I have been meaning to respond in this thread for a while now - the semi-compulsive research I mentioned in another thread is the main reason I have not yet done that, along with low energy levels.
Thank you for the interview, Alex and Michael, you guys covered some very interesting ground without fear of its controversial nature.
This post is essentially just to stake out my position on the many issues related to race as raised in the interview and the discussion in the thread.
I can see the appeal in denying the existence of race: if race does not exist, then nor does (can) racism. Nevertheless, reality is immune to being defined out of existence: racists will continue to be racist, whether or not the concept of "race" has been semantically excised from consensus reality. Denying the existence of race is, rather than an act of benevolence, a perpetuation of harm by proxy: in the absence of a valid concept of "race", and thus of a coherent concept of "racism", those particularly mass and systemic injustices committed on the
basis of race(ism) are no longer coherent either; to deny race is to deny the harm done by colonialism and imperialism as well as the possibility of and need for remedy and restoration.
Like Michael Patterson, I live in Australia, and I think the dilemma he poses has a clear answer: that...
..this is, always has been, and always will be indigenous land, never ceded. An invasion is no more justified than an illegal settlement; in fact, being an act of unprovoked and one-sided aggression, it is less justified. There can be fruits of an unprovoked invasion, but there cannot be
rightful fruits. The effective dispossession of this land from its rightful owners is an as-yet unresolved crime from which we non-indigenous occupants continue to benefit at the expense of its victims.
The resolution is simple: return effective sovereignty to the land's rightful owners. If they feel that they have benefitted from colonisation, then grant them the choice to continue to reap its rewards; if not, then grant them equally the choice to determine the destiny of their land on their own terms.
We are all complicit to some extent; guilt is a reasonable though not a necessary response: more important than how we feel is that we recognise that an ongoing wrong is being perpetuated, and support the process of righting it.
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Vortex, in
post #74, you solicited a response, so I will offer one. As I think is clear from the above, I answer the questions you posed to Charlie in criticising his position differently than you do, but I agree that his position is untenable for - I think - similar reasons as you do.
In the rest of your post, you identify "three groups of people who are still desperately clinging to racist assumptions and racist thought", all three of which you oppose. I am not sure whether you would slot my views, as expressed above, into any one of them. Perhaps the closest fit is this:
However, my position is not at all based on "lust for revenge" but on righting wrongs; on restorative justice. There is a principle in Western law, which I think reflects a corresponding principle of natural justice: that the rights of the original owner of stolen property are in no way invalidated by the transfer of that stolen property from the thief to other parties; that no matter how many hands through which that stolen property passes, justice is served only when it is returned to its rightful owner. My position is that this principle be respected at the group level at which land has been stolen by imperialists from its indigenous custodians.
I do not think either that this is an "authoritarian" position; I think that the reverse is instead true: to continue to impose upon rather than to be led by the rightful owners of the land, and moreover to refuse to even involve them in decision-making in any meaningful way, is the truly authoritarian approach.
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Regarding the general question of whether there is anything wrong or unethical with a racially (and/or culturally) homogeneous group of
legitimate occupants of a particular region maintaining that racial (and/or cultural) homogeneity, I say: no, there is nothing wrong with that. I say this because I believe in the right - where it causes no harm - to self-determination at not just an individual but at a group level. It is also consistent with the position that I outlined above: that the legitimate custodians of Australia (and other invaded indigenous nations) have that right to self-determination meaningfully returned to them.
Personally, as a member of a racially and culturally heterogeneous society, I prefer multiculturalism - but different people have different preferences, and if any currently homogeneous society with
legitimate right to its land prefers to remain homogeneous, then so be it; that is its members' right, and, in my view, it is not necessarily (although it can be) racist, for two reasons: (1) it need not at all involve disrespect for other races and cultures, but could rather be based in respect for racial and cultural diversity, and in a desire to maintain that racial and cultural diversity by not diluting it, and (2) it is a valid defence against the McDonaldisation of the planet.
I
do, though, see a problem with
forcing out of a heterogeneous society - in order to
create or
return to a homogeneous society - people who have themselves or by virtue of their ancestors been invited into that country, or arrived, by legitimate means. All bets are off if their presence is illegitimate in the first place though, as is that of those of us non-indigenous residents of countries like Australia.
Thanks for your long and detailed reply, Laird - I was asking for it indeed, and here it is.
Now I want to issue a reply to your reply.
Your idea of returning effective sovereignty of particular lands to the indigenous people (e.g., the the original, earliest inhabitants of the land) does have some strong moral basis (much unlike Charlie's one!), and does contain an important
part of truth, yet it is
incomplete - not wrong, but incomplete. Let me explain.
What I will write below is based on my understanding and interpretation of your position, Laird. Feel free to correct me if you think I misunderstood and misinterpreted you.
Your position is based on a principles of restorative justice - principles that I'm aware of. Effectively, they (among other things) mean that the people have the right for the restoration of the benefits which were denied to them because of someone's violence against them - such as the return of the stolen goods - or the proportionate compensation if restoration is not fully possible. Such restoration / compensation may require engagement of the third parties that were not initially the participants of the violent act, either as its perpetrators or its victims: for example, if a person has stolen the other person's belongings and then sold (or gifted) them to the third person
who was not aware that these items are stolen, the first person has a right to demand the return of the stolen things from the third one,
without implying the the third person is somehow guilty or complicit. In this case,
it would not be a punishment of the third person, but just a restoration of unjustly broken ownership of the third one.
