Angry Wimmin

Lefties: Angry Wimmin, directed by British filmmaker Vanessa Engle and featuring Linda Bellos, Sandra McNeil, Sheila Jeffreys, Femi Otitoju, Julie Bindel and Kirsten Hearne (among others) was first broadcast on BBC4 in February 2006.

LEFTIES: ANGRY WIMMIN
In the late 1970s in Leeds, a group of women called the Revolutionary Feminists splintered away from mainstream feminism. Unlike the socialists, who pictured a revolution where the ruling class and the working class would be on opposite sides, Revolutionary Feminists declared war on men.

Their leading activist was academic Sheila Jeffreys.

he Revolutionary Feminists’ first move was to publish an inflammatory document called ‘Political Lesbianism – the Case Against Heterosexuality’. It stated that in order to achieve liberation, women should stop having sexual relations with men. They rejected beauty practices, turning their backs on high-heeled shoes, make-up and uncomfortable clothes. They strove to eliminate men from their language, inventing new ways to spell ‘wimmin’. They espoused separatism as a way of life and some even abandoned their sons.

The Revs were deeply affected by the Yorkshire Ripper, who for them represented the threat of male violence.

In response, they set up WAVAW – Women Against Violence Against Women – and instigated ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches, campaigning vociferously against pornography. An extremist wing of WAVAW calling itself ‘Angry Women’ even went as far as burning down sex shops.

In the early 1980s, feminism entered a second phase and increasingly turned inwards on itself. As black, working-class and disabled women focused on their differences, and the creation of the GLC’s women’s committee incorporated females into mainstream government, the Revolutionary Feminists’ simplistic men-versus-women analysis began to lose its currency.

Is prison obsolete?

Sisters Inside recently held a conference in Brisbane titled “Is prison obsolete” . You can listen to Professor Angela Davis’s keynote address here.

Angela Davis was a controversial political activist in the United States and member of the Black Panthers in the late 60s and early 70s. She was imprisoned for a crime she was later acquitted of, and was at one time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

Today she is a university professor and writer, and remains committed to the struggle for economic, racial and gender equality.

Angela Davis discusses prison reform, the history of prison as an institution, and how women have become, she says, the fastest growing sector of the prison population.

She also  discusses the election of Barack Obama,  “technologies of racially directed hyper-surveillance”, the basis of the death penalty in slavery, and how gender inequality  shapes the prison industrial complex.

Angela Davis is founder of the US  organization Critical Resistance.

Saturday Miscellanea

The Official Website of Revolving Door , a documentary about a Gillian, a Melbourne street prostitute and her experiences as a young girl incarcerated at the Winlaton Youth Training Centre, Nunawading. To listen to Gillian’s story in her own words, click the second link.

http://www.beeworld.net.au/rdoor/menu.htm

http://www.beeworld.net.au/rdoor/words.htm

UPDATE: I just discovered Sherry Lee Short’s blog, Juxtapositions and I  highly recommend it. In particular, check out the posts Ads of Iniquity, Hypermasculinity and Femininity: Shared Paradigms in War and Modern Animal Husbandry, Exploiting Ourselves, and Flamboyant Exploitation: Halloween Pimps and Hos for Kids. This woman is brilliant! She also grows some frickin’ huge vegetables!

And just another reminder (particularly for women in Perth, Western Australa) to check out the ROAR Collective’s blog here. You might also like to read their recent media release, published by Fairfax’s WAtoday.com just in time for Reclaim the Night last week. Finally,  if you’re a graphic designer, multimedia artist or similar and would like to assist with designing their logo (pro-bono, of course!) I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

Busy!

© Edna Walling Collection, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria Accession No.: H96.150/278 Subject/s: Shows Edna Walling looking down at her Rolleiflex camera as she shoots her own portrait.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I haven’t abandoned blogging – I’m just really busy with end-of-semester assignments. When I no longer have any pressing commitments to attend to I plan to write on the following topics:

• Same-sex marriage
• Martha Vicinus’ essay “Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?,” Radical History Review, Vol. 60, 1994, pp. 57-75 and the privileging of the mannish woman and visibly marked difference in lesbian history and historiography.
• Misogyny in “indie” and/or “alternative” music and white “hipster” culture.
• The prostituted women who was charged (and later acquitted) of anally raping her male “customer” in Melbourne earlier this year.
• Woman-loving and sisterhood.
• Prostituted women, disability rights advocates and men’s sexual access to women as a ” human right”
• A reappraisal of Valerie Solanas

The photograph is of Edna Walling (1895-1973), the Australian landscape gardener, photographer and journalist. She was a lesbian  and spent much of her life among single, independent women. You can read more about her here.

I hope all of you are in good spirits and good health. In sisterhood, redmegaera.

Reading for this week

Mahnaz Afkhami, “Towards Global Feminism: A Muslim Perspective” in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Kathleen Barry, “Pornography and the Global Sexual Exploitation of Women” in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Chrystos, “They’re Always Telling Me I’m Too Angry” in Fugitive Colours, Cleveland State University Poetry Centre, 1995.

Chrystos, “Anthropology”, Lesbian Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer 1989). Available online here.

Marilyn Frye, “A Note on Anger” in The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983.

Marilyn Frye, “On Being White:  Toward A Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy”, in The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983. Available online here.

Marilyn Frye, “White Woman Feminist” in Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1992. Available online here.

Susan Hawthorne, “Gender Mainstreaming”, Susan’s Political Blog, 5 October, 2009.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, “From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Women Anyway?”in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Teboho Maitse, “The Past is the Present: Thoughts from the New South Africa” in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Tatyana Mamonova, “Freedom and Democracy–Russian Male Style”in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Robyn Rowland, “Politics of Intimacy: Heterosexuality, Love and Power” in  Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1996.

Barbara Smith, “Racism and Women’s Studies” in The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom, New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Media

Victor Malarek on Johns and Prostitution, The F Word, June 6, 2009.

Victor Malarek is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. He discusses his recent book about Johns and Prostitution; and he explains why this issue has become an increasingly dangerous epidemic that is the ‘last bastion of male dominance over women’.

ABC Fora: Bronwyn Winter on the Politics of The Hijab, 17 April, 2009.

An ostensibly simple piece of cloth can be one of the most controversial and divisive items in a society. In 2004, when the French Government decided to ban Muslim girls from wearing headscarfs – or hijab – to school, popular opinion split on the issue. Was it an authoritarian abuse of religious freedom? Or, was it a strike against religious ghettoisation, by a staunchly secular government? Bronwyn Winter has better part of two decades thinking and writing about the politics of the hijab, and here in conversation with Shakira Hussein at Gleebooks they explore the issues surrounding this highly politicised garment, which are very far from simple.

Shakira Hussein is a writer and researcher focusing on Islam, gender and South Asia. She is currently completing her PhD on encounters between Western and Muslim women at ANU’s Centre for Asian Societies and Histories.

Bronwyn Winter is the author of “Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarves Debate.” She is a Senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of Sydney. She is also Director of the University’s International and Comparative Literary Studies program. Winter is currently working on a book that will look at how 9-11 has impacted on women’s lives and on transnational feminist activism.

