Concerning Racism and Racialism

Concerning Racism and Racialism

Notes on Marcia Langton’s The Quiet Revolution. Indigenous people and the resources boom. Boyer Lectures 2012. ABC Books. Harper/Collins Australia, 2013.

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

On her own evidence, and by her own intention, Marcia Langton’s The Quiet Revolution  lectures have aroused a good deal of consternation. Though they are informative and interesting on the history of land rights, on Aboriginal relations with mining companies and on the period of struggle leading up to these successes, she at times expresses confronting views and also, to identify this potential hurdle right at the start, makes some surprising generalizations. There is, for example, her implied assertion that Aboriginal people do not make mistakes, that there could have been no trial and error in managing a new land and its resources on the part of the first human settlers tens of thousands of years ago. I would consider this to be a “racist” approach, if racism is defined as attaching absolute values, be they negative or positive, to human biological characteristics and thus dehumanizing people. Biological characteristics are unchangeable while the essence of being human is that you have an almost limitless potential to make choices and change yourself and the world. Aboriginal people are human and they are therefore of necessity not infallible.

Tim Flannery’s theory that humans who lived in Australia forty-five thousand years ago probably caused the extinction of Australia’s mega-fauna is more than once mentioned by Langton as an inexcusable insult to present-day Aborigines. Theories of this kind about prehistoric times are always hypothetical and subject to revision in the light of new or newly interpreted evidence. On the other hand nobody, least of all Flannery, would dispute that the choices modern man has made, and Australian settlers are prominent here, have also been responsible for extinctions. Humans make choices, and some of them will have results we now understand to be unfortunate. As curators of the land, the Aboriginal people made a great many good choices and that has been widely acknowledged. Whether such curatorial expertise could always be handed down intact to later generations is another question but the land management agreements which government bodies have entered into with Aboriginal people (Langton has the better part of a lecture on this) suggest that indigenous knowledge is still or again highly valued. What particularly riles Langton is what she interprets as Flannery’s view that white scientists and national park regimes are better and more reliable at conservation than the traditional owners for whom the land might, presumably, have many uses. Langton reminds us that “wilderness” areas had actually been managed by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years and are pristine only because they, rather than white people, have cared for them. She also points out that “Aboriginal people have dedicated more than 30 million hectares of their own land to environmental and biodiversity conservation” (113) and have agreed to manage it in close cooperation with white conservation authorities.  

Theories like Flannery’s concerning the extinction of Australia’s mega-fauna soon after the first arrival of humans, whether right or wrong, can be used as political ammunition. Flannery himself, as he plausibly protests, does not do this although Langton insists on suspecting him of it. One obviously cannot censor scientific discussion because its findings or hypotheses could be used politically and offend someone as  “racist”. Marcia Langton’s lectures are peppered with accusations of “racism”. There are of course, among other things, personal reasons for this; she mentions having experienced racial discrimination herself. But she goes further. Among other things she makes the extraordinary accusation that beside the “racists in the ‘green’ movement” and the “grazier activists” there are at present still “advocates for Indigenous genocide” (23).

Of course it cannot be denied that Aboriginal people have a great deal to complain about. They have been treated abominably by white colonizers in more ways than is possible to enumerate. But whether this behavior can be usefully defined as racist is a different matter. Racism is probably the crudest of all ways of conceiving difference. There were, and still are, genuine ethnic differences between white and Aboriginal people; they had a different culture which implies different ways of perceiving the world. Their traditional land management, cosmogony, laws governing social interaction, as well as the structure of their economy and their language are among phenomena that can be studied; ethnology does not regard such differences as essential but as evolved in the context of particular living conditions. For a while it was fashionable in Australia, following Lewis Henry Morgan, to impose upon prehistory a timeline, stretching from savagery through barbarism to civilization, that gave support to racialism. But this is no longer accepted, just as eugenics, an attempt at a scientific justification of racialist and biological evaluations of human difference, has been shown to be without substance. – There were, of course, also religious differences between white Christians and traditional Aboriginal people. Here the Christians often set out with rigidly supremacist views. But ultimately, these too were shown to be subject to argument and review; religions can be compared and chosen. – Finally, there were what one might call class differences between white people and Aboriginal people who traditionally had fewer material possessions than the settlers, also less destructive weapons, quite generally less power. We can have opinions about the way of life of traditional Aborigines and there have always been admirers and detractors.

