Our submission to the Racial Discrimination Act consultation

Dear lawmakers,

The thing is, people already have the freedom to be bigots. And in spite of federal and state laws, bigots feel free to shout slurs at us as we commute to school or work, to mock our customs, our appearance and our accents, to question and challenge our presence in this country. We see ourselves demonised in television dramas and stereotyped in advertising. We see ourselves erased from history and marginalised in political discussion.

For the most part, racism in Australia flourishes uninterrupted. Alan Jones still has a radio show, and continues to broadcast xenophobic hate speech even after he racially vilified people of Middle Eastern backgrounds in the lead up to the Cronulla riots. Andrew Bolt still has his newspaper column, as well as a television show, in which he regularly espouses Stolen Generations denial, among other offensive untruths.

Andrew Bolt’s attempt to intimidate light-skinned Aboriginal people from publicly identifying as Aboriginal was found in breach of the Act because it contained factual errors and inflammatory and provocative language. Bolt’s intimidation continues regardless of this finding. Bolt has targeted up to thirty light-skinned Aboriginal persons, including school children, on his blog under implicit headers of 'No Comment'. If the present provisions are ill-equipped to shield even vulnerable Aboriginal school children from racism and humiliation, weakening these provisions seems an unnecessary limitation of already scant protections. These limitations are, in our view, incorrectly made in the name of open and free public discourse which is by no means violated by the present Act.

However, these changes may have the effect of disincentivising participation in public discourse for persons who have fear of such racial vilification. The proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act hollow out the core of a piece of legislation that is already very limited and specific in its possible applications. We oppose all of the proposed changes, as we will discuss in more detail below.

Proposed repeal:

18B. Reason for doing an act

If:

(a)  an act is done for 2 or more reasons; and

(b)  one of the reasons is the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of a person (whether or not it is the dominant reason or a substantial reason for doing the act);

then, for the purposes of this Part, the act is taken to be done because of the person’s race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

Repealing subsection 18B appears to condone any vilification or intimidation on the grounds of race, colour or national or ethnic origin of a person so long as there is a secondary reason for the act. For example, talking about a flood of cashed-up Chinks would appear to be acceptable as long as it is also a commentary on the real estate market.

As women of colour, the racism that we experience often intersects with sexism. We are concerned that repealing 18B will make it more difficult to redress vilification that targets us on the basis of gender, sexuality, disability or other factors in addition to race, colour or national or ethnic origin. For example, will the new Act excuse referring to a migrant woman as a ‘mail-order bride’ because this is said on the basis of her gender and relationship as well as her race and national origin?

Proposed repeal:

18C. Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin

(1)  It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a)  the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b)  the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

Note: Subsection (1) makes certain acts unlawful. Section 46P of the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 allows people to make complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission about unlawful acts. However, an unlawful act is not necessarily a criminal offence. Section 26 says that this Act does not make it an offence to do an act that is unlawful because of this Part, unless Part IV expressly says that the act is an offence.

(2)  For the purposes of subsection (1), an act is taken not to be done in private if it:

(a)  causes words, sounds, images or writing to be communicated to the public; or

(b)  is done in a public place; or

(c)  is done in the sight or hearing of people who are in a public place.

(3)  In this section:

"public place" includes any place to which the public have access as of right or by invitation, whether express or implied and whether or not a charge is made for admission to the place.

And proposed addition:

1. “ It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

a. the act is reasonably likely:

i. to vilify another person or a group of persons; or

ii. to intimidate another person or a group of persons,

and

b. the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of that person or that group of persons.

2. For the purposes of this section:

a. vilify means to incite hatred against a person or a group of persons;

b. intimidate means to cause fear of physical harm:

i. to a person; or

ii. to the property of a person; or

iii. to the members of a group of persons.

Repealing and replacing Section 18C with the new proposed wording on vilification and intimidation will severely reduce the already limited protection available in the Act. The revised Act will make racial insults, offenses and humiliation acceptable unless they can be proven to ‘incite hatred’ or ‘cause fear of physical harm’. It will not recognise the substantial psychological harm that insult and humiliation causes to individuals, nor the social toll through which vilification makes racialised minorities doubt our rights to be visible, to be heard and to be active participants in the future of our nation.

