I recall a time when an apology to our First Nations people was raised, I think it was during the first Howard government years. My family migrated to this country long after it was first settled, so it was explained that we had nothing to apologise for; we didn’t steal the land, we didn’t dispossess them of their cultures, their language. We had nothing to do with that.
In a discussion regarding the Israel/Palestine situation, I was reminded of a doctor’s description of his family’s life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and how he was the sole survivor of his family, how on escaping or being rescued he found his way to England where he was raised and educated to be the doctor he still is today. The treatment of Jews during those dreadful years, the mass slaughter of a people is somehow used today as justification for the continued oppression, displacement and what can only be termed a genocide of Palestinians as the descendants of holocaust survivors claim their biblically promised land as their homeland.
To call those attitudes racist is a misnomer. To me there is just one race, the human race.
We saw in the Olympics yet again, people from all parts of the world, from 206 countries, competing as equals, their humanness was not questioned. Gender yes, in one unfortunate instance, but never was there a question of the contestant’s humanity.
And yet throughout history difference has been marked, people have been judged on the things that cannot be changed, their ethnicity, their skin colour, their gender, their sexual identity, and that continues today as it always has.
Two questions arise: How? and Why?
To consider the ‘How?’, we need to explore history, and rather than re-invent the wheel, I was advised to watch a film called Origin, which explores the race and caste system which is used to divide people. The film documents the writing of a book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkinson. Rather than give a synopsis of the film or even a review, I reflect on the way we here in Australia have treated and continue to treat our First Nations people, and in the ongoing conflicts from other places, using the tools presented in the movie.
But before going there, an interview re-enacted in the film was with a Jewish lady who was horrified that somehow slavery in the US was in any way similar to what the Jews had suffered in the holocaust, yet the roots of that genocide and the laws the Nazis enacted to discriminate against the Jews were based on the Jim Crow laws of the southern states of the USA. While those laws discriminated on the basis of skin colour, the discrimination of the Jews was based on ethnicity. Further, the discrimination in India through the caste system is based on social hierarchy. It is not about race.
Discrimination is not based on physical difference as much as an expression of superiority. If one group sees itself and/or defines itself as inherently superior, others are by that same definition, inherently inferior. In Nazi Germany that was defined as Aryan Supremacy, the “Master Race”. As such any other ‘race’, all other people were considered inferior. Jews were ruled to be so inferior they needed to be eliminated.
That attitude was a driving force throughout the colonial period as new lands were ‘discovered’, indigenous people decimated and slaves imported to work the land; a task beneath the dignity of the settler colonists. Slaves were not just Africans captured and sold off as chattels, but also ‘criminals’ in newly industrialised Britain where the enclosures had deprived the peasants of the land they used for their food supply, forcing them to seek employment in the cities or to scavenge for food in the King’s forests, sentenced convicted criminals to periods of servitude in the colonies. The American War of Independence forced the need to find a new colony, far from England so that return was near nigh impossible.
New South Wales was decided upon and so a caste system was created in the new colony, top of the tree or pyramid was the Governor and the soldier/guards, next the convicts and least of all, bottom rung, the indigenous peoples. As free settlers arrived or the soldiers decided to stay after their terms of service expired or convicts were freed at the completion of sentences, they became the second tier of the pyramid. Convicts were used as slave labourers, the indigenous were slaughtered if they would not cede their lands or ‘stole’ the farm animals, sheep, cows, which were replacing the natural fauna.
As with colonists in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas, there was no attempt to learn the language of the indigenous peoples. They were not even considered as separate nations, but all lumped together as savages, less than humans, this land had been described as Terra Nullius, empty, uninhabited.
The establishment of a caste system needs a number of support structures to be established, one of which is the control of marriage, in the case of the Australian indigenous peoples, while marriage was not on the cards, the use of women as sex slaves was quite acceptable to the immigrant men, convict or free man, a native woman, bit of black velvet was always a temptation to great to resist. The progeny became the Stolen Generation, half caste children were fostered out, to be trained for domestic service or labourers.
