America’s frontier: The end of the myth

The Washington Memorial in Washington DC as seen from the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Author’s collection

The seductive idea of America’s frontier was that it was never ending. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, American expansion exhilarated because it could be projected to infinity. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the American political class steadily upped the ante pushing global engagement as a moral imperative. Then came Donald Trump. “I want to build a wall,” he said, and America’s racism and extremism had nowhere else to go. Trump was not America’s first racist president. Andrew Jackson drove a slave coffle and oversaw ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson cultivated the Ku Klux Klan in his electoral coalition, while Nixon won the Neo-Confederate vote in 1968 thanks to his “southern strategy”. But the country no longer has a “divine, messianic” crusade to hold it together. America, says Greg Grandin, in his 2020 book of that title, is at The End of the Myth.

Grandin says British North America was conceived in expansion from Europe’s religious wars. Native Americans had to get out of the way or be murdered or enslaved. As Benjamin Franklin said, America’s vastness allowed for endless expansion and markets growing with supply. “We are scouring our planet,” Franklin said, “by clearing America of woods.” Then came the first worldwide war, not of 1914 but of the 1750s when Britain and France fought for control of India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. In North America both countries deployed standing armies, settler militias and indigenous allies. British rangers learned to live, dress and kill “like the Indians”.

Britain won the war and inherited an enormous swathe of forest land from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But it could not reconcile local interests. Britain issued a 1763 proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of the Appalachians, which suited indigenous allies. But settlers like the rangers saw it as a violation of their right to move west. As authorities dithered, settlers moved west anyway, forming militias and terrorising Native Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was the settlers’ ultimate rebuke to the crown. Jefferson claimed they were the inheritors of Saxon freemen finding new lands. The 1783 Treaty of Paris laid down the borders of the new nation at the Mississippi River and Americans moved swiftly across the Appalachians.

Jefferson negotiated the right for US ships to moor on the Spanish bank of the Mississippi and demanded access to Florida’s waterways. Southern states claimed their territories ran all the way to the Pacific and settlers and war veterans purchased land west of the Mississippi. They were following James Madison’s 1787 Federalist paper advice on how to avoid an aristocracy. Madison’s solution was “extend the sphere” to dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.

South America took a different tack. In the 1820s Spain’s former colonies had won independence setting their borders along the old colonial boundaries, based on the old Roman law uti possidetis, “as you possess”. This self-containment became the guiding principle of 20th century decolonising nations and modern Africa remains mostly aligned on colonial boundaries. In contrast, the US thought it was one of a kind, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom,” said Jefferson. Its constitution transformed western lands into territories which in time could become states. America doubled in size thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France (which had obtained the territory from Spain). The new frontier was the Rockies and once again Americans poured into new lands. These lands were not empty, but Jefferson wanted Native Americans to be assimilated into settler life and give up valuable hunting lands. If mass murder was required, then it was Britain’s fault having seduced the tribes “to take up the hatchet against us.” Settlers executed “removal” operations to drive Native Americans further west towards “the frontier”.

Wealthy Tennessee businessman Andrew Jackson flouted laws to enter Indian territory. Jackson believed liberty was the freedom to do whatever he wanted and led a militia to exterminate Tennessee’s Creek Nation, ordering his men to cut noses off corpses to more easily tally the dead, paying off tribal leaders, and concluding a punitive treaty with survivors. He subdued Florida’s Seminoles and Tennessee’s Chickasaws using the same tactics of “terrorise, bribe and legalise.” Jackson became a national hero by defeating the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and now wanted to make all of North America white. In 1829 the aristocratic Founding Fathers lost control of the presidency to the outsider Jackson and his mandate to remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and extend slavery.

Jackson was a believer in “small government” but ensured his government would enforce enterprise and property rights, including the right to own human property. The Age of Jackson was a radical empowerment of white men at the expense of black men who were denied the vote they had in some northern states since colonial times. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act pushing Native Americans beyond the Mississippi and extinguishing their land rights. Settlers poured into Indian country, demanding military protection and prompting repeated cycles of forced removals. Indians must die out, said New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it,” Greeley said. In practice, speculators, railroads, ranchers and corporations claimed the best land for themselves.

By the 1830s attention turned to Texas, the northernmost part of Mexico. Spain founded Texas as a “slaver’s utopia” for Anglo settlers in the hope they would become a loyal buffer against American encroachment. But Mexico abolished slavery when it won independence in 1821 and the Anglo Tejanos revolted. In its time as a short-lived republic, Texas enshrined slavery in perpetuity and Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Texans wanted to join the United States but its admittance would tip the balance of power to the slave states. Jackson protege and slaveholder James Polk won the presidency in 1844 promising to annex Texas to secure the frontier. In 1846 Polk declared war on Catholic Mexico, at the same time that “manifest destiny” was coined to described the belief Providence was guiding Anglo-Saxon Protestants across the continent. Migration west was a messianic mission.

