The Work of White People in Dismantling Racism

Activism

30 Oct

Words by Eva Rose Addinsall (She/Her)

[Written on reflection post invasion day protest, 26th of January pre-covid]

Image originally from Aretha Brown’s Instagram

I will not believe that to be housed in a body that is black is to be dressed always in black for the funeral.
— Safia Elhillo, Self-Portrait with a Yellow Dress

I had never cried at a protest before.

It was invasion day earlier this year, I was dripping with sweat, most of it mine but a lot of it from the bodies beside me. I was just one of tens of thousands crowding outside Parliament House in Melbourne. I was listening to First Nations’ speakers pour out story after story of wrongful arrest, deaths in custody, children ripped away, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers — all trying to make visible what people like me, people with privilege for no reason other than the colour of our skin, couldn’t (or don’t want to) see. I had never cried at a protest before because I had never allowed myself to feel the pain of First Nations people and the hate and violence of my ancestors simultaneously. I could feel, in my body, the way in which that hate and that violence manifested itself in the institutions I am a part of. I could feel it in the assumptions I make and the privilege I have.

The privilege I have to have never cried at a protest before.

I could feel it and I could see the effect that it had on the Indigenous people mourning around me. I understood what it was to be born into this skin for the first time. An understanding of intersectionality can make it difficult to place ourselves and the ways in which we affect the people around us. For me, I realised that my skin made me, at best, an ally, and at worst, a barrier to sexual, economic, political and social liberation. An oppressor.

“When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realise that there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch.. . . Something’s going on here. I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.”

Audre Lorde, a self-described black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet was undoubtedly a proud, sexually and emotionally empowered woman. Anna Fearon teaches us that when your skin, hair and features speak before you even utter a word, when your body as an entity is policed, when your very being is politicised: then your pride is resistance. There is no doubt that there was resistance in Audre Lorde’s pride, and yet the white woman in this encounter couldn’t see it — and saw only what she had been socially conditioned to see.

This is the same lens that allows white protestors to be “very good people” and protestors of colour to be “thugs”. It’s the same lens that allows terra nullius to remain intact in the cultural and political imaginary. The same lens that allows forced child removals. The lens that sees January 26th as a day of celebration. The lens that doesn’t see deaths in custody. It is the dominant lens: blind eyes, white bodies.

We police black and brown bodies with our prejudice and our assumptions everyday. We protest against colonial policing without realising that we are the police. It is important to see the pain and the suffering and the trauma inflicted on black and brown bodies and that we feel the weight of our responsibility for it. It is only after we realise this that we can understand the power we have in being the bodies that this lens is lived through, and the role we must play in dismantling it. These systems might be able to control who we are, but not who we can become.

So, now — we need to see those same black and brown bodies as survivors. Survivors who are alive and living. Who are resilient and tender and loving and powerful. We must see that to be housed in a body that is black is not to be always dressed in black for the funeral. We have to rewrite the past in order to envision a future, because for generations black and brown bodies have been written out of both. The reason that we need sex educators is because we exist within a colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal structure, a structure that built shame into pleasure, passion and vulnerability.

We need to see and hear the anger at injustice - because to feel anger towards the oppressor is to perform an act of love. But when we hear constantly of violence and anger, we miss the fact that they are symptoms of a system that doesn’t let people of colour express any other reality.

Anger is an act of love, and so love is an act of defiance.

Love, passion and pleasure expressed by black and brown bodies aren’t weaknesses or pacifiers, they are a form of healing, activism and social justice. We must see and understand, because it is white bodies that built the structure and lens of shame, and it is white bodies who have the responsibility to dismantle it.

None of this writing is my own. Every word has been influenced by the counter narratives I’ve been digesting since I started looking at the system I was (and am) upholding and benefiting from.

Anna Fearon, Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, Safia Elhillo, Judy Atkinson, and every other marginalised body who has tried, knows that it is hard to write a counter narrative. It is hard to rewrite a history or envision a future that you have been erased from. This is why I am writing, and urging, for every non BIPOC body reflect on their role in this erasure, their role as a barrier between the present we live in and the future we can envision.

It will require feeling the ancestral hate and accountability, feeling the trauma and pain, but also feeling the liberation and the resistance. For me that all came together in protest, in demonstration— but it was infused with reading and asking questions, listening to stories. It has to be a constant daily practice. The path to reconciliation will be different for everyone, and there is power in that diversity. The system of policing bodies provides us with the constraints but also the strength to rise— we are united, together, unexpected. We must rewrite the legacies inscribed on our skin, so that we can all be proud of what it means to wear it. No matter the colour.