Proposed repeal:

18D. Exemptions

                  Section 18C does not render unlawful anything said or done reasonably and in good faith:

                    (a)  in the performance, exhibition or distribution of an artistic work; or

                    (b)  in the course of any statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for any genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest; or

                    (c)  in making or publishing:

                             (i)  a fair and accurate report of any event or matter of public interest; or

                            (ii)  a fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment.

And proposed addition:

4. This section does not apply to words, sounds, images or writing spoken, broadcast, published or otherwise communicated in the course of participating in the public discussion of any political, social, cultural, religious, artistic, academic or scientific matter.

We are very concerned by the broad range of exemptions under this proposed sub-section, which will have the effect of permitting public discussion which is intimidating or vilifying without any requirements of fairness, accuracy, sincerity, reasonableness or good faith. In the context of this nation’s eugenicist past, we are especially anxious about an exemption for discussions of ‘scientific’ matters, and the impact such scientific exemptions may have on public discourse surrounding persons vulnerable to racism, and the Stolen Generations.

The proposed change also specifically targets the capacity of racialised groups to collectively protest vilification as an issue of justice and national political interest. Several commentators have said that Pat Eatock et al could have won a defamation case against Andrew Bolt. Instead they chose to sue under the Racial Discrimination Act which offers no damages, but which more accurately frames the issues as intimidation of a racialised group rather than defamation of several individuals.

Currently the Racial Discrimination Act’s provisions relating to racial hatred are often used in relation to public discussion in the course of the matters outlined above, as private acts do not come under the Act. Anything less would possibly be seen as trivial. We ask when the Attorney-General imagines the new provisions would apply if not in cases exempt under this sub-section.

Proposed addition:

3. Whether an act is reasonably likely to have the effect specified in sub-section (1)(a) is to be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community.

The implication of this addition is that the current law panders to oversensitive minorities, that we require an 'ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community' to decide what real racism is. In the media coverage of the discussion surrounding the changes, it is apparent that people who admit they have never experienced racism nevertheless feel they would be best placed to arbitrate it. While lack of experience in other areas rarely implies expertise, it seems when it comes to racism, experience is seen as a problem, undermining ‘neutrality’. We challenge the possibility of neutrality or an ‘ordinary reasonable’ perspective in relation to an Act that is specifically designed to provide redress in relation to vilification, intimidation and offence situated within historical and ongoing unequal power relations. We think the current Act should be rephrased to clarify that vilification (offence, insult and humiliation) should be assessed by the standards of the affected community (as it has been interpreted by the courts to date).

In conclusion, we feel the proposed changes effectively negate any protections against racial hatred that the Act can offer. The changes champion powerful media commentators’ lust for offense, humiliation and lucrative controversy over the rights of marginalised Australians to observe and participate in public discussion free from vilification. The changes also suggest ignorance of the social and political context which creates the demand for laws against racial hatred. We urge the government to work harder at understanding and challenging racism.

Yours sincerely,

the undersigned members of the Women of Colour Network Australia

[names and personal details removed for privacy reasons]

Speech from NOWSA 2010

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the owners of the land we are meeting on, the Pambalong people. This is stolen land whose sovereignty was never ceded, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present, and future, and to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.

I’d also like to thank the organisers for giving me the opportunity to speak today. It’s a real honour to have been asked and I hope what I have to say is valuable to you.

Just a little about myself, before I start. I’m studying at Sydney University, where I’m involved in the postgraduate association, SUPRA. From October 2008 to June 2009 I was sole president, then from July 2009 to June this year I was co-president. I’ve also been involved in feminist and anti-racist organising in Sydney.

I’ve been asked to speak about the herstory of the Women of Colour Network to the conference, and how it relates to the themes of intersections and autonomy. I’ll include some personal stories along the way in relating this herstory, and go on to talk about how it relates to other activism that I’ve been involved in.