The State Sanctioned Abuse of Girls in New South Wales Between 1961 and 1974 (Part 1)

***WARNING: What follows is the first half of an essay I wrote earlier this year about the abuse of women comitted to Parramatta Girls Training School and the Hay Girls Institution as teenagers between 1961 and 1974. It could be triggering for survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse. It’s also not that well written.***

Parramatta Girls Training School

In this essay, discussing with reference to the experiences of women who were committed to Parramatta Girls Training School and the Hay Girls Institution as teenagers in the period between the 1961 Parramatta riots and the institutions’ ‘closure’ in 1974, I ask how individual experiences contribute to our present understandings of Australian identity and history. Drawing on former inmates’ personal accounts of their experiences in the New South Wales juvenile corrections system—including literary works, personal essays and interviews and submissions to the 2004 Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care—I explore the lives of women labelled “delinquents” by the State and attempt to situate their experiences within the context of a long history of the incarceration and abuse of disadvantaged women and girls in Australia. How do their stories challenge popular representations of life in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s? How do public versions of the past, such as those constructed through Child Welfare Department reports, newspaper coverage and Senate and House of Representatives Hansards, both enable women to discuss their negative memories of institutionalisation and constrain or proscribe limits to the ways in which those memories are understood?

The Parramatta Girls Training School (hereafter Parramatta), also known as the Parramatta Girls Home, the Industrial School for Girls and the Parramatta Girls Training Home, was established in 1866 at Fleet Street, Parramatta. From 1911 the site operated as both an Industrial and Training School, with girls considered “less corrupt” housed in the Training School and others who were deemed “corrupt” sentenced to the Industrial School. In 1925 the institutions were remerged in the interests of “economic efficiencies”.[1] Between 1961 and 1974 Parramatta was a punitive institution designed for girls who, in the terminology of the day, were deemed “anti-social, maladjusted, incorrigible, hardened, wayward, uncontrollable and, ultimately, ‘delinquent’.”[2] According to the findings of the 2004 Senate Inquiry, large, barrack-like industrial schools such as Parramatta “were set up in Australia to provide rudimentary education and industrial training for children who were not necessarily orphans but who subsisted in poverty or whose parents did not provide for them.”[3] Its function also complemented the Child Welfare Department’s foster care system in that girls who ‘failed’ in foster care were committed to Parramatta for a period of ‘training’.[4] Processed through the Children’s Court, girls would be sentenced on a general committal charged with non-criminal ‘status offences’ such as truancy, uncontrollability and exposure to moral danger for an indeterminate period, usually six to nine months.[5] As Kate Gaffney writes in her history of the Winlaton Youth Training Centre at Nunawading, ‘semi-penal’[6] institutions such as Parramatta were promoted by authorities “as a solution to female juvenile delinquency of all kinds: criminality, sexual promiscuity, homelessness or parental neglect.”[7] According the Tasmanian Department’s 1956 annual report into the Ashley Home for Boys at Deloraine, the purpose of training schools was “to provide care and training for older wards, who, because of maladjustment and delinquency, require special institutional control.” This is a description which could apply to any of the “training” homes or schools established in Australia before 1974.[8] In practice, however, it’s likely that a majority of the “delinquent” and “maladjusted” girls committed to Parramatta in 1961-1974 came from family situations of sexual abuse, incest or domestic violence.[9] For example, Irene Byrne who was committed to Parramatta as a fourteen year-old girl in 1962 recalls

Dad…was listed as dangerous, he was on TV. He was captured and placed in the North Ryde Psychiatric Hospital…When I was a child I always knew when we were going to cop it, as Dad would screw his mouth and he would go all white, pure white around his mouth. We would cop a kicking, thrown from wall to wall. Hit on the jaw, steel-capped boots in the backside if they weren’t shiny enough…I got bashed a lot from my father as well as made fun of by the kids at both schools I went to. Because of the way we dressed, our shoes. Our family was the poorest of the area. I would also bash up the local kids. I wagged school a lot because of how we were treated.[10]

Of the events leading up to her appearance before the Children’s Court in 1962 she writes

One day my siblings and I were hungry, my stepmother Frances and my father were not feeding us, so Johnny and I and some aboriginal [sic] kids break into the Newtown Tech School tuckshop. I took food, I didn’t vandalise the ship but did break the window and bend the bars. Johnny and I went home with the food. Police came to our house and took me to the Newtown Police Station and put me in the cells for a while, until Dad got there. He never came.[11]

After spending a night at the Metropolitan Girl’s Shelter in Glebe, Irene appeared before the Children’s Court and was committed to Bidura Children’s Home. She escaped custody but was arrested again by police on Erskineville Road, Newtown on a visit to her siblings. Following her arrest she was taken to Newtown Police Station and charged with absconding lawful custody and “exposed to moral danger”.[12] Unfortunately, Irene’s story is not unusual. Jennifer Curtis and Carol Ann Capes were abused by their fathers; Teresa Finley’s mother was an alcoholic.[13] According to the Senate References Committee’s report on Australian’s who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, the entry books to Parramatta show that “girls who were raped or the victim of incest often found themselves committed to the institution, while the perpetrators remained free.”[14] Anonymous’ case, for example, is almost paradigmatic. At fourteen years of age Anonymous was pack-raped and abandoned in the bush separating housing at St Marys from the tanneries and munitions formerly operated by Australian Defence Industries in western Sydney.[15] After the perpetrators were charged, brought to trial and later acquitted Anonymous “took off to join the season pickers at Leeton” where she was arrested by police and sent to the Children’s Court at Glebe. Leaving home again in 1969, Anonymous was surrendered to the police by her mother and committed to Parramatta Girls Training School.[16]

Many women committed to Parramatta ran away from home; Maree Giles was sixteen years-old in 1970 when she ran away to her boyfriend’s rented accommodation at Manly[17] and other women report in their submissions running away from situations of sexual abuse, domestic violence and family dysfunction. Once on the streets, girls were presumed by authorities to be “sexually promiscuous” and would be arrested and subjected to a vaginal examination on remand while awaiting court appearance. As one of the NSW Department’s field officers told Joanna Penglase, little thought was given to the sensitivities of the girls “because they were regarded as juvenile prostitutes.”[18]

In many respects institutions like the Parramatta Girls Training School were reminders of the continuing hold that Victorian ideas about class and female sexuality had on Australian public life. The pathologizing of poverty, prostitution, alcoholism and criminality by nineteenth-century eugenicists and degeneracy experts was an attitude that persisted in Australian social policy well into the later part of the twentieth-century.[19] As Peter Quinn argues, from the institutions’ inception girls committed to Parramatta and Hay were considered part of a “delinquent class”. Girls were not treated as victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse but “as the progeny of a criminal class destined for the most part to remain part of that class.” This perception coloured all aspects of the way in which they were treated by authorities— “specifically lack of resources, the dominance of economic consideration over the welfare of children, excessive regimentation, harsh discipline and illegal punishments.”[20] The idea of a ‘delinquent class’, Quinn explains, originated in Britain in the early nineteenth-century where, in slum areas of London such as St. Giles and Seven Dials—both places in which there was a high concentration of Irish immigrants— there was “great public apprehension at a perceived increase in juvenile crime, and the creation of a dangerous, self-perpetuating class of professional criminals.”[21] While the idea of a delinquent class was never openly conceded, the actions and privately expressed attitudes of politicians and administrators are crystal clear. For example, in the Annual Report of the Girls Industrial School, Parramatta for 1914 the Superintendant refers to the girls there as “a low-class human type—a mere bundle of appetites of animalism…eminently biologically predisposed to prostitution of the lower type”.[22] He then goes on to report complaints from members of the public about the perceived wastefulness of spending money on girls they felt would surely end up as prostitutes.[23]

