It's Not So Black and White: An Outsiders Observations on Racism in Australia

In this blog I will be making observations on racism in Australia.  I have to preface this piece by clarifying that:

• I am a New Zealander, which in the minds of a lot of Australian's automatically disqualifies me from making any observations about their country or culture (too bad!);
• I am indigenous, which for a small group of Australian's disqualifies me from having an opinion about any subject, 
• I've only lived here for two years (three if you include 1990);
• I am not racist or prejudiced against Australians... some of my best friends are Australian....
• Yes, I will be making sweeping generalised statements about Australia and Australians, but those of you are not racist will know who you are :-)
• Mostly importantly, I live in Brisbane, which most Aussies living south of Tweed Heads don't consider part of Australia at all, but some weird, backward place stuck in the 1950s.

Putting all that aside I believe that as an 'outsider', in being both non-Australian and Indigenous, I am able to bring a unique perspective to an analysis of racism in this country.

So, here are some observations that hopefully will cause debate:

Observation 1: casual racism

Most of the courses I teach at University in Brisbane focus on Indigenous justice.  A couple of times I have been asked by students 'are there any differences between Australia and New Zealand with regards racism'.  In my experience there is a significant difference in how racism is expressed in social settings and I explain it to them in this way: in New Zealand we have 'polite racism', here in Australia you have 'casual racism'.

To clarify the difference between the two sets of behaviour - in New Zealand if someone is about to make what might potentially be considered a racist comment they will preface it by saying 'I'm not a racist, but....', and then proceed to make a completely uninformed, racist remark about people of colour.  They make this comment not because they do not think they are racist (I suspect the majority know) but so they can feign hurt, shock and surprise if they are pulled up for their racist behaviour.  Another possible explanation is that they hope that the Maori or Pacifica guy who overheard them, the one built like the All Black front row, doesn't decide to pummel their racist ass.

Here in Australia, especially where I live in Central Brisbane, racists don't appear to be concerned about being pummelled - mainly because you see very few people of colour in social contexts here (by that I mean drinking!) apart from the odd Maori of Pacifica man who work in nearby building sites.  They see no need to preface their racist comments with a qualifier like 'I'm not racist, but...'.  Instead they just say it, and say it loud and proud: 'I hate Abo's, Wog's, Nigga's, Chinks, Maoris, Muslim's, Boat People'.. and occasionally, 'New Zealanders'.  I have heard it all and I have heard it often.

In a two week period last year an English friend and I counted four different occasions when we went out that we had a white Australian standing next to us or talking directly to us make these types of comments - always unsolicited.  The worst incident was when a Torre Strait Island friend and I went to a pub where two young Australian men and two Canadians had a competition to see which country's Indigenous peoples were the worst (the most drunk, violent, poorest, laziest, etc), judged by telling the best (as in the most racist) joke.  The funniest part of this incident was when they finally realised the two guys sitting next to them were 'brown', one commented... 'only joking guys', we aren't racist'.

I have a feeling that particular idiots mother is a New Zealander.

Observation 2: it is better to be white....if you stuff up

Sports is a big thing in Australia: If you are good at sport people will like you.  If you excel in Rugby League, AFL, Rugby or Athletics and Swimming  a lot of people will adore you.  So, when a sporting star stuffs up in some way it brings a lot of media and public attention.  My observation is this: how you get treated and how your behaviour is explained by media and sports insiders depends a lot on your ethnicity.  

This issue arose recently when a high profile Aboriginal AFL player was charged with a criminal offence while on leave in the Northern Territory.  Soon after an article appeared in a newspaper quoting a AFL club scout who said that problems such as this made clubs weary of contracting Black Fellas and that they were more attractive propositions if one of the parents was white.  The implications of this attitude is obvious: if a 'Black player' behaves it is because of his 'whiteness', if he is all Black, well....

