Academic Writing as Factory Work

As the publish or perish environment of academia intensifies and graduates are now expected to have 20 books before applying for a postdoc (or whatever equally ludicrous academic inflation now considers 'entry level' qualification for job security), and as some universities turn to points-based systems to measure and compare ‘research outputs’, a growing neoliberal academic self-help industry has emerged, promising to lift us out of our languid ways if only we followed these simple rules. 142 habits of highly successful academic authors! How to publish 52 journal articles in a year!

Within this trend, one thing I’ve increasingly encountered are academics promoting writing as a kind of factory labour: academic writing as dispassionate production lines manufacturing publications for points. In the popular ‘Pomodoro method’ you literally clock in and out of short bursts of work with alarm clocks telling you when to put the writing tools down and when to pick it up. Others suggest shorter bursts. Rather than follow an idea where it leads us, we follow an arbitrary clock. Write for only 15 mins each day or even just 10 mins each day. Writing for time-poor academics. Writing gurus appear to slay the romantic illusions that stubbornly refuse to serve our new masters: prophets (or overlords depending on your perspective) of The New Age of Academic Productivity. We are exhorted to leave inspiration, imagination and passion at the door. We're here to write, god damn it! The tongue-in-cheek title of many writing workshops and groups neatly captures this new attitude: "Shut Up and Write!"

To be clear, these techniques do work … for certain problems. If you find yourself lacking motivation or if you find yourself lacking discipline, then setting yourself clear and achievable goals to complete in short bursts of time can be very useful in helping you form writing habits and regulate your alertness. Being part of a writing group can help you feel ‘accountable’ to your writing goals. There’s much to commend these approaches. But not all writing problems are about motivation and discipline. Many academics are ‘motivated’ by high levels of precarity and the desperate belief that if only they published this one more thing they can have more secure work. Motivation is not the issue. Treating all ‘unproductive’ writers as if they were simply lacking the will to write isn’t just patronising, it also displays a severe misunderstanding of the range of writing problems that scholars/authors can encounter. It assumes that the act of writing is transparent and easy, only requiring time rather than skills development. Learning to identify new writing problems that one encounters with new phenomena or novel arguments and developing new writing solutions is a key part of academic writer development. Perhaps I’m slower than my colleagues, but such things take me much longer than 15 mins to solve.

My main concern is that this factory approach to writing is beginning to seep into academia, where it is beginning to stifle other approaches. In some writing circles, the art of writing is discouraged. Writing here become a paint-by-numbers exercise. Form no longer follows function. Indeed, function is reduced to formulaic cookie-cutter sentences that stand in for the work of learning to articulate complex argumentation unique to one’s work. Eloquence through variation is discouraged. Inventing a good turn of phrase is time consuming. Finding your voice is a non-discussion. Instead, here are some pre-made sentences. Just add info and voila! You have writing! There is a vast difference between learning rules of composition that help guide you to express your own argument, and purposefully narrowing arguments in order to fit simplistic writing rules or formulaic sentence structures.

Some teach their junior colleagues to maximise their outputs by ‘salami-slicing’ their argument. 'Don't waste all of your argument in one article when you can write two or three!' Some of us are taught to minimise our efforts by calculating how many points we get per number of words. 'This journal publishes 3000 word articles that count as a full point, but this journal published 8000 word articles that only count as half a point'. Strategise! Location, location, location! Maximise what counts as outputs; minimise effort. This is what academic 'writing' has become.

Yet this is not the writing that inspired me and drew me to academia. It’s not the writing that I loved, the writing I would devour in cafes contemplating their idiosyncratic turns of phrase, savouring their eloquence just as much as their insight. For me, good writing forges new meanings and understandings through words that transform people's relationships to themselves, to things and the world around them. It is an exploration into the unknown: the tentative, careful but insightful reaching out to others, to other places and situations, pushing against the limits of our knowledge. The act of writing can also be an exploration of the self, of finding one's voice - not just centralising authorial voice but finding a style of expression that is yours, that best conveys your ideas.

Writing invites the reader to look askance at the world, to see things differently. Writing doesn’t always have to be goal-oriented. We don’t need to always see the destination. Sometimes it is enough that you are here, with me, to start this journey together. Sometimes it is enough that we are asking this question seriously, no matter how small, with the gravitas that a world of mysteries deserves. Other times writing can be a world-making practice; the art of creating inhabitable futures for us to live better lives. Sometimes we can even get lost in these worlds, meandering and tripping into new rabbit holes. My favourite authors can give you a sense of purpose even as they remove the ground from under your feet or take you for a seemingly aimless wander while still finding meaning in it all. It's a tricky path, but it’s a wondrous opening into worlds that other writers would never dare to tread because they lack the writing skills to navigate successfully. At other times, writing can be an impassioned endeavour to call oneself and others to action, to enact justice, to fight for equality or simply to make things better for others. It might invite us to linger in our discomfort, to ask us to confront ourselves in our hypocrisies and lies. Writing can lead us to the better part of ourselves.

Not everyone shares all these senses of writing with me, and that's fine. That's what makes us different readers and different writers. But instead of academia preserving and indeed promoting diverse writing, in certain sections, which I fear are growing, we are being asked to become writing drones, spewing forth predictable article after predictable article with formulaic phrases that mimic an intellectual enquiry but lacks any of the passion and curiosity that makes it such. Zombie articles, perambulating their way across a passionless academic landscape. Is this what it means to be a modern productive academic?

Perhaps I am, as they suggest, one of those stubborn romantics. ‘Of course, he would defend the old ways. Look at him. He's barely productive himself.’ Perhaps I will be described as an elitist that clings to a patriarchal, aristocratic model of writing best suited to upper class European men with slabs of leisure time made possible in part by their doting wives and servants. Writing is work, they insist. Idealism is a privilege we cannot afford. Sure, writing is work. I'm not denying that. But to insist that the factory is the best model for the labour of academic writing (rather than artisanship, craftsmanship, play, exploration, meditation, dialogue, experimentation, etc.) seems to be an increasingly unchallenged truth and one that limits not just our modes of expression but also our modes of inquiry.

Patriotism in The Report (2019)

I finally got round to watching The Report (dir. Burns, 2019) with Adam Driver following the instigation, research, and completion of the infamous US Torture Report that took over a decade to release (well, the exec summary was released), which detailed the authorisation and use of torture by the CIA during the War on Terror and evidence that such torture was not useful or effective in obtaining actionable intelligence.

The research for this movie is meticulous. Having seen so many US films about torture (whether directly or indirectly) that often misrepresent or outright lie about the use of torture by the US military and CIA and its value, the research behind this has clearly not only gone through the exec summary report, but takes phrases directly from key intelligence elite interviews and speeches to build the dialogue. Sure, there's some artistic licence here or there, but overall it's pretty accurate with current publicly available evidence.