But once racist standards are imposed, all comparison and argument is halted. People are placed in a category that is meaningless with regard to anything but the crudest of judgments: I am superior, and you are inferior because you are biologically different from me. That leads to the inevitable reciprocation: you are morally inferior for calling me inferior. Racism leads on to invective and people who use it cannot be unaware that their remarks or actions along with the angry responses these provoke, are merely weapons in a fight. Almost anything can serve as ammunition here. Australian governments now ban racist talk and behavior just as they ban knives and guns.  

Throughout history, racism has usually gained dominance when there were economic and power interests at stake. I would tend to agree with Langton’s comment: money does make the world go round (60). To peacemakers the nature of the weapon will always be of less interest than what the fight is about and in my view there has always been too much attention on racism and too little on what provokes it. Langton joins in the racist melee and ecologists like Flannery, whose concerns she perceives to be a threat to Aboriginal hopes of prosperity, are in the front line of fire. At stake is a potential increase in Indigenous power and independence as brought about by the Mabo ruling in combination with the mining boom: a unique opportunity white machinations might thwart. One unfortunate effect of racist exchanges is that they tend to disguise the real issues and thus make it harder to find rational solutions for genuine problems.

The traditional Aboriginal way of life of the ancestors has all but disappeared today and Langton does not mourn it. For her it is out of date and will hold Aboriginal people back if it is not discarded. There are of course both black and white people who do mourn its passing and believe that the value systems underlying this ancient way of life are still of considerable interest. Sustainability, for one, is attracting growing attention. A culture in which the traded values are knowledge and artistic expression rather than material goods may also seem a desirable alternative to people who are concerned about the wastefulness of our modern civilization of limitless economic growth and its effect on the climate of our world. Aboriginal organization of a peaceful, law-abiding and at the same time, to use W. E. H. Stanner’s expression, “militant” society is of interest. The wide distribution of responsibilities within a tribal group so as to utilize all talents and avoid any usurpation of power will seem desirable to some, particularly those appalled by the dictatorial potential of western civilization. Educators have drawn attention to the teaching methods that Aboriginal elders employed. Some form of initiation for young men can seem a useful practice in an age in which men often feel they have lost their pride and their distinctive purpose in life. The respect for the wisdom of elders that comes with a knowledge culture and that runs counter to fast-moving modernity with its emphasis on youth is an attitude that can arouse nostalgia and seem to correct social imbalances. All these values would have to be adapted to modern life in order to become effective today; they are ideas that can lead to regeneration, in the way that new ideas have always been generated when cultures meet and come to terms with each other.

It is absurd for Langton to claim that those who value such ideas are in the habit of insisting that Aboriginal people must for ever remain “noble savages” and be denied the right to participate in the modern economy, or that admirers of a bygone way of life determine government policy or Aboriginal self-perception. (They might, of course, influence tourism programs, often a source of income for Aboriginal people.) Why should there not be an exchange of values, a cross-fertilization, with both groups moving ahead and renewing themselves? Certainly, white respect for Aboriginal ideas is overall

more likely to work to the advantage of Aboriginal people than to hinder them and hold them back, as Langton claims. It is quite unreasonable to accuse people like Flannery, crusaders for the health of the earth and thus the survival of our human civilization, to be plotting to short-change Indigenous people. Langton’s fury at “Greenies and wilderness campaigners” derives, as said, from her aggressive desire to protect what she perceives as Aboriginal economic and property interests with their liberating potential; she seems convinced that only a strong right-wing political engagement can defend them. No one with any sense would want to deny Langton the right to prefer personal affluence and an economy of growth to traditional indigenous values; and it is likely that many long deprived Aboriginal people will share her orientation.  All the same, there are also still people interested in Indigenous cultural values, among them white people who would welcome opportunities for discussion with committed and knowledgeable traditional elders. It is now, of course, also possible to get much valuable information from books, often written or co-authored by elders. (Karl-Erik Sveiby’s and Tex Skuthorpe’s collaboration Treading Lightly. The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People can serve as an example among many.)

As the sub-title suggests, most of Langton’s lectures focus on the recent mining boom across Aboriginal lands. She describes the exploitative approach of early mining ventures and indicates that she herself had a role in negotiating fairer agreements. This is an interesting story and her contribution as an activist and professional demands respect. The change of direction initiated by powerful fair-minded mining executives like Brendan Hammond, which she acknowledges gratefully, also deserves to be honored while the opportunities made available by the Mabo decision, which ultimately gave Aboriginal people the right to negotiate with mining companies, were of course of the utmost importance here. But contrary to Langton’s assumptions, my experience is that most Australian “tax-payers” today, particularly in the south where day to day conflict with Aboriginal people has long ceased, are unlikely to begrudge remote  communities any opportunities they may have to support themselves; that does not mean that there aren’t also some responsible citizens who are worried about aspects of the mining boom. It is hard to understand whom in particular Langton’s bitter accusations could refer to unless she is simply hitting out generically at the descendents of colonizers, still presumed to be intent on depriving all Aborigines of any means of advancement. Langton’s suspicions are of course not without a basis; historically, that has been the way things were all too often done.