Naturally these comments and the newspaper articles caused controversy and the AFL scout resigned.  Amongst all the commentary one thing stuck out for me, how come when white players misbehave, say abuse drugs, shag their team-mates girlfriend or wife (perhaps not 'illegal' but dodgy, unethical behaviour nonetheless), sleep with and use young women after making 'school visits', get drunk, fight, fall over, urinate in public, etc - all behaviours that are common in sports populated by young, fit, well-paid and well known men -  their 'whiteness' is never raised as an issue?  In comparison to Black Fellas, the poor behaviour of white sportsmen (yes, they are almost always men) is explained by focusing on them as individuals and never on their ethnicity.  I long for the day when I read the newspaper headline: 'White Player Behaves Badly'.

Observation 3: being Australian means being white, anything else is 'UnAustralian'

My last observation relates to the propensity for some white, middle class or wealthy, middle aged men to use the term 'UnAustralian' to criticise and silence a political view or action that differs from their own.

The first time I heard that comment was when the Federal Government talked about making Mining companies pay more taxes on their not inconsiderable profits (making them pay more tax = 'UnAustralian').  Aussie friends tell me the term has been around for some time, but is being used more frequently.  Since Xmas I have heard the term used against anyone who dares criticise the rich and powerful (more often than not mining magnates) and especially against the Aboriginal tent protesters for their actions on Australia Day.

As I said at the beginning of this section, the people who use this term most often come from a small section of Australian society.  What they appear to be saying is that unless you behave and think like I do, as a white, middle class or rich, middle age male, you are not truly Australian.

So, I would like to hand my second Bullsh*t Artist of the Week award to anyone who has used this term in the past, or in the future, in order to silence views and ways of life that differ from your own.

God help this country if this self-important group were to one day dictate how to live as an Australian.

Control Freaks and Criminologists

Control Freaks and Criminologists

The focus of this blog entry are non-Indigenous criminologists who build their careers on the backs of Indigenous peoples yet demonstrate little commitment to First Nation issues or engagement with the communities they write about with such authority.

One of the most influential criminologists in the world today is Biko Agozino, a Nigerian academic currently teaching at Virginia Tech in the US. I regard Biko as one of the key criminologists of the 21st century for a number of reasons, in particular the fact that he dares to speak truth to power, namely the discipline of criminology and the part it plays in the continued subjugation of First Nations peoples and other marginalised communities.  Biko's importance to the development of Indigenous perspectives on social harm/crime, and critique of Eurocentric criminology is beautifully captured when he asks and answers the question:

"What is criminology? A control freak discipline!"(Agozino, 2010).

Control-freak indeed: has any academic discipline (apart from psychology) failed so dismally to achieve what it tells everyone are its key objectives namely to 'understand and reduce crime'? When the celebrated Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University was set up in the 1950s, the British Home Office gave it the task of 'identifying crime and solving the crime problem', meaning that it had to identify the causes and discover a cure.  If that is what we were meant to be doing then by every measure the academy has been a dismal failure.  The same can be said of the disciplines main host, supporter and funder, government (yes, if government is the host, then the discipline of criminology is a parasite).

Throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st, we have offered ever more sophisticated theories of criminality and cures such as boot camps, tough on crime policies including New York's much praised (but greatly exaggerated) broken windows approach, longer prison sentences, ever more sophisticated prison regimes (for example, New Zealand's Integrated Offender Management process) community policing, militaristic policing strategies, conferencing and restorative justice, crime prevention through environmental design (for example, CCTV) and my favourite academic discovery of the moment, crime science. Anyone out there feeling any safer due to all these successful solutions?  Seen any significant reductions in offending rates? Of course if they are confronted with difficult questions like 'why do your scientifically-derived interventions not = meaningful, long-term reductions in crime', criminologists, clinicians, practitioners and policy wonks will invariably produce a small, localised evaluation of their pet project and say 'here, we reduced crime for this group over 12 months.....' or something similar.  Dig deeper and invariably you will find that those who designed the solutions manufactured (and often carried out) said research, or paid someone to do it for them while maintaining control over research production (a particular skill of the policy sector). One thing that can be said with accuracy about criminology is that it is extremely skillful in the art of self-promotion and self-preservation through making itself relevant.  And how does it make itself relevant?  Well, too often by kissing the backside of the state via gazing uncritically at its activities while gazing from afar at the life-world of First Nation peoples (Tauri, 2011: by 'from afar' I refer to the tendency of some criminologists to analyse statistics whilst sitting at their desks, then write with authority about the Indigenous context while getting no closer to engaging with us than staring out the window).