Herstory of the Women of Colour Network

The Women of Colour Network was an idea born in the minds of two women in 2007 - myself and a friend who was then University of Melbourne Student Union’s Co-Women’s Officer. I had begun to become interested in radical women of colour politics, and had freshly read This Bridge Called My Back. Meeting another radical woman of colour feminist was incredibly inspiring, and we were in a mood to try to reach for big things. We spoke to the organising collective about having an autonomous space for women of colour, and of establishing an autonomous caucus. Both of these requests were granted, and we eagerly prepared for the caucus, and to establish a network.

NOWSA is an intensely political space, and it can be marked by a number of tensions, conflicts, and challenges that aren’t always comfortable to negotiate. Autonomous spaces within the broader NOWSA conference offer a temporary reprieve of some of those tensions, and let us reconfigure them in new ways. I can’t claim to speak for all participants in the caucus, but I certainly felt that the caucus space was the highlight of the conference. Where, in most other spaces, the experiences of women of colour are marginalised, the caucus was driven by the political energy coming from our experiences.

It is important to acknowledge that the Women of Colour Caucus came about after NOWSA had gone through a history of racism. In 1989, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women from the First International Indigenous Women’s Conference walked out of the NOWSA conference in Adelaide. In 1999, Aboriginal poet Lisa Bellear was booed when she addressed racial issues in a plenary, and there have been major tensions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women participating in the NOWSA conference in the past. Lisa Bellear wrote a list of suggested protocols in the Melbourne University Student Union’s publication Judy’s Punch, which was circulated at the 2006 NOWSA conference. Many of these protocols were incorporated by the 2007 organising collective.

With this history within Australian feminism, it is important that there is formal recognition of women of colour within feminist organising. Including an autonomous caucus in the NOWSA conference will hopefully ensure a continued space for women of colour to raise our concerns within student feminism.

We wanted to create something sustainable for the future as well. The student movement is characterised by constant change and people moving on. You can’t always be there to see your own projects through, so you have to leave strong institutional legacies to make sure that equity is addressed in the movement. Most of the founding members of the Women of Colour Caucus have graduated and moved on. Knowing that the caucus continued last year at NOWSA without the participation of any of the founding members was really inspiring, and I hope that the caucus will continue after we all (eventually) graduate.

With the bane of VSU blighting the numbers, the engagement, the energy, and the capacity of our student organisations, we can’t ensure that NOWSA will always be well-populated or that the variety of student feminists will be well-represented. In particular, it seems that funding constraints often mean that only a few women from each campus, at times only Women’s Officers, are able to attend. This tends to disadvantage women of colour, particularly those who can’t take time away from work. Hopefully the continuity of the Women of Colour Caucus will ensure that women of colour have a strong presence and contribution to NOWSA far into the future.

Intersections

NT Intervention

Shortly before the 2007 NOWSA conference, the Northern Territory Intervention was announced.

From the earliest days, the rhetoric around the intervention has been about the protection of women and children from domestic violence, issues which have been front and centre in feminist campaigning. Disappointingly, however, feminist organising hasn’t really developed much around the Intervention. Instead, the political right has co-opted feminist language to justify the economic coercion, dispossession and cultural genocide enacted under the Intervention. For instance, the National Plan Of Action to Reduce Violence Against Women and Children, which was called for by many women’s groups, affirms the Intervention as the most appropriate response to domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

Only a few weeks ago, the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment
(Welfare Reform and Reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act) Bill was passed, which allows the federal government the power to apply income management to any area in the country where it deems it’s necessary. The Intervention has finally been made national, and will disproportionately apply to the most disadvantaged people in the community, predominantly women.

In an historical sense, welfare has been a central concern of feminism. Feminists have fought for fairer welfare provisions, for equal access to certain benefits, and for services from the state. At the same time, Aboriginal women particularly have suffered through the social control mechanisms of welfare. The Intervention is clearly an extension of paternalistic forms of welfare, which women of colour the world over have fought against. Although some feminists, and nearly all welfare agencies, have opposed income management, the presence of feminists in the campaign against the Intervention remains patchy. It is time to put an intersectional perspective into action and deploy our feminist politics in standing against this gross injustice.

The limited experience I had of truly intersectional organising was working with the Sydney Reclaim the Night collective in 2008, where we made the Intervention the main focus. We highlighted the role of state violence in the Intervention, and the ways that state coercion has been experienced as violence by the people affected by the Intervention. This effect has disproportionately fallen on women, but I now think that we may have underestimated the effect on Aboriginal men.

