Jackson Jive Response Part 2: It’s only a joke, right?
Mining is a rich industry, but mining towns are often fairly poor.
Jobs can vanish quickly, and not everyone can be a miner in any case, when i was a kid women didn’t get mining positions with any regularity. My careers teacher told me I would be a secretary, then pregant, then married, so why bother with tertiary education (I wanted to be a park ranger or a ninja turtle, possibly at the same time).
The area I grew up in had a big share of hard luck cases with the diseases the industry contributes to, there was considerable domestic violence, and many people had it very tough indeed. The area was not what one thinks of as class privileged at the time.
It was highly privileged, racially. If you were the ‘right’ race.
If you were an Indigenous Australian, there was outright abuse in the streets. I saw it happen in Morwell, and assuming that as a child I was just as clueless then as I often am now, I have no doubt that it occurred vastly more frequently than that. Many people where I lived and grew up held forth frequently on two opinions that could be boiled down to: ‘I wouldn’t give those lazy abos a job’ and ‘Look at those lazy abos, they don’t have jobs’.
When one has white privilege, one is able to, for example, not know anything about blackface and its history of stereotype, racism, and creating caricatures that encouraged sneering superiority. One might not know it has a history in Australia.
While it may seem to beggar belief in the US, there are people in Australia who have absolutely no idea the concept of blackface is offensive. This is privilege. The good news about such privilege is that it can be recognised when pointed out, and admitted to. It can be acknowledged. Having privilege is not the same thing as being racist.
Racism is when you respond to ‘blackface is offensive’ with ‘Bugger off and stop being so politically correct’. Racism is when you use your white privilege to let you ignore the fact that you are hurting someone else, someone who has probably been hurt many times before by people just as blithe as you are; someone who almost always gets attacked by people just like you. You might not be able to choose having been born with unearned privilege, but you do have the responsibility not to swing it around as a club.
I am not writing about the performers themselves, but rather the massively defensive response from a large segment of our community. It pays to consider the reaction from members of our indigenous community to this.
This is a show beloved by the people I grew up with, who often got a raw deal in life. It was something I liked when I was a kid. When you lack class privilege, it gets tempting to use that as a shield to say ‘I can’t have privilege because look how damn poor I am’. But you still get white privilege and that is very sharply illustrated by who got jobs and who did not when I was growing up in Morwell.
The problem is not having no idea. The problem is refusing to take citicism on board, understand where it comes from, and not taking responsibility as Australians for injustices we perpetuate.
Related Content: Jackson Jive Response Part 1: But we never even had Blackface in Australia! – by Ceredwyn Ealanta
Ceredwyn Ealanta is a web designer and developer working in Melbourne, which is Wurundjeri land in the Birrarung valley. She has an interest in social media, responsible design and usability, gaming and sustainability. In her spare time she writes, does art and stained glass work, and goes rock climbing. Her regular blog is rookinthegarret.