In the war that followed, America’s armed superiority was overwhelming. They took Mexico City in 1847 and the following year the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring not just Texas but Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and southwest Wyoming to the US, some 100 million people in a half million square miles. The Jacksonian consensus kept together slave and free states as the border moved south and west. Settlers to Oregon, which also joined the union in 1848, didn’t want slavery or free blacks, passing laws to exclude them from the territory. But tensions over slavery could not be resolved and America waged war on itself in the 1860s. Millions of slaves were released in 1865 and Lincoln’s final legacy, his Freedmen’s Bureau, was a repudiation of Jacksonian politics as a federal initiative to resettle refugees, redistribute confiscated lands, levy taxes and regulate labour and the minimum wage. But new president Andrew Johnson hated it and believed ex-slaves should help themselves. Johnson ensured the southern planter class regained power and restored the Jacksonian myth of a minimal state and individualism. Thanks to more Lincoln legislation like the Homestead Act, which promised lots for working the soil, Americans looked west again. Native Americans were pacified in the 30 years following the civil war, and southerners were re-integrated into the federal army while Jim Crow laws were instituted across the south. The frontier, said late-1800s historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”

Turner’s thesis held that America’s unique individualism gained strength “each time it touched a new frontier”. The frontier was not a physical border but a way of life. The American west encouraged an idea of political equality that seemed to go on forever, at least for white Anglo-Saxons. Turner ignored the removal of Native Americans and the invasion of Mexico and dismissed slavery as “an incident”. As America stood on the verge of global power, Turner’s ideas were expanded on by historians, economists, novelists and future presidents. Theodore Roosevelt celebrated frontier vigilantism and rough justice as “healthy for the community” while Woodrow Wilson justified the invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines as “a new revolution”. The myth of rugged individualism was used to define socialists and unionists as un-American. But it could only be maintained through ceaseless expansion.

Confederate and union flags flew together as the cotton-growing states enthusiastically supported the invasion of Cuba in search of new tariff-free markets. Grandin said that 1898 war transformed the south’s “Lost Cause” of slavery preservation into humanity’s cause for world freedom. President McKinley, who served the union in the civil war, wore a Confederate badge on his lapel in a victory tour of the south after Spain was defeated. The dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged led by 1898 veterans who draped themselves in high ideals of reconciled national history. Resurgent racists formed “rifle clubs” which were fronts for white terrorist organisations and got away with lynchings, property confiscation, disenfranchisement, arbitrary prosecutions and chain gangs. Wilson won his second presidency in 1916 on the white southern vote, purging blacks from federal jobs, re-segregating Washington and legitimising the KKK.

America’s move across the Mexican frontier took a new form. Capital replaced settlers as American investors took over the Mexican economy dominating oil production, railroads, agriculture and ports. Thousands of Mexicans were deported from their homelands and forced to work on large plantations. American courts sanctioned vigilantes like the Texas Rangers who killed thousands more in mass executions in border regions. When the First World War came, the Rangers, now an official branch of law enforcement, defined anti-war activity as anything from organising a union to trying to vote, and rounded up and deported thousands of strikers. After the war the rejuvenated KKK fixated on many threats besides African Americans, including jazz, immorality, high taxes, and increasingly Mexicans. Border clans infiltrated church groups, school boards, police and national guards and suppressed the Mexican vote to reinforce minority rule. The New York Times worried it was “open season for shooting Mexicans” along the Rio Grande. America’s growing xenophobia was encoded in the 1924 Immigration Act which favoured Anglo-Saxon migrants. Though Mexico was exempted due to the need for its cheap labour force, white supremacists took control of the new US Border Patrol and turned it into a “vanguard of race vigilantism.”

Not everyone was intoxicated by America’s limitless power. Socialist editor of the New Republic, Walter Weyl, blamed the frontier for American ills such as racism, class domination and corruption. American individualism was doomed to defeat itself, said Weyl, “as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.” The Great Depression seemed to do exactly that and Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 that America had reached “its last frontier”. It was facing an economic and ecological disaster with intensive strip mining farming practices leading to dust storms, forcing many to leave the land. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the government’s biggest intervention since the Freedmen’s Bureau, resettling families, offering work, planting forests and expanding national parks. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace said what was needed was “not a new continent but a new state of heart”. But Roosevelt appeased southern planters by ensuring that rural workers, mostly black or Mexican, were excluded from laws allowing workers to unionise so agriculturalists would keep their supply of low wage farmworkers. Mexicans who weren’t illegal and subject to imprisonment were unprotected by labour laws. As one sugar planter said, “We used to own slaves, now we just rent them.”

With the coming of the Cold War, leaders moved the frontier to new geographies. Life magazine said the frontier was on the Elbe between East and West Germany. It was also between the two Koreas, the two Chinas and increasingly, up the Persian Gulf. Defence budgets soared as did profits for US capital. Truman integrated the military and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Libertarians worried about expanding government bureaucracy and harked back to the Jacksonian “frontiersmen” who broke loose from the economic controls “that restricted their energies.” Nobel winning economist James Buchanan hailed the role of the frontier in breaking up collective identities of “the nanny state”.

Martin Luther King had different concerns. He believed rugged individualism was a faulty foundation for national identity and America was indeed socialist, only its wealth redistribution was upwards. “There is,” King said, “an individualism that destroys the individual.” He said the Vietnam War would exacerbate America’s worst sentiments including racism while diverting funds from progressive legislation. Sure enough, the war strengthened the position of southern segregationists in Congress who threatened to withhold military funding to veto civil rights laws. In 1967 King looked “beyond Vietnam” to see America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” and a political culture where profit and property were more important than people. The LA Times attacked King for “linking these hard, complex problems” which would lead not to solutions, but “a deeper confusion”. Angry soldiers displayed Confederate symbols at every opportunity in South East Asia while at home pro-war demonstrations marched on Pittsburgh with a large Rebel flag, now the banner of those that felt “stabbed in the back” as America tried to wind back white supremacy. When Floridian William Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre, Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign transformed him from a war criminal to a cultural wedge to weaponise southern grievances. Even in the 21st century Iraqi war, the Rebel flag remained a banner of “free-floating resentment” as Grandin calls it, hanging in the tent of Bagram torturers.