It needs, however, to be said that for most of post-colonial history, white Australians have been genuinely confused about how to judge their takeover of the continent. Should the criterion be, for example, British law and the intentions of the British parliament, or colonial practice in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, or ancient indigenous rights to the land, or the best man for the job and a sensible use of the resources of the world, or the prize won by brave explorers and enterprising pioneers, or the brutal rights of conquest, or the now customary rights of a settler nation? Today most of us seem to agree that the only approach we can all live with successfully as citizens of one nation is one based on fairness, decency, equality and humanistic values; but vestiges of older attitudes and bitterness obviously remain.

The mining boom with its creation of jobs and business opportunities and its royalty payments, which Langton welcomes so enthusiastically, has been good to some, but is less likely to be a quick fix for the welfare dependence and substance abuse problems entrenched in so many remote communities, problems that the Federal Intervention and Aboriginal leaders like Noel Pearson and Alison Anderson are attempting to deal with. Langton has very little to say on this topic here. It is, in a sense, a legitimate omission because there are now two distinct groups of Aboriginal people: the emerging well-earning, assimilated, but in its most creative proponents still culturally committed middle class, with whom she proudly identifies and to whose considerable achievements she devotes her last lecture, and the remote area welfare recipients whose problems often almost defy solution.

Sadly, Langton is right when she speaks of “the tendency of the settler state to destroy or control or warp any Aboriginal initiative” (131). It can still be hard to work out what is well-meaning clumsiness, what stupidity, what blind tradition, what bad faith and what intentional destructiveness when it comes to the management of Aboriginal affairs. While we should attempt to avoid conspiracy theories, the frequency with which supposedly benign initiatives have ended up being injurious to Indigenous people is uncanny. (Peter Shergold only recently admitted multiple administrative failures in The Australian, 8-9 June, 2013.)  Even the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response, with its often hamstrung white administrators, its expensive and minimally productive white tradesmen, and its refusal to give the targeted people any agency, is seen by some to be so poorly designed that it goes a way towards boycotting its own purported efforts.  Today’s official intentions are not quite as obvious as when the Bjelke-Petersen government, as Langton reminds us, made a point of buying up and gazetting as National Parks all lands which Aboriginal groups had an interest in acquiring, citing a 1972 Cabinet decision: “The Queensland Government does not view favorably proposals to acquire large areas of additional freehold or leasehold land for development by Aborigines or Aboriginal groups in isolation”(110).

Langton speaks of the “racialist tendencies in this society” but I would argue that it becomes obvious here that race has always been only incidental, a convenient excuse. What Australian governments were really worried about was any suggestion of a return of conquered lands, any reversal of the almost total loss of control over their lives that Aboriginal people had suffered under the colonizing regime, any slightest increase in power. It is the stance of an intransigent and fearful conqueror who still sees the subjugated indigenous inhabitants as unwelcome outsiders and potentially dangerous rivals, and this even after they have been officially declared citizens with full voting rights; it is a stance frozen in time. Before the courts stepped in with their Mabo decision, there had clearly never been any genuine intention to share the land on the part of white settlers. Any proof of competence by Indigenous people was always swiftly undermined. Australian governments knew from very early on that racial inferiority was not the true reason for Aboriginal exclusion but the last thing they wanted was for this to become public. When Langton emphasizes racialism, she is in effect giving support to a fallacy with which some Australian people still like to justify their takeover. The reality was always more sinister, for it involved not just the quarantining of a supposedly “primitive” people, incapable of fitting in with modern society, but until fairly recently the ongoing and at least partly intentional, unprovoked damaging of a rival people, a low-key version of genocide on behalf of the settler nation. It is not surprising that Langton welcomes the opportunities the mining boom has given her and others to catch up economically and join the middle classes, a goal which they have shown themselves, as she herself proves, to be eminently capable of achieving.