We have to understand that men of colour, too, are implicated in the white paternalism of the Intervention, and feminism has historically been terrible at addressing the oppression experienced by men of colour alongside women of colour. In some cases, de-centring sexism is the most vital thing we can do to fight against oppression of women.

International Students

This is particularly clear in the rather male-dominated field of education activism.

One of the major things I took on in my term(s) of office as president of the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association was campaigning for international students’ rights. It was clear to me from the outset that international students are some of the most oppressed students in the student community. Visa restrictions, exploitation in the workplace, abuse by landlords, discrimination in universities, and intimidation were the things I heard from international students on a regular basis about their experiences. The intersection of education, capitalism, race, and class shape these issues. For women international students, the huge but invisible issue seems to be sexual harassment in the workplace.

Many of these issues were only addressed in the media last year, after many years of advocacy by international students through their student organisations. Part of the reason for this was that the issue of violence was taken up as a salient point in protests, and part of it was that international media had started to pay attention.

As it became clear that many international students are prospective immigrants to Australia, the current of xenophobia in the public discourse about international students became more pronounced. International students were either hapless dupes of unscrupulous immigration and education agents, or they were ‘bad’ immigrants, opportunistically using education to jump the queue, so to speak.

Government responses to issues raised by international students has been incredibly contradictory. On the one hand, the regime of allowing onshore applications for permanent residency was initiated by the Howard government in 2001, and now that we are in an election year under a Labor government, the door is being slammed in the faces of thousands of students who have spent thousands of dollars in accessing education, employment and a livelihood in Australia.

After a lot of advocacy, the government initiated a range of inquiries. Their solution to the ‘problem’ of international students was to restrict the numbers that come to the country in the first place. The Migration Act Amendment (Visa Capping) Bill 2010 will very likely be heard in parliament in mid-August. This bill gives the Immigration Minister the power to terminate residency applications from any particular class or range of visas, which might mean discrimination on the basis of race or nationality.

But we already know that the bill will affect students trained in the least valued occupations - cooking, hairdressing, and community welfare: all gendered as traditionally feminine occupations. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

I really encourage you to find out about the convergence on Canberra happening in August when the Bill is read in parliament, and make the effort to come along in support.

Intersectional Politics in Action

My experience in the campaigns against the Northern Territory Intervention and for international students rights have involved working with people less privileged than me. I’ve learned some hard lessons in these campaigns, which I want to share with you today. Most of these lessons won’t make as much sense outside the context of the particular work being done, but I want to try to articulate what I’ve learned as my contribution to this conference. I also think it’s important to share these reflections because many of you will graduate and then go on to work in service provision, advocacy, or will continue as activists. For the activist community to mature and grow we need to share our lessons more effectively. I was never given much guidance with these issues, so I felt that it would be good to take the opportunity to share my knowledge with others, to reverse that trend.

In many ways, intersectionality is a bit of a buzzword in radical politics, but most organising still takes place along single-issue lines. It’s difficult to address multiple oppressions at the same time, especially in activism that’s focused on transforming particular institutions. Working on more than one institution at once is incredibly difficult, and requires a lot of dedication and commitment. Too often, intersectionality has remained a theoretical understanding of domination only, and hasn’t been deployed in feminist praxis.

Feminism has historically fetishised particular forms of sexism at the expense of recognising forms of domination that intersect with sexism and exacerbate violence against particularly vulnerable women. In those cases, it may be the case that we need to de-centre sexism in order to address the nature of oppression affecting particular women. At the same time, a hegemonic womanhood is usually addressed by campaigns and issues which term themselves ‘feminist’. Feminist campaigns such as reproductive rights and equal pay still centre white women. Although reproductive health care and working rights are enormous issues for women of colour, they are experienced differently from white women.

One of the key elements of intersectional politics we need to understand is to act in solidarity with others who may experience oppressions that we don’t. Most often, this solidarity work is called “being an ally”. I think this term, and this way of looking at it, is really problematic.