Nixon opened the floodgates to polarise the electorate, and following presidents would help create a permanent state of disequilibrium. None expressed the right to American limitlessness better than Ronald Reagan. His energy policy was “more, more, more” when it came to oil and gas, but the sunny sheriff of Washington also removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. His state department eschewed human rights in favour of individual rights which could be deployed on behalf of people trampled by tyranny but also act as a racist dog whistle. Reagan pushed through deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, and granted free speech rights to corporations. His Cold War revival and support for anti-Communist insurgents kept his base happy while his libertarian government chipped away at welfare, public education and weakened unions. “There are no limits to growth,” Reagan said. “Nothing is impossible.”

So it seemed to a triumphant America as the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Democrat Bill Clinton beat Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush in 1992 by channelling Reagan’s folksy optimism and outdoing the Republicans. Clinton supported free trade agreements, kept Wall Street unfenced, and increased military presence in the Gulf. While NAFTA destroyed Mexican small farms, American agribusiness kept their subsidies. Mexico’s vibrant dairy industry was destroyed as the country was overrun by American junk food, increasing obesity and malnutrition in tandem. Refugees eked out a living in the drug trade or migrated illegally across the border. They were joined by Central Americans whose economies were destroyed by American mining and biofuel corporations. NAFTA didn’t allow for freedom of movement of people and Clinton beefed up border operations with punitive immigration measures. Border patrol became the second largest law enforcement agency behind the FBI. Alarmed Republicans swung even further right spurred on by the growing power of Fox News, worried about undocumented migrants and “anchor babies”.

After 9/11 George W. Bush pledged to “extend the frontiers of freedom”. But Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters leaving America with huge military spending at a time of deep tax cuts. The long years of individualism led to increased racism and poverty, and war revanchism led to increasing fears around America’s borders. Violence against Latinos surged as vigilante groups like the Minutemen hunted for illegal immigrants in New York and other northern cities. “The border is no longer in the desert,” one Minuteman said, “It is all over America.” Backed by Fox News, they demanded a wall across the entire length of the border.

The rage of Nativists increased with the GFC followed by Barack Obama’s election. While the first black president packed “an emotional wallop”, his policies were moderate and he refused to think beyond 1990s-style Free Trade. Even that was too much for the growing Tea Party movement which merged with Minutemen in contempt for the political establishment while maintaining dominance over immigrants. The overseas wars raged on, and were mirrored at home by escalating massacres, school shootings and white supremacist rampages. The collapse of America’s military authority and the moral bankruptcy of the free trade growth model left Obama no outlet to rise above the polarisation. Nativists combined a “psychotropic hatred” of Obama with grievances over health care, taxes, war and especially migrants. As one border protest put it in 2014, “We can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves.” Two years later this community would vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Trump won in 2016 by running a Jacksonian outsider campaign against the entire legacy of the postwar order. His border wall became a stick with which to demonise migrants. The wall offers the illusion of simultaneously recognising and refusing limits. Trumpism feeds resentment that America has been too generous while encouraging a petulant hedonism expressed in the right to own guns or “rolling coal” where truck engines are modified to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel as “a brazen show of American freedom” targetted against enemies like walkers, joggers, cyclists, and hybrid and Asian cars. America was becoming defined by what it hated.

According to Grandin, Trump’s point was not to build the wall, but to constantly announce it. The frontier is closed and Madison’s sphere can no longer be extended. America is at the end of its myth, but instead of a critical, resilient and progressive citizenry, it has ended up with conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change. Life expectancy is declining while infant mortality is increasing. Only the super-rich are emancipated from the rules and still dream of new frontiers, with billionaires creating floating villages beyond government control and plans to industrialise space. Grandin says nothing will change until America accepts there are limits to growth. The choice he says, is between barbarism and social democracy. As Trump remains a good chance to win back power in 2024, it’s far from clear which way America will go.

Stamped from the beginning: A history of racist ideas in America

Kendi’s “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis.

Ibram X. Kendi’s monumental Stamped from the Beginning chronicles how racist ideas became established in the fabric of American society. The title comes from Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s 1860 claim that America was founded by white people for white people and the inequality of white and black was “stamped from the beginning.” The book tells the story of racist ideas from the colonial era to the present through five “tour guides”: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis. Blacks own 2.7 percent of American wealth but make up 40 percent of the jail population. America’s racial disparity is older than the United States but kept alive through constant reinvention by vested interests.

Bostonian Puritan Cotton Mather preached inequality in body skin while insisting the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become white when Christianised. His work was widely publicised during the Enlightenment and justified as a defence of slavery, including by Jefferson, newly independent America’s intellectual giant and third president. After Jefferson’s death Garrison spearheaded an emancipation push based on the racist idea that slavery had brutalised black people, making them inferior. Du Bois, America’s first professionally trained black scholar, believed Garrison but later converted to anti-racism. Davis was another black intellectual who suffered in the backlash to 1960s civil rights advances. Kendi says the popular idea of ignorant people producing racist ideas and then racial discrimination is false. He says racial discrimination leads to racist ideas which lead to ignorance and hate. Consumers of racist ideas believe that something is wrong with black people and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed and confined them.