The Department also took a different attitude to delinquent girls compared with boys.  Girls were universally accepted to be more difficult to control and rehabilitate than boys. This was attributed in part to the fact that girls in institutions were claimed to have lower intelligence quotients than boys, but in practice had more to do with the perceived sexual precocity of delinquent girls, their predisposition to prostitution and the notion that their bad conduct was of an aggravated kind because they were “spreading venereal disease throughout the State.”[24] Similar attitudes persisted well into the twentieth-century. For example, in his famous ‘Forgotten People’ speech of 1942 Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies implied a link between poverty and lack of intelligence:

…to say that the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social desserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd.[25]

Similarly, in 1956 R. J. Heffron, the NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Education wrote that

Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid.[26]

By 1961 “there was thus a general view, extending over so many years that had become entrenched in the attitudes of those who were involved in the treatment of girl delinquents.”[27] This view was reflected in the institutional practices of places like Hay and Parramatta. Parramatta was highly-regimented, punitive institution. On their arrival girls were subjected to a compulsory vaginal examination, a practice which had been carried out routinely at Parramatta for many years. According to Peter Quinn, committal registers for Parramatta in the period before the First World War refer to girls as “NVI”—an abbreviation for non virgo intacta.[28] Such examinations were accepted by courts as evidence of the extent of sexual misbehaviour and were used in sentencing. Most girls were traumatized by the experience. In 1964 a visiting medical officer referred in passing to “the fact that when girls resisted vaginal examination, the practice was to bring them to his surgery, where the examination was conducted under general anaesthetic.[29]In her play Parramatta Girls[30]writer Alana Valentine records the following exchange:

GAYLE: My file had two lines on it.

JUDI: What’s that?

GAYLE: That’s the number of fingers the doctor was able to insert.

JUDI: Maybe it was something else.

GAYLE: It wasn’t something else. It was the number of fingers. If he could get two in that meant you were still a virgin, if he could get three in you’d had sex, if he could get four in, well. I’ve never met anyone with four lines on their file. Have you?[31]

Without exception every ex-Parramatta girl who made a submission to the 2004 Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care recalls the shame and humiliation of being subjected to a compulsory vaginal examination by “Dr Fingers”. Irene Byrne writes

I thought I was going to be deloused like I was in GGS [Glebe Girls Shelter]. I kept hearing other girls talk about the duck beak and I didn’t know what they meant and I never asked them…The nursing sister looked like a Nazi in a concentration camp. She had a hard, bad look on her face. She had an accent. I lay on the table, legs up, Dr. at one end. The nurse put the duck beak in. Suddenly my legs shook and my whole body shook. The Dr. inserted his fingers first and moved them around and then he stuck a stick inside and it really hurt. The nurse shone a torch at my pubic area and under my arms. I was too young.[32]

Sharyn O’Brien, a former inmate at both Parramatta and Hay writes in her submission

Some of the treatments were to have an internal vaginal check by a “doctor” on arrival who used stainless steel implements and his fingers to examine me, standing in line to have nightly showing of the crotch of our underpants by the officers, how embarrassing and soul-destroying for young teenage girls to do this…[33]

Delousing by cutting and washing hair in kerosene was also common.[34] Head-shaving, a practice first introduced by Governor Ralph Darling in 1826 as a form of punishment applied to women in the third penitentiary class of female prisons,[35] was a common disciplinary measure[36] and life at Parramatta was heavily regimented. Up until the mid-1960s, “all doors were normally locked so that passage of girls from one activity to another was habitually interrupted by the routine of locking and then unlocking the doors.”[37] Most activities were regulated by bells and the girls were only allowed to talk to each other for one hour a day. There were frequent musters where the girls were counted and detailed records were kept of the girls’ menstrual cycles.[38] Inmates wore “uncomfortable underwear made of unbleached calico which was not changed daily, and they were not issued with brassieres or sanitary pads.”[39]Sharyn O’Brien remembers menstrual blood running down the girls’ legs and “wetting ourselves while waiting for permission to be allowed to go to the toilet.”[40]Illegal punishment, including periods of isolated detention well-exceeding the allowable maximum time, was endemic in the system and persisted into the 1980s.[41]

Because of the harsh condition and oppressive regime, riots were a frequent occurrence at Parramatta with the earliest recorded in 1887 and others drawing public attention in 1890, 1898, 1899, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1946, 1953, 1954 and 1958.[42] In February 1961 the first of a new spate of serious riots took place at Parramatta, when more than twenty “screaming, hysterical girls defied police and fire brigade officers” [43] and climbed through an attic onto the roof where they shouted “obscenities” and hurled roof tiles at the police.[44] As in the 1940s and 1950s the methods used to counter the problem of riots and large-scale abscondings were coercive and the girls were removed after midnight by use of fire hoses. An even bigger riot occurred the following day, with a hundred girls climbing on the roof and hundreds of passersby gathering in the street outside to watch. The girls “stripped naked and tore tiles from the roof, smashing windows, destroying furniture and causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.”[45] According to the Sunday Telegraph, six girls “climbed to the steep, galvanized roof of the school and scuffled with two uniformed policemen who were trying to force them down.”[46] Girls who were inmates at the time later alleged they had been beaten with rubber hoses.[47] As had been the case in the riots of the 1940s, the ringleaders were taken before the Children’s Court and sentenced to terms ranging from one to three months.[48] Those who were old enough were committed to Long Bay Gaol. Marlene Riley, then fourteen years-old was one of the youngest ringleaders. Although the Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare described the riots as isolated to “a small group of girls who were emotionally disturbed, unusually violent and unruly or inclined to be hysterical,”[49] Marlene Riley remembers things differently:

Myself and another girl were the first to get on the roof at Parramatta which was to escape the brutal bashing we knew we would get for leaving the laundry. Mr. Johnson was then in charge, he was a brutal man and within that week I had seen him bash and kick a girl that he had been molesting to try and induce a miscarriage. I still carry the horror of that incident in my mind as it went on for thirty minutes. Her name was Barbara…I knew that I would be flogged because I was on the roof, so I decided to ‘out’ him and verbally screamed that I knew what he was doing to Barbara…I screamed that it disgusted me as he was the worst abuser there at the time. He said he was going to kill us and tried to climb onto the roof. I realised that I could break the tiles loose I did this to protect myself and try to keep away from him…I was sick of all the bashings, the poor food, the conditions and the brutality of Johnson and Gordon and that  if we stuck together in the future we would receive better conditions and treatment. I put this to the older girls when I was released and that was how the riots began.[50]

It was the official view of the Department that one of the main factors contributing to the riots at Parramatta was that the “present facilities [did] not permit a satisfactory segregation of those girls showing serious behaviour problems from those who are more amenable to the training situation.”[51] Thus, as a result of the riots, Harold Hawkins, Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare announced that a special institution for troublesome girls would be established at Hay on the site of a disused gaol.[52] According to officials its purpose was not punitive but to provide girls with a “degree of individual attention out of the question at Parramatta”.[53] In reality, it was a place of punishment for girls who incited rebellion or otherwise misbehaved at Parramatta. Department reports claimed that the emphasis at Hay “[was] on productive activity of a kind that [would] encourage a sense of achievement”[54] and boast that “broken paths, rank grass and accumulated rubbish in the grounds [had] been replaced by trim lawns, gay flower beds and flourishing vegetable gardens.”[55] Most girls remember it as a kind of hell on earth. Jytte Divargue, for instance, remembers being ordered by a female officer to scrape paint off a cell wall with the back of a wooden brush.

