“I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”

Australians are rightfully proud of the good thing we’ve got going on here. We know that we live in god’s own country and most of us wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact I couldn’t agree with it more. However, one area in which we’re certainly not world leaders is self reflection. Most of us are pretty happy with our lot in life and don’t feel the need to risk it by asking too many questions of ourselves. As a result, we’ve made avoiding direct public discussions about the (relatively minor) imperfections in the Australian way of life an art form. It’s trite, but it’s the Australian way to dodge any issues that have the potential to make us uncomfortable with a dismissive ‘She’ll be right’ or ‘No worries’.

I had cause to reflect on this recently when I posted a bit of a spray about the inadequacy of the police response to the recent attacks on Indians in Melbourne on my Facebook profile. This deliberately direct comment provoked some very odd responses (both public and private) from ordinarily sensible people. While the content of these responses was extremely varied, they had one fairly consistent theme – a desperate avoidance of confronting the role that racism (subjective or structural) has played in these attacks.

I knew that Mark shared my frustration at people’s reluctance to confront the issue head on, so to try and keep up the momentum for addressing the core of this problem I offered to set out a factual basis for discussion and respond to some of the more common dodges that I’ve seen employed to avoid these facts.

Factual Basis for Discussion:

1. Media coverage of violence in which racial minorities are the victim has increased substantially over the last 18 months or so. I don’t have data for this, but I don’t think anyone’s really disputing it.
2. Assaults and robberies of people of Indian appearance increased by 5.4% in 2008-09 (a total of 1525 incidents).
3. People of Indian appearance are 2 ½ times as likely to be the victim of an assault as non-Indians (an assault rate of 1700 assaults per 100,000 people compared to 700 assaults per 100,000 people). It could even be worse than this; a number of Indians who have contacted me privately has suggested that there is chronic under-reporting of attacks to the police driven by a fear of losing visas and a belief the police are apathetic.
4. Representatives of the Australian-Indian community and the Indian Government have publicly stated their belief that these attacks are racially motivated.
5. The public response from the Police to this situation has been inconsistent. Public responses to incidents are provided on a case by case basis without reference to broader trends. On some occasions the Police have conceded a racial motivation for attacks while in others Police have publicly rejected race as a causal factor despite evidence to the contrary.

On the basis of the response I received to my original post, I’m sure people are already starting to object that nothing in the above necessarily equates to a problem of racism. So let’s examine the most common responses that have been prevalent online in the past few days:

Disavowal: “You Can’t Prove That These Incidents Were Motivated By Race”

By far the most common response to claims of racist violence basically boils down to a correlation v causation argument. Anyone with a little knowledge of statistics knows that correlation does not imply causation. In layman’s terms, the mere fact that Indians are two and a half times as likely to be victims of violent crime doesn’t mean that they are victims of violent crime BECAUSE they are Indian. There could well be another cause that isn’t a function of their race – the frequently cited alternative causes are Indians over-representation in poorer areas, more dangerous jobs and shift-work (Mark’s already covered the structural racism angle here so I won’t go over old ground here).

This is an argument that’s not limited to the online debate – variants of this argument have been advanced by people as senior as Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Peter Varghese, who recently complained that:

There is an unfortunate tendency in the tabloid media to equate anything bad happening to a person of Indian origin to racism. Then they focus on why you won’t admit it is racism, because they take it as a given that any attack has to be a racist attack.’

Unfortunately, this argument is one of those examples of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. As XKCD has put it, while correlation doesn’t imply causation “It does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.” Unfortunately, in Australia, when correlation points to racism, we don’t ‘look over there’ – we resolutely look the other way. The avoidance instinct kicks in and we latch onto another causal explanation, any causal explanation to avoid having to confront the presence racism.

This instinct to look the other way that leads to extraordinary logical contortions like the following chain of reasoning from a Victorian Police spokesman:

I think there was a mention where there was a comment similar to `why don’t you go home?’ but there was nothing more… They appear to take some delight in the actual assault. It’s very disturbing and their propensity for violence is quite shocking… I think the motivation would have been robbery.

Well, obviously.

I’d be happy if the Victorian Police were able to make the case publicly that racially motivated violence isn’t a problem. It would be great if someone could publicly show that that the correlation between Indian and being a victim of violent assaults is not the result of a causal relationship. Show me some data that shows that taxi drivers, night shift store clerks or people in other at risk occupations are equally likely to be victims of assault as Indians (in fact, before you do that you’d better show me that Indians actually are over-represented in these professions).

But people don’t do this. Instead the default position of the Police seems to be to rule out a causal relationship, despite the overwhelming correlation and without any data of their own. Any honest evaluation of the statistical context of these crimes would lead someone to ask how the Police could possibly be justified in confidently ruling out racial prejudice as a causal factor in time for the next morning’s news.

It’s this automatic dismissal of a racial element to these crimes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that’s causing so much resentment among Australian-Indians and the Indian Government. Neville Roach AO, the Chairman Emeritus of the Australia India Business Council hit the nail on the head when he said that:

Unfortunately, the seeming instant dismissal by local authorities of the possibility of racism being involved has created an impression of a nation in denial. This has seriously damaged Australia’s credibility and helped inflame public opinion in India and within the Indian community in Australia, who see the official line as indicative of an unwillingness to take complaints of racism seriously.