Cotton Mather’s grandfathers John Cotton and Richard Mather brought Puritan racist ideas to America. Richard Mather was instrumental in the founding of Harvard, leaning on Aristotle’s theory that hotter climates produced inferior people. Using Aristotle and St Paul’s defence of slavery (“obey your earthly masters”), John Cotton produced New England’s first constitution in 1636 legalising “perpertuall servants.” When Cotton died, Mather married his widow while Mather’s son married his daughter and named their son Cotton Mather after the alliance. Young Mather was marked out for greatness following his father and grandfathers into the ministry, entering Harvard aged 11. He followed his father as Boston’s foremost Puritan pastor. Mather believed in witchcraft and supported the Salem trials and executions in 1692. He absorbed the idea of graded “races” with Europeans at the top. Mather supported slavery but believed black souls could be saved, which was not popular, because Christian slaves could sue for their freedom. His 1706 book on slavery The Negro Christianised influenced young Benjamin Franklin. As slavery increased in the 18th century so did slave revolts and severe anti-black codes, stripping free blacks from owning property. Gradually Mather’s ideas that blacks could be Christianised took hold, which one slaveholder said encouraged them to “become more humble and better servants”. Mather died in 1728 aged 65. As Kendi said he had produced the racist idea of “simultaneously subduing and uplifting” slaves. As Mather’s son and biographer put it, Mather had blessed blacks with the prayer “Lord Wash that poor Soul (and) make him white.”

Cotton Mather’s greatest disciple was Thomas Jefferson who grew up amid slave workers at wealthy Shadwell estate. He studied at Virginia’s College of William and Mary and graduated in law, following his father into the House of Burgesses. Though against slavery he used slave labour to build a plantation at Monticello, near Charlottesville. Jefferson joined the rebel Virginian legislature in 1774 protesting British debts, taxes and mandates to trade within the empire. In 1776 Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress and drafted the independence document with its immortal line “All men are created equal”. It was unclear if Jefferson’s “all” included black people and he criminalised runaways in the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Johnson pointed out American hypocrisies saying the “loudest yelps for liberty (come from) the drivers of negroes”. But America gained a powerful ally in Adam Smith and his 1776 bestseller The Wealth of Nations which said wealth stemmed from productive capacity which Africa lacked. While Britain tried to crush the American revolt, Jefferson hid in Monticello and wrote Notes on Virginia (1781). Jefferson wanted to end slavery and acknowledged white prejucide but also said blacks were intellectually inferior. In 1784 he took up a diplomatic appointment to Paris while his slaves made Monticello profitable. He missed the Convention which omitted slavery from the new US Constitution but introduced the infamous “three fifths rule” which counted three-fifths of enslaved blacks (“other persons”) in the census, handing power to the South until the civil war. In France Jefferson also began a lifelong affair with his slave Sally Hemings with whom he had at least five children.

He returned to America in 1790 to become George Washington’s first Secretary of State. He fought against Haiti’s slave revolt fearing it might inspire American copycats, calling its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.” Around this time, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which put cotton and slavery at the centre of the American economy. Jefferson became president in 1800 and his Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of America as slaveholders marched west into new lands. While Jefferson promoted the end of the international slave trade in 1808, it increased the demand for American slaves. Slavery helped the north’s factories and ports and powered America’s Industrial Revolution, sucking the life out of anti-racist movements. Jefferson retired in 1809, though all the presidents until 1841 except Quincy Adams were his disciples. The 1820 Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state which Jefferson worried would eventually lead to civil war.

In retirement Jefferson refused to condemn slavery though one enduring legacy was his promotion of the idea of colonisation. He suggested slaves guilty of plotting rebellion could be sent to the Caribbean or Africa. The idea was later taken up by the American Colonisation Society and Kentucky Whig Henry Clay who influenced Lincoln. The US colonised part of west Africa which they called Liberia, though few black Northerners would go there. In 1829 the ACS invited young Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison to give an address. Garrison hated slavery under the influence of Ohio Quaker journalist Benjamin Lundy and shocked the ACS by demanding emancipation not colonisation. In 1831 Garrison started abolitionist newspaper the Liberator and a year later wrote Thoughts on African Colonisation which condemned “the expulsion of the blacks.” Garrison’s ideas including the need for a cheap black workforce was the deathknell of the ACS.

Garrison inspired a printing revolution spread by railroads with abolitionist ideas printed on cheap rag paper determined to “awaken the consciousness of the nation to the evils of slavery”. Though 300,000 people joined Garrison’s movement by 1840, enraged slavers saw his tracts as an act of war. Congress led by South Carolina senator John Calhoun banned the post office from sharing them. In 1845 Frederick Douglass wrote his narrative of his escape from slavery, with Garrison writing a preface. By the end of the decade Free Soilers demanded slavery restrictions. In the Compromise of 1850 California was admitted as a free state, ending the balance between free and slave states but the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened to criminalise abettors and deny Blacks a jury trial. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin strengthened the link between black slaves and Christianity but she wanted a return to colonisation, which president Fillmore endorsed. While Garrison and Douglass criticised Stowe’s racist ideas, her writings brought more abolitionist support than either of them.