So where does Langton stand as an intellectual, as a spokesperson for her people, and as a political leader? She has been accused of being too close to the mining lobby. Revelations of undisclosed funding from that quarter could appear to support this. Langton’s commitment to mining may have sounded less strident but hardly less fervent if she had not had that motivation. To me, it seems a shame that she used Australia’s most prestigious lecture series, listened to largely by reasonable and sympathetic intellectuals, to launch a bitter attack against the likes of them and above all against anyone she believes could be an environmentalist. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know how alienated an Indigenous intellectual can be. Langton’s lectures at times sound triumphal, as though she were convinced that the mining bonanza is enough to tip the balance of power in favor of the “first Australians” (also the title of a TV series directed by Rachel Perkins to which Langton contributed), to give them independence from governments and paternalistic helpers and eventually solve all Indigenous problems.

But one can’t help feeling that she has a disregard for the less fortunate and the severely damaged among her people; perhaps she sees them as a problem to be tackled at a later time, maybe once the new middle class has established itself. Even if one agreed that, to achieve reform, the initial emphasis needed to be placed on building up the economic viability of Aboriginal communities, it may be simplistic to give so much redemptive weight to one sector of society, though mining is of course currently an important employer and financier in the outback. But listening to and reading these lectures, I could not discern a long-term and inclusive strategy in them; rather, the envisaged goal seems to be individual liberation and success within modern white society for those strong, fortunate and gifted enough to succeed. It almost appears as though Langton still needed to prove to herself and others that Aborigines are, if properly educated, as intelligent and competent as their white conquerors and their white relatives, a fact that was, by all accounts, obvious even in Governor Phillip’s day.  

All the same, I would agree wholeheartedly with Langton that it is essential Aboriginal people be far less often dictated to by governments. Whether solicitous or hostile, governments work with clumsy tools; they also have to keep an eye on their voters, most of whom are not Indigenous. In this country, voters are moreover always convinced that, much like “god”, “the government” has the primary duty to work for their individual personal advantage; the public good is not often evoked. Governments have, however, as Langton acknowledges, been useful at legislating for Indigenous rights. In contrast to the machinery of government and its bureaucracy, with which Langton, like others, is extremely frustrated, Australians in their private capacity tend to be warm and helpful, a resource to be drawn on by anyone in need. I think it is important to make these distinctions.

There can be no doubt that Indigenous people have to find ways to participate in the real economy. For that, education will always be crucial. Where mining companies reach their limits, employment opportunities and training can presumably also be provided or mediated with the assistance of other enterprises or even helpful citizens. The benefits of friendly contacts with the broader population, which would include a better and wider understanding of Indigenous needs and thus less racism or indifference, should not be underestimated. It is often hard for non-Indigenous Australians to know how they can contribute. (The organization Indigenous Community Volunteers comes to mind as having found a workable formula.) The descendents of colonizing settlers may not deserve forgiveness but it would be better for our country if they were offered it anyway. If we are to be a reconciled nation, we must become acquainted with each other and work together, rather than avoiding and disparaging each other. One side of Langton seems to want to blame and reject, while the other would like to merge and be accepted. Most Aborigines today, and particularly urban people, have, of course, been born into both black and white worlds, though the white has never welcomed the black. Langton makes it clear that she is not a separatist. It seems to me, therefore, that her only other choices are either assimilation and ultimately the disappearance of Aboriginal identity; apartheid, which does not have a good reputation; or bi-culturalism in conjunction with First Nation status, consolidated by the ownership of  “82% of northern Australia in a variety of titles” (46). Bi-culturalism, for its part, is a complex way of existing that needs to be explored and experimented with; in today’s Australia, people from many parts of the world have gathered experiences in this area. Langton’s lectures do not investigate bi-culturalism but she does provide us with a useful quote from Noel Pearson (who had, in a memorable 2006 speech “Layered Identities and Peace”, thought deeply about its complexities):

I believe that the only choice available to indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is to find a way of living together in a unified community which respects our particular and different identities and the particular rights of indigenous peoples. Because, as I often say to the discomfort of both black and white people, Mabo has put to rest two gross fantasies. Firstly, it has put to rest the fantasy that the blacks were not and are still not here. The fantasy of terra and homo nullius. Secondly, Mabo also puts to rest the fantasy that the whites are somehow going to pack up and leave. Coexistence remains our lot. (140)

What we all need to work on is how Aboriginal and settler societies can enter into a new, fairer and friendlier relationship, a difficult project when such disparities have been allowed to accumulate. While Langton accuses her non-Indigenous listeners of neglecting to notice “the much changed situation in the twenty-first century that offers more than a few rungs on the ladder of opportunity to those who choose to take this path” (15) one could also accuse her of not acknowledging that white attitudes too have changed and are still changing. In this climate Langton’s lectures may at times seem unduly confrontational; but they also give us a good deal to think about, and that was obviously what she intended.