A female officer comes into the cell every now and then, to check how I’m doing with my task. This time she has decided to tell me how I can get the paint off: “You take the brush, turn it around, use the wooden side, scrub and thus scrape the paint off; but don’t tell anybody I told you.” I stayed in the cell and scrubbed for seven days until the bare brick.[56]

Girls sent to Hay were drugged with the anti-psychotic drug Largactil and taken, without warning, at night to Strathfield or Campbelltown stations.  Once there they were placed on the Naranderra via Junee train and handcuffed to the armrests for the duration of the trip.[57] At Hay they faced a regime far more oppressive than that at Parramatta and in many cases experienced sexual and physical abuse at the hands of senior staff. In 1962 The Hon. Ann Press raised the issue of cruelty in the NSW Parliament after a copy of the Riverina Grazier, dated Friday 10^th of August 1962 reported that residents of east Hay had heard “pitiful screams” coming from the institution.[58]

---

[1] Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, “Parramatta Female Factory”, http://www.parragirls.org.au/id2.html. Accessed 25 August 2009.

[2] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living: Growing up in Care in Twentieth-Century Australia, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005, p. 248.

[3] The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, Canberra: Community Affairs References Committee, August 2004, p. 37.

[4] Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, “Parramatta Female Factory”, http://www.parragirls.org.au/id2.html

[5] Peter Quinn, “‘Unenlightened Efficiency’: The Administration of the Juvenile Correction System in New South Wales, 1905-1988”, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2004, p. 13.

[6] Alana Barton, Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women, Hampshire & Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 3-4.

[7] Kate E. Gaffney, “The Best of Intentions: Winlaton Youth Training Centre: 1956-1993,” Masters Thesis, Monash University, 1998, p. 11.

[8] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 248.

[9] Ibid., pp. 225-226.

[10] Irene Byrne, , Submission no. 416 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub416.pdf.  Accessed 13 August 2009.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Barry Curtis, Submission no. 488 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub488.pdf. Accessed 13 August 2009.  Carol Ann Capes, Submission no. 325 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub325.doc. Accessed 12 August 2009. Teresa Finley, Submission no. 530 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub530.pdf. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[14] The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 55.

[15] Name withheld, Submission no. 511 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub511.pdf. Accessed 10 September 2009.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Maree Giles, Submission no. 284 to the Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into  Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub284.doc. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[18] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 243.

[19] Diana H. Wyndham, “Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia: 1910s to 1930s”, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1996, pp. 228-279.

[20] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 3.

[21] Ibid., p. 19.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 188.

[24] Annual Report, Child Welfare Department 1922-1925 quoted in Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 259.

[25] Sir Robert Menzies, “The Forgotten People”, The Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Foundation Ltd. Menzies Virtual Museum, http://www.menziesvirtualmuseum.org.au/transcripts/ForgottenPeople/Forgotten1.html. Accessed 21 September 2009.

[26] R.J. Heffron, quoted in Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 219.

[27] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 259.

[28] Ibid., pp. 312-313.

[29] Ibid., p. 314.

[30] Parramatta Girls is an example of what is called “verbatim theatre”—a form of documentary theatre where the playwright interviews people that are connected to the topic that the play is about and then uses their testimony to create the piece. Valentine interviewed a number of women committed to Parramatta, several of whom are named in the acknowledgements, and constructed a play based on their experiences.

[31] Alana Valentine, Parramatta Girls, Sydney: Currency Press, 2007, p. 10.

[32] Irene Byrne, Submission no. 416, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub416.pdf.

[33] Sharyn O’Brien, Submission no. 238 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub238.pdf. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[34] Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 86.

[35] Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Melbourne & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 85.

[36] Teresa Finley, Submission no. 530, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub530.pdf

[37] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 285.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., p. 286.

[40] Sharyn O’Brien, Submission no. 238, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub238.pdf.

[41] Peter Quinn, The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, “Official Committee Hansard, Reference: Children in institutional care, 4 February 2004, Parramatta”, Canberra: Community Affairs References Committee, 2004, Pp. CA107-CA108.

[42] Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, “Parramatta Female Factory, http://www.parragirls.org.au/id2.html.

[43] Unknown, “Girls Climb on Roof, Defy Police”, Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1961 in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 8.

[44] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 271.

[45] Ibid. pp. 271-272.

[46] Unknown, “Rooftop Riot by Girls”, Sunday Telegraph, 26 February 1961 in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, pp. 8-9.

[47] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 272.

[48] Ibid.

[49] “Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1961” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 11.

[50] Marlene Riley, “Marlene” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, pp. 15-17.

[51] “Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1961”, p. 11.

[52] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 273.

[53] Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1962”, in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 26.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., p. 25.

[56] Jytte Divargue, “Jytte” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 31

[57] Bonney Djuric in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 6.

[58] NSW Hansard, Legislative Council, 12-9-1962: 305 in Bonney Djuric (ed.) 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 28.

Copyright the author of this blog.

Brief statement

All peices of writing attributed to an  author other than the author of this blog do not represent the views of this blog except where explicitly stated.

The author and the women who comment on this blog  are flesh-and-blood human beings with real lives. They have real insecurities, and experiences of oppression,  real joys, vulnerabilities and prejudices . By all means, hold other women accountable for their words and actions but be mindful of the women behind the words. Try not to write things  that you wouldn’t be prepared to say face-to-face. I am very tired but I’m  also comitted. I love all the women who read and comment on my blog- regardless of whether that love is reciprocated or whether or not we always agree. I love all women and I am committed to our freedom. We can’t and shouldn’t ignore those issues which divide our movement; nor should we minimize our own structural capactity to hurt or marginalize other women. More often than not though, when we involve ourselves in personal attacks, we don’t affect the kind of positive change that we are after. We don’t need permission to feel angry, hurt or beaten-down or to express those feelings to other women but it is worth considering how to best harness our rage. To make our anger productive.  It’s also important that we don’t lose sight of what we have in common, why we’re here- just so long as it’s not at the expense of recognizing our differences.

I know I’m a pretty flawed human being but I’m trying. I know all of you are trying too.

“Detour-Spotting for white anti-racists” by Joan Olsson

This essay has been helpful to me. I hope it proves helpfulto other white women.