In 1854 Democrat Senator Stephen Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, repealing the Missouri Compromise and leaving the slavery question for settlers to settle. The bill destroyed the Whigs and the Republicans contested the 1856 election against the spread of slavery. The 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision declared blacks were inferior and could not be citizens. Douglas fought the 1858 Senate election in defence of Scott while ex-Whig and now Republican Abraham Lincoln declared a vote for Douglas was a vote to expand slavery. Lincoln believed that slavery retarded non-slaveholding white southerners. Garrison hated most politicians but recognised anti-slavery votes could make a Republican president in 1860. Southern fears increased after John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. After Brown was hanged he became a martyr to the anti-slavery cause. The Democrats split over Kansas handing the election to Lincoln. Secession spread across the deep south and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy. His vice president Alexander Stephens said their government “rested upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”. Three weeks later, the Confederates bombed Fort Sumter. Lincoln said the civil war was fought to protect the union but Garrison knew it was a war to end slavery. Thousands of blacks fled north and the Union Army was forbidden to send them back. The Fugitive Slave Act was dead. Lincoln still believed in colonization and wanted blacks to move to Liberia. Douglass dismissed it as hypocrisy and as war progressed, colonisation talk died. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration on January 1, 1863 and wrote himself into history as the Great Emancipator. At a celebratory concert in Boston that day, the hero was not Lincoln. “Three cheers for GARRISON,” they shouted.

As war ended, thoughts turned to reconstruction including black civil and voting rights. While Sherman gave 40-acre land plots to blacks in South Carolina, other whites pushed back. New Freedman’s Bureau boss Oliver Howard believed blacks would remain dependent on their masters and refused to spend money on a “pauperising agency”. After Lincoln’s death, president Johnson restored Southern property rights. Emboldened Confederates barred black voting and instituted discriminatory codes which they justified because blacks were “naturally lazy, lawless and oversexed.” Former Rebel general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Bedford Forrest said violence was necessary to “keep the niggers in their place.” Republican Rutherford Hayes won the disputed election of 1876 by promising to stop interfering in the South. In 1879 Garrison called it an abomination and “bloody misrule” before dying four weeks later. In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the 1875 civil rights act, the last gasp of reconstruction. The era of intimidation began with Jim Crow laws. Between 1889 and 1929 a southern black was lynched every four days.

As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back towards slavery.” “Willie” Du Bois was born in small town Massachusetts in 1868 and raised by his abandoned mother. Suffering racism at school he was determined to show the world “Negroes were like other people”. This was a time of Social Darwinism when Darwin’s ideas were used to show blacks were too weak to thrive in the modern world. The talented young Du Bois was not immediately permitted to attend Harvard but went to America’s top black college Fisk University in Nashville where he learned about assimilation and uplift suasion, the racist idea that blacks must change white minds about their abilities. “When you have the right sort of black voters, you will need no election laws,” he said on hearing of voter suppression laws. After graduating he achieved his dream and attended Harvard’s history doctoral program. He gained a scholarship to attend the University of Berlin in 1892. He studied two years in Berlin until funding ran out and he was not allowed to defend his economics doctoral thesis. Though he earned his history doctorate at Harvard in 1895, racist whites such as Franklin Roosevelt called him one of “a half dozen Negroes”which Harvard had made “a man out of a semi beast.”

Du Bois taught Greek and Latin at the African Methodist Episcopal flagship college in Wilberforce, Ohio. He believed white stupidity was the cause of racism and was determined to spread knowledge based on scientific investigation. Black intellectual Booker T. Washington was more acceptable to white minds as he wanted blacks to remain at the bottom in comfort, to “dignify and glorify common labour”. President Grover Cleveland hailed Washington the “new hope”. In 1896 the Supreme Court supported Washington’s segregationist ideas with the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v Ferguson stating Jim Crow laws did not violate the constitution. Whites ignored discrimination, preferring to focus on what was wrong with blacks.

In 1896 Frederick Hoffman released an influential theory that American blacks were headed towards extinction due to their immorality, law-breaking and diseases. Du Bois noted Hoffman’s native Germany had higher death rates than American blacks but no one was saying Germans were going extinct. But he had no answer to high black crime rates, which perpetuated the circle of more police, more arrests and more suspicions. He accepted Hoffman’s numbers as fact and believed it was a black problem to solve, pushing education and persuasion, reproducing the racist ideas he was trying to eliminate.

Booker Washington was at the height of his power in 1901 with his autobiography Up From Slavery which promoted personal responsibility, hard work, and “white saviours”. Du Bois scolded him for his accommodation though even that was too much for some racists. When president Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner, South Carolina senator Ben Tillman said it would “necessitate our killing of a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again”. Roosevelt never invited a black person to the White House again. In 1903 Du Bois released his own book The Souls of Black Folk comparing humble, soulful Africans with hard, rational Europeans. Du Bois argued blacks were not allowed self-consciousness but could only view themselves through white eyes. He wanted them to see themselves as “both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois criticised Washington’s “Talented Tenth”, the top 10 percent of Black Americans which he said added to the prejudice. A white Nashville paper admitted Du Bois’s call to strike down Jim Crow made the book “dangerous to read”.

President Theodore Roosevelt believed lynching was the fault of black rapists while he dishonourable discharged a famous black regiment falsely accused of murder in the racist Texas town Brownsville. When Jack Johnston became the first black world boxing champion, newspapers fixated on his white wife. He became the most hated black man in America. His victory over white boxer Jim Jeffries sent racist mobs into frenzy. The US government succeeded where his opponents failed and arrested Johnston on trumped-up charges of transporting a prostitute across state lines. He fled bail and lived overseas for seven years before spending a year in jail.

Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910 as Social Darwinism was at its height and published the NAACP newspaper the Crisis promoting black ability including the first black millionaires. He encouraged blacks to vote for Woodrow Wilson for president but once in office Wilson supported southern segregationists. Wilson held a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation which depicted post civil war blacks as evil rapists of white women. The film revitalised the Klan and prompted an increase in lynching which led to a great migration of blacks north during the First World War. Racist Harlemites feared a menace of “black hordes” and began a white flight that led to segregated communities across America. Du Bois attended the Paris Peace Conference and wrote how the victors opposed granting independence to African countries though black soldiers were well received in Europe. President Wilson worried the good treatment of blacks would “go to their heads”.

Du Bois’s post-war essays Darkwater argued the belief that blacks were sub-human had no factual basis. White reviewers slammed it as a “hymn of racial hate”. Flamboyant Jamaican Marcus Garvey led a new African solidarity movement. Du Bois admitted Garvey was extraordinary, but opposed Garvey’s introduction of Caribbean colour politics into America. When racist president Warren Harding opposed racial amalgamation in the south, Garvey hailed his support of racial separatism while Du Bois was appalled. Garvey was silenced by mail fraud and was eventually deported.

During the Depression, Du Bois realised that trying to persuade powerful racists was impossible and became an ardent antiracist socialist. FDR’s New Deal was racially discriminatory to secure Congress approval of Southern Democrats but was attractive enough to take black votes from the Republicans. By 1934 Du Bois supported Garveyite segregationist positions of black institutions and saw comparisons with the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. When America joined the Second World War, Du Bois backed the black American “double V” campaign against racism at home and fascism abroad. At war’s end he attended the United Nations conference in San Francisco and was feted by black African leaders determined to forge independence with American help. But the situation remained dire in the south. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo called on “every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls.” Six thousand years had proved black inferiority, Bilbo raged.

Scientists had other ideas and proved that skin colour had no effect on intelligence. The Truman administration promised to move towards black civil rights, worried about America’s international reputation. However the McCarthyite witchhunt equated black activism with Communism and the 82-year-old Du Bois was arrested in 1951 before being exonerated. His passport was revoked to stop him from making embarrassing revelations overseas. The Supreme Court finally overturned the odious “separate but equal” segregation in 1953’s Brown v Board of Education, Du Bois saying, “I have seen the impossible happen.” Southern white politicians railed against the decision saying it promoted “hatred and suspicion” where none existed before. It led to the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott with its young figurehead Martin Luther King, whom Du Bois called an American Gandhi. A year later Arkansas deployed the national guard to stop school desegregation forcing Eisenhower to send in federal troops. Now approaching 90 and with his passport returned, Du Bois toured the Communist world. He told Mao that American blacks were not diseased, but merely lacking income. Du Bois was still alive to read King’s letter from Birmingham Jail which said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Du Bois died aged 95 on August 27, 1963 one day before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins told the Washington meeting that Du Bois was “the voice calling you to gather here today.”

Angela Davis also experienced racism growing up, born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. Educated by radical parents she studied at Massachusetts’ Brandeis University where she was electrified by lectures from author James Baldwin and activist Malcolm X. X argued that whites weren’t born racist but the American “political, economic and social atmosphere…automatically nourishes a racist psychology”. The Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought enfranchisement but also a change in racist tactics. Media warned of “a time bomb ticking in the ghettoes” and black riots in depressed neighbourhoods were an excuse for police crackdowns. Like Du Bois, Davis did post grad studies in Germany but returned to California intoxicated by new black movements. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee dedicated to nonviolent, direct action while completing her doctorate at UC San Diego. After King was assassinated, she joined a massive rally in Los Angeles where she blamed racism for the killing but she urged against confrontation with the well-equipped LAPD which recruited many officers from the deep south.

In that year Richard Nixon studied the racist tactics of Alabama governor George Wallace. Nixon’s law-and-order “southern strategy” of demeaning blacks without mentioning race helped win the presidential election. Emboldened Republican governor of California Ronald Reagan tried to fire Davis from her teaching position at UC though the state’s Superior Court ruled his anti-Communist regulation was unconstitutional. She was sacked again in 1970 after attending a rally to free two Jackson brothers who were sentenced to life due to black power activism in jail. That August another of the Jackson brothers took a judge hostage at gunpoint before police opened fire killing him and the judge. Ownership of one of Jackson’s guns was traced to Davis and she was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, facing a death sentence if found guilty. She went on the run. J. Edgar Hoover placed her photo complete with famous Afro on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list. She was arrested in New York in October and extradited for trial in California. Amid calls of “Free Angela” the prosecution alleged her gun ownership, flight, and words of love for Jackson in her diary constituted first degree murder. The jury did not agree and acquitted her in June 1972.

Davis put her energies into black incarceration saying jail only created crime. Her old enemy Ronald Reagan had other ideas. In the 1980 election campaign, Reagan emulated Nixon by not mentioning blacks but his promise to restore state rights helped win southern white votes and with them, the presidency. He cut social programs, the New York Times noting that much progress against poverty made in the 1960s and 70s had been “wiped out”. In 1982 Reagan issued a devastating law enforcement executive order to “mobilise all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” despite few Americans viewing drug usage as a major problem. Davis ran as vice president for the US Communist Party in 1980 and again in 1984 where she condemned Reagan as the most racist and sexist president in history.

