My thesis, distilled

From zarabee:

I have to stop buying into the frame of the racist elements.

So when someone says “The muslims are out-breeding us”
My first temptation is to say “So what? I fail to see a problem.”
When really, I should be saying “Who the fuck is this “us” you’re talking about.”

The frame is “us and them”. My first instinct is to deconstruct the “them”, and it should be to deconstruct the “us”. The whole point of a multicultural society is that there is no version of “us” that doesn’t include “them”. My point shouldn’t be to illustrate how the construction of “them” used is false (like the rest of us monolithic folks here in outer Monolithia, clearly all people designated to a specific cultural subset take on all stereotyped characteristics of that subset without exception, dontchya know. ), but to point out that the construction of “us” is false, and moreover, that the construction of “them and us” is doubly false.

I don’t believe in “them”, and yet I still buy into the frame. I need to stop.

For the wanky, expanded version, see my thesis. or the paper I delivered at AGMC, linked at http://www.heliotrope.net.au/mordwen/articles.

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6 Responses to “My thesis, distilled”

  • paraphasiclotus Says:
    March 19th, 2006 at 2:09 am

    I did a great subject on Indigenous Studies in Education last semester at uni. The whole first six weeks was looking at the students, how Australian culture does exist and the types of questions asked in a Whiteness Studies framework. It was transformative in a very real and practical sense.

    It’s a hard experience to describe as much of the real work was done in tutorials with the all-Indigenous teaching team asking us the hard questions (mostly why?) – but I feel that I was well prepared by the subject to examine the assumptions of the word “us” in that statement before I even began to address the “them”.

  • rickybuchanan Says:
    March 19th, 2006 at 6:05 am

    Wow… one of those things that is so blindingly obvious and RIGHT that it makes me wonder why on earth I didn’t already know it.

    Thank you.
    r

  • bourdieu_boy Says:
    March 19th, 2006 at 11:15 am

    Funny, the paper I presented on Friday dealt with some of these issues. The problem is who gets to do the deconstruction of the “us” and the “them”. For the disempowered, drawing a sharp discursive line between the us and the them is a strategy of empowerment, however self-defeating.

  • i_ate_my_crusts Says:
    March 19th, 2006 at 8:04 pm

    I agree — for the disempowered, getting to define themselves is empowering, because it’s not a right that’s granted, it’s a right that has to be carved out and taken from the dominating culture. It’s donme with intent at inclusion, at creating an in-group from an out-group. It’s incredibly powerful.

    As part of For those who are part of the dominating culture, the challenge is to both value that, and to take on the role of challenging the divide as drawn by the dominating culture.

    And not to make it all about us.

  • p_cat Says:
    March 19th, 2006 at 10:13 pm

    Thanks for this. I will never forget John Howard’s address to the nation during the Wik debate, when he actually spoke in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

  • bourdieu_boy Says:
    March 20th, 2006 at 7:57 am

    Yes, there are no easy answers, just slow, considerate, careful politics across the boundaries. If only…

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