I’ve been trying to make sense of the events in Sydney all day, and figure out how it interpellates me, affectively. I think this is how.

On the Archive, A. talks about camping at Lakes Entrance last year. On the first day of the trip, she punctured her foot on a fence buried in the sand. It was really intense, a lot of blood, a lot of pain, and a stupidly long walk back to the campsite and phone. This was when we didn’t have a car, hence the long walk through the dunes, the beach carpark, down the road and back to the camping-ground.

Of all the tourists, beach-goers, local fisherpeople and surfers that passed us, no-one stopped to help. Thre were individuals, families and carloads. To a person, they all looked, looked away, and walked on by. I remember thinking that maybe we looked particularly ‘weird’ or ‘out of it’, or maybe that other visual differences were preventing aid. (Two ambiguously gendered bodies with their arms around each other, one obviously close to fainintg, are are more confronting and difficult than one.) But I don’t think that’s what was happening. Those people looked at our shabby clothes, and the colour of A’s skin, and decided we were up to no good. They made a decision based, maybe, on the high population of Kooris around Lakes, given the presence of the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust (an ex-mission), and their purported tendency to walk around town sniffing petrol and passing out. They may also have made a decision based on the fact that many Greek, Italian and Arabic families go to Lakes Entrance for beach holidays, and there’s a general local disapproval of such even as the locals reap the benefits of ‘diversity’, ie a cafe with good coffee.

The incident didn’t surprise me that much. But it did position me in relation to the ‘beach’ in a new way. This is a beach I grew up swimming at, a beach and a town where the sexism, racism, homophobia were explicit and licensed. I was the person who witnessed moments of racism. Like the Koori kid, Gary, in my class in Grade 5 who no-one would sit next to because everyone claimed he ’smelt’. Like the friend of my mother’s who said once that she wished the local Indigenous population were less ugly — “at least the ones in New South Wales are more attractive, some of the girls!” Like the queer boys wearing nail polish and leopard-skin who had the temerity to come into the cafe I worked in one summer, whom no-one else would serve.

In witnessing these moments I sometimes tried wussily to be apologetic and ‘nice’ afterwards — both because my anger rendered me completely inarticulate, and also because I wanted to distance myself from being implicated. But I never was actually on the receiving end until that day at the beach last year. It really shocked me, far more than it shocked A. — not an uncomprehending shock: ‘why are people being so mean?’ but the shock of suddenly being invisible myself. Afterwards, when A was all bandaged up and I’d had time to think about it, this episode changed something in my response to this shit. It made me feel equally protective and crazy mad; made me feel like if it happens again, I’ll call it out, challenge it, or maybe just try, however ineffectually, to beat someone to a bloody pulp.

This week I’ve been working at the call centre. On Monday one of my upper-echelon superiors pulled me aside, took me into a private room, and asked if I’d had an difficulties with an elderly lady who hung up on me on Sunday. The woman was maybe German, and definitely very old. She freaked at the end when I asked the standard demographic questions about age, marital status, income bracket, yelled a bit and finally hung up on me. It seems that this woman then called the police, and informed them she’d been harassed by someone with an Asian accent from X company. This has happened a bit — a couple of months ago a man hung up on me after telling me he’d only talk to an Australian, not someone with an Asian accent, and once a respondent congratulated me on my fine grasp of English. Now, I don’t know what this generic ‘Asian accent’ would sound like. But despite my pale skin, incontrovertible evidence of Anglo-ness, and what I’d call an inner-urban Melbourne accent, I obviously have one…

It’s easy to explain why this happens. The home telephone, once the symbol of 20’s Anglo community-building, is mutating into the focal point for transmission of panics about ‘brown invasion’, not limited to ‘Australian’ call centre jobs going overseas, but the frightening possibility that an Anglo cannot assume the ethnicity of the person on the other end of the line. In the absence of visual proof, fantasy takes over — a kind of hysterical deafness — and every slightly different accent sounds irreducibly other, ‘Asian.’

Despite the absence of visuality in this example, this teaches me that skin colour is totally relative. ‘Passing’ as something often has absolutely nothing to do with your ‘real’ identification, your ‘real’ skin colour, your ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ ethnicity. So maybe preceding, and definitely at, the moment I pass as having an ‘Asian accent’, channelling a nightmare of call centres to the hysterically deaf survey respondent, I start feeling weirdly interpellated into wanting to participate in calls like this, which position the necessary coalitions of resistance to what happened in Cronulla not as a ‘Leb’ thing but as a ‘wog thing’, and implicitly a non-white thing.

If this sounds like dumb white appropriation, I’m trying for it not to be. Rather I’m attempting to point out that racialising violence of all kinds is always premised on a fantasy misrecognition. I’m not only talking about the violence of the mob, but the violence of politicians and media talking about tribalism, Lebanese gang warfare, the appellations of alleged ‘racism’ involved in a blue with some life-savers over a game of soccer; the NSW Police Commissioner’s talk about ‘unleashing the [non-white] beast’ and ‘letting the genie out of the bottle’. Moreover, there is no proper recognition with which to substitute that misrecognition. Forget desires for a peaceful, communicative, Habermasian public sphere in which we can all get along, all recognise each other as human. Only one thing’s for certain: they do hate us all.