It's a sobering watch to see the mechanisms and abuse of power that would allow such atrocities to be legalised, the political machinations that would protect such practices even when they are opposed and the tactics they used to silence the report. It also does a good job of representing the reality of what happened, including the CIA hacking Senate computers to expose and attack the lead investigator.

But the film centres the drama on the lead investigator working under Senator Feinstein for the US Senate Intelligence Committee and in doing so portrays the story as a heroic triumph of a dogged investigator working to expose the truth against elite political forces. The poster (see below) even quotes the AV Club’s description of it as “A Portrait of American Heroism”. This leads inevitably to its patriotic conclusion. Towards the end of the film, just before the report is released to the public and revealed to the Senate, Senator McDonough (John Hamm), in attempting to supress the report, asks: “Democracy is messy. But let’s just think … how many countries there are in the world where a report like this could even get done” (my transcript, emphasis in original). To this Senator Feinstein retorts: "I would like us to be more than the country that did the report. I'd like us to be country that made it public."

Poster for The Report (2019)

And herein lies the crux of its conclusion. The revelations of torture, of legalising torture, which they knew to be torture, should leave Americans shamed. But the movie wants us to see this as a patriotic moment, something to be proud of. 'We released the report. We acknowledge we've done wrong.' Several senators in fact do say this in the film, both real (through footage of Senator John McCain’s speech) and portrayed by actors in the film. So rather than becoming a sobering expose of the lies and deception about torture and the call for justice, the film transforms that revelatory moment into sentimentalist patriotism. It glosses over the fact that no one that oversaw, developed and conducted this torture was prosecuted for war crimes, that the US taxpayers paid US$80mill to the psychologists that created the torture program, which included covering any legal costs against criminal liability. This would be compounded under Obama’s administration where the whistle blowers were the only ones prosecuted and jailed. It does a bait and switch. It swaps justice with the act of revelation, as if simply acknowledging that one is a war criminal should not only indemnify them, but indeed demonstrates their magnanimity.

The Report (2019), like the US Torture Report itself, is a study in how US propaganda works successfully even in its darkest moments. Americans can stare at their own sadistic horror and honestly and genuinely say, "Look how great America is! Aren't we great?!" without any recognition that such senses of superiority is why they believe they are entitled to torture others in the first place. The truly sad thing? I think most of us agree. The Torture Report was released in 2014. Polls from 2016 demonstrated that almost half of Americans still supported the use of torture. The following year Donald Trump won Presidency on a platform promising to bring back the torture program and “a hell of a lot worse”. Nothing was learnt, and this film reflects that. American patriotism cannot abide shame and that lack of shame leaves the door open for future atrocities.

Reflections on Eurocentrism as a Disciplinary Technique

I was talking to a junior humanities colleague who was interested in reading more non-Western theory but wanted to work in Australia and I had to be honest and tell them that that was a very difficult road. The reality is that white and Westernised colleagues will not see that as equivalent expertise to those who have a strong grounding in the Western canon. For them non-Westernised scholarship is only an empirical field to be studied anthropologically in area studies, not read as interlocutors in the global production of knowledge. However, you are allowed to cite Westernised scholars in non-Western countries because they also draw on, and implicitly support, the centrality of the Western canon.

Nevertheless, there is a racial divide in the relationship between theory and object of analysis. You cannot, for example, use a Filipino conception of emotions to frame a reading of a French novel and get that published in Australia, but you can train Filipino students to read Filipino cultural products as examples of French theories of universal human experience drawn from an elite, European corpus. While there are some journals devoted to cross-pollination work, they are low-ranked journals in Australia's metric system of measuring the 'quality' of publications and thus would limit your hiring and promotion potential.

While there are obviously lots of instances of conceptual borrowing (particularly from the East to the West), this involves Western scholars appropriating a specific concept and reframing it within the Western canon. But any time you want to talk from within non-Western scholarship, or worse to assume non-Western scholarship as the measure of cultural value and the universal language of human experience, you'll need to devote huge chunks of time/space to translational work for a Westernised audience. Even then this could lead to disengagement because colleagues do not have a way to engage your ideas even if ideologically they are supportive. This will reduce your citations and again hamper your career. I'm not saying that this work is impossible, but it's hard - very hard - and you need to be strategic while also putting in more work than your colleague who just specialised in a trending French or Italian theorist.

It was a sad moment for me because I remember the same youthful excitement of reading scholars from around the world. I read theorists from Argentina and the Philippines and Cuba and Nigeria and Japan and South Korea and Greece, etc., but quickly found that this was not considered 'theory' by colleagues. I 'lost' a lot of time reading these and becoming 'irrelevant' to my disciplines rather than staying 'on trend'. Although I was trying to impart my experience to help a junior colleague, I realised that I had been disciplined and in turn was disciplining him. I realised that the joy I once found in intellectual exploration had been severely shackled by the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism and that I was unwittingly destroying his excitement as well, which is the complete opposite of what I think a teacher should be doing; namely, fostering their passion for knowledge.

Here was a student that was wanting to actually learn something new, rather than being led by fashionable theory and peer pressure, and who was excited by the prospecting of finding whole new ways of thinking and perceiving that could have enriched our intellectual landscape, and my response was to discipline him. As a young person I really hated older people assuming what I could or could not do based on their own life. Had I listened I wouldn't have come out, I wouldn't have studied humanities, I wouldn't have become an academic, etc. I think this responsibility to foster dreams, or at the very least to leave open the possibility that your experience doesn't have to become their experience, is doubled when you are a teacher and in this instance I don't believe I lived up to that responsibility.

I think I need to reflect more on what I can do to create spaces that foster this passion both for myself and my students/colleagues while still being attentive to the pressures of disciplinary and institutional demands, which is another way of saying, how to create spaces of sustainable passion that do not limit our potential for success given the material and intellectual reality of Eurocentric (though in Australia it’s probably more precise to say ‘Anglo-Americancentric’) institutions and disciplines. I’m thinking of setting up a reading group devoted to non-Western ‘critical theory’ whose goal is to produce publications that ‘translate’ such work for a Westernised audience and in doing so create the intellectual grounds for a future critical and cultural theory that is not limit by Eurocentrism or Anglo-Americancentrism.

Ridiculing student work on social media is not ok

I wrote this short piece on something that's been bugging me: teachers ridiculing student work in social media. The frustration had been building for a while until I (unjustifiably) got angry at a junior colleague when I misread their post. I realised then that I needed to get this off my chest.

Like any profession, teachers have their ups and downs, their joys and frustrations. Like everyone else we gripe about the pains of the profession, such as when our students misbehave, the useless metrics of ubiquitous surveillance and when our teaching goes horribly wrong. We might do this with colleagues, with our family or even on social media. All of this is normal.