Of course I need to qualify the previous statement by stating that when I talk about the failures of criminology, I am referring to particular schools within the discipline often referred to as administrative criminology or positivist criminology. In short, these criminologies are characterised by a) a focus on issues, definitions (of crime), policies, etc deemed by the state to be important and worthy of empirical enquiry; b) take as their theoretical and epistemological (a word so loved by post-modernists that simply means 'world view') framework from dead white guys or live ones, that are sprinkled liberally over social and cultural contexts for which the said framework lacks explanatory power; c) 'job for the state', meaning take the Crown's coin and do the Crown's bidding; d) knowing little about the communities they research and write about, highlighted by the fact they prefer to use non-engaging methods (statistical analysis, written questionnaires, etc); and e) ignore or are uninterested in key issues for  marginalised communities like the impact of colonial dispossession, genocide, institutional racism and bias and the historical lack of meaningful infrastructural investment (see Cohen, 1988 and Young, 2011 for excellent discussions of these forms of criminology).

In neo-colonial jurisdictions there exists an even more virulent form of the criminology described above, to which I give the title Authoritarian Criminology. This form shares many of the identifying markers of administrative criminology highlighted previously, but is distinguished by:

• confining its criminological gaze to issues relating to state-defined ‘problem populations’, more often than not people of colour and working class youth, and issues without significant engagement with individuals or communities from these populations; and
• the utilisation of methodologies/methods that highlight Eurocentric knowledge construction  and ‘expertise’ devoid of meaningful engagement with First Nations, while silencing our methods of knowledge construction and dissemination through labelling them non-scientific, ideological and value-laden.  

This form of criminology can be called Authoritarian because it purposely seeks to ingratiate itself to the Policy Industry by isolating the Indigenous experience and voice and seeking to speak for us.  It perpetrates our disempowerment through its blindness to the role played by colonisation, genocide and institutional racism in ongoing Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system (or through focusing on individual antecedents of crime while sidelining structural drivers because they are 'unmeasurable').

Of particular concern to me is that there is far too much of this type of criminology happening in New Zealand and Australia at the moment.  Too often the work produced by this school is being peer reviewed and published in journals, edited books, etc, that are produced by like-minded colleagues, and without the necessary critical scrutiny of the First Nations about which these experts say so much (for those of you wanting to engage with this type of criminological material I suggest starting with Marie (2010), Weatherburn (2010), Weatherburn and a myriad of colleagues who provide exemplars of this type of work in the Australasian context).

Understandably the work produced by Authoritarian Criminologists is extremely popular with the mainstream media in Australasia, in part because it silences the Indigenous voice and offers simplistic statements on the causes of brown crime whilst avoiding nasty, complex issues like institutional racism, and the impact of neo-liberal social and economic policy on marginalised communities.  Remember, darkies behaving badly = revenue, and we can't let these people speak for themselves and offer informed commentary because they must be biased. Commentary must be left to outsiders, because after all they are objective aren't they?  The body of work is popular with policy makers for similar reasons and because its data is derived scientifically and practitioners don't ask political risky questions like 'what does the community want to do about this issue'?  For the very same reasons the work of Authoritarian Criminology is worthless to many Indigenous peoples.  Why?  Because it looks and sounds nothing like our experience of police, courts, prisons and the work of the Policy Industry.

It is imperative that First Nation commentators and practitioners take Authoritarian Criminology to task for the lazy, disempowering, culturally inappropriate research activities of its practitioners.  If you are doing this kind of research, then do us a favour and put aside your pretence at objectivity, because the fact that you choose to silence our voices while empowering yours through the use of non-engaging methods, invalidates this particular claim to authority.  Put aside your pretence at value neutrality because what you do as just as value-laden, ideological, and political as my commitment to Indigenous peoples and indigenous issues.  The difference between an Indigenous empowerment approach which I and the likes of Biko Agozino aspire to, and your approach, is we actually talk to First Nations and let them speak for themselves.  Try engaging with Indigenous communities in a meaningful way (with our permission and guidance); you might find it liberating to give voice to actual experiences and not just statistics.  