Reagan’s War on Drugs targetted drugs used by blacks such as marijuana and crack cocaine aided by racist stories in the media while the mostly white users of cocaine were ignored. Although blacks and whites used drugs in equal numbers, blacks were twice as likely as whites to face prison for usage, especially in heavy-policed inner cities, feeding the stereotype of dangerous black neighbourhoods. The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies. Reagan was less willing to fund a war on unemployment which might have reduced violent crime. Millions of blacks were hauled into the justice system where they could not vote, affecting countless close elections in the years to come, including the 2000 presidential election. Drunk drivers, three-quarters of which were white, killed more people than urban blacks, yet were not demonised as violent criminals nor was there a war on drunk driving.

George H.W. Bush tapped into the anti-black formula to win the 1988 election. He was losing in the polls until he released an ad complaining that black murderer Willie Horton had raped white women while on bail. Bush supported the 1987 Supreme Court judgement McCluskey v Kemp which ruled that the racially disproportionate impact of Georgia’s death penalty did not justify overturning a death sentence. One academic called it “the Dred Scott decision of our time”. Davis agreed, complaining blacks were suffering the most oppression since slavery. President Bush condemned the Rodney King video in 1991 but did not retreat from his tough-on-crime stance. Bill Clinton beat him in 1992 by promising more of the same. Davis was a rare voice denouncing the law and order argument which was leading to more police and more prisons.

The Republicans moved further right with the racist mandate of blacks needing to take “personal responsibility” for their socioeconomic plight and racial disparities, dusting off theories of lazy and dependent blacks. Clinton supported the idea ahead of the 1996 election with a bill limiting welfare programs. Republicans were outraged when UC honoured Davis with a prestigious professorship in 1995 decrying her reputation for “racism, violence and communism.” A year later California banned affirmative action and the percentage of African Americans at UC went into decline.

By 2000 Davis lamented that there were two million prisoners in America, half of them black. She imagined a world without incarceration in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? which noted criminals were fantasised as people of colour. Though the idea of race was exposed as factually incorrect and Clinton said people were “99.9 percent the same”, people focused on the supposed 0.1 percent difference. George W. Bush won the 2000 election when his brother Jeb denied tens of thousands of black legitimate votes in Florida. Bush promoted the racist standardised testing tying education funding to test scores, blaming victims for being left behind, and took voter suppression methods to Ohio to retain power in 2004. The racism of Bush’s America was exposed by the double tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, first the black lives lost unnecessarily and then the prime real estate cleared away for gentrification.

Barack Obama emerged as the electrifying keynote speaker in the 2004 Democratic convention and cemented his reputation with his memoir Dreams From My Father. Following Du Bois, Obama noted that only white culture could be deemed objective and non-racial. Obama’s 2008 opponent Joe Biden fed the stereotype by calling him “the first mainstream African American who is bright and clean” while Michelle Obama was depicted as an “angry black women” for saying her people were hungry for change. When reporters found no dirt on the Obamas they condemned his support for Pastor Jeremiah Wright for attacking the American prison system and preaching American terrorism abroad led to 9/11. Obama saved his campaign by abandoning Wright’s “distorted view” and pacified racists by blaming blacks’ “own complicity” in their problems. Still, the 64-year-old Davis gave her first ever vote to the Democrats in that election, enraptured by the pride of a black victory.

Hatred against blacks did not disappear with Obama’s victory. Despite claims America was “post racial”, there was a rise in police shootings of black people and murders of black people leading to Dylann Roof’s shooting dead nine Charlestonians in southern America’s oldest AME church in 2015. Kendi’s book came out a year later. The issues remain the same as that confronted Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB Du Bois and Angela Davis. The Black Lives Matters movement rejected the racism of six centuries but right wing pundits blamed blacks for the rise in violent racism. In the age of Trump, Republican administrations passed electoral laws to disenfranchise Black voters, and banned teaching the history of how southern states maintained white power through systems of racial disenfranchisement. Lawmakers won’t change racist policies for fear of discriminating against whites. But supporting prevailing bigotries is only in the interest of a tiny group of ultra rich WASP males. The rest of us need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves, Kendi says.

Why Adam Goodes has done Australia a favour

I was halfway through writing this post when I saw an article from Paul Daley in the Guardian which expresses my opinion more eloquently than I could hope for. To understand the Adam Goodes booing, you have to understand Australia’s history. The matter did not begin on a football field, Daley said, but in our attitudes and cultural sensitivity was never White Australia’s strong point. Many prefer not to know the problem.

That was brought home to me in a vox pop on ABC’s Brisbane local radio station yesterday. There was a wide mix of opinions but the one that stood out was the lady who said in an exasperated tone she was sick of the subject and wished it would go away. When pressed to say was the booing “racist” she said flatly no, it wasn’t. Hers is a common view that Australia does not a problem with race and we shouldn’t talk ourselves into it.

But others do want to talk about it. Some defend the booing forcefully. The “whiny, needy bullshit” as Guy Rundle called the arguments of convicted racist Andrew Bolt and others is “usurper’s complex”: victim blaming. Those who take power unlawfully must justify their acts – to themselves and others. It was Cecil the Lion’s fault for ruining the life of the man who killed him. So it is Adam Goodes who must change not the people doing the booing.