However, I’ve noticed some really inappropriate social media posts from colleagues who quote student work on social media for ridicule. This kind of behavior is increasingly copied by junior colleagues, particularly during marking season, who think that this conduct is welcome. I want to make clear why this is unacceptable and hope to convince my colleagues not to continue or imitate this behaviour.

I’m not sure when this started. I haven’t conducted systematic research on the topic. But I do know that this trend was encouraged among my Australian colleagues by the viral posting of this 2014 satirical piece in The Monthly, which caricatured undergraduate student essays in Australian history. Many humanities academics around Australia posted this on their social media for humour. I can’t remember if I posted it myself, but I definitely laughed along. Although that Monthly piece was written under a pseudonym, it was itself inspired by a 1983 essay in The Wilson Quarterly by Prof. Anders Henriksson, an American academic at Shepherd’s University, on undergraduate essays in European history, which was republished online in 2014. These encouraged an online environment where colleagues felt it was acceptable to laugh at ‘poor’ student work online among colleagues, which in turn set the tone for more direct ridicule of individual students.

For a start, this behaviour contradicts our role as teachers. It is our job to develop students’ skills, to facilitate access to knowledge and to guide students in their learning. As a university teacher I spend way too much time undoing some of the bad teaching the students have encountered through their high school education. I tell my students that ignorance is not something to be ashamed about or to mock but an opportunity to learn and an opportunity to teach. Indeed, I insist that learning to be good at ignorance, that is, being able to recognise and identify our true ignorance, is the start of real critical learning. Most people never recognise their own ignorance and so they proceed through life believing they ‘know’ something that they do not. Mocking student’s work online contradicts this valuable lesson to appreciate and live with honesty and humility in the lifelong task of serious learning.

It is inappropriate to mock students in a classroom for lacking knowledge or skills because it associates feelings of embarrassment and humiliation with the simple crime of not knowing something - surely the premise for most educational encounters. This makes students who are struggling feel ashamed and can demotivate them, causing them to participate less in class and thus fall further behind. It simultaneously trains other students to believe it is ok to be smug about their knowledge and to be abusive to people they perceive as ‘ignorant’. So rather than building a space for respectful and collaborative learning, such behavior contributes to a culture of academic elitism that makes students fearful of their ignorance. This produces a defensive classroom where students are afraid of appearing ‘stupid’ in front of their peers and their teacher rather than a culture of open and critical inquiry. If this is unproductive in the classroom, what would make it more appropriate in an online environment in front of a potentially larger audience? Even if you intend it as simply an online conversation between teaching colleagues, I argue it is still unethical and potentially harmful.

First, it is unethical because students submit that work for a particular assessment task within a course and have not given permission for their essays to be republished. No student submitting an assessment thinks that sections of it are going to be printed online for the amusement of others. Students, for the most part, retain copyright over their work, which is why, if we want to use our student’s work for a publication, we must ask their permission. This is assumed if we were to publish, say, a book on teaching or a journal article or a conference presentation on the success of an assessment and we wanted to quote their assessment submissions as an example. As the person in a position of power, the teacher should, on ethical grounds, always ask permission when sharing the student’s work. Yet these are all instances in professional life where we would be citing such work often in a positive and fair light. The fact that colleagues that ridicule students’ work online do not seek permission from the students they belittle, underscores that they know this behavior is wrong.

Second, professors often have postgraduate students on their social media; if not ones they directly teach then often some from other universities. When they ridicule students’ work in this fashion, there must be at least some students who wonder whether they themselves are being ridiculed behind their backs. Students that already suffer from impostor syndrome, particularly minority students, may feel even more vulnerable since this implicitly threatens them with the potential of professional mockery, which they cannot defend against. On the other hand, it implicitly gives license to other students to feel that it is acceptable to disparage fellow students’ work if it falls below standard, but also fearful that at some point they may fall on the other side of this ridicule when they have a tough time themselves. Rather than producing a research culture of mutual learning and support, it solidifies unnecessary and cruel competitiveness among a junior cohort. Further, given that so much casual face-to-face teaching is conducted by these postgraduate students, it trains them to replicate such contempt in their own undergraduate teaching and marking.

I’m not saying that we can’t complain about the tough times as a teacher on social media like other professions. Nor am I silencing teachers from complaining about unfairness or injustice in the workplace, which, yes, may involve students behaving badly. But none of that gives teachers the right to quote student assessment work online without permission, let alone in dismissive and derisive tones to be laughed at by fellow academics. Students submit their work ostensibly for the purposes of receiving constructive feedback, not to be scoffed at in public behind their backs.

In the long run I believe this behavior contributes to the nasty and toxic academic environments we see around us, built on the terror of mutually-assured humiliation. To be sure, there have always been these kinds of cruel academics and I don’t see that ending soon; egotism and narcissism is rife in many quarters. But for junior colleagues I want you to know that you don’t have to be like this even if the Professors around you are. You can choose to be a different kind of teacher, a different kind of colleague.

Facebook Sperm Donors and the Politics of Reproduction

I watched this British documentary on sperm donors to see if there was something that would be useful for a subject I teach on critical thinking around sex and sexuality. It focuses on men that donate sperm outside of a clinical context via online forums, such as Facebook groups, which they do for free. The catch though is that these men do so on a large scale as the subtitle makes clear: “4 men, 175 babies”.

Clive, from Super Sperm Donors: 4 men, 175 babies. Taken from: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/4-men-175-babies-the-uks-super-sperm-donors

I watched in part because, given the sensational title, I was hoping the initial disgust I felt would be challenged by the documentary offering a more complex picture. There were already scandalous media reports portraying Facebook sperm donors as dangerous rogue breeders. At the start, this is what I got. Clive seems like an affable enough fellow, satisfied simply with the prospect of giving joy to others that want a baby. I was drawn in by the rhetoric of ‘gift-giving’, ‘joy and happiness’, ‘love’ and of course ‘family’. As he puts it:

“The reason I do this is purely to help people. I see the happiness that it brings and that’s enough payment in itself”

— (Clive, my emphasis, my transcription)

As someone who has supported women’s and queer families’ reproductive rights and who has witnessed people close to me suffer the struggle to conceive, I felt understandably drawn to his selflessness in freely gifting his own semen for others to start their own family with no strings attached. This echoed academic research portraying this practice as “an altruistic act” in which donors had to make “certain personal sacrifices and risks”.

He talks openly about his donation procedure in seemingly professional tones, while avoiding words like ‘sperm’ in favour of ‘the donation’. Essentially, he turns up to the recipient’s house, wanks into a beaker inside his own van, puts his semen into a syringe and then hands it over at their door without ever stepping foot in their house. I saw this as a sign of his thoughtfulness in serving the role of a donor, keeping himself distant from the family. He cultivated an air of being clinical, delivering on his promise to donate with no strings attached.