References

Agozino, B (2010) Editorial: What is Criminology? A Control-Freak Discipline! African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 4(1): i-xx.

Cohen, S (1988) Against Criminology. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.

Marie, D (2010) Maori and Criminal Offending: A Critical Appraisal, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 283-300.

Tauri, J (2011) Criminology and the Disempowerment of First Nations in Settler Societies, paper presented at the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: An International Conference, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 25-28 September.

Weatherburn, D (2010) Guest Editorial: Indigenous Violence, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 197-198.

Weatherburn, D; Snowball, L and Hunter, B (2006) The social and economic factors underpinning Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system, Crime and Justice Bulletin 104. Sydney: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Young, J (2011) The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity.

The Media, Politics and Darkies Behaving Badly

A few years ago I was driving the prominent and respected Maori lawyer (or as mainstream New Zealand media prefers to call him, 'radical') Moana Jackson, to a meeting in Hastings.  On the way he told me a story about a seminar he gave to a room of media workers (radio announcers, journalists, etc), most of whom were European, some of them well known.  Moana began his presentation by asking them an interesting question, did they recognise names such as the Chris and Cru Kahui and other Maori children killed by parents/relatives and care giver?.  Everyone in the room knew these names.  He then mentioned others, all Pakeha children killed by their parents, at around the same time, yet not one of the media present had heard of any of them.  He then asked 'how is it that you know of Maori children killed by whanau, but not non-Maori'?  Moana informed me that his question made many of the participants uncomfortable, with one asking him 'are you implying we are racist', to which Moana replied 'no, just putting that point out there for you to think about' (my paraphrasing and apologies to Moana for any inaccuracies).  I will go where Moana did not go that day and state that mainstream media reporting in New Zealand and Australia of First Nation issues, including crime, Treaty rights, welfare dependency, etc, etc, is often uninformed, poorly evidenced, biased and racist.

I expect the mainstream media's response will be to accuse me of playing the race card in order to silence their voices.  In response I ask when has any criticism, no matter how well founded and evidenced, ever stopped mainstream media from commenting on the Indigenous social context that, given how poor so much of the writing and commentary is, many of them appear to know little about?

Or the response might be that Maori commentators like me don't like uncomfortable truths being told about our communities.

So, let me kill off that rubbish right here: first, as a criminologist I am well aware of the damage we do to our own and to a degree alot of mainstream media lack, because I actually live in/research with, Indigenous communities.  But of course that direct engagement, the hallmark of good research in my experience, also makes me aware of the range of drivers and explanations for such behaviour; including individual proclivity, mental health issues, drug and alcohol abuse, histories of violence and abuse, institutional racism, violent/biased/over-policing, and long term impact of social and economic dislocation via the colonisation process (Tauri, 2004).

In other words, scholars who engage are aware of the complexity of the causes of the social ills facing First Nation communities, the multiplicity of drivers and the difficulty in constructing solutions in the messy context of the social world.  Although it has to be said that the creation of effective responses  might be made easier if the policy sector would stop making 'policy from afar' and work directly with communities to develop solutions, and cease relying on the importation of socially and culturally inappropriate interventions (Tauri, 2009).  

Secondly, I agree with many non-Maori commentators, including the venerable Michael Laws that we need to take ownership of the issue of violence/crime in our communities.  However, unlike Mr Laws, I know that some Maori are taking responsibility, something he would know himself if he left the radio booth and went and visited the Maori Women's Refuge in Hamilton that works with Maori women abused by men, and their male abusers, or the youth/social service providers like Mana Social Services in Rotorua, CART and Eugene Ryder who work with Maori (and non-Maori) youth offenders in Wellington.  If he and his fellow media experts were to engage with Maori in this way then perhaps they would stop making silly comments like 'what are Maori leaders doing about these issues'.  What Maori leaders (that includes all who work in this area and not just Iwi/tribal leaders) are doing is working...  they haven't got time to stop and educate mainstream media.  I suggest that  ill-informed journalists, breakfast show hosts and the like get off their backsides and go see what Maori 'leaders' and communities are actually doing... but please try not to get in their way while they are doing it.