It is difficult to understand how the police are able to rule out racism completely and with such certainty. While a premature conclusion of racism would also be inappropriate, the apparent disproportionate number of attacks on Indians relative to other overseas students does suggest racism is a factor.

Quite. It’s not the people who are suggesting that racism is relevant here that have something to prove. It’s those who are denying it.

Other Countries Are Worse!

“Australians on the whole are no more racist than anyone else, and possibly less so than quite a few places”. This one is often accompanied by gratuitous assertions that because of this fact, if you criticise anyone in Australia for being racist you are an anti-Australian, latte sipping, left wing basket weaver (those who know me will know how deeply insulting I find that).

The rejoinder this is short an obvious: Yes, so what?

I have no doubt that Asian, American and particularly European countries are far more racist than Australia (anyone who disagrees with that is either ignorant of the OS experience or into pointless self-flagellation). There probably is no other country in the world that I would rather live in if I was of another race (or more pertinently, that I would rather my child to live in).

But so what? Racism isn’t a relative concept. It’s not less bad because others are worse. To put it another way, we wouldn’t stop trying to stamp out paedophilia in Australia just because we discovered it was more common in another country.

Further, putting false relativism to one side, Australia’s uniquely exposed to negative economic consequences of being perceived as racist (to wit see projections of declining Asian student numbers). We’ve got good reason to hold ourselves to a higher standard than everyone else.

All Violence is Wrong – We Shouldn’t Focus on the Racial Element

Violence is violence is violence. It’s repulsive in any form and there are strong laws against it in all forms so we shouldn’t fixate on the racial element.

A week ago I probably would have agreed with this. I was against hate crime legislation because I thought that was already adequately covered by existing criminal laws and anything beyond that was getting close to criminalising thought.

However, upon reflection in light of the incident that I experienced, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think violence with a racial element IS in fact different to other violence because it has a differential impact. Violence with a racial element has an additional, targeted intimidation impact on minority communities that general violence doesn’t have. I hadn’t really thought about this before, but sitting on that train the news reports of racially violent incidents came immediately to mind in a way that I think general reports of violence wouldn’t have in that situation. In this way, the broader intimidation impact of violence is greater when it’s targeted towards an identifiable sub-group.

Further, generalising the problem in this way can blind policy makers to presence of important causal factors specific to the racial subgroup. It’s a bit like saying to an Aboriginal that alcoholism is bad wherever it manifests itself, therefore we shouldn’t focus on alcoholism in remote communities, rather simply on the general, Australia wide problem.

Don’t Talk About It – It’ll Only Make It Worse

The common objection to confronting the racial element of these incidents is that even if it does exist, if you talk about it in public, one of the following things will happen:

* You’ll ‘fuel’ the problem by given racist louts the publicity they crave;
* You’ll provoke a ‘law and order’ bidding war between Labor and the Liberals; and
* You’ll undermine the operational independence of the Police.

And on top of that, it won’t change the behaviour of people who are already flagrantly disregarding the norms of society.

I have to say, this is the response that irritates me the most. It amounts to little more than the advocacy of sweeping the issue under the carpet.

I simply can’t accept this – Words matter.

Words matter even more when they are being delivered by the Police – the bearers of the Government’s monopoly on the use of force. The Police enforce our society’s laws and as such are standard bearers for our values. Their public statements and behaviour carry special force. You could probably run off half a dozen slogans of police road safety campaigns. When the Police speak, they speak with authority.

However, when the Police simply ignore the overwhelming correlation between being Indian and being a victim of violent crime, they send the message that it’s ok for the rest of the community to similarly look the other way when confronted with racial prejudice. By equivocating in the face of overwhelming evidence of racially motivated violent incidents, the Police send the message that the broader community is also equivocal in the face of racism. When this prejudice is unchecked in the public debate it creates the impression that there is room for this in our society. And they send a message to the Indian community that they are not taking the issue seriously.

Let’s Face Facts and Act

It was this feeling that the representatives of law and order in our society, the Police force, were letting down the Indian community by not being honest about the issue that prompted my extremely minor contribution to remedying the problem. It was as much an act of absolution of guilt as community service (though there are international precedents and a strong public policy argument in favour of such an approach). I decided to start mapping incidents of racial violence and any consequent law enforcement response because I wanted to try to face the facts and see the scale of the problem for myself. I haven’t gotten far and I’m shocked that it has received the attention that it did, but I’ve already learnt more from people’s response to the idea than I probably expected to learn from the exercise itself. It hasn’t changed my view that Australians in general aren’t racist. But it’s made me realise that we’re more ‘actively complacent’ about it than I ever expected.

Elsewhere: Hoyden About Town.

Elsewhere: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Thread continues here.

Even when development and enlightenment stare them in the face, their instinct is to destroy them pretending to safeguard their honor, the mechanics of which supersede all else including a happy life of fulfillment and accomplishments.