But then we meet Mark, who is more secretive about his donations. He lists his recipients as lesbian couples, a few single ladies and straight couples where the husband has had a vasectomy. He explains that he tried to donate at a sperm clinic but was too old and so chose to donate via this unregulated system. In contrast to Clive, Mark talks more possessively about the outcome of his donations: “To date I’ve got 54 babies born with nine ladies currently expecting” (Mark, my transcription, my emphasis). Instead of a rhetoric of selflessness, his donating came from feeling “underused” after having had his own children with his wife. He asks rhetorically “if Des O’Connor could have babies at the age of 73, why couldn’t I?” But his reasons are even more narcissistic than the facile comparison with Des O’Connor. As he explains:

“I want to reproduce with as many women as possible and pass on the genetic characteristics that I have”

— Mark, my transcription

This is demonstrated by a cut to him playing with one of the children produced from his donations in which he observes proudly “She’s got those wonderful blue eyes that all my babies have”.

The undertone narcissism is difficult to ignore the further we delve into the various men’s backstories and reasonings. Even the affable Clive mentioned above later shows his meticulous record keeping of every donation and pregnancy. He pulls out a map where he plots the birthplaces of each one of the babies created from his donations. We watch him drawing each dot onto his map from his accurate records and then admiring how much they cover the map. Another donor talks about getting women pregnant as similar to ‘scoring a goal’, pinning this down to a psychological “classic male focus on a number” that they can increase. Mark philosophizes:

“Procreation is a natural instinct. I think if I was a three-foot dwarf with only one eye I’d still want to spread my genetic material as far and as wide as possible”

— Mark, my transcription

Later the 61-year old Clive becomes worried about declining fertility when his success rate of conception appears to drop. He becomes slightly defensive, saying “in my defence” before reminding the camera that the women have fertility issues. Before the next donation he checks his sperm under a microscope with the camera rolling, exclaiming: “oh crikey! Ab-so-lutely billions of them! […] Looking here, I can’t see what the problem is, it’s certainly not me” he concludes, smiling.

Narcissism is perhaps most obvious in the ways that they deal with their own relationships to women in their lives. Clive began donating without his wife’s knowledge, but later confesses when she discovers his secret. Although she is unhappy with it, he still continues to donate to hundreds of recipients in his spare time and using their money. By contrast, Mark has not even told his wife, knowing that she would feel that it was a form of cheating. But rather than give her a choice or a say, he chooses to do this behind her back, which if not cheating sexually is still an act of dishonesty that removes her ability to be a co-decision maker. While a third unmarried man, Mitch, says that he’s had difficulties with girlfriends who couldn’t understand his abstinence, interpreting their rejection of his abstinence as a complaint about losing their ‘enjoyment’ signified by his ejaculation.

Both Clive and Mitch even use the happiness of the recipients to counter the unhappiness in the women in their lives. As Clive says: “it’s making her [his wife] unhappy. However, it’s making lots of people very happy” (emphasis in original, my transcription). Mitch explains his stance on abstinence: “why would you put two seconds of pleasure over someone’s chance of having a family?” (emphasis in original, my transcription). This echoes a classic gaslighting trick that redirects the guilt trip onto their partner and making them question whether, in fact, they are the ones who are really being selfish. I think it’s problematic to cast these as risk-taking on the part of the men and therefore chalk it up to personal sacrifice, when this fails to adequately recognise that the men make these decisions enmeshed in the lives of others who are dependent on them. Decisions made affect the whole family at a legal level at the very least. This raises interesting questions about what men’s reproductive rights are. How much ‘right’ does a woman have over her husband’s semen? And socially, is reproduction outside marriage without sex still a form of ‘cheating’?  Such questions, far from being simply intellectual, have significant implications for a family’s sense of security (financially, socially, legally) and the bonds of trust and intimacy that inhere in the families we build.

The documentary doesn’t judge the men or the women and presents many sides, including the happy and grateful mothers as well as tragic stories of unsuccessful attempts. Perhaps its greatest strength is that it allows the men to present themselves, who, in their honesty and obliviousness, often say far more about themselves than they think. So while I am similarly wary of overly negative, scandalous portrayals of ‘rogue breeders’ as the researchers I mentioned above, I think we need to be more sceptical than simply taking men at their word. Few people act out of evil intent. Most of us simply try to make our way through the messiness of life, justifying ourselves after we’ve already acted, ennobling ourselves and our motivations in the process. Yet I don’t deny they are being genuine when they say they want to help. Altruism and narcissism don’t have to be mutually exclusive motivations; people are more complex than that. Still, this begs more critical attention, particularly when so many children’s lives are at stake. And while it is true that media have highlighted dramatic cases, such limit cases might have much to teach us as well, philosophically and legally. We should not dismiss them either.

Yet despite the obvious machismo and narcissism, who am I to say that this make them bad donors or even bad men? If it’s all consensual between adults, voluntarily conducted in full knowledge and everyone is happy, who am I to judge? How many parents have children for precisely the same reasons? I’ve met many narcissistic parents in my time. I’m not convinced this becomes immoral simply because it’s practiced on an industrial scale. Far more children are conceived in far less noble circumstances all the time around the world.

Nor am I convinced that better regulation of donation outside a clinic would stop these kinds of donations (although it might limit how extensive these donations are). Certain regulations can be put in place to minimize dishonest donations, but they can’t entirely screen motivations, or, even if they could screen motivations, I’m not currently convinced of arguments for banning motivations other than profit or direct benefit. This would require parents of assisted reproduction to have more barriers to reproduction than others who don’t have to question their motivations simply because they don’t need assistance in reproducing.

But this does shine a light on the gap between rapidly shifting reproductive practices with new technologies and our capacity to ascertain and judge the political and ethical rules governing these new practices at a social level. And it does raise interesting, knotty questions for me as a gender studies and cultural studies scholar about the relationship between men’s bodies and reproductive rights, between technology, the social and nature, and the question of what children’s rights are in this new era of assisted reproduction.

Ruby Hamad on Arabs and Whiteness

As part of SBS’s Face Up to Racism (FU2Racism) week, writer Ruby Hamad published an article arguing that Arabs are not white. I was a bit annoyed. Some wanted to know why so I’ve jotted some preliminary thoughts down here. While I agree with her overall claim (that Arabs are not 'white' in the present) she prosecutes her case via historical inaccuracies, cherry-picking arguments/facts, while sniping other minorities in the process. Part of the bitterness though comes from a wider set of disappointments. I consider Hamad to be one of the more prominent and informed writers on race issues in Australia so I have come to expect more of her than others. It comes during the week of FU2Racism's disappointing programming on SBS (Australia's multicultural channel) featuring two problematic documentaries that left me dejected at the state of discussions of racism in Australia. When Hamad's piece popped up on my newsfeed I had a brief flash of hope that was quickly dashed.