The employment opportunities for indigenous men was stockmen on the various stations developed on the stolen lands. When Aboriginals were finally approved of as being real people in the referendum of 1967, mustering was far cheaper by helicopter than an Aboriginal on a horse, and so many were forced off the stations into regional towns such as Tennant Creek or Alice Springs and because they had progressed from being fauna to real people, were allowed to drink alcohol and that created so many of the social problems evident today; high imprisonment rates, public drunkenness, family violence. Poverty meant that the housing within the towns was out of reach, so camp areas were established outside the town limits. Water had to be brought in to those camps, bucket full by bucket full. The natural water holes were not available for use, they were too important for the pastoralists and station owners, so personal hygiene became an issue. Unlike the clean, regularly washed white folks, the indigenous were dirty, polluted. Children were embarrassed to attend school, often covered in sores and in old, dirty clothes.
Throughout the colonised world, indigenous cultures were actively eliminated through the mission system. Mission schools taught the religion of Christianity and replaced language with that of the coloniser. In Australia, English was taught, indigenous languages were banned from schools and over time they virtually disappeared. People were removed from their lands breaking the cultural connections.
It is hard to dehumanise a single person, someone you talk with, consider a friend or workmate, someone who has a name. Dehumanisation is far more effective when a group is targeted, all aboriginal people, all First Nations people, all Jews, all Palestinians. Dehumanisation denies them names. Traditional names for Aboriginal people were not used, but ‘boy’ or ‘hey you’ being polite names, or in the case of Jews, just like prisoners, numbered, a number tattooed on the forearm, or for Palestinians, lump them together as Hamas sympathisers, terrorists.
For many, the caste system is part of their daily lives, part of relationships where men and women are defined, objectified, ranked for preference, their desirability either for a quick fling or as a marriage partner. (Bit of fun or a lot of respect.)
* * * * *
The 1970 Mungo Jerry song, In The Summertime goes:
In the summer time when the weather is high
You can stretch right up and touch the sky
when the weather’s fine
you got women you got women on your mind,
Have a drink, have a drive
Go out and see what you can find
If her daddy’s rich take her out for a meal
If her daddy’s poor just do what you feel
Speed along the lane do a ton or a ton and twenty five
When the sun goes down
You can make it, make it good in a lay by.
It sounds like a rollocking, fun song, but the objectification of the woman from a poor family is an interesting observation; poor, powerless, just do what you want with her, but from the rich family, respect needs to be shown. The pyramid of the caste system.
Which brings us to the Why?
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics was a series of floats which sailed on the Seine, past the assembled audience. One float depicted a scene from Greek Mythology, Dionysus, the god of wine and partying celebrating on a float which some Christians took as a send up of the famous painting depicting the last supper Christ had with his disciples before being crucified. The Olympic Games originated in Greece, the Greek gods revelled in the games.
Someone asked me why Christianity was being mocked. I did not relate those two items, the Greek origins and the float thought to parody the Last Supper until a little while later, but Christianity was the the faith of the European colonisers, an action which seemed to prove their superiority, making all other beliefs inferior, proving also the superiority of ‘God’s People’, going out and Christianising the world as they raped and pillaged their way through the newly discovered lands and enlisted an unwilling labour force, stolen and sold off as though they were no more than farm equipment. The hypocrisy of claiming that theft, kidnapping and murder as being sanctioned through their faith in the supreme God can be part of the reason why Christianity is open to mockery, and of course those missionary schools set up in colonised countries where children were raped and murdered falls into the same hypocrisy. And possibly a sense of ‘victimisation’.
The power of one group over another, the need for the rich to not be sullied with actual ‘get your hands dirty’ work, or to raise a sweat more than that of a tryst with an enslaved or poor woman, the need to prove that one person is so much better than any one else that lives can be so demeaned, so trammelled, destroyed at the behest of one who is superior in every way.
The why is because we can, because we have better weapons, we have greater power.
The why is because I rule over you and you will do as I say, if not I will kill you, or hurt you, or deface you, make you undesirable for anyone else.
Dexter Dias describes the why so very well in The Ten Types of Human, where, as a human rights lawyer he confronts both the best and the worst that humanity can offer, and demonstrates that ultimately the choices we make when meeting people, when living in a relationship, when confronting other people in whatever situation, makes a difference to them and to us. Either for the better or the worse.
There can be many more ‘why’s’, about as many as there are people who choose to treat others with contempt.
The film Origin closes with the last line from the book being typed by the author:
A world without caste would set everyone free.
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