Being an ‘ally’

In all my activist work, seeing myself as an “ally” really limited how effective I could be. The notion of “allies” presupposes that the political self-identification of someone as an “ally” means that the person is being effective, regardless of whether they actually are. It militates against the person being held accountable by the group they are supposedly “allied” with. That lack of accountability is based on privilege; so in many ways, the notion of being an “ally” reinforces privilege.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was imposing my own vision of liberation onto a community I was working in solidarity with; and I’ve seen this done time and again by student activists. While you might have a great theoretical understanding of a particular kind of oppression, even one that’s related to the oppression that affects you, only the people experiencing it can determine the appropriate response to it.

What’s important to remember about the nature of oppression is that it undermines the autonomy of the people it affects. And opposing oppression means upholding the autonomy of oppressed peoples, even if that autonomy might sometimes mean engaging with the so-called oppressor. Imposing a rigid vision of liberation onto people can be just as oppressive as historical and traditional forms of oppression. Part of ending oppression is creating the space for oppressed peoples to engage with things that have been deployed oppressively on their own terms.

It’s also important to remember that not all of the people within an oppressed community will have the same response to their oppression, and there can be some very sensitive tensions within a community around political differences in relation to domination. It’s important to respect those tensions, since they’re often the result of a history that affects a lot of people. You can get drawn into a situation where you’re benefiting from tension and infighting. Those circumstances are always really difficult to negotiate.

It was really counter-intuitive for me to understand this, but at times, the best thing you can do in solidarity with a community is to go against the wishes of someone you are working with. That can especially be the case when they’re doing something abusive and unethical. It’s important to get rid of the notion that we sometimes have of people in oppressed communities as helpless victims. This vision erases the agency that oppressed people have, and the real harm they can do to other oppressed people. Part of an intersectional perspective is understanding that oppression and privilege can be contextual, and can work together to benefit or harm certain people. A perspective informed by privilege and guilt can cause you to be harmfully negligent when abuse is happening. And, of course, the key to unpacking this privilege is to begin with how it affects your own community, and may uphold oppressive practices within feminist spaces.

Ultimately, there’s no field manual for solidarity work. Your judgement is the only tool you have to make a decision about how to approach a situation. In most instances, you will be held accountable, and you need to be open to being held accountable, for mistakes you make. There is no source of information that can give you all the answers and negate your accountability for your own actions. All we have is the opportunity to learn from others, and the wisdom of our own experiences.

On that note, I’d like to leave a question for the conference delegates not participating in the Women of Colour Caucus. I’d like to ask how you think we can better build mechanisms of accountability to women facing a variety of oppressions into feminist organising spaces.

A Working Manifesto

This manifesto was written by Raina Peterson and presented to the 2008 Network of Women Students Australia (NOWSA) conference, where the Women of Colour Network initiated a discussion about the relationship between racism and feminism. The manifesto came out of difficulties that some of the members of the Network were having with the Women's Department of their student organisation.

The discussion ranged over many issues and raised a number of concerns for the conference. We are re-posting it here to make it available for other feminist/women's groups to use as a tool for liberating, anti-racist organising.

***


WORKING MANIFESTO

This working manifesto is concerned with the relationships between women of colour and white feminists. It is particularly concerned with the dealings between Women's Departments and the women of colour in and out of their Collectives.


WHY WOMEN'S DEPARTMENTS SHOULD SUPPORT WOMEN OF COLOUR

It is part of the Women's Officers' job description to represent and support women on campus. We are women on campus. However, as women of colour, we are yet to be adequately represented and supported by the feminist movement, including Women's Departments. As women of colour, we are especially marginalised within broader society and within the feminist movement. The feminist movement needs to address its past and present mistreatments of women of colour.


A FEW OF THE OFFENCES OF WHITE FEMINISTS

Alienating women of colour; using us as mascots; reproducing colonial ideologies and practices; upholding gender as the only or most important axis of oppression; normalising white womanhood; expecting us to assimilate into white feminist culture; expecting us to adopt white feminist ideologies and practices even when they are irrelevant, inappropriate or antagonistic to our lives; not listening to us; talking for us; pretending we don't exist; racialising, essentialising and exoticising us; recruiting us and using us to support their campaigns; failing to adequately support our own campaigns; disrespecting our autonomy; failing to address racism in the feminist movement; failing to address racism in broader society; failing to address racism in themselves; appropriating our culture; claiming that our brothers are their 'oppressors'; failing to provide us with spaces that are safe from racism; failing to address our emotional, cultural and political needs; expecting admiration from us whenever they say something about racism that isn't completely stupid; racially abusing us; getting defensive when we talk about racism or call them out for racist conduct; expecting us to educate them when they should be doing it themselves; refusing to fight for our causes but expecting us to fight for theirs; to name but a few.