To start with, the article is often vague and poorly defines key terms. For example, it’s not clear what the distinction is, or if there is a distinction, between whiteness, white, European, Western European, western, race, racism, colonialism and imperialism. Early on the article claims that 'whiteness' was used to "justify everything from slavery to Terra Nullius to the war on terror". But this simply isn't true. Indeed, one of the reasons why we study the doctrine of Terra Nullius is precisely because it underscores how modern racism justified itself through legal categories of property and ownership in contrast to the Spanish conquistador's use of the divine mandate to justify Christian colonisation during the Age of Discovery. Granted, the point may seem overly finicky to some, but it's a really important way for those of us who study racism to trace racism's extraordinary adaptability. Terra Nullius was grounded in the liberal framework of natural rights while the Christian mandate was grounded in theological notions of divine rights and ordained responsibilities. What this shows is that racism, as the differential distribution of rights and resources according to a hierarchy of Europeanness, was able to function effectively under completely different political regimes. 

One of the reasons this is important is because contemporary debates about racism in public life tend to assume that racism is only about skin colour - something Hamad is also critical about. I agree that neither racism nor whiteness is just about skin colour. However, Hamad's conceptual move is to expand 'whiteness' into such an expansive ideology that it covers all instances of racism, colonialism and imperialism. This will always encounter problems once you test it against the archive. Take the War on Terror, one of the examples she raises. As the name implies, one of the striking things about the war on terror is that it used potential terrorism and weapons of mass destruction as its primary justification for its pre-emptive invasion. After it was clear there were no WMDs a new justification conveniently emerged in conservative and mainstream media primarily focused on gender and sexual equality and rights in the Middle East/Islam. Whiteness was not a central concept in these justification. It was racist, sure, but not because of 'whiteness'. White people benefited, sure, but whiteness itself was not a primary concept for mainstream mobilization. This is what makes the work of scholars of racism difficult, because we often have to painstakingly deconstruct the rhetoric of the time and trace out the power relations in order to prove that racism is at play. The lack of 'whiteness' in the official War on Terror rhetoric is also what makes the rise of populist nationalism so prominent in the political landscape because what we are witnessing is a bold and in-your-face return to the language of race, and 'whiteness' in particular, to justify state actions.

Throughout the piece one of her central contentions is that whiteness is fluid. One the one hand, this emphasis on the fluidity of whiteness fails to recognize that its fluidity only oscillates between ‘whites’ and ‘honorary whites’ (eg. Eastern Europeans and East Asians), while failing to note that there has never been a period of history where descendants of Africans and Southeast Asians were considered ‘white’ (except in instances of 'passing' and/or 'mixing'). In other words, whiteness is fluid for some groups, but other groups are always excluded. Whiteness is far more fluid for an Arab, who can at least weave in and out of the category depending on historical, geographical and cultural context, than it is for an black African. On the other hand, her main concept ‘Arab’ is never defined, although I think we can presume she is referring to an ethnic group from the Arabian peninsula and the Levant. The problem here is that while she devotes much time to showing that 'whiteness' is fluid there's no self-reflection on how 'Arab' identity might be fluid as well, in which case it is possible for Arabs to be considered white in some contexts.

In addition the piece is riddled with factual inaccuracies. She claims early on that whiteness wasn’t invented until the early decades of European colonization of the Americas. (I want to emphasise that this particular thesis is a favourite of white socialists who are desperate to believe that racism is simply a divisive tool to separate the workers. The argument that whiteness was invented by the ruling elite in the American colonies in order to suppress worker riots by splitting the workers conveniently fits their core political ideologies.) Anyway, the medium.com article she cites as proof actually talks about colonial Virginia in 1600, pinning the emergence of the language of race around the 1680s and claiming that it was codified in Virginia law in 1691. It is strange, to say the least, to describe 1691 as the ‘early decades of European colonization’ given that extensive European colonization began after 1492 spearheaded by the Spanish expedition of Christopher Columbus. But rather than challenge this historical claim, let’s just accept the claim that whiteness was invented in 1691 in colonial Virginia USA for the sake of the argument. Later on Hamad argues that the Irish were colonised “on the basis that they were not ‘real’ white people”.  Again, presuming this was true, and failing to couch this in the political, social and economic history of that region played out in courtly intrigue, conflict, war and conquest, there is no evidence provided for this significant claim. In fact, the book she cites in her article as ‘proof’ relates to the racialisation of Irish migrants in the USA in the 1800s. It is not even about Irish colonisation. But let’s assume that she made a simple citation error and that there is a book she can later show that does proves the Irish were colonised on "the basis" that they were not 'real' white, and let’s assume that she’s referring to the English colonisation of Ireland from 1536 to 1691, rather than say the Norman invasion of the 12th century. According to her own argument, whiteness was the pretext for colonising Ireland in 1536 but was only invented in Virginia, USA in 1691. This is impossible unless they are Time Lord colonisers!

What is also missing is an understanding of the different histories of colonisation. Her assumption throughout is that whiteness is somehow necessary for colonisation. Yet one of her first claims is that whiteness was invented after the colonisation of America. How is this possible, unless there are other categories used to justify colonisation other than, and prior to, whiteness (and I would argue co-extensive with and after it as well)? And if it is the case that other concepts were used then her major contention falls apart. The picture she paints of a monolithic ideology governing colonisation and imperialism from 1492 until the War on Terror across all geographies, all European empires, all colonies, in all languages and in all time periods, is just breathtakingly simplistic. Missing are categories central to the history of colonisation and imperialism, like ethnicity, culture, civility, civilization, nationality, religion, character, progress, barbarism, divinity, order, and more recently democracy.

Furthermore, there's just no reflection on the different geographies that her article crosses over. The claim that Arabs are not white surely has to be read within specific contexts. Some polities recognize Arab as an identity and others do not. Some record it in their official records and others do not. Some categorise Arab as a variation of 'white' while most do not. We cannot make a blanket claim about the status of Arabs across the world, especially between places where Arabs are minorities and places where Arabs are the ruling majority and elite. These require very different analyses of power because of their relationship to the ruling hegemony. It is therefore striking that almost all of her references are from the US, perhaps the one place where her argument just doesn't hold. It's striking because the argument could have been much easier to make in the context of Australian history, where Hamad resides. This reflects the general Americanisation of racial politics in Australia, which I have been struggling against (and losing).

But let’s leave aside such moments – and there are many – and focus on what I believe is the core of her argument.

As I understand it, her main argument is that even though Arab Americans are classified as white by the US state, and even though some Arabs identify as white, and even though Arabs may exploit workers from Africa and South Asia, she contends they aren’t white because Arabs face discrimination and therefore ‘fall short’ of whiteness. It bears reminding that this same argument is used by white people to deny they are racially privileged. For example, some Irish people argue that they do not have white privilege because they were victims of colonization too.

