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.
I hear that…I’ve got issues here in tassie that aren’t even close to this but are getting me riled none the less…
I hope you deal with it effectivly and constructivly - I just feel kinda impotent
Comment by datakid — December 12, 2005 @ 10:35 am
great post. ‘us’ whiteys’ DO need to look at ourselves, and we are being reminded to DO so. but instead of listening to this people are retreating to horrific dogmas and rascist positions to secure their privileges. it’s bullshit and a cop out. that said, i abhor the violence being perpetuated by so many. violence always begets violence, and that frightens me. watched a bloke smashing cars in my street yesterday arvo. he had tears in his eyes.
Comment by C — December 12, 2005 @ 11:11 pm
Az, three things.
I am not sure if you realised it, but ‘PS blogging’ is akin to ‘footnote academia’. The smiley face, etc are pretty much universal internet signifiers of a light-hearted comment. Why do you want to take my PS’ed and smiley’ed comment as my substantial point? I would direct you to my comment in the third para: “beyond the racist/alterity stuff, which I don’t feel like I can say much about” Yes, I was signalling my ignorance and inability to speak on this issue. You want to interpret my gesture of solidarity as an inability to discuss what you perceive to be the main issue when I actually signal in my comment I cannot discuss it, then go ahead…
Secondly, perhaps you need to do some cultural geography or something, because unlike the riots on Sunday, the beach is a relatively complex space. The riots were pretty straightforward in the focus on race and ethnicity. The riots as a specific event and the beach as a particular cultural space do not exist on the same register. Yet, you want to reduce the ‘beach body’ to being a signifier of _only_ race. Why? You need to have a bloody good reason to do so. Otherwise you are merely effacing the complexity of the space and the social codings that exist there.
Lastly, in relation to my specific point about the construction of the ‘beach body’: I can’t see what your problem is when in your last line you say that feeling uncomfortable in one’s body is pretty much a universal experience. I was affirming this view of a relatively universal experience by providing an example from my personal history of never liking the beach because I am have been a fat bastard. Does this compare to racialisation of cultural differences? No, of course not. Was I comparing it? No, I wasn’t and I am sorry you read it in that fashion. The ‘beach body’ is a particular set of signifiers and what ever and on of these is definitely related to the fat/skinny/lean axis. I don’t go as far as saying I hate beach culture, like Ben does, because I have had some good times at the beach.
I don’t know, I am a bit of a soft target to take your anger out on, don’t you think?
Comment by Glen — December 13, 2005 @ 12:03 am
I agree that it’s a diversion to talk about beach body image in ways that erase the specificities of race, but I do think that the way one experiences one’s own body can be quite fundamental to “beach racialisation”. I’d suggest that there’s a continuum between such micropolitical affects and the enactment of pogroms, but how that continuum works is another question entirely :) …
Comment by jebni — December 13, 2005 @ 1:06 am
I just wrote a long comment, and lost it. Grrr.
I think what’s so scary about this whole event is the likelihood that racist riots may become just another ‘part of the landscape’. It feels like a really important moment in which critique needs to take place, before the ways that people think and feel about this have stratified. That’s partially why I said what I said.
Glen, I reckon Freud would have a field day with your ‘PS’. Sometimes it’s the slips of the tongue, the throwaway comments, that mean the most. You’ve claimed you can’t speak about the racial stuff, which therefore gives you licence to contribute in the only personal way you can — by talking about beach bodies generally. Yet you actually have said quite a lot (indeed, on your own blog you used the opportunity to quote yourself from somewhere else… nice work ;)) I notice this because I am always interested in the politics of who speaks and how — and hey, you’re no soft target, you can respond as well as the best of them.
I never claimed the ‘beach body’ was only racialised. Indeed, if this blog conversation was just about “how we feel about our bodies when we go to the beach”, I could contribute tomes on discomfort and body image. But it’s not, and I won’t, because I think maybe the general or abstracted ‘beach body’ discourse here works to obscure the very specific, particular effects of, as Ben puts it, ‘beach racialisation’. I don’t think the riots and the body image stuff do take place on two separate planes — surely they’re connected in that the ways bodies occupy spaces (mob, fleeing, in this case) are always related to how people experience the materiality of their bodies feel in such spaces, what bodies are marked, what bodies go unmarked?
And this is not to say, everyone should shut up about anything that’s not about ‘race’, here, but more to say that the politics of racialisation and differentiation infects and invisibly supports a whole lot of things that don’t appear to have anything to do with ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ — like overweightness, and ‘body image’, which is popularly assumed to be a white person’s problem and thus also ‘general’, ‘ubiquitous’.
Comment by goingsomewhere — December 13, 2005 @ 2:18 am
Hey, Az.
Like yourself, no doubt, I was sickened and appalled by the behaviour of the “nazified assholes” in Cronulla. I can hardly say such behaviour is ’surprising’, given how right-wing and racist this country has become (just watch Johnny H. attempt to distance himself from the beachside riot! Onya, Johnny, ever the ‘little Aussie battler’). But it’s still a massive shock.
On a related level, yes, I too am a northern suburbs resident. I’m currently living in Northcote, which (despite its gentrification) still has a high number of residents from cultural backgrounds other than Anglo-Saxon. There’ve been reports in the local paper over the years of attacks against muslims, and no doubt these can be (to a large extent) related to the ‘islamoterrorist’ stereotype Johnny and his boys have perpetuated and sent us to war on. I’ve personally witnessed racial abuse on the streets, and it’s frightening the 1950s mentality so many of these white boys (and girls) hold.
And having grown up in Williamstown, I can testify that the beach is certainly a ‘multicultural’ (to use a rather problematic term)space compared to other Melbourne beaches. It’s just sad that some residents (such as the ‘leftie/feminist/pro-queer/etc/etc’ dude you mentioned) have a problem with women wearing hijab in the water. That sort of attitude isn’t entirely different to the attitudes we saw on display from the “nazified assholes” in Cronulla on the weekend.
Comment by Jay — December 13, 2005 @ 2:39 am
Az, in the case of the riot-event, I agree with Ben’s and your conflation of what I see as two separate dimensions: the ‘beach culture’ and the ‘reactionary nationalist’ culture. I am not arguing that both dimensions are not relative or important to engaging with what happened. The ’slip of the tongue’ was a PS because I knew that it had really nothing to do with the riots. I shouldn’t have mentioned it, because I see the specificity of ‘beach culture’ is a separate issue. However, in Ben’s experience, ‘beach culture’ is not a separate issue.
Comment by Glen — December 13, 2005 @ 3:12 am
hey Az,
Thanks for this, it’s nice to hear about something that’s not so fucked up. I’m not in Oz so I can put this stuff away in my head, but then I read about it and it makes me so unhappy and really unproductively angry. While your post expresses that stuff too it’s nice that it’s not so totally … well, total.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 13, 2005 @ 4:01 am
re: hey, you’re no soft target, you can respond as well as the best of them.
Glen’s a soft target *because* he responds, or more correctly, because he might actually think about what you’ve said before he responds. The hard targets are the ones who wouldn’t enagage with you on any level beyond “fuck off”.
On another note, if you’re talking about “first blogosphere responses” then perhaps you might need to widen your scope a little.
Comment by Will — December 13, 2005 @ 8:57 am
See, Will, I’m not sure I’d really give a shit if someone said ‘Fuck off’ to this post. I’m not trying to convince anyone here; I don’t address this blog to a ‘wider public sphere’, for whose benefit I’ll tone down the anger of my words so I can get to the ‘real racists’.
Comment by goingsomewhere — December 14, 2005 @ 5:06 am