so they can wait for several months
for a tap to be fixed and the cost of this ends up being in the
hundreds for a simple repair.
I
haven’t even gotten to cultural issues yet. There are taboos around
menstruation and partly this is inherited from white missionaries and
their teachings of the uncleanliness of such activities. Partly it’s
ancient taboos around gendered business. One of the most
condescending things I think I saw when I wrote this article was a
claim that white people don’t have social issues around
menstruation. My response was pretty much “well why do you call
menstrual items ‘feminine hygiene’ or ‘sanitary protection’
then?” Other taboos exist in some Indigenous communities on top of
this and while education and community support may assist in some
circumstances, not much can be done without having the facilities and
means to be able to work in more positive ways in the first place.
So
there you have it. It started with tampons, went to capitalism then
racism and gender politics and all of this is geared around the
denial of autonomy and self-determination. A shipment of pads is not
going to assist this. A smashing of systems of oppression to ensure
that Aboriginal girls (and trans boys who menstruate) are not
penalised for their gender and sex, their location, their race and
just in general is where we are left at the end of the day. Analysing
all of these elements at the same time to see how these girls have
less access than impoverished people in the cities who have less
access than mainly women but also transmen and non-binary people in
cities who are additionally wealthy but who are financially penalised
compared to wealthy white blokes and ensuring that liberation occurs
at that critical end first is precisely what intersectionality should
be.
This
is all a roundabout way for me to get down to why I think
intersectionality ends up being shallow. This is controversial but
for me, intersectionality has utterly nothing to do with being a good
ally. When a woman of colour from a community which practices FGM is
trying to talk about the cultural imperatives behind this and is ends
up being silenced because someone decides to talk about the
fundraiser they’re running to raise money for women in some region
nearby, this is not being intersectional. Including a couple of black
women on a panel then referring to them only for “special comments”
while assuming that they couldn’t possibly have anything else to
say, such as what happened to myself and Roxane Gay on a panel a
couple of years ago at what is supposed to be one of the premiere
feminist festivals, is not being remotely intersectional.
No-platforming is not being intersectional either. Protesting is great and should be actively encouraged. But when you’re an ally and
you’re trying to convince a person from a marginalised background
that someone else should not be listened to or have a voice when that
marginalised person has had to fight tooth and nail to gain any
traction in the first place, it’s rarely going to work. The answer
is to instead promote the voices of the oppressed.
I’ve
read some hardcore stuff in my time written by radical feminists.
Some of it has been actively racist, other has been transphobic.
Likewise, I have read hard leftist theory that has been orientalist,
or downright sexist. I’ve read radical Indigenous rights theory
which has been separatist, has been sexist and has been devoid of
class analysis. Yet despite all of this, what I learnt from every
single one of these was the art of structural analysis and that is
not something I have ever been able to gain from liberal analysis
which to me reads like choice politics and the art of assimilation.
Yet
as I said, intersectionality often seems to be the sole preserve of
the feminist movement and this shouldn’t be the case. My “other
life” as people know is the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Organiser of the National Tertiary Education Union. I
additionally serve on the Women’s Action Committee of the NTEU as
it was pretty much a hard ask to keep me off it, if I’m honest. And
I feel exceptionally privileged to work for this union because it is
one of the few which has driven a strong Indigenous sovereignty
agenda. It has also been at the frontline of many women’s rights at
work struggles and was one of the first to introduce domestic
violence leave as part of enterprise bargaining. It also has a
commitment to academic freedom and is not affiliated with the ALP and
that independence and respect for discussion has created an
environment which has seen my external voice supported in ways it
wouldn’t be elsewhere.
I do
love a good solidarity protest and it’s a rare occasion that I
don’t make it out to actions being taken by other unions. Yet at
times, I realise when in this environment just how much cotton wool I
am wrapped in. There’s nothing quite like hearing a male official
from another union blame domestic violence on the capitalists because
they’ve cut their workers’ wages which leads to stressed and
angry blokes. There’s nothing quite like hearing another official
claim that they are going to “fuck the bosses up the arse” while addressing a picket line.
I
also cannot tell you, as a unionist and Arrernte sovereignty
activist, just how much a campaign about saving “Aussie jobs” or
keeping “Aussie jobs for Aussie workers” does not appeal to me,
particularly off the back of unsavoury union support for the White
Australia Policy and their blind eye to exploitation of Indigenous
labour for so long. Perhaps I’m also too internationalist to be
able to deal with hearing workers on a couple of dollars a day being
talked about as if they are competition rather than heavily exploited
comrades. Oh, and if I hear about “the lads on the line” or about
“Smitho’s missus who was crucial to our campaign” but who
apparently does not even have a first name, I think I will scream.
Male-dominated unions are still seen as the real workers which we are
all supposed to support yet getting them to actually mark
International Working Women’s Day on the 8th of March by
walking in solidarity is continually like pulling teeth.