On a more fundamental note, it’s her own definition of whiteness that undermines her main thesis. She argues that whiteness is not just skin colour, nor does it pertain to “people themselves but to an ideology that set European (now more broadly “Western”) culture and ancestry as the benchmark by which all others are judged”. Later, she argues that “whiteness is a social construct not a biological reality, it is fluid rather than rigid, the boundaries separating those with privilege from those without constantly shifting”. Thus, from her own words, who counts as white is historically contingent. It follows then that it is possible that Arabs may count as white depending on whether they occupy that position of white privilege. This means that if you can prove that Arabs occupied that position of privilege then they would be 'white' within such a timeframe.

This is precisely what her own account suggests. As she rightly notes Arab Americans were considered white by the US state through the census and some Arab-Americans, to her dismay, even identify as white. In other words, not only are they structurally privileged by being conferred the status of whiteness within a white supremacist state, they even identify with that position. How is this not ‘white’ according to her own definition? Her dismissal of such moments of affinity through the metaphor of seduction is telling: “the appeal of whiteness is so alluring, they succumb to the temptation to win favour in a racist system”. The Arab, here, is portrayed as being reluctantly mislead by the succubus of whiteness to oppress others less racially privileged.

What she conveniently leaves out is that this came about because of several court cases from 1909 to 1915 involving Syrian immigrants to the US that specifically argued for their status as ‘white’ rather than ‘Asian’ to circumvent the effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which prevented them from gaining citizenship. In other words, this wasn’t an accident, a random happenstance that they became ‘white’. It wasn’t thrust upon them by the fate of history, nor were they mislead by some seductive temptress. They actively pursued and argued for their status as ‘white’, pooling their money togetherto fight across several courts, to ensure their designation as ‘white’ in the US. This isn't an "appeal" of whiteness. Arab Americans purposefully occupied the positionality of whiteness for a century.

These cases are briefly mentioned in the resource Hamad herself links to her article. Yet rather than pursue this line of inquiry before her, Hamad chose to portray the “attempt to position [Arabs] as white” as some kind of external imposition, when in fact they pursued it for their material benefit and maintained it for about a century. What is even more shocking is when you realise that the example that Hamad cites as an unfair imposition is actually an article by a Sudanese-American Muslim, Isra Amin Ibrahim, who is at the time critiquing anti-black racism from Arab Muslims. It would be completely different, and I would be far more sympathetic, if Hamad was arguing against white authors who were unfairly coopting Arab Muslims identities. What this reveals is that Hamad’s article is a response to being positioned ‘white’ by Black Muslims critiquing racism.

If, on the one hand, Hamad's attempt to dissociate from whiteness is done to protect against accusations of anti-black racism, on the other, she happily draws on model minority myths to portray Asian Americans. At the same time that she denies Arab Americans as white, despite legally fighting for this classification in state apparatuses and even self-identifying as 'white', she then cites approvingly the claim that Asians in the US are increasingly grouped with white people. If we leave aside the ludicrousness of such a claim (the news article she cites is a hyperbolic observation of the model minority myth), this ends up undermining her own thesis. If she can so readily agree that Asians can be white, why is she so adamant to dismiss the facts before her about the historical whiteness of Arab Americans?

This raises some uncomfortable questions. Why choose now to claim the category of People of Colour? Why are Arab Americans so insistent now that they are not ‘white’, rather than, say, during the Civil Rights Era or during the Vietnam War? Consider, for example, Arab American, Kayed Hassan, recounting favourably his service in the US military during the Vietnam campaign in 1967:

“I didn’t feel any discrimination at all during my service, even after the Arab-Israeli wars and the politics of it all […] And with a name like Hassan, it’s not like you can hide from it. I didn’t. I was proud to be Arab and also proud to be American. […] The other soldiers always respected me as an Arab and as a Muslim […] I was too busy being an American and an Arab to allow anyone to attack me.”

— Kayed Hassan, 69yo, Syrian American Veteran

Compare that to Muhammad Ali’s response to conscription in the same year:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”

— Muhammad Ali

The response by two different Muslim Americans to the Vietnam War couldn't be more divergent in their political modes of racial identification. It's one of the reasons I was struck by the number of young non-black Arab Muslims in America and Australia who attempted to coopt Muhammad Ali as ‘one of their own’ upon his death, oblivious to the racial specificities of his life struggle.

This leads me to another glaring absence in her argument. The smooth causal ties she creates between whiteness, colonialism, slavery and Islamophobia is undercut by the existence of the Arab slave trade from the 7th century onwards. Hamad’s attempt to pin the kafala system in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE squarely on the European ideology of 'whiteness', while completely ignoring the history of slavery and indentured and forced labour in the Arab world is probably the most obvious attempt to whitewash history in her favour. That strikes me as a rather disingenuous way of dismissing Arab privilege in systems of exploitation that are sanctioned by Arab states. I don't have enough knowledge or time to go into the differences between the Transatlantic slave trade and the Arabic one, but it is possible to recognise the existence of the Arab slave trade without falling for false equivalences.

Are Arab Americans white now? No. But they were white for almost a century, and happily so from what it seems. A century is a long time to occupy privileged spaces to accrue access to resources, education, jobs, etc. I can understand that many Arabs across the West definitely do not feel 'white' right now. And it is valuable for Hamad to give voice to this political shift. But why can’t she just make a case for dissociating from whiteness in the present rather than pretending they never had it? Why not focus on the excellent writing by Arab Americans that are currently challenging and resisting the label of whiteness? Or if her goal is to highlight the contemporary plight of Arabs, then why not simply cite the growing body of literature charting and tracing the contemporary formations of Islamophobia across the West? Why not simply cite the important body of work tracing the colonial and imperial struggles over the Middle East and North Africa and how these shaped the contemporary political, economic and social instability of the region? It strikes me as a rather underhanded and convoluted way to claim oppression by denying the history of one's privilege in specific contexts, especially when the author does so by pushing back against other racialised minorities.

[NB: A far more nuanced account of the racialisation of Arab American's at the turn of the twentieth century can be found in Sarah M. Gualtieri's Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora. She provides a more in-depth and sensitive account of their decision-making within the context of America's racial order than what I provide above.]

Thoughts on Activism in Australia

So a young activist friend recently asked in despair what the left should be doing right now. This has been part of a longer conversation I’ve had with her about my time in left political movements in Australia from the 1990s onwards as well as discussions about the current state of the left-wing activism in Australia. Marisa Wikramanayake posted up a response here, which I think offers a great list of practical things you can do (but also very focused on individual action). 

I promised this activist friend a while ago (as well as a few other friends) I would write more of my thoughts and experiences on leftwing politics in Australia, so this seems like an opportune time. I have an aversion to lists which present a strict series of orders or dos and don'ts, but I also understand why these are popular. Maybe it's because our memeified culture tends to reproduce these lists at an alarming rate and it feeds directly into a culture of individualistic entrepreneurialism.

