On being “black” in Australia and the U.S.
Here in Sydney as well as in Egypt, people have often commented to me on the strangeness of the American logic of race. “Why do you call Barack Obama black? His mother was white. Why don’t you call him white?” I explain the cultural logic of the “one-drop rule” of attributing race in the United States, but often people just shake their head at the absurdity of it. I tell them that yes, it’s absurd, but it’s how our culture popularly imagines race. Everyone knows that Obama’s mother was white, and yet everyone “knows” that Obama is black.
I’ve read enough of the work of my colleagues who do work in Brazil, and I’ve lived in Venezuela (where the racial imaginary is closer to that of Brazil than to that of the U.S.), to have some familiarity with different cultural logics of “race.” When it comes to Australia, though, I arrived here pretty ignorant. So for the past year and a half, I’ve been watching and listening carefully, trying to work out how the Australians imagine race. In certain ways the Australian logic seems to parallel the American formula. But in other ways the logic is quite different. Here, being Aboriginal seems to be not about the mixing of genetic or biological material but rather about heritage, about identifying with a community of people who claim you as one of their own. I’ve met several Aboriginal scholars who are as fair as Welsh-background me with straight blond hair, so it’s definitely not one’s appearance that is considered to make one Aboriginal.
Yet perhaps that’s also true in the U.S. It is self identification that matters most in “racial” categorizing, and this is reflected in the U.S. Census, where a person is categorized as black or white or Hispanic etc based purely on how they describe themselves. In contrast, Indigenousness in the U.S. can be is more straightforwardly about imagining the mixing of blood; to be officially Native American for purposes of obtaining some college scholarships or special admissions considerations, for example, you have to show that you are at least 1/16 or 1/32 Native American by descent (see this interesting online discussion); in contrast, the right to hold a Tribal I.D. card from most Native American tribes has to do with how you were raised and what community recognizes you, not with fractions and bloodlines.
But I started out talking about how Australians imagine Indigenous identity, i.e. Torres Strait Islanders or Aboriginal Australians, not about what Australians think it means to be black. I still don’t know that much about how Australians imagine blackness. (Maybe that’s because Australia is more about imagining whiteness than blackness?) This recent SMH article describes a group of Aboriginal artists as “black,” though the skin color of the artist they use to illustrate the article is quite fair. Yet to my American eye, this article is so wonderful — and strange — because of the way it describes a fair-skinned musician as black without at all indicating that there’s any strangeness about that. It makes it look like Australians are a lot less hung up on racial appearances than Americans are.
Can any of my Australian colleagues tell me more about how these labels get applied in Australia? Is “black” applied to all Indigenous Australians, independent of skin color? Is it equally applied to Sudanese immigrants?
Racial discrimination has a long history in Australia, and is synonymous with its colonial history. There is a huge legacy of distinctions made between ‘full blooded’ Aboriginals and ‘half-caste’ children, who were not ‘black’ or ‘white.’ The fact that Australia was colonised around the time other colonies were beginning to exploit African slave labour might have made a difference in the way settlers viewed the indigenous people of Australia in comparison to African populations. I don’t know enough about history to continue this train of thought.
I am inclined to believe that indigenous people are definitely separated from people of European descent in the average Australian’s mind, it is a seldom occurrence to hear this verbally. In Australia to hear someone call an indigenous person black would be quite peculiar. There are plenty of other derogatory terms, especially used out of Victoria, and if you pressed someone they would probably say that indigenous Australians are ‘black,’ but it is not at the forefront of the mind.
Personally, I think of Obama as black because the media has saturated all avenues with the opinion. He is a ‘good black’ – because he is The Great Liberator, it’s OK for the press to throw ‘black’ around every sentence and for us all to yap about blackness until the cows come home. In a few generations if there is another president of mixed race I doubt there will be as much of a fuss (unless Obama is assassinated.)
I personally believe someone is of Australian indigenous identity if they claim they are. I’m not anthropologist but I thought I’d blather a bit to see if I could contribute something useful.
You raise an interesting issue.
In my experience, the term black is rarely used in modern Australia outside two main groups – the media and some Europeans talk about black-white in the context of relations with and treatment of the Aborigines, while Aborigines will talk of white fellas, black fellas. This can sound a bit odd when the person speaking is as European looking as I am.
Historically, the term blacks was applied to the Aborigines by Europeans and then used by them in turn. However, even then its use was limited.
Part of the reason for this is that, unlike the Americas, Australia never had a large African community, so our attitudes went through a different process.
All racial attitudes come back to them and us.
On the us side, if you read past material from Australia as well as comments from Britian about Australia you will see references to the phrase the Australian race. Australia and some of the dominions were seen as breeding a new and better form of the British race.
This is quite important, because many Australians were as prejudiced against Southern Europeans as they were against other groups. They weren’t Brittish.