DETOUR‐SPOTTING
for white anti‐racists
joan olsson
For white people living in North America learning to be anti‐racist is a re‐education process.
We must unlearn our thorough racist conditioning to re‐educate and re‐condition ourselves as antiracists. There is scant social or political encouragement for this journey of re‐education. We are constantly tempted to detour off course by the racist propaganda of society and our own guilt and denial. In the face of society’s and our own resistance, sustaining the will to continue this journey takes bold and stubborn effort. This journey sends us into unfamiliar territory. No white person has ever lived in a non‐racist North America. We were never taught the skills of anti‐racist living. Indeed, we were carefully taught the opposite: how to maintain our white privilege. Racism, the system of oppression (of people of color) and advantage (for white people) depends on the collusion and cooperation of white people for its perpetuation.

Most of us first became aware of racial prejudice and injustice as children. As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda. That early “training” was comprehensive and left little room for question, challenge or doubt. Our childhood games, rhymes and media conspired: “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo; Catch a n…r by his toe …” We played cowboys and Indians. All of us knew the Indians were bad and had to die. My WWII generation watched “Bugs Bunny” outwit evil Japanese villains. As Lillian Smith acknowledged: “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy, performed from babyhood, slip from the conscious mind down deep into muscles and glands…and become difficult to tear out.” (1)

Our generous child wisdom told us racism was wrong, but there was no escaping the daily racist catechism. We resisted the lies, the deceit and the injustice of racism, but we did not have the skills to counter the poisonous messages. Our conditioning filled us with fear, suspicion and stereotypes that substituted for true knowing of people of color. We internalized our beliefs about people of color,
ourselves, other white people and about being white. Those internalized attitudes became actualized into racist behavior. As I continue my journey toward becoming a re‐conditioned and effective anti‐racist, I have become aware of “habits,” attitudes and their attached behaviors, which divert me from my intended goal. To change the detouring behavior, I must first be fully conscious of what I’m doing, the behavior and its consequences. Next, I need to reflect on the behavior’s attitudinal roots. Finally, I determine the prescribed, desired change I want to make and the best strategy for achieving it. Sometimes I need to remove the behavior from my personal repertoire. More often though, re‐tooling is necessary, replacing the discarded pattern with new behaviors. It will likely take repeated attempts before I have fully internalized and externalized the desired change.2
Most of the obstacles and detours encountered on our journey of re‐education are those same habitual behaviors birthed in our internalized beliefs. The behaviors will vary with each white person. I recognize that no two white people share exactly the same experiences and societal moldings. We learned racism in our unique and personal ways from different teachers and at different times. But we all learned the lessons well. I have observed in myself and other white people some common patterns of guilt, denial and defensiveness which appear regularly in our interactions with people of color and other white people.
Eighteen common detours from our anti‐racist journey are examined in this way:
#) The Detour’s Title
Attitudes or behaviors that signal a detour or wrong turn into white guilt, denial or
defensiveness.
Reality Check and Consequence
A clarification of the underlying meaning and consequence of this behavior pattern.

1) I’m Colorblind
“People are just people; I don’t see color.” Or “I don’t think of you as Chinese.”
Reality Check and Consequence
Statements like these assume that people of color are just like us, white, and have the same dreams, standards, problems, peeves that we do. “Colorblindness” negates the cultural values, norms, expectations and life experiences of people of color. Even if an individual white person could ignore a person’s color, the society does not. By saying we don’t see their color, we are also saying we don’t see our whiteness. This denies their experience of racism and our experience of privilege. “I’m colorblind” can also be a defense when afraid to discuss racism, especially if one assumes all conversation about race or color is racist. As my friend Rudy says, “I don’t mind that you notice that I’m Black.” Color consciousness does not equal racism.
2) The Rugged Individual and The Bootstrap Theory
“America is the land of opportunity, built by rugged individuals, where anyone with grit can succeed if they just pull up hard enough on their bootstraps.”
Reality Check and Consequence
The “rugged individual” and the “bootstrap theory” are two of the crown jewels of U.S. social propaganda. They have allowed generation after generation to say, “If you succeed, you did that, but if you fail, or if you’re poor, that’s your fault.” Belief in this propaganda is founded in a total denial of the impact of either oppression or privilege on any person’s chance for success.

3) Reverse Racism
(a) “People of color are just as racist as white people.”3
(b) “Affirmative Action had a role years ago, but today it’s just reverse racism; now it’s discriminating against white men.”
(c) The civil rights movement, when it began was appropriate, valuable, needed. But it’s gone to the extreme. The playing field is now level. Now the civil rights movement is no longer worker for equality but for revenge.”
Reality Check and Consequence
(a) Let’s first define racism: Racism= Racial Prejudice (white people and people of color have this)
Plus
Systemic, Institutional Power (white people have this)
To say People of Color can be racist, denies the power imbalance inherent in racism. Certainly, people of color can be and are prejudiced against white people. That was part of their societal conditioning. A person of color can act on their prejudices to insult, even hurt a white person. But there is a difference between being hurt and being oppressed. People of color, as a social group, do not have the societal, institutional power to oppress white people as a group. An individual person of color abusing a white person – while clearly wrong, (no person should be insulted, hurt, etc.) is acting out of a personal racial prejudice, not racism.
(b) This form of denial is based in the false notion that the playing field is now level.
When the people with privilege and historical access and advantage are expected to suddenly (in societal evolution time) share some of that power, it is often perceived as
discrimination.
(c) This was said by Rush Limbaugh, who is obviously no anti‐racist, but this comment is loaded with white people’s fears of people of color, especially if “they” gained control. Embedded here is also the assumption that to be “pro‐Black” (or any color) is to be antiwhite. A similar illogical accusation is directed at women who work for and end to violence against women and girls. Women who work to better the lives of women are regularly accused of being “anti‐male.”
4) Blame the Victim
(a) “We have advertised everywhere, there just aren’t any qualified people of color for this job.” Or “If he only had a stronger work ethic.” Or (b) “If she just felt better about
herself…” Or “Internalized racism is the real problem here.” Or (c) “She uses racism as an excuse to divert us from her incompetence.” And “He goes looking for racism everywhere.” (As if racism is so hidden or hard to uncover that people of color would have to search for it.)
Reality Check and Consequence
All “blame the victim” behaviors have two things in common. First, they evade the real problem: racism. Second, they delete from the picture the agents of racism, white people and institutions, which either intentionally perpetuate or unintentionally collude with racism. As long as the focus remains on people of color we can minimize or dismiss their reactions, and never have to look directly at racism and our own responsibility or collusion.
5) Innocent By Association
“I’m not racist, because …I have Vietnamese friends, or my lover is Black, I donate to Casa Latina, or I marched with Dr. King.”
Reality Check and Consequence
This detour into denial wrongly equates personal interactions with people of color, no matter how intimate they may be, with anti‐racism. It assumes our personal associations free us magically from our racist conditioning.
6) The white knight or white missionary
“We (white people) know just where to build your new community center.” Or “Your young people (read youth of color) would be better served by traveling to our suburban training center.”
Reality Check and Consequence
It is a racist, paternalistic assumption that well meaning white people know what’s best for people of color. Decisions, by white people, are made on behalf of people of color, as though they were incapable of making their own. This is another version of “blame the victim” and “white is right.” It places the problems at the feet of people of color, and the only “appropriate” solutions with white people. Once more the power of self‐determination is taken from people of color. Regardless of motive, it is still about white control.
7) The White Wash
“He’s really a very nice guy, he’s just had some bad experiences with Koreans.” Or “That’s just the way Uncle Adolf jokes. He’s very polite to the Black janitor in his building.”
Reality Check and Consequence
We’re trapped here by another version of our guilt response. We attempt to excuse, defend or cover up racist actions of other white people. We are particularly prone to this if the other person is close to us, family or friend, and if we feel their actions reflect on us.
I Was An Indian in A Former Life (2)
“After that sweat lodge I really know what it feels like to be an Indian. I have found my true spiritual path.”5
Reality Check and Consequence
This is spiritual or cultural appropriation and poses a serious threat to the integrity and survival of Native cultures. To fill a void in their own spiritual core, some white people are drawn into the New Age garden to pick from a variety of Native spiritual packages usually offered for sale. Since Native spiritual practice is inseparable from their history and current community, it cannot be disconnected from that context to service white people searching for life’s meaning. Appropriating selected parts of Native cultures romanticizes the lives of Native peoples while denying their struggles. Their lands and livelihoods stolen, indigenous peoples now witness white people trying to steal their spirituality. Rather than escape our white racism by finding a spiritual path, we instead collude in one more way with the genocidal attacks on Native cultures.