WHAT WE EXPECT

- Feminists (especially Women's Officers) will address the concerns raised in the previous paragraph.

- Feminist spaces will be made safe for women of colour ie. No racism.

- Feminist bodies (inc. Women's Depts) will be anti-racist and will engage in anti-racist campaigns.

- Feminist spaces and bodies will address the political, cultural and moral needs of women of colour.

- Women's Officers and feminists in general will educate themselves about racism instead of presuming to already 'know' or expecting women of colour to do it for them.

- Feminists will not get defensive when we talk about racism, but will show respect, listen, and learn.

- Feminists will not get defensive when we call them out for racist conduct. Instead, they will show respect, listen, apologise, learn from their mistakes, and will not repeat their misconduct.

- If they are still unsure how their actions or words constitute racism, they will make the effort to find out for themselves.

- Feminist spaces and bodies will provide anti-racist educational and activist resources.

- Feminist spaces and bodies will provide adequate resources and political support for women of colour and our collectives, projects and campaigns.

- Feminist spaces and bodies will support the fight for Aboriginal Sovereignty.

- Feminists will interrogate their own privileges – class, race, ability etc.

- Feminists and feminist bodies will interrogate the ways in which feminist ideologies and practices may reproduce colonial ideologies and practices, normalise white womanhood and marginalise women of colour.
- Feminists will acknowledge that Women's Spaces are built on stolen land, and acknowledge the traditional owners of the country on which they meet.

Introducing... The Ladies of Colour Agency (LOCA)

I'd like to bring your attention to the fantastic work of a group of women who are involved in the WoC Network: LOCA, the Ladies of Colour Agency, and their fantastic cabaret.

The Ladies of Colour Agency (LOCA) is an autonomous anti-racist collective, which is a support group, activist squad and performance troupe rolled in one. In 2007, we three devised, directed, produced and performed in the LOCA Troika Cabaret, which was so successful that we are doing another one this year as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, which we are calling the Ladies of Colour Cabaret. Our shows revolve around the themes of racism and identity, and feature hip-hop, spoken word, music, comedy, dance, drag and burlesque.

Who is a Woman of Colour?

This is a question that gets asked a lot when we encounter someone unfamiliar with race politics -- which is a lot of people. This article comes out of discussions we've had on the subject and the questions that commonly get asked when we tell people about the network.

What are the origins of the term?

The original use of the term probably comes from French colonies in the West Indies, where gens de couleur libre (free people of colour) were designated a separate class from enslaved Africans, until the abolition of slavery. Martinician anti-racist theorist Frantz Fanon used it in his work in the 1940s and 50s, which probably influenced racial justice activists in the USA in the 1970s and 80s, who began to take it up.

At this time, the women's movement had been in full swing for a number of years, and a number of prominent critiques of feminism began to emerge. Indigenous women, women from the Third World, immigrant women, and women from racially subordinated groups criticised mainstream feminism's centring of white, middle-class women's experiences and strategies for liberation. In order to emphasise their commonality with one another, sometimes trying to forge a separate political identity to feminism, women started using the label 'women of color' to refer to alternative types of feminism.

Who does it refer to?

Most of the work done by self-identifying women of colour comes from the USA. In that context, the groups of people designated historically as not-white fall into the category of 'people of color': Native Americans, African Americans, Latin@s, and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

However, more recently, in the context of the 'war on terror' there has been work by Arab/Middle Eastern American women on developing political alliances with other women of color networks, and in exploring the racial oppression of Arab Americans. In this context, a number of women of color organisations have worked on developing solidarity with Palestinian women, and on critiquing the gender politics of the war on terror.

