The longer I continue my education, both at university and in the ‘school of life’ the more aware I become of the inherent privileges I have been granted. The privileges I refer to here have nothing to do with financial wealth or material items. What I am referring to is the inherent privilege of existing as a member of the dominant culture in my society, and what this has given me carries far greater importance than money could ever buy. I have never experienced what it feels like to be isolated within society, to watch films and television, to open magazines and walk past billboards, and never see looking back at me, the face of someone with whom I can identify. And what this privilege has afforded me, is not just a place within society, but more importantly a voice.
It has always struck me as odd, witnessing the people who are afforded the right to speak for and about minorities. Whether it is the media vehemently arguing that Adam Goodes being referred to as an ‘ape’ by a 13-year-old crowd member, is simply not a racial issue, and therefore invalidating not only his personal experience of this abuse, but also the history that it exists within. Or more recently the same – apparently un-biased – media turning the murder of a teenage girl – Laa Chol – into a deeply racist conversation about the ‘African Gang Problem’ in Victoria, again removing the focus from the victim and her families experience. For me these discriminatory dialogues are just another form of victim shaming.
What is most disturbing about these discourses, is that they appear to ignore the complex histories that these issues exist within. There are numerous incredibly valid reasons that the insult flung at Adam Goodes in 2013, cannot be written off as a personal attack. There is the deeply rooted and ongoing issue of institutional racism that all Indigenous Australians are subject to; the history of ‘scientific racism’ – a fabricated theory that Indigenous Australians were closer to apes than white colonists, and could therefore be systematically subjugated and abused.
It’s striking to me that individual people can be so complacent in allowing themselves to be turned into subjects of the state, so willing to swallow the shit shovelled in their direction, rather than face the difficult fact that things need to change. In this ‘modern’ society we somehow still abide by archaic customs, indoctrinating our youth – directly or indirectly – to grow up with myriad judgements built into the very fabric of their beings.
Why are we letting people so ill-equipped, speak for our minorities, rather than hearing voices embedded in and living the realities?
Why do we give so much weight to the voices that sound the same as our own, and so little to those that could actually teach us something?
Whose story really counts?
Bad Feminist 