[Marxism] Aborigines & the identity question a comment to Noel Pearson

["Gary MacLennan" <gary.maclennan1@xxxxxxxxx>]

* *

Along with some indigenous friends I am engaged in a long term project of
critquing the work of the right wing think tank, The Cape York Institute,
run by the Indigenous intellectual Noel Pearson.  These are my initial
responses to a 2006 paper he delivered in Brisbane

* *

*Paper 1 LAYERED IDENTITIES AND PEACE ; **Earth Dialogue ; Brisbane
Festival; Sunday 23 July 2006 *

*Located at www.cyi.org.au/www.cyi.org.au/*

This piece owes much to Amartya Sen.  It also interestingly seems to
acknowledge ontological depth in its talk of layered identities.  But I feel
that the talk on identities does not acknowledge some important salient
facts.  Identities do cause wars etc.  They do provide bonds and they do
blow up bridges between people.  What is the solution here?  Pearson as
befits a true son of the postmodern impulse seeks diversity.  So he gives us
a model of the individual as the layered site of "competing" identities.
This is the "many" of the ancient the One versus the "many" of philosophical
debate.



The notion of competing identities is meant to prevent the development of a
mono-identity at any level. Fragmentation is supposed to exist at the
individualistic level.



I would counter this with a model which restores the notion of the one at a
deeper existential level.  We are both many and one.  There is only one race
and that is the human race. So at a depth level we all share a universal &
common core humanity. But this is a concrete universal.  It is realized in
the individual who is subject to many other mediations.



However the sad fact is that for many individuals the universal identity is
abstract rather than concrete.  To the impoverished Aborigine who has been
driven out of Cairns or Townsville by the police and the local authorities
and has nowhere to go, talk of a universal identity is very abstract indeed.
He has become the despised other of White society and no pious talk can
gainsay that.



Again what is the answer here? I think the answer is to acknowledge that yes
identities are layered.  But not all layers are equal.  The correct metaphor
is not that of the smorgasbord where we can go out in the morning and select
the appropriate identity for that day.    That is the dream of the
postmodernist intellectual, but it is an insult to try and peddle that to
the people of Weipa or Aurukun. They are thrown into the identity of the
Despised Other and must seek to reject it or succumb to the multiple
miseries of Capitalist modernity.



If we acknowledge that not all identities are equal nor are they all chosen
freely, then we are I think closer to a more nuanced model of the choices
facing all of us and in particular those who are thrown into the identity of
the Despised Other.



The salient fact is that some identities will emerge as the dominant or
important one and the individual is not always free to choose which identity
will emerge as the existentially crucial one. Identities emerge from
contexts or to be more accurate from social struggles.  Thus under the Third
Reich the distinction between secular and religious Jews was dissolved in
the furnace of Nazi hatred.  Similarly in Gaza today all differences between
Palestinians have been elided by the Zionist war machine.



Pearson's musing on identities would also have been helped by a realization
that identities can be real but also false.  Chris Sarra's research
documented the continued existence of the Aborigine as Despised Other.  The
notion that Aborigines are filthy, lazy, unreliable etc is still strong
within our society.  It is then real in that it is efficacious.  But it is
of course also deeply false.



But in addition to being false the identity of the Aborigine as the Despised
Other is also necessary. In other words in Bhaskarian terms it is deeply
ideological.  Its necessity of course lies with the role it performs in the
continued project of the expropriation and oppression of Indigenous
Australians.



Finally I would argue that what we need is not a model of competing
identities but rather a struggle for all individuals and societies to
construct a complex of compatible identities.  We are all human and as such
we are heir to a universal identity based on love and creativity, what
Bhaskar has termed as our ground states. But we are all born into a
particular biological, social and political conjuncture and it is this
conjuncture that determines which range of identities is open to us and the
relationships that hold between the identities.

Arguably the present situation in the Middle East is demonstrating with
horrific intensity that the identity of being a Zionist is not compatible
with the identity of being a true human being.  While of course the identity
of being a Jew is compatible with all that is best in humanity. Similarly I
think that Australian history shows, for instance, that the identity of
being an Aboriginal Australian is compatible with that of being a true human
being, while the identity of being a white colonist is not.
 comradely

Gary
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