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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Lushington D. Brady
Why Brag about Things You Never Did?
Identity politics is strictly for losers
Australian Aboriginal academic Anthony Dillon recently wrote: “I don’t say ‘I’m a proud … man’ like my Indigenous peers do. Not because I’m ashamed, but because I recognise my Aboriginal ancestry the same way I recognise my English ancestry, gender/sex, Queenslander status, heterosexuality, and all the other parts/influences I never chose.”
Dillon throws up an interesting challenge. The “proud … man/woman” trope has become very popular in certain circles, much like the faddish, nonsensical import, “First Nations”. Almost no ABC story on an Aboriginal Australian fails to recite the “proud…” formula, no matter how ridiculous. Take the case of Ancestry?”>Marion Leane Smith, an Aboriginal Australian woman who became a nurse in WWI.
The ABC introduced her as “Aunty” Marion Leane Smith, “a proud Dharug woman”. But Smith had just one Aboriginal grandmother, lived in Canada from the age of two, studied nursing in the US, served in the Canadian armed forces, married an entirely white Canadian, and died and was buried in Canada. If Smith thought of herself as anything, it would certainly have been “Canadian”. The honorific “Aunty” would probably have mystified her.
Not just content with posthumously turning people into their intersectional dress-up dollies, a great many “Indigenous” Australians are playing dress-ups with their own identity. It often seems that the tinier their quotient of Aboriginal ancestry, the louder they are at promoting that above everything else.
Some, like writer Bruce Pascoe, appear to be putting on metaphorical blackface. Pascoe claims to be “Indigenous”, a claim rubbished by geneologists who traced all lines of his family tree back to Britain, and two out of the three Aboriginal groups he claims kinship with. Yet, the taxpayer-funded broadcaster still introduces him as “a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man”.
It’s suspected that there are a lot more Bruce Pascoes out there. The Australian Census shows an astonishing growth in Australia’s “Indigenous” population: many times what can be explained by natural growth. In other words, thousands of people are suddenly ticking the “Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander” box.
Bindi Cole Chocka was one of a group of people who sued columnist Andrew Bolt, who argued that they assumed Aboriginal identity merely to further their careers and cash in on opportunities only available to the “box tickers” as some Aborigines call them. Bolt famously lost the case, but Chocka at least has had second thoughts. While Chocka still regards Bolt’s column as hurtful — not unreasonably — she now says that she probably wouldn’t use the Racial Discrimination Act in such a way again.
Chocka says, truthfully, that she is of mixed racial identity, but now argues that “there is a problem with identity politics and intersectionality”. “When you do identify in these ways, you are so often buying into a victim identity,” she says.
Further, she acknowledges that buying into such a victim identity was a means of evading personal responsibility. “I could constantly blame everything and everyone else.”
Yet, Chocka as much as anyone could, really could claim to be a victim. She writes of her upbringing with a drug-addicted, prostitute mother in Melbourne’s then-notorious St. Kilda. “I was exposed to so many things that young children shouldn’t be exposed to. I was repeatedly abused, sexually and physically, and I was neglected badly.” Chocka carved out a successful career as an artist, only to be victimised again: “cancelled” by the art world, she says, after coming out as a Christian.
In finding God — she says He spoke to her a week before she was arrested and jail for drugs — Chocka says she “realised how much I had hurt other people”. She took on the mantle of responsibility, not victimhood. She began to forgive those who had hurt her as she begged to be forgiven.
Note the difference, here: Chocka chose to become Christian and redeem herself; she did not choose her ancestry. This is what Anthony Dillon means, when he says that “I recognise my Aboriginal ancestry the same way I recognise… all the other parts/influences I never chose”.
We all recognise the things that helped shape us, even though we had no choice in them. What seems curious or innapopriate is laying claim to those things as if they were our own achievements.
Like many Australians and New Zealanders, I’m proud of the fact that my grandfather was an original ANZAC. But it would be weird and presumptuous beyond belief to tout myself as a “Proud ANZAC man”. It would be no more appropriate, and no less arrogant, than going to an ANZAC Day parade wearing his medals on the left side of my chest.
It would be even weirder if I promoted myself as a “Proud Anglo-Celtic-Germanic man”. All those things are objectively true: through no choice of my own, that is my genetic heritage. In many ways, it’s also my cultural heritage: each of those ancestries has left a cultural stamp on me.
Often tenuous, it is true: for instance, I find Tasmania’s bleak winters refreshing, whereas my wife, of Mediterranean parentage, finds them depressing. I sometimes wonder if some kind of ancestral “memory” (as mediated by, perhaps, genes that mean that my vitamin D levels don’t fall as much as hers in winter, which has an impact on mood) of the ancient, dank Teutonic forests and the green hills of Erin plays any part.
Perhaps, I wonder, this is the “connection to the land” of which so many Aboriginal activists speak? But my “connection” to Australia is surely mediated more by the fact that I was born and lived all my life here, that I simply know and love it. How does the minute Aboriginal genetic heritage of someone who is clearly otherwise almost entirely as European as I apparently make such a crucial difference?
Besides, aren’t we all just Australians? My wife has just one generation of ancestors buried in this land; I have six; an Aboriginal Australian might have as many as 1500. But my wife is (rightfully) mortally insulted by the suggestion that I am “more Australian” than she is.
Even if it were true: by what right would I go strutting around, boasting of it to all and sundry?
It is, as Anthony Dillon points out, something I had no part in, which happened long before I was born. As are all the other parts of my heritage. They may have shaped me, but I didn’t do them. If I’m going to publicly proclaim that I’m anything, it’s the things I’ve personally achieved.
I rather suspect that anyone who feels the need to define themselves by things that they had no hand in are people who haven’t really achieved anything by themselves to be proud about.
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