Another response is likely to be a statement along the lines that they are simply reporting the facts.  Well if your facts are based on only ever telling one side of the story, or focusing your attention predominantly on brown people for a behaviour that occurs in all communities, then I stand by my claim of racism.  If you tell me that you are 'only giving the public what they want', then I say bullsh*t.  In any media outlet there is a process in place for selecting and managing the construction and dissemination of news (see Barak, 1994; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Sloan and Mackay, 2007; Valverde, 2006), and it is clear that in all Settler Societies (such as New Zealand and Australia) Darkies Behaving Badly = sales, revenue and readership, especially if the story is about crime.

Media responses to Raema Merchant's child abuse research

The story Moana told me came to mind recently when I read online and media responses to Raema Merchant's Masters thesis, titled Who are abusing our children? An exploratory study on reflections on child abuse by media commentators (2010).  In short, Raema argued that while Maori were over-represented in child murder statistics, a significant portion were still committed by non-Maori, but that media outlets predominantly focused on Maori victims and offenders. The media reaction was, as usual, uninformed, biased and vitriolic.  A classic example was posted on the blog CrusaderRabbit and described Raema's work (2010b) as 'dishonest and propogandist'.  And because she drew attention to the uncomfortable truth that non-Maori also kill their children, she must be racist.  The irony of such a rant is astonishing, and actually provides evidence to support one of the key issues Raema studied in her thesis: 'why do media focus so much on brown people who kill, and not other ethnicities'?

The CrusaderRabbit blog proceeds from there to state the obvious, that Maori disproportionately kill their children (although the writer somehow misses the fact that Raema acknowledges this point), while conveniently ignoring an uncomfortable truth, that 60-70% of New Zealand children are not killed by our people.  Similar stances were taken by other media and bloggers such as No Minister whose response was "So..... 80% of the population account for about half the child abuse cases. Stop trying to minimise the disgrace that is Maori child abuse by using the "they do it too" excuse. Master thesis without maths. Nice".  Actually it is No Minister whose maths is wrong, and just like the commentator on CrusaderRabbit, misses the crux of Raema's argument.  Nowhere in Raema's work (2010a and 2010b) does she minimise the damage we sometimes do to our children.  Instead, she asks the valid question 'why media, policy workers and politicians scrutinise our communities to such an exaggerated extent, while others are largely ignored'?

I am tempted to turn No Ministers question around and ask why it is that non-Maori commentators like him (I'm assuming from the style of writing that it is a male) and CrusaderRabbit are driven to deny the reality of non-Maori/brown people's rates of child murder and abuse.  I would like to ask these commentators why they are so keen to deflect attention away from Pakeha child/wife abuse and crime with the 'it's only the Darkie's that do it' kind of rhetoric and logic so often espoused by enlightened social commentators like Michael Laws and Paul Henry in New Zealand and Andrew Bolt in Australia?

In case any of you feel like reading the blogs and other media cited here, you might first want to read some of Merchant's findings and comments on the issue, such as:

• Almost 9000 children were victims of physical abuse between 2000 and 2008, yet only 21 became “household names”’ in the media.
• Just one-third of child deaths were reported in the press, and they were predominantly Maori cases.
• Merchant urged the public and media to focus on real problems of child abuse, rather than making Maori the “face of abuse”.
• “The real danger I have seen from a social worker point of view is that there are a lot of children being abused but as far as the public are concerned they only seem to know about the ones that are Maori".
• “Child abuse is a problem for all people, not just for Maori".

