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I might have missed the week for doing this, but I have been thinking about it. I don't have much to say. I really, really, really, related to Zarabee's post. I know I'm privileged. I try and check my privileges, but I live in some rarified circles. I find it amusing that most of the strangers in america I like to read tend to be Korean-Americans. Maybe it's because we bond over food.
:-)
I don't know any one who is 100% colour. This is Australia, after all. I'm 1/8th chinese, (a quadroon!) and then miscellaneous Irish and English. My great grand dad was the interesting one, apparently he "escaped" china, and then was one of the founding members of the China Society (Chun Wah, I think? I can't find my papers, and you all already know what sort of a mood I am in!). He helped sneak people into Australia to escape China. He was also the gambling boss of Perth Chinese community, and married a white girl to gain respectability. He was fined once for illegal alcohol consumption, but from the look of the fine from those days, they were using the words but they were using the book... if you get my meaning. Anyway, eventually he died, after my Nanna and her siblings were born. Because every one thought he was rich, no one bothered to pay his widow the money they owed, and she died destitute in the end.
My dad's family have done a lot of reasearch into Grandfather Sunnon (my memory sucks when I'm hormonal. *sigh*) because it seems he is the interesting relative. (Do we all only get rations of one?) But I wonder what life would have been like for my nanna's Mum, a white girl married to a chinesie in a time when chinesie were the scum of Perth. :-)
Which, in a long and winding way, leads me to this.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,19904788-948,00.html
It's all about how our prime minister thinks "`All this sort of stuff really was a diversion from the main issue and the main issue is to help indigenous people become part of the mainstream of the Australian community,'' he told Macquarie Radio"
Now, it's pretty damned easy for us to find out what he thinks. But what I wonder is what do Aborigines think. As part of various minorities, we are always struggling to define our problems OURSELVES to the dominant paradigm. In our Femconnexion list, that guy I called a troll, had basically defined what was a SAHM position, and it pissed the fuck out of me because HE was telling ME what my problems were, what my life was, and defining the person in it (me) without any understanding of what it is like. And I think that politics is stuck in a quandary - they HAVE to define problems to fix them. But the processes of finding out what the problems are seem to be inherently broken on a continual, large scale. Aborigines, I expect, all have a different view on what needs to be done to fix whatever problems they would like fixed. Women all have a different view on what needs to be done to fix ... We are stuck by the dominant paradigms' need for us to act as a monolith, when in reality, we're just a bunch of individuals who all have our own ideas on how to make the world a better place.
And when the dominant needs us to act as a monolithic expression, it is imposing a rigid set of semitoic structures onto the way we can express that need. And the language of the dominant just does not handle the needs of the non-dominant.
Now, a different thing: someone was telling me about how in the bush the government created well paid jobs for the aborigines. In an office. Forty hours a week. Huge amounts of money. And people got those jobs for a week or two, and then just didn't come back. And the government was all scandalized.
Well, funny that. I mean, really. The 40 hour a week thing for a fistful of dollars was introduced a few hundred years ago (it's called the Protestant Work Ethic) and quite simply, I'm not convinced it's the best way to go still. What was the government trying to do? They were trying to make the Aborigines into us. But that's not what all Aboriginals want. What I think they might want is the right to be themselves. To not be the token black person. To not be seen as a symbol when they're walking down the street, but to be seen as a person. The government was offering incentives that were a trap. Become like us. Like, it's a good thing. I don't agree that it is. I worry that the education the prime minister is talking about is an indoctrination away from Aboriginal roots and into anglo-saxon roots. There's no real way it couldn't be. All education is an indoctrination. But what are the kids going to learn? That they don't exist. There's no black people in the history I learnt. No women either.
Let's look at education. I like education; I love to learn things. But I'm also white, iddle class, anglosaxon descent. I'm pretty damn boring on the outside, if people were looking for oddities. Although my new haircut... sorry, no, back on track. I loved school. It fitted the way I think, it gave me the option to absorb as much as I wanted, usually at a pace I wanted, and provided facilities for me to get ahead if my learning was further than that of my school mates. I went in, and I sat down, and I did what I was told, and I graduated, and was a very popular kid from the teacher's POV. But the semiotic structure of schools realistically only works with kids like me.
My brother's not like me. He struggled to sit still. He wasn't very interested in book learning. He couldn't be relied upon to do extra duties because he'd barely finish his work. He came out of school with a lot of low grades. Because really, he thinks differently. Responds differently. And I expect, his brain works in ways completely different to me.
We had plenty of Aboriginal kids at primary school. Usually with surnames like "Brown." They were very different from my brother or I. And this sitting down to learn thing was really not their style. They're come for a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, and just disappear. They hated teachers. They hated school work. They hated sitting still. They hated the fact they "had" to be there. I think our schooling system failed them.
When we produce teachers, where do we start? We start with middle class, anglosaxon people, who have done reasonably well in a school system that already pretends Aboriginals don't exist.
And we usually send them to schools where there are very few Aboriginal kids.
They get given class plans which are singular and structured in one particular way. A way that would only work for one type of child. The white, anglosax, middle class child, with a particular type of brain. The amount of reading required - some kids don't like to read. But usually, they don't like the way reading is taught.
The poor teachers are given so little help to try and help those that don't fit into the right molds, and then get the flack when results aren't perfect. How are they supposed to be able to help people when as far as I can make out, the government can't actually find out what they need, simply because of the way our government has to run.
I hope I haven't annoyed any of the teachers on my list - please feel free to tell me I'm completely wrong, it's all changed in the last 20 years, and more leeways is being given to students who think differently. Instead of just blaming the teachers for "not doing it right."