The contestation of the term highlights how socially constructed racial groupings are. However, the process of contestation has sharpened the politics of anti-racist campaigning by demanding a more political and less essentialist definition of race. Using the term 'people of color' tends to be a political act, which defines the group in question as being subjected to particular kinds of subordination. Colonial dispossession, persecution, exotification, (super)exploitation, cultural marginalisation, and discrimination are all processes that racially marginalised people have in common, and using the term 'people of colour' emphasises that commonality, and also the ways that different communities can work together to resist subjugation.

Despite the US-centric origins of the term 'women of colo(u)r', it is a marginalised term even in the USA. We have found that the political motivations behind using the term support our goals of inclusion without trying to homogenise, and emphasising commonality-in-difference.

Why do we prefer the term "women of colour" as opposed to other terms, e.g. "non-white," "culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD)" and "non-English speaking background (NESB)"?

Most of the terms that refer to racially other-than-white people have negative connotations. Terms like "coloured," "mulatto," and "half-caste" aren't used very often any more, but the stigmatisation that inheres to those labels lives on.

The terms 'non-white' and 'minority' define people negatively -- they define people by what they are not. This implicitly sets up whiteness as normal and normative (setting the norms by which others are judged). An anti-racist analysis needs to break through that ideological privileging, so using a different label can turn the analysis around to question why whiteness is considered normative.
The use of the term 'minority' is also misleading. Minorities differ in different contexts, and globally, it is white people who are a minority of the global human population. Referring to a group of people as a minority tends to represent them as part of a homogenous group, downplaying internal differences.

'CALD' and 'NESB' -- terms used in the Australian context -- are bureaucratic labels that tend to confuse the issue of what racial subordination is. These labels refer to immigrant groups, and tend to imply that immigrant communities are essentially the same and can be dealt with in the same way. They also imply that it is the differentness of a group of people that leads to them being marginalised. These terms also tend to set apart issues of racism towards immigrants and towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by creating artificial boundaries around the issues.

'NESB' implies that the major point of difference with the mainstream is linguistic difference -- of not speaking English. However, this is a spurious basis for distinguishing people. Many colonised and formerly-colonised countries -- particularly in Africa and South Asia -- teach English, because of British imperialism. What's more, people who are white but come from Europe can claim to be subordinated on the basis of being from a "non-English-speaking background" even if they are upper-middle-class and come from a country that formerly had an empire (in fact, this has happened, very recently, at one student organisation where a white man justified taking an anti-racism position because of his 'non-English-speaking background').

'CALD' also implies that it is the characteristics of marginalised groups -- in this case "cultural" and linguistic characteristics -- which leads to their marginalisation. This tends to depoliticise the issue of racial subordination by focusing on the way that racially subordinated groups are "different" from the dominant culture, rather than on the ways that they're subjected to injustice.

Terms that are imposed by governments, bureaucracies, and the ruling elite tend to stigmatise racially oppressed people.

What about the term Black?

Black as a label has had a long history of being politicised in a similar way to 'people of colour'. Originally used by those of the African diaspora to explore the meanings of the experience of racial subordination, and resistance to domination, anti-racist activists in the UK and Africa have also used the term to refer to a broad category of people subjected to processes of colonisation, mostly African and South Asian peoples.

In the Australian context, Blackness tends to also be associated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, with Indigenous peoples and peoples of the Pacific Islands, as well as with people of African descent.

There are women who are involved in the network who identify as Black, although not all do. Identifying as Black and as a woman of colour is not mutually exclusive.

What do you mean by 'white'?

'White' as a racial category is the flip-side of 'people of colour'. Where people of colour are racially subjugated, white people are racially privileged. The designation of people as 'white' only began to occur within the hierarchical relations of European imperialism. While decolonisation may have occurred, and systems of apartheid have been removed from legal systems, the social inequalities and oppressive processes between racialised groups still exist today. White people as a group still benefit from the injustices that people of colour face, and the benefits of racism transfer over generations.

Different contexts have different definitions of whiteness, both legally and socially. The definition of whiteness can also change over time. For example, there was a time in Australia when Italian and Greek immigrants were not considered white, and were subjected to discrimination, but over time that has changed. Yet within Italy and Greece, other groups of people are considered non-white. This is because whiteness is socially constructed; but that doesn't mean it's non-existent, imaginary, or that it can be wiped away by pretending it doesn't exist.