Tony Abbott Hopeless poster, Melbourne, 2015.

But it's also because, for me, political empowerment doesn’t come from being told to write a letter or sign a petition, it comes through cultivating political awareness, consciousness raising and skill sharing through political action. Signing a petition or writing a letter aren't political unless you know what you are writing, what the document stands for, and you are doing it in order to contribute to some kind of change - no matter how small or impossible that change may seem. Furthermore, political movements have to be responsive to their particular historical conjuncture.

That's all to say I’m afraid I don’t have a ‘5 easy steps to political liberation’ program. I don't think of myself as a particularly good activist role model in any case. What I have instead are some observations gathered over 15 years of on-and-off political activism, of some successful and many unsuccessful campaigns. If I were to pin down the difference between successful campaigns and unsuccessful ones in my experience, I see three main differences: emotionally mature leadership, strategic mobilisation and political intervention.

Emotional Leadership: If a campaign is to be successful the organisers will need to build a broad movement and this means creating the relations and the space that can sustain such movements. Such a space requires mature, emotional leadership.

• The current discussions I see online and in political activists circles are full of grandstanding, self-righteousness, and displaced moralism that are just as likely to perpetuate lateral violence as to call anyone in real power out. Movements need leaders who take the emotional work of activism seriously (and by leaders I don’t mean charismatic, patriarchal leaders leading from the front, but anyone taking on the responsibility who can just as easily lead from the side or even from behind).

• Emotional leadership is more than just telling people to take time out or indulge themselves in self care ready to come back to the same burnt out space of demoralisation. It means diffusing tensions, refocusing the collective, bringing people together in hope and mutual respect. Long-term campaigns/movements are able to create these spaces of hope and senses of belonging. By contrast groups marred by in-fighting don't tend to last. So take time out for self care, sure, but also do the work of preparing yourself emotionally for solidarity. This applies particularly for men to ensure they are not emotionally burdensome on fellow women activist to play mother.

• It also means being aware of those that emotionally ‘drain’ activist spaces and taking steps to deal with them or, if need be, ask them to leave and come back when they are more ready to work collectively. It means cultivating emotional awareness in junior activists to prepare them for the work ahead. It means preparing spaces that are resilient enough to have difficult debates and even long-standing disagreements that do not jeopardise the movement, while recognising that this necessary discomfort is different from emotionally draining individuals.

• Campaigns and movements will also need to consider different activist spaces and its effects on organising. Online discussions at the moment are a ‘ranty’, rambling mess of incohesive opinions, which are easily derailed by a single troll. At a collective face-to-face meeting, there are a number of different ways of dealing with derailing behavior that are not possible or less useful in online spaces. We need better tools for managing online discussion and debate and we also need to commit to continuing those discussions in person. Many 'fights' are resolved quickly face-to-face, which might have boiled over for days online.

Strategic Mobilisation: Prioritise campaigns, not actions. If I compare the campaigns I was involved in that were successful versus campaigns that were unsuccessful, one of the differences is the existence of strategy.

• Don't just jump into action every time someone calls for an action or asks you to sign a petition and try not to pass these on or create them as well. Constantly getting people involved in useless actions creates an expectation that things will change and when they don't (because there is no campaign), this can lead to demoralisation. Constinuously demoralised activists eventually leads to demobilisation.

• Question what is the campaign? what are its long term and short term goals? what is the overall strategy? who is being targeted? with what demands? and will it be effective? Without these kinds of questions and discussions, political movements simply leap from rally to rally, slowly leaving activists burnt out and overly cynical.

• When there is no strategy it also easy to distract the movement, since members are not clear on their goals. A clever opposing strategist can make them leap from media event to media event fighting shadows and symbolic wars while allowing prevailing structures free reign. Lack of strategy also enables the cooptation of our movements by celebrities and others better at manipulating media events than your average punter.

Political Intervention: Finally, devise strategies that actually work in the systems of power you live within. In order to effect politics there has to be some power that you can leverage. The movement must be attentive to the political processes, institutions, and formations in order to effectively intervene.

• When I look at succesful campaigns it was because we leveraged a lot of different kinds of power. Sure we organised people power and held rallies, but this was supported by clear messaging in successful long-term media strategies, lawyers using cases to push on the legal front and politicians pushing on the legislative front. We also built broader alliances across multiple movements for support. However, if the campaign/movement attacks all journalists, academics, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, etc. as 'elites' and 'sell outs' then you can't be surprised when your strategy fails to intervene in the prevailing, dominant political structures and institutions.

• This also means being attentive to the different kinds of values and roles that your members can play with the skills, talents and networks they have. Know your collective and ask for their help in appropriate things. This not only builds confidence and allows people to feel helpful and useful, it generates far more interesting and successful movements because a more diverse body of people can see themselves reflected in the movement. A movement needs all types and talents and leaders that understand and appreciate the variety of skills available and how they work in and through and leverage various kinds of power.

• Having said that, there are many instances where you cannot rely on certain kinds of power or where it will actively be opposed to your campaign. If this is the case, must also find ways to deal with opposing forces in the context of your campaign and take account of them in your overall strategy. This is part of being attentive to the political systems you live within.

• Finally, being attentive to the political systems and processes also means paying attention to the fact that Australia is not America or the UK and that we have our own political institutions, processes, formations, protocols, history, culture, etc. that we need to engage. Simply copying American or British movements in Australia does not necessarily work unless you’ve done work to understand the local political, social and economic contexts. I’ve seen many ‘activists’ insist on running American-style campaigns in Australia and when it inevitably fails, the first thing they do is attack fellow activists and Australians or Australia more generally. This is perhaps one of the more recent but highly pernicious forms of demoralisation I’ve noticed recently, particularly in anti-racist activism.

As I said, I don't really like lists. These are more notes of things I've learnt over the years. Hopefully, these lessons are useful for others too.

Peace.

Reflections on Christmas, 2016

Most other times I can momentarily leave politics to the side, but I can't bring myself to 'celebrate' Christmas with people that knowingly vote for refugee detention on our shores.

It says something that two Muslim friends, who don’t even believe in Christmas, have invited me to spend Christmas Day with their families in their homes because it pains them to know I will be alone on my holy day. By contrast, this Christian nation willfully supports the locking up of Muslim refugees to be tortured, raped and abused because ‘we’re full’ and ‘can’t afford' to shelter them.

It is somewhat ironic that the hypocrisy of this stance is most evident in the season to celebrate Christ’s birth. During Christmas, Australians are predicted to spend AUD$48.1 billion at retail stores. Of this, $19 billion will be spent on food and $8.8 billion on presents alone. By contrast, Australia has spent $9.6 billion between 2013 and 2016 to fund its deterrence policies against refugees.