Outside the early settlement period, Australia’s indigenous people were a very minor sub-text in Australian history until quite recently. Of far more importance was the looming presence of Asia. The phrase yellow peril is an example.
There are a lot of racial terms around today, but they are far more fragmented as Australia has become more fragmented. Sometimes they also reflect splits within individual ethnic groups as well as the history of those groups.
In the case of the Chinese, for example, we have ABCs (Autsralian born Chinese), bananas (yellow on the outisde, white within), eggs (white on the outside, yellow within) and Hongkies (Hong Kong born Chinese).
A particular difficulty in Australia is our tendency to import and apply models that have little to do with Australian history.
I hope that this is of some help.
Thanks Luke and Jim for those thoughtful and helpful comments.
Oh, and on Obama’s whiteness/blackness, see this funny little ditty about Obama (O’bama) being Irish, as his great-great-great grandfather came from Moneygall, Ireland
http://www.oneeyedparrot.org/obama.html
Should we not consider the ways that our identification of blackness is shaped by influences beyond Australian history, in particular modern day transnational political projects and their expressions in popular arts? A non-indigenous Australian risks insulting an Indigenous person by using the term blackfella in much the same way as using the ‘n word’ in America; yet, a fair skinned Indigenous man recently observed to me, with some amusement, that many Indigenous people overseas are ‘really white’ (e.g. in Scandinavia, central Europe etc.,). That is, the ‘Indigenous project’ seems synonymous with colonisation by the white of the black or brown, and modern day expressions of identity, such as music forms popular with Indigenous people (e.g. reggae, hip-hop) express resistance, emancipation and anger about racism. i do not suggest that the Indigenous Australian image of blackness is an appropriation of external iconography (e.g. American, West-Indies, etc.,) but that perhaps views of blackness today draw upon transnational political projects that are as much black as white.
I recently found out that in the Netherlands, schools with high concentrations of “allochthonous” children (i.e. children from migrant families) are called “black schools.” The “problem migrants” here are the Moroccans, and to a lesser extent Turks and Surinamese; only a small percentage would be called “black” in a “racial” sense.
I think it’s an interesting point that you raise, Nic. It certainly is worthwhile considering the transnational dimensions of concepts of blackness and indigeneity. Lisa’s post is pointing to national variations in attitudes and concepts but it’s equally interesting to consider how they mutually influence each other. I think you’re right that there is a widespread assumption that ‘indigenous’ people are brown or black skinned, though the Sami in Scandinavia and others are exceptions. While you might be right that skin colour is widely connected with indigeniety, there have been recent conferences and events in Australia which have brought together representatives of Sami communities and indigenous Australians. As far as I know there was a lot of common ground and common experience between these groups.
I think the term ‘indigenous’ is often misused to connote merely being born in a place, or having one’s ancestors from there, as when white Australians say that they are ‘indigenous too’ (so what are the Aborigines making all this fuss about, being the implication). However, indigenity has a lot more to do with the process of colonisation of people living in non-state societies who have been incorporated into states, colonial or otherwise, and who remain distinct from the majority population and who are also marginalised.
I also can’t agree with you that ‘blackfella’ has the same level of negative connotations as ‘the n-word’ does i the USA. I think the fact that we are both reluctant to use the latter is an indication of how much more fraught that term is. It’s possible to use the word ‘blackfella’ without any derogatory connotations. As Jim said though, it’s less common for white Australians to use the terms ‘whitefella’ and ‘blackfella’, but I would say that those who do are often claiming a greater level of intimacy with Aboriginal affairs as cultural insiders.
I am an African American living in the U.S. and by that I don’t mean I am a Black American. My father was a very dark skinned African from Sierra Leone, and my mother is the child of Italian and British immigrants to the U.S. making her American. Culturally my parents always told me that I would be viewed by the world around me as black, and growing I identified mostly with hip-hop and reggea style music, speak with my friends in hip hop style vernacular and dress with hip-hop style clothing. Because of this I mostly identify with the “black” race, although my father always had an issue with that term saying that his skin was brown. Still when I fill out statistical questionaires I always put both because I can identify with both black and white and technically I am both having just as much one as the other in my genetic make up. I conclude, that race is biological, but culture is entirely different.
I can’t speak to the culture of Obama but technically, like myself, he is an African American man, and when the term is used in America it is synonomous with a black man, even though linguistically it should mean both African and American. However the cultural divide in America is extremely strong still, or wouldn’t have been a big deal that an African American was elected in office, and therefore like myself he is viewed as black when in America. However, I am sure that is not the case in Kenya, as it is not the case in Sierra Leone, where we would be viewed as white. He is counter to the majority because of his complexion, and is viewed as a minority in both places. I don’t know anything about Australian cultures and ethnicities, but I hope my experience in America and Africa can help shed some light on the subject.
Very interesting and insightful comments. Thanks Abioseh for sharing your thoughts.