In the Australian context, white tends to mean people with predominantly European ancestors. However, because of many mixed-race relationships, there are light-skinned people of colour who 'pass' as white, but experience many of the oppressive conditions of darker-skinned people of colour. This is especially true for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, many of whose ancestors were subjected to systematic rape by white colonisers, and who were removed from their families by government policy in order to assimilate them into mainstream society. So although pale skin does bring privileges with it, it isn't always an indicator of whiteness.

Okay, so you've talked a lot about race, what about gender? Why a group for women of colour in particular?

The Women of Colour Network was started by activists within student organisations' women's departments, through the Network of Women Students Australia (NOWSA). The network was born from the Women of Colour Caucus that was convened at the 2007 NOWSA conference. Often, in student organisations, women's departments are better funded and better established than anti-racism departments. In many student organisations, anti-racism departments don't exist at all. The Women of Colour Network is convened by feminist activists who are interested in anti-racism, but have found very little scope for being active around these issues within student organisations. So partially, it is the legacy of its origins.

We are interested in bringing new perspectives to student feminisms by emphasising race without de-emphasising gender. Too often we are put in the position of choosing between feminism and anti-racism, when our very being demands that we support both. The network is a space where we can explore the intersections of gender and race to inform our activism with a liberating perspective. We recognise that Western feminism has been particularly white-centric, and that an alternative needs to be presented.

In this we draw on concepts from women of colour politics around the world, such as reproductive justice, to broaden the scope of feminist activism. Reproductive justice is a concept that women of color organisations in the USA devised to refer to women's reproductive health issues beyond the legal right to abortion. Issues such as sterilisation abuse, welfare, and the right to keep access to children are emphasised in a reproductive justice approach, since women of colour have been disproportionately subjected to these forms of injustice. Whereas mainstream white feminism universalises about the pressure to reproduce that women face, a women of colour perspective recognises that women of colour have been targeted on the basis of both gender and race as reproducers of their race, and that racism targets women's reproductive capacities in specific ways.

We recognise that Western feminism has been exclusive in other ways in its definition of 'woman' as a category, and the issues it concerns itself with. Women with disabilities, poor women, queer women, trans women, women in prison, and many other marginalised women have been excluded from the feminist category of 'woman'. We are mindful that in using the term 'woman' we don't refer to an exclusive or homogenous category, but a gendered form of difference that varies over times, spaces, cultures, bodies, and sexualities.

Why use the term 'women of colour'?

Unlike labels which have been applied to us to limit our understanding, and our action, we find the term 'women of colour' enables us to think outside the dominant understandings of race, and to develop our own political consciousness and practices in liberating ways. In that way, the term "person of colour" as a racial identity is similar to the term "queer" as a sexual identity. It is a term which has been reclaimed to express a political point about the nature of race, and to identify our relative positions in the hierarchy of race.

By not specifying a particular racial or ethnic category as defining the framework of racial subordination, we open the term up to interpretation based on the needs of the people using it. This causes a creative tension, which means we are constantly called on to respect the differences between us whenever we speak about the things we have in common. It also allows us to build alliances between non-Aboriginal feminists of colour and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples on the basis of broader and more flexible understandings of racism and colonialism, and to tap into the commonalities we share in order to resist racism.

Am I a woman of colour?

Generally we emphasise self-identification as being part of a racially subordinated community, and as being a woman, as being the main criteria for being considered a woman of colour. Each person must consider this for themselves, and decide about the politics of using these labels. This means that membership of the network is largely a matter of self-selection.

We would like to emphasise that trans women are welcome to join the network.

Who isn't a woman of colour?

In the Australian context, a number of people who consider themselves, and are considered by others, as white are often surprised to find an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestor, or a person of colour ancestor. Generally, we feel that people who receive most of the privileges of whiteness are not people of colour.

Men of colour are welcome to contribute in other ways than being part of the network, as are white women and men. However, joining the network is only open to women of colour.

Hopefully that clarifies some things. If you'd like any more information, please email .