It costs something like AUD$1 mill per year to house a single asylum seeker on Manus Island, and estimates of housing refugees in the community are between $12,000 and $40,000 per year to house them in the community on a bridging visa. Taking the more conservative costing, if we didn’t buy presents for each other to ‘celebrate’ Christ’s birth but rather enacted the lessons Christ gave us to help the destitute we could potentially house 220,000 refugees in Australia on a bridging visa each year. Alternatively, if we had used the money we already spent on draconian deterrence policies over the last 4 years we could have already housed 60,000 refugees to live in our community while their refugee status is being determined. This presumes they aren't working. If they had the right to work it would cost less. Instead, we have enacted a policy to forcibly incarcerate them where they are tortured, raped, physically assaulted and medically neglected. So how did we get here?

Christmas Island is the site where Australia's draconian refugee policy was born. The island was so named by Captain William Mynors in 1643 when he sailed past it on Christmas Day. In August 2001, when the Norwegian ship, MV Tampa, attempted to disembark 438 refugees on Christmas Island, it was forcibly stopped by Australian special forces under the orders of the then Prime Minister John Howard. As Suvendrini Perera brilliantly outlines, this led to an emergency cabinet meeting where the then Prime Minister Howard excised Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone so that they could not claim asylum. And so John Howard's Pacific Solution was born.

A few months later in October 2001, another boat carrying asylum seekers sunk off the coast of Christmas Island when it was intercepted by HMAS Adelaide. In order to malign the public against the refugees, the Howard government made public allegations, repeated by journalists, that the parents had threatened to throw, or had thrown, their own children overboard to save themselves, which were later proved to be false.

The 'children overboard scandal' was a propaganda masterstroke that exploited the public’s fears of a wave of immigrants for support in the upcoming election, while simultaneously silencing any sympathy for the refugees from the ‘bleeding hearts’ by portraying the refugees as themselves heartless. The children overboard claims could not be challenged without evidence that obviously had to wait until an investigation was possible well after the election.

Our willingness to lie about refugees for political gain, while severely punishing them for seeking refuge, continues throughout our subsequent refugee policies. Often touted as protecting a Christian Australia, they starkly reveal that we are only ever nominally Christian. Our impoverished version of Christianity is most evident in this clip of our ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott trying to explain how turning back refugees was consistent with the teachings of Christ: 

Notice the twists and turns the then Prime Minister Abbott performs in order to ignore the central teachings of the Second Testament. The Cleansing of the Temple that Abbott invokes was when Jesus drove the traders from the temple because they had made a house of worship into a house of trade, not because he believed things belonged in specific places. In various versions of the story in the Bible, Jesus refers to them as 'thieves' because they profited off the poor and the widowed. It is a condemnation of those that would use the temple to generate money, that would twist prayer into profiting off the downtrodden. In other words, the moral of the story is the complete opposite of Abbott's retelling, which he uses to justify turning away those in need.

We should remember that Abbott wanted to be a priest and so his misinterpretation must be understood as a willful attempt to mislead since it contradicts so much of the Second Testament. He ignores the circumstances of Christ’s birth, with Mary and Joseph seeking refuge from the Massacre of the Innocents according to the Gospel of Matthew. Gone is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37) where Jesus answered the question ‘who is a neighbour?’. And it ignores the numerous injunctions in the Bible to help the poor and the needy, such as Matthew 25:45 where it warns that whatever we do or do not do for the least of our brethren (i.e. the most destitute, most poor, most downtrodden of humanity) we also do to, or do not do for, Christ.

In fact the Abbott government was so morally bankrupt that when refugee mothers were self-harming in the misguided hope that their children would be allowed to come to Australia, Tony Abbot’s response was to accuse them of ‘moral blackmail’. Any human being would have had at least a moment of sorrow, a bit of shame and possibly self-doubt. Not so for our then Prime Minister, who, unable to recognise his own conscience, projected the negative feelings generated by his conscience onto the victims to then accuse them of forcing him to feel sorry for them. Notice too that whereas the children overboard scandal under John Howard portrayed refugees as being heartless because they were willing to sacrifice their children for themselves, in this case the parent's own willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children is now portrayed as a form of 'blackmail'.

This is what comes of decades of allowing shock jocks and rightwingers to use ‘bleeding hearts’ as a pejorative to disparage attempts to centralise humanity and compassion at the core of good Australian 'Christian' citizenship. The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of the most well-known devotions of the Roman Catholic Church:

Pompeo Batoni 1767 Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is a common image of the sacred heart. Variations are used extensively in Catholic imagery.

Catholic Card, circa 1880. Auguste Martin Collection, University of Dayton Libraries

The physical heart of Jesus, sometimes represented as bleeding from an arrow, is taken as the manifestation of Christ’s love for humanity. It is also meant to be a reminder for us to practice the teachings of Christ, particularly his commandment to ‘love one another’. The Christian Right and increasingly the mainstream media have done everything possible to undermine this message. They openly mock people who have ‘bleeding hearts’ so that the average Australian now thinks it is a sign of weakness when individuals cannot abide the violence against asylum seekers. Their message has borne fruit. After years of forced, mandatory, mass incarceration of people fleeing persecution, the violence against those we detain has been extensively documented now in innumerable reports both national and international.

And so it was that we arrived this Christmas to wake up to the death of anther refugee in our detention system; this time from medical neglect. Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a 27 year old refugee from Sudan, detained in Manus for over 4 years despite his claims to refugee status being upheld by the Australian authorities, had suffered from seizures and blackouts for several months prior to his death. Despite seeking medical treatment from International Health and Medical Services, which manage the medical services in refugee detention, he was consistently told he had no problems. At one point IHMS actually banned him from returning because they claimed there was nothing wrong with him, which prompted 60 refugees to sign a petition to provide Ahmed with adequate medical assistance. The petition fell on deaf ears. Ahmed collapsed in detention on Thursday and was flown to Brisbane hospital where he died on Christmas eve.

Refugee Banner on Manus Island, 2016 (source: Refugee Rights Action Network Western Australia, https://www.facebook.com/rran.org/posts/738398296311738)

Today, a ‘Christian’ nation will greet each other with 'Merry Christmas', stuffing their faces with more food than they need, as their children gleefully scratch open their $8.8bill worth of presents. While their children run into the backyard, squealing in delight, to play with whatever expensive bauble they’ve just received from Santa, asylum seekers are ‘celebrating’ Christmas getting beaten by the security guards and ignored by the medical personnel we hired to abuse them. I can already imagine the spin that the (nominally 'Christian') Right will pin on these events to paint the refugees and asylum seekers as 'ungrateful' and 'undeserving' so that we can go on with our Boxing Day shopping having convinced ourselves that it was 'their fault' all along.