Like every great player in every team sport, Goodes was always the subject of “special attention” from opposition fans, little to do with his indigenous background. But the sustained booing he gets now dates to last year when as Australian of the Year he urged people to see John Pilger’s Utopia. Pilger enrages many on the right because he puts himself into the argument. In my view, Utopia is flawed and does not give enough credence to the problems of de-colonisation. But Pilger’s subject matter deserves a voice and Goodes was right to recommend the film’s confronting approach to Australian history. This action enraged the right which attacked Goodes for his recommendation more than Pilger for his film. John Howard’s wish of a people “relaxed and comfortable” about their history could only exist on the premise of not telling the truth about that history.

Yet we would be more comfortable with the real history. While Britain’s intervention came at enormous cost to the indigenous people it is a history that pre-dates racism. The British who arrived in 1788 felt superior to the Australians (likely the Eora felt the same way about the British). However the newcomers preferred to explain the difference on cultural and environmental grounds. Marine Watkin Tench believed British education and enlightened thinking was all that separated them from the “savages” in Botany Bay. There was no innate difference. “Untaught, unaccommodated man is the same in Pall Mall, as in the wilderness of New South Wales,” Tench wrote.

The Creationist view of a 7000-year-old world underpinned the idea Aboriginal people had only recently fallen from grace, and could and should be changed. Governor Lachlan Macquarie took this to its logical conclusion and formed Australia’s first mission in 1814 to civilise the native population and “render their Habits more domesticated and industrious”. Macquarie’s Native Institution failed but the idea of missionaries took hold from optimistic clergy who used “Gospel motives” to transform Aboriginal people. They all failed. Indigenous people remained disinterested and suspicious. They stayed only as long as they were fed.

The rise of science and European rage for classifying the world led to a new way of explaining human difference. In his 1775 book The Natural Varieties of Mankind, Johann Blumenbach came up with five races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay. Australia Aboriginal people were an awkward fact that did not fit the classifications. By mid 19^th century, Caucasian superiority had taken root. Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation (1844) argued the other “races” were vestiges of past forms. Charles Lyell proved the world was far older than 7000 years, rocking the biblical certainty of Adam and Eve. The pseudo-science of phrenology claimed Native Americans and Africans had no ability for civilisation while Darwin, following Lyell, assumed the Australian Aboriginal “variety of man” was becoming extinct when faced with “stronger” forms.

While books were slow to reach Australia’s frontier, the idea of racial inferiority began to supplement and eventually replace the original notion of Aboriginal “savagery”. The publicity around the death of Pallawah woman Trugernanna led to inaccurate reports of the “last Tasmanian” and lent credence to the idea Australia’s native population was doomed. Inferiority and inevitable extinction were convenient crutches to explain the theft of an entire continent and wholesale ethnic cleansing.

Racial superiority was a core philosophy of the new nation of Australia in 1901 and dominated its first half-century. As historian Richard Broome said, it took the abominations of the Nazis for the world to reject notions of race as wrong and unscientific. Hair, eye and skin colour and the shape of facial features are a tiny component of our genetics and have no biological explanatory function. The 1978 UNESCO declaration on race and racial prejudice reminded the world humans are a “single species and are descended from common stock”.

By 1978, racism was on the wane in Australia. It remained strong in country areas, especially with large mixed populations, but government policy was empowering Aboriginal people. By the 1990s, reactionists like Pauline Hanson campaigned against Aboriginal “privilege”. The Nationals found outrage against native title while in the 2000s large populations could be still be painted as full of paedophiles, drug addicts and rapists. Race does not exist any more, but racism remains rife. It must tread carefully but still finds voice in Bolt critiques, Hansonism, “boong” jokes and other forms. Booing is a handy way of publicly being racist while retaining plausible deniability.

Adam Goodes has done Australia a favour by calling it out. Now, as Paul Daley says, Australia must confront the demons of its past and embrace Aboriginal culture. New Zealand’s Waitangi Treaty should be the template. Without a treaty it is hard to imagine the entire cohort of an Australian school doing as a New Zealand school did, and conduct an indigenous war cry to farewell a much-loved indigenous teacher. It will never happen here until we accept the consequences of our history.

On Irish jokes and Australian casual racism

I‘ve been thinking about the relationship between Ireland and Australia so I read with interest Pádraig Collins’ angry article in the Guardian yesterday. The article was headlined “When it comes to smearing the Irish, Australia is the world’s serial offender” which was over-precious and over the top, though the writer made some good points. Collins is, like me, an Irish-born journalist living in Australia, and I know why he is angry.

Collins was responding to TV footage of Liberal apparatchik Grahame Morris’s bizarre anti-Irish rant during a same sex marriage debate. After saying he “loved the Irish”, Morris used Irish caricatures such as failed potatoes, silly shamrocks and funny accents to explain why Australia should pay no attention to the stunning “yes” vote in Ireland’s same-sex marriage referendum. No doubt being an equal opportunities bigot, Morris would have found equally hilarious reasons why Australia should not follow the example of Britain, New Zealand or the many other jurisdictions that have legalised SSM.

Collins didn’t think the shamrock as a weed joke funny, nor the inability to distinguish to pronounce “th” funny, though he didn’t mind people having a crack at them. (British people found it funny when I pronounced tree and three the same way when I lived in the UK in the 1980s and in the end I did “thry” to differentiate them). But what most annoyed Collins was the