9) The Isolationist
“I thought we resolved this issue (racism) when it came up on the board last year.” Or “We need to deal with this specific incident. Don’t complicate it by bringing up irrelevant incidences of the past.” Or “This only happened today because the TV news last night showed police beating a Black kid.”
Reality Check and Consequence
Attempts are made to isolate a particular incident of racism from of the larger context. We blame a publicized incident of racism outside our organization to rationalize an internal incident and to avoid facing the reality of racism within. When trying to resolve an accusation of racism within an institution, we often see the incident in a vacuum, or as an aberration, in isolation from an historic pattern of racism. Racism has been so institutionalized that every “incident” is another symptom of the pattern. If we continue to react incident to incident, crisis to crisis, as though they are unconnected, we will find genuine resolution only further from our reach.
10) “Bending Over Blackwards” (3)
“Of course, I agree with you.” )Said to a person of color even when I disagree) or “I have to side with Betty on this.” (Betty being a woman of color.)
Reality Check and Consequence
Our white guilt shows up as we defer to people of color. We don’t criticize, disagree, challenge or question them the way we would white people. And if we do disagree, we don’t do
with the same conviction or passion that we would display with a white person. Our racism plays out as a different standard for people of color than for white people. If this is our pattern,
we can never have a genuine relationship with a person of color. People of color when we are
doing this. Our sincerity, commitment and courage will be rightly questioned. W cannot grow to a deeper level of trust and intimacy with people of color we treat in this way.6

11) BWAME
“But What About Me. Look how I’ve been hurt, oppressed, exploited…?”
Reality Check and Consequence
This diminishes the experience of people of color by telling my own story of hardship. I lose an opportunity to learn more about the experience of racism from a person of color, while I minimize their experience by trying to make it comparable or less painful than mine.
12) Teach Me, Please
“I want to stop acting like a racist, so please tell me when I do something you think is racist.”
Reality Check and Consequence
White people often assume we can learn about racism only from people of color. We further assume that people of color have the energy and/or desire to do this teaching. My understanding is that most people of color are weary of educating white people about racism. We will get stuck. We’ll get frustrated and impatient with ourselves and other white people in this struggle. And we’ll stay stuck if we don’t seek help from other white anti‐racists. Our inclination has been to ask people of color to help us. We should seek out other white people BEFORE we go to people of color. Perhaps, as we become more trustworthy as allies, we will build genuine relationships with a few people of color who offer their reflections for us when we get stuck. This is at their discretion, not ours. We can’t assume people of color should be so grateful for our attempts at anti‐racism, that they will be willing to guide us whenever we are ready to be guided.
13) White On White, and Righteously So
“What is wrong with those white people? Can’t they see how racist they’re being?” Or “I just can’t stand to be around white people who act so racist.” And You’re Preaching To The Choir “You’re wasting your time with us, we’re not the people who need this training.”
Reality Check and Consequence
We distance ourselves from “other” white people. We see only confirmed bigots, cardcarrying white supremacists and white people outside our circle as “real racists.” We put other white people down, trash their work or behavior, or otherwise dismiss them. We righteously consider ourselves white people who have evolved beyond our racist conditioning. This is another level of denial. There are no “exceptional white people.” (4) We may have attended many anti‐racism workshops; we may not be shouting racist epithets or actively discriminating against people of color, but we still experience privilege based on our white skin color. We benefit from this system of oppression and advantage, no matter what our intentions are. This distancing serves only to divide us from potential allies and limit our own learning.7
14) The “Certificate of Innocence”
Sometimes we seek or expect from people of color some public or private recognition and appreciation for our anti‐racism. Other times we look for a “certificate of innocence” to tell us we
are one of the good white people.
Reality Check and Consequence
If our ally commitment depends on positive reinforcement from people of color, we set ourselves up for sure failure. The first time a person of color is displeased with our actions, we
could respond, “Well, if the people I’m doing all this for don’t want my help, then why bother? I quit.” Clearly, we’re challenging racism for “them” not for us. We have not identified our selfinterest, as white people, for fighting racism. Until we do, we cannot stay on this lifelong journey.

15) Smoke And Mirrors
We use the current PC language; we listen to the right music; we state the liberal line; we’re seen at the right meetings with the right people. We even interrupt racist remarks when the right people are watching and when there is no risk to us. We look like an anti‐racist.
Reality Check and Consequence
This is the “Avon Ally,” the cosmetic approach. People of color and other white antiracists see through this pretense quickly. This pseudo‐anti‐racist posturing only serves to collude with racism and weakens the credibility of sincere white anti‐racists.
16) The Accountant
We keep a tally sheet. If we perform some “feat of anti‐racism,” we expect reciprocity from an individual or group of color, usually with some prestige or power that can serve our interests.
Reality Check and Consequence
“I scratch your back, you scratch mine is NOT justice seeking nor ally behavior. It serves only to reduce justice work to some kind of power brokering currency.

17) Silence
We stay silent.
Reality Check and Consequence
Our silence may be a product our guilt or fear of making people of color or white people angry with us or disappointed in us. We may be silent because our guilt stops us from disagreeing with people of color. We may be afraid that speaking out could result in losing some of our privilege. We may be silenced by fear of violence. The reasons for our silence are many, but each time we miss an opportunity to interrupt racism, or to act as allies or to interact genuinely with people of color or other white people. And no anti‐racist action is taken as long as we are silent.
[A note about silence: Silence is a complicated issue/matter. There are times when faced with a potential intervention situation that I may choose not to interrupt – for reasons of good sense or strategy. Anti‐racists need courage, but foolish risks makes little sense. When the choice is between intervening in this moment, alone, or gathering allies to speak out later in a more strategic way, the latter may prove more effective.]
18) Exhaustion And Despair – Sound The Retreat
“I’m exhausted. I’m only one person. I can stop and rest for awhile.” Or “Racism is so pervasive and entrenched, there just isn’t any hope.”
Reality Check and Consequence
Despair is a real enemy of anti‐racists. For our commitment to be a lifelong one, we must find ways to mitigate the effects. Burn‐out or desertion are of no use to the struggle. We can remember men who jumped on a “Take Back the Night” bandwagon, challenging violence against women – for a while. Until the attention on them as good men waned. Until the “glamour” of the issue faded. One of the historical, repeated failures of “liberals” in social justice movements has been short‐term and inconsistent commitment to the “issue du jour.” If we quit, for any reason, we engage our “default option.” (5) As white people, we can take a break from the frustration and despair of anti‐racism work. Such retreat will result in no significant consequences for us. Racism doesn’t allow such a respite for people of color. One of the elemental privileges of being white is our freedom to retreat from the issue of racism. If things get too tough we can always take a break. And our work against racism doesn’t get done.
THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
Once identified, behaviors like those above are possible to change. The patterns are repeated less often. We re‐educate and re‐tool ourselves to avoid racist behaviors and to take
more potent anti‐racist action. People of color will continue to demand their rights, opportunities and full personhood. But racism in North America won’t end because people of color demand it. Racism will only end
when a significant number of white people of conscience, the people who can wield systemic privilege and power with integrity, find the will and take the action to dismantle it. That won’t happen until white people find racism in our daily consciousness as often as people of color do. For now we have to drag racism into our consciousness intentionally, for unlike our sisters and brothers of color, the most present daily manifestation of our white privilege is the possibility of forgetting about racism. We cannot. Racism continues in the name of all white people. While there is nothing about racism to celebrate, there is much to celebrate in
a life lived in the pursuit of justice.

ENDNOTES
1. Lillian Smith, Killers Of The Dream. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1949. Page 91.
2. Paraphrase of title by Andrea Smith. “For All Those Who Were Indian In A Former
Life.” First printed in Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, November 1990.
3. I first heard this phrase from Rev. Joe Barndt of Crossroads Ministry and the author
of Dismantling Racism. Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis. 1991.
4. Credit to Kathleen Carlin for her “Principle of Intentions versus Effect” from her
anti‐sexism work. Translated here to a racism corollary. Before her death in 1996
she was the Executive Director of Men Stopping Violence in Atlanta, GA.
5. Term from Dr. Molesi Kete Asante, Chair of African American Studies, Temple
University, Philadelphia, PA.
©1997 joan olsson
“Used with permission”

For S.

Untitled.

You

who cast off the yoke before you felt its weight

A lesbian

and a woman, too

Why think of yourself as a circuit breaker,

an albatross

a blemished peach?

Your laugh

like a hot knife

cuts through the treacle of my voice.

Your incautious lust

shakes me

it shakes me with delight.

Why being “queer” is a privilege

James of Scribo Ergo Sum recently left this comment on my blog ,in response to  my support of fellow-commenter  helzeph’s statement that men are a health hazard:

To support such a normative statement, Red, you have to establish a normative about a gender using averages. Is this not exactly the approach which left feminists with so much work to do eliminating empty cultural tropes? You know: women don’t enjoy sports, women are no good at X, etc, etc. They are established by attempting to forge some “average woman”, who does not really exist. You seem to be trying to do the same with men.

I apologise if you dislike my use of the word “misandry”, but as far as I am concerned it is perfectly possible to hate men. That is not something compatible with attempting to eliminate the gender binary, as to hate men is to be in adherence to it: you accept that society is split into two distinct categories, & loathe one side of the division. Someone opposed to the gender binary would not only find the normativity of the statement “men are a health hazard” problematic, but also the “men” part.

(Which, incidentally, is why I am no “MRA”. I don’t want there to be a clear distinction between men and women, I don’t believe in natural rights & I’m far too lazy to be an activist for anything.)

On a broader level, that of strategy, such statements are also disastrous: how are we to demolish the gender binary while arranging a movement in lockstep adherence to its demands? There is no way you can argue against its existence with only one of the groups it attempts to hold apart present. This is a “Be the change” thing.

It is not that feminism “Needs men”, it’s that if it’s implications are followed there would be no reason to exclude them. If the gender binary is a farce which should be toppled then there’s no reason both genders can’t be part of that process.

Earlier he wrote this in his response to a comment by aladydivine:

I’m opposed to the gender binary, thus it would be impossible for me to be a male supremacist. Please don’t be presumptuous of my opinions.

Now I’ve written about this before, but for the benefit of everyone who decides they would like to comment on my blog, here are my thoughts regarding “misandry” and here is where I freely admit  that I am a “man-hater”. With regards to the “gender binary”, I have written abou this within the context of ” queer theory” at my sister Undercover Punk’s place.  Allow me to elaborate further. It is my summation that “queer” politics is  idealist (in the philosophical sense),  reactionary (because it is centrally  antagonistic toward  feminism) and politically conservative (in the sense that it is a liberal, individualist politics that upholds, rather than challenges, the status quo). With respect to the latter I immediately think of Andrea Dworkin’s interpretation  of what she calls “the split within the Women’s Movement”:

“…I think a lot of what people call the split within the Women’s Movement is basically a class split. I have seen it that way for years: the women who have used the Women’s Movement to achieve some kind of respectability (which is not to  say that they were necessarily born middle-class but they became middle-class because feminism conferred on them certain professional options that weren’t there for them before) want to maintain respectability.”

Since in many countries socio-economic class is racialized and race classed, it is also a racial split- and one which plays itself out across other relations of domination and submission, privilege and marginalization too. I think of “queer” politics’  myopic  interest in ” destabilising  the gender binary” in much the same way- as the preserve of the privileged; of those men and women who have inherited a world bequeathed to them by earlier  generations of feminists, lesbian feminists and gay liberationists and who see  themselves as far removed from the messy realities of women’s oppression. As  Sheila Jeffreys puts it, the term “gender”, when deployed by queer theorists

“..is gender depoliticised, sanitised and something difficult to associate with sexual violence, economic inequality, women dying from backstreet abortions. It is gender reinvented as play for those who see themselves far removed from the nitty gritty of women’s oppression.”

The problem with the “gender binary” as it is conceived by “queer” politics (I’m not about to deny that there is a binary relationship), is that it obscures the hierarchical relationship preserved by and constructed through gender; that is, it implies a symmetry or equivalence  between masculinity and femininity, between male and female roles. For all its talk about “power” and “subversion”, “queer” demures from theorizing about relationships of exploitation, of dominance and submission. When a father rapes his daughter or a husband socks his wife in the jaw, “queer” politics discretely leaves the table, looks the other way, psychologizes the violence. The deconstruction of the subject in “queer” politics, the idea that abstract general terms such as “man” and “woman”, “blacks” and “whites” are totalizing categories that wrongly attribute a single identity to diverse individuals is at best wrong-headed and at worst  self-serving and politically reactionary. I consider it a derailment tactic, a marker of privilege  and representative of the backlash against feminism. Now before you denounce me as a witch (or worse- an essentialist!) let me say that I don’t believe in a pre-social masculine or feminine “essence”; I am not a biological determinist.  Following Monique Wittig, I do think we need to differentiate- and throughly dissociate- ‘women’ (the class within which we fight) from ‘woman’, the myth.