A Comment on Riots, Non-Riots and Bullsh*t Media in Australia

I would like to end this blog by handing out the very first 'bullsh*t artist of the week award'.  The winner of this prestigious award goes to Henry Ergas, a writer for the Australian for his coverage of the so-called riot that supposedly took place in Canberra on Australia Day (The Australian, 2012).

For those of you who don't know, on Australia Day in Canberra (January 2012) 200 heavily armed Aboriginal protesters stormed a restaurant, attempted to kill the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition, maimed and wounded 30 police officers with knives, guns, machetes and the like, resulting in 3 dead and 56 arrested.

Well, actually that didn't happen at all; but you would think so after reading the rubbish that a lot of mainstream media were reporting in Australia at the time.  The Australian and many other newspapers, radio shock jocks and the like continuously referred to the 'rioting, violent, aggressive' nature of the crowd, as did police when called on afterwards to explain their bizarre behaviour, which saw the Prime Minister being dragged out by police as though caught in a firefight with armed rebels.  What we saw on TV was a protest action, and nothing more than that.  Yes it was loud, and angry, with people shouting slogans, banging on windows and the like, but it was not a riot.

What occurred in some cities in Britain recently, violent clashes between protesters, youth and police involving weapons, death, the burning of businesses, homes, vehicles, looting... now THAT is a riot.  The same goes for the 2005 Cronulla riots involving an estimated 5000 people and on the first day resulted in 26 people being treated for injuries, violent clashes with police, arrests, property damage and such like (note that the Cronulla riots did not involve Aboriginal peoples in any significant way). Nothing of the sort occurred in Canberra on Australia Day.  

And yet in The Australian we have Mr Ergas comparing what happened in Canberra to Cronulla, when the two incidents are clearly dissimilar in both scale and impact.  However,completely exaggerating the Canberra incident is not THE reason Mr Ergas receives this award.  The reason is the stunning, illogical argument he poses that the Australia Day incident shows that Aboriginal peoples and their supporters received special treatment, based on the fact that no one was arrested.  He hints that this demonstrates 'how far Australia has come' in Aboriginal affairs.  Wrong on all counts Mr Ergas: firstly, the protesters weren't arrested because unlike events in Cronulla in 2005 and recently in Britain, participants were not rioting, they were not stabbing, shooting, impaling police or politicians or members of the public.  Nor were they setting fire to vehicles and buildings.  And lastly, the argument that the protesters were in some way protected from arrest because of their Aboriginality would be offensive if it was not so (unintentionally) funny.  My gut feeling is that many Aboriginal communities experiences of policing are vastly different from Mr Ergas.  If their experiences are anything like that of First Nation peoples in New Zealand, Canada and the US, then many Aboriginal people in Australia will tell you that police rarely pass up the opportunity to arrest them whether it is deserved or not.

References

Barak, G (ed) (1994) Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. New York: Garland.

Herman, E and Chomsky, N (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. New York: Vintage.

Merchant, R (2010a) Media representations of child abuse, in J. Te Rito and S. Healy (eds), Kei muri i te awe kāpara he tangata kē: Recognising, engaging, understanding difference: 241-244, 4th International Traditional Knowledge Conference, June 6–9. Available from http://www.traditionalknowledge2010.ac.nz/sites/default/files/NPM2010TraditionalKnowledgeConferenceProceedings.

Merchant, R (2010b) Who are abusing our children? An exploratory study on reflections on child abuse by media commentators, unpublished Masters thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North.

Sloan, W and Mackay, J (eds) (2007) Media Bias: Finding it, Fixing it. Jefferson (NC): McFarland and Company.

Tauri, J (2004) Conferencing, Indigenisation and Orientalism: A Critical Commentary on Recent State Responses to Indigenous Offending, keynote speech to the Qwi:Qwelstom Gathering: 'Bringing Justice Back to the People', March 22-25, Mission, British Columbia.

Tauri, J (2009) The Maori Social Science Academy and Evidenced-based Policy, MAI Review (June - available online).

The Australian (2012) Enforcing One Rule of Law For All, 30 January.

Valverde, M (2006) Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths. London: Routledge.