Such position is good and understandable, but it has its crucial limit; without it, it may lead to injustices that may be even worse than the original ones. I may call it
the generational limit, and formulate it thus:
all restorative and compensatory efforts may be enacted only as long as at least some of the original participants of the situation that require restoration or compensation is still alive.
Let's return to the example above: let's suppose that we are talking about not the original participants - the Theif, the Victim, and the Unaware Buyer - but about their great-great-grandchildren. Let's assume that the stolen item has since turned into a beloved family heirloom for the descendants of the Unaware Buyer, now being owned by his great-great-grandson. And then, a great-great-granddaughter of the Victim appears at his door and demands that his family heirloom should be given back to her, since it was stolen from her great-great-grandmother more than a century ago and than sold to the great-great-grandfather of its original owner, who was unware of its stolen nature.
Should her demands be fulfilled immidiately? I don't think so - several generations has passed since then, and now the item rightfully belongs to the the great-great-grandson of the Unaware Buyer. These two people, of course, still can negotiate the situation between themselves; they can ask someone to mediate between them, and to assist them in the negotaiation process;
but the Victim's great-great-granddaughter now can only ask, controvertibly, not demand, incontrovertibly, to return the long-ago-stolen-by-a-long-dead-person item to her. The right to the obligatory demand to the return of the stolen goods ceases when all the participants of the initial situation are deceased.
Now, let's suppose that the person from whom the heirloom is demanded back is not desdendant of the Unaware Buyer, but of the original Thief. Wouldn't the original Victim's great-great-granddaughter have a right to demand it back, then? No, she wouldn't: the generational limit which I described above will remain intact.
Let's now return from our relatively simple example outlined above,
which at least involves only specific persons, to the situation of the lands the violently robbed from the indigenous populations centuries ago,
which involves the whole populations.
In such a case, our situation become as hard and complex as one can imagine. Let's have a pair of examples...
1) How would one separate the indigenous peoples from non-indigenous ones, given that inter-ethnic / inter-racial sex, coupling and childbirth are common events, an became more and more common as time passes? Are people whose blood are the mixture of the indigenous and non-indigenous ones have a right to call themselves "indigenous"? Or they have not - only a pureblood indigenous people may apply? Or it depends on the cultural preference and social neighbourhood they have themselves chosen during their lifetimes? Then what about the people who may be not indigenous by blood at all, but have lived with the indigenous ones for a long time and got deeply immersed in their culture?
2) What about the descendants of the slaves who were brought on the originally-indigeous lands against their will, such as black people in the Americas (I mean both North and South America, taken together - South America had its own share of the black slaves)?
And so on... But let's concentrate on the clear decendants of the colonisers / invaders, such as white and Latin Americans (don't forget, Latin Americans are also descendants of the European colonisers - Spanish and Porteguese ones, who were pillaging the Americas before white Englishmen and French, who arrived some time later), and the (descendants of) willing immigrants such as Asians, Italians, Jews or Irish. Do they have a right to call the land of the Americas their homeland?
My answer is plain and simple:
YES, THEY DO. They, and generations of their ansestors, have lived and worked and played on this land, and now it is theirs -
equally with all other people who inhabit it. Someone's ansestors may have lived here for 20000 years and someone's ones only for 200, but it does not change the right for their descendants who how share not just the land and what was built on it, but also, to some extent, culture and, most importantly, society.
Their primary moral duty nowadays is to overcome the painful legacy of the mutual hostility and mistrust, and learn how to coexist, cooperate and communicate in the way of mutuality and solidarity. No group of these peoples has the right to claim these lands as their exclusive property and then to drive away (or, as Charlie has proposed, to discriminate away...) other groups of peoples. This work not only to the white and Latin descendants of the violent colonisers, or even (the descendants of) the willing Asian, Italian, Jewish and Irish immigrants, but also for the descendants of the unwilling slaves and even if the first, indigeous inhabitants of the lands. The history, as it was enacted by all their ansestors taken together, has brought them into the society they they live toghether now, provided them with the culture with that they live and the land and constructions on it by that they live. Oftentimes it was an ugly, bloody, cruel history - but it also granted us all the positive legacy we enjoy, from the principles of freedom to the spirtual practices to the material wealth.
And we cannot separate the "good" history from the "bad" one; it is all ours. Yet we can, and should, learn from it so we can choose wisely the parts of our legacy that deserve to be maintained and preserved (such as the principles of freedom, or great works of art, or scientific discoveries, or religious sites and relics) and the ones that must be rejected and given away (such as initiatory warfare, or torture, or slavery, or human sacrifice). And we should not repeat the acts and practices of our ansestors that we now justly reject as cruel and oppressive.
Some old wrongs cannot be righted. Sometimes it is simply too late for any meaningful restoration or compensation - we cannot reverse and replay our shared history, even we would painfully like to. What is humanely possible for us is to learn from both mistakes and achievements of all ansestors - and act to each other in the way that the former ones would not be repeated and the latter ones would be not only preserved, but surpassed and excelled.
This is what I sincerely think about the issue.