Ostensibly, the writer, Farid Ghatry, is accusing Hamas and Hizbollah of being ruled by “instinct”, but it doesn’t take him long to elide those organisations with “Arabs” collectively:

Their poisonous rhetoric of violence feeding a frenzied mass of ignorant Arabs leaning on their extreme religion to honor their incapacity to compete with the West is destroying future generations of hopeful saviors of our culture and traditions.

I don’t want to discuss the specifics of this conflict in this post – this thread is still open for those wishing to do so. I do want to observe that peace appears to have few champions at the moment. Endless dissections of history and propaganda claims and counter-claims seem to leave debate stuck in the same morass – of friends and enemies, and the only logic of that cycle – on both sides – is a drive to extermination. It seems to me that since the Cold War ended, the peace movement has more or less disappeared from view – at least in this country – and there are very few voices prepared to prioritise humanitarianism and conflict resolution over picking sides.

There’s a huge irony here – in an age where humanitarian war and “the responsibility to protect” are both lodestones of political discourse – both options, of course, involving the application of violence. It would appear that the easiest thing to do for many is to demonise those who are seen as “unlike us” – and one of the many cards the cheerleaders for the Israeli state play is to invoke the claim that Israel is “the only advanced democracy in the region”. In fact, Israel is not a secular state (not that it’s a religious state either… but that’s part of the problem). And it’s rarely mentioned that it’s the only nuclear power in the region. But clearly one of the rhetorical effects such a claim has is to increase the identification we are supposed to have with one side of the conflict – or more properly, with the government, political class and military/intelligence apparatus of one side of the conflict, because there is certainly still a peace movement within Israel itself.

One of the difficulties humanitarian impulses have is the gap between abstraction and concrete situations. It’s actually inherent in the whole notion of humanitarian universalism because there’s always going to be a tension between a particular and a universal, and this is where philosophy itself stops being a parlour game or a learned discipline, and shows us something about the very messy world of political violence and making distinctions and judgements. One can rightly be sceptical about violence in the name of humanitarianism, and in fact we ought to be, because it can never be divorced from all the other calculations, strategies and investments which accompany any exercise of political power – and the use of force is the ultimate political decision.

But we can resist the dehumanisation of civilians caught up in conflict zones, or in zones which are subjected to cruel and inhumane blockadesm, or civilians targeted by rockets. They might not all be “like us”, but we need to recognise that humanity itself has ethical claims to make – on all of us. What we need to do is to give up the habit of accepting far too blithely the dehumanisation and thus alienation of others, and begin to look above the parapets of a tragic history and the particulars of political advantage being sought on both sides and refocus our efforts – and our imagination – on the one goal that should be truly paramount – peace itself.

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict – through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project – on cities and war – I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity.

The whole article can be read here.

Elsewhere: At the Global Sociology Blog, there’s a complementary post from SocProf where she also takes a look at Sassen’s work in the context of Mumbai as a space of globalisation.

THE slaughter in Mumbai was a barbaric attack not just on India, but on us. On the West.

Now, I don’t think that the reflex response to the desire to prematurely ascribe blame to Al-Qaeda before the facts are known should be to rush off in the opposite direction. But it did interest me that many of the television reports a few nights ago sought commentary from experts in terror studies, rather than sourcing those who have a deep knowledge of Indian and subcontinental politics and history per se. This in itself ties in with the desire to write one single narrative of international terrorism, as the terrorism experts in question are usually best informed about Middle Eastern and South East Asian affairs. This in turn both ascribes more unity to international terror networks than actually exists, and turns them into an immediate and default suspected cause, no matter what the specificities of the political and social environment in which attacks actually occur.

Anyone with anything more than a passing acquaintance with Indian politics, society and history, though, would know that it’s quite possible, even probable, that the attacks’ causes lie in factors such as the increasingly weak Indian central government’s inability to control its territory and monopolise the use of violence, and the inability of either the justice system or the state (even after the Congress-led coalition defeated the BJP) to prevent inter-communal violence and massacres such as those in Gujarat in 2002 or hold anyone to account for them. Political violence in India recently, it’s also worthy of note, has often been directed as much against Christians as Muslims, and what we may be seeing is the emergence of what are basically pogroms on a much bigger and more organised scale. The role of the Shiv Sena Party in the governance of Mumbai itself, a party which has called for the formation of Hindutva suicide squads and an ethno-religious sectarian neighbourhood cleansing program in the city, may additionally be a factor.

One shouldn’t rush to judgement. And one shouldn’t do that also for reasons of preserving an awareness of the horror of the deaths and injuries that have been inflicted in Mumbai and some more respect and dignity for the victims than instantly transforming them into political footballs. But if causes are to be sought, and they should be, both the Pakistani connections to violence and the emergence of terrorist movements pushing back against the nationalist pogroms may well be found in time – after the facts are in – to have been at work in these tragic events.

Elsewhere: Crooks & Liars, The Independent and Boing Boing.

Update: Shakira Hussein in Crikey.

Update: The Blair/Bolt Watch Project, Guy Beres and a roundup of citizen journalism at The Guardian.