complicity in all its forms
How safe do you feel today? Do you feel safe enough to go to the beach? Would you like to play soccer on the beach? Maybe you shouldn’t go today.
There’s a moment when the world cracks open and all the invisible wires holding it in place become visible. Cronulla is one of those moments. I’m so glad I live in Coburg today. Coburg where the locals are supposedly talking about taking over, the suburb Kim Beazley might have mentioned after Lakemba when he suggested that lockdowns of whole suburbs might be necessary to stem the ‘terrorist threat’. Coburg where the owners of the local Turkish restaurant give us free turkish delight and dolmades whenever we get eat there, where the manager sits outside and smokes with deep, guarded melancholia as if he knew this would happen, and when you talk to him, you end up swapping stories about how much capitalism sucks. Thank the fucking gods for Coburg.
The nearest beach from Coburg is Williamstown, the singular bastion of Melbourne’s western suburbs seaside wealth, where the kids and their cars congregate on a hot summer night and the beats flow. Here again Williamstown differentiates itself from any other beach in Melbourne, because on any day you’ll find far less white people there than not.
Someone I know walks his dog at Williamstown Beach, and I’ve heard him complain about the loud music, heard him say he doesn’t feel comfortable there. I think I’ve even heard him say he hates the way the chicks wear hijab even in the water. This boy is a ‘leftist’ and a ‘feminist’ and ‘pro-queer’ and ‘pro-trans’ and all the other approved positions you could think of. He’s kind of scrawny; maybe he’s just afraid of copping some shit. And on the other hand, maybe he’s complicit. Because it’s not about the masculinity and the cars, it’s about race. He’s scared because he’s in the minority.
I think it’s worth condemning the nazified assholes who took part in the riots in Cronulla yesterday, those 5000 “Aussies” with their hands held high in fascist salute. But for me, this just reveals the racism deep in the whole of idea of ‘Australia’. No beach in Australia is without racism or its shadow; the absence of difference — the whitification — of country surf beaches; even the cosmopolitan yuppie beaches of St Kilda and Brighton where good middle-class behaviour obscures the subtle mobilisations of ‘ownership’ feelings. This means that in dealing with it, even supposedly good leftist folks who would ‘never be racist’ need to really think hard about our/their reactions, the way ‘we’ frame a response.
It makes me fucking angry that one of the first blogosphere responses to Cronulla was effectively to efface the workings of racialisation and flatten out the effects of this event by claiming that “fat bastards don’t go to the beach either ;) ‘beach body’ is not just racialised!” (The first comment, not the actual post.) This is total bullshit. Why don’t we talk about fat people feeling weird on beaches when there are pogroms being organised against them? There’s a fucking HUGE difference between feeling the constant threat of racialising violence on a beach because of the politics of skin colour, and feeling vulnerable about your body because you don’t like it. (Which, hello, is not limited to ‘fat people’ — it’s probably pretty universal.)
Angry angry angry.