For “woman” does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while “women” is the product of a social relationship.

The problem with “queer” theory is that it gets stuck at the first part of Wittig’s formation and erases the second. Yes “woman” is an imaginary formation but the structures that enforce gender dimorphism and, hence, male supremacy, are very much real. The effect of genderfuck is an individualizing one that sits nicely with globalized, late-capitalist societies. When academics  and their acolytes allow themselves become mired in long, self-indulgent analyses of their multiple  and shifiting  subject positions, they are not doing politics. Or rather, they are not doing the politics they imagine themselves to be doing. As the brilliant Amy’s Brain Today put it in a comment on this blog:

Oppression is inherently a class-based, that is, a collective phenomenon; “identity” an inherently individualistic phenomenon.

Don’t you think it’s funny? The moment “we” as  women (and colonized peoples, blacks, lesbians,etc.) begin naming our oppressors,  the moment we begin to speak for and about ourselves as subjects, we’re told that “the subject is dead”. We’re told that  the differences among us preclude us from organizing around our shared experiences of oppression or naming a common opressor. We’re told that to name a social relationship upheld through a myriad of structures and social institutions is  essentialist and politically naive. Pretty fucking convenient for those in power if you ask me.

Perhaps the person who puts it best in Elana Dykewomon (yes, I am obsessed with her) in her 1993 essay “Our Bodies are the Flags” :

“Every gay paper is filled with these “gender debates.” It’s the ’90s — you are me and she is he and we are all together (okay, so the Beatles did it 20 years ago, that only means they were ahead of their time, not that we’re just following an old groove, right?). Transsexual men⁶ and their friends call lesbians hate-mongers, fascists and “essentialists” for not opening every lesbian and women’s organization to them. It’s in vogue for everyone to be a bi-sexual (the “natural” human state, which, oddly enough, makes lesbianism “unnatural” all over again).

Of course there’s a pivotal point in these arguments: what are women and men? If a woman is the sum of her clothing and mannerisms, then a man can become one, and the line so often read in lesbian personals, “must look like a woman” would make sense. This is a very confusing and tricky set of logical propositions [...]

Many of us, who perceive men as destroying the world, are reluctant to give up the old dichotomies: men war, women nurture. We can argue forever (and seem to be) about whether it’s being born with a womb or being socially constructed that makes us “women” without being able to come to a final answer. But the more we understand attributes (self-reliance, adventurousness, curiosity, domesticity) as options instead of innate qualities, the more choices we have as individuals. Lesbians tend to choose from the full range of available attributes (and occasionally invent some of our own). That doesn’t mean we don’t know where we live — all of us must choose, at some point, whether or not to cast our lots with the “women.”‘ Individual choice alone does nothing to change power structures. Men can (and do) call themselves sensitive and understanding in order to maintain their power in new social climates¹⁰ (Chevron cares).

Queer Nation has picked up the idea that women and men are “created” and given it a popular spin: get behind the fluidity of identity, don’t be a rigid role-monger, don’t cling to your label like a reactionary to a life-boat, be flexible. It’s an attractive idea. So attractive that you’d think somebody would have thought of it before the late ’80s….

As many womyn, particularly womyn of color¹¹, have noted, the more you have power, the more you don’t use “labels” to define yourself (you don’t see a lot of Rockefellers in the midst of these debates). It’s the use of the “label” that states: I have to assert my own identity. All of us who have to consciously name ourselves have, at some point, been uncomfortable with this (if for no other reason than that someone we don’t like can claim the same label).

But you can’t change power structures by simply proclaiming these “roles” (gender, class, race) culturally constructed, and therefore bourgeois baggage. Sure, roles are absurd — and they exist for reasons. “Deconstructing” them without challenging the power of those who make them necessary doesn’t accomplish anything – it’s only playing dress-up with fancy words.

This idea – everything is fluid, we can change the world by blowing straight people’s minds, we can overcome our origins — is nothing new. European and American cultures have a long “bohemian” tradition, and gender-bending has, in fact, been around since at least Shakespearean times. It’s a parlor game the privileged play, and they let some of us “others” in so the game doesn’t seem rigged. It doesn’t go to the root. And along the way it accomplishes the power structure’s dirty work: it makes it look like we can “transcend” who we are and all become “human.” Race and class become things we can shed – and should try to. Womyn-only space is invaded and neutralized.

Which is why it seems to me so important for us to do the work of claiming ourselves. Our own bodies, our pride in them. As often as we have to.

our bodies are the flags that advance our causes
age race culture size ability
lesbian womyn lesbian
creased into the cloth
a permanent seam
flapping in the evening chemical breeze

SJ remembers: I was a child and saw
survivors’ numbers tattooed on their arms
my aunt said: cover it up shame cover it up safety cover it up
do you want them to see?

Sauda says
the darker we are
the more we represent the unknown
the thing which others are afraid of
and are embarrassed to see us carry
along with our daily lives

and Karyn says, they don’t just mean:
oh you’re still here, Indian
they mean: aren’t you dead yet?

and Cath says
if I let myself feel or hear the names they call me on the street
I’d never leave my house

the brand has always been on the flesh
so obvious
we have to turn our eyes away
while we distract ourselves
get through the week
our bodies bear witness

With respect to the philosophical idealism of “queer” politics,  it seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?   But one needs to look no further than James’s comment itself: “I’m opposed to the gender binary, thus it would be impossible for me to be a male supremacist.” Now can you imagine any self-respecting liberal or leftist (and I do make a distinction between those two terms) speaking that way about other forms of social inequality? Let’s give it a try: I’m opposed to racism, thus it would be impossible for me to be a racist. I’m opposed to capitalist exploitation, thus it would be impossible for me to exploit workers. I’m opposed to class privilege, thus it would be impossible for me to benefit and oppress others by virtue of my position in the class system. I’m opposed to environmental degradation, thus it would be impossible for me  to impact negatively on the environment. You get the picture. Following this line of thinking, gender is all in the head. It isn’t a way of organizing human relationships by means of violence or the threat of violence; it isn’t about exploitation- it doesn’t benefit one cohort of the population at the expense of another- if you stop believing in it is ceases to exist.  Poof! Opression schmession. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Jabbering on about “totalizing narratives” and ‘destabilising the gender binary” doesn’t change men’s structural capacity to rape and women’s corresponding vulnerability. It doesn’t do much about the feminization of poverty or explain why the majority of people who appear in pornography are women and the majority of people who buy it are men. It doesn’t do much toward recognizing women’s unpaid labour- either as being unwaged or as labour. It doesn’t explain why religious organizations in Victoria can now discriminate against single-mothers but not the corresponding absentee fathers. It doesn’t provide us with the tools to understand men’s use of rape as a weapon of war. So whose interests does it serve? Who does it benefit?

This isn’t by any means a exhaustive exposition of my feeling about “queer” politics and could stand to be more nuanced and better argued, but hopefully it will spark some conversation….

I didn’t reference my sources, but will happily provide anyone who asks with exact references.