Yes,
the union movement could be a hell of a lot more intersectional in
its approach. As could the left, including the radical left. There
will be no workers’ revolution in a society where women are still
secondary and are expected to pick up all the caring
responsibilities. We will not be overthrowing any class system if we
are willing to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of non-white
labour, both here and internationally – often for our own
capitalist benefit and sense of entitlement. There is nothing
inherently revolutionary in covering up rape culture, or treating
women like crap, or fostering racist environments. It’s just the
destruction of the class system and the collectivisation of
self-managed labour for the privileged few.
Finally,
and I have left this one until last because it is the most difficult
to talk about in a country which was built on the racist bedrock
mentioned earlier, but Aboriginal rights needs to get more
intersectional as well. It’s a difficult discussion to have
additionally because in this country we are continually having to
defend our culture because it has been under attack since 1770. It’s
a friggin tough spot to be in.
In
fact, naturally we are forced to do intersectionality to an extent
anyway due to being a severe minority so I do find some aspects of
diversity which are more readily embraced in an Indigenous context
than other fights, but we still have some ways to go. I think, for
example, we tend to account for disability better than other rights fights,
but when elders are the senior people in your movement and when you
have significantly higher rates of disability and health issues than
other communities, necessity drives this more than revolutionary
politics. I think we have also been more accepting of sexuality and
gender diversity to an extent, though when I am having to refute
statements made by conservative Christian Aboriginal groups against Marriage Equality, I have to wonder if I am correct on this
matter.
Then there is the celebration of the creation of the "Aboriginal middle class" by some of our moderate and conservative commentators - as if this is something to be proud of and not just assimilation while leaving our most vulnerable behind.
Gender
politics comes up often though, and it’s a battle I see playing out
in so many ways. From traditional ideas of gender equivalence meaning
gender equality or arguments of matriarchal societies; which exist in
some cases but in others what is meant is that there were strong
women in patriarchal societies along with matrilineal inheritance structures. As we keep trying to tell white people, we are not a homogeneous cultural group and differences exist from one end of the land mass to the other. Then
we have contemporary sexisms. I mean, according to the theories of
intersectionality, an Aboriginal man has at least one less structure
of oppression holding him down than an Aboriginal woman. While we
are seeing this play out constantly in white society where the
“Aboriginal voice” has been dominated by conservative black men
because they are the least threatening to the status quo, we also see
it play out in our communities.
I
will never, for example, forget seeing that statement put out by the
Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance last year, I believe. In it,
they pointed out to the many people who had been contacting them to
stop referring to them as “brus” or asking if you “brothers
needed any assistance” because they were a collective of mainly
young Aboriginal women. These young women had been shutting down
Melbourne for months, they had put their bodies on the line, they had
dealt with the police yet somehow, despite them being so visible, a
disconnect happened with many community members where it was assumed
that such revolutionary actors had to be men.
Worse still was recently when Sam Thaiday made a concurrently racist and sexist
comment on the Footy Show where he was asked about his preference for
women and he claimed that he liked “jungle fever” when he was
younger but “white was right” now. I have utterly no interest in
the sportsball whatsoever which is my key failing as an Aboriginal
person, apart from my vegetarianism and my loathing of country music,
of course. But naturally, there was a strong community reaction to
this with many expressing their disgust with Thaiday’s comments and
making statements in support of Aboriginal women.
This community reaction was wonderful to see except for one small detail: so many of these
comments ended up replacing Thaiday’s sexist comments with more
socially-acceptable sexist comments. As a single Aboriginal woman who
is not a mother, I don’t want to hear about how I am the life-giver
of our community. I don’t want to hear how I’m behind some man
giving him strength. I am not a nurturer and as someone with a fucked
back, I’m also no one’s backbone. Yet continually, we saw these
comments and we’re supposed to be thankful for continually being
cast as the support act in the community, even though we’re leading
protests, we’re challenging systems, we’re contributing thought
and we are basically doing a lot more things than what we are given
credit for. And we’re doing so while experiencing violence at rates
38 times higher than any other women. While we’re dying and the
alleged justice system cannot even be bothered charging our killers.
So
after all that, I guess I had better get to some closing points. I
believe that the politics of intersectionality is inherently
revolutionary and indeed, I feel that within movements such as
anarchism, where autonomy and collaboration based upon mutual aid and
respect are core values create a natural fit for intersectional
politics. I certainly believe this is why I see so many revolutionary
Aboriginal people self-identifying their political leanings as anarchism
and it’s why I feel that I myself seemed to just fall into that
barrel without meaning to. Though let’s be honest, there’s little
chance of an Aboriginal person trusting the system anyway…
But
when it comes to intersectionality, we have to be incredibly careful
because without that strong structural analysis, without that
commitment to the rights of other human beings and the notion of
equality for all, without using privilege to elevate the voices of
those who have less rather than talking over them in the name of
being an ally, it runs the risk of being identity politics doomed for
nothing more than circular games of oppression Olympics. Our actions
be driven towards the identification of the systems of oppression and
the clearing of the obstacles to allow diversification of discussion.
We’re doing nothing if we talk revolution but continually promote
white men and their tactics as leaders. We’re just reinforcing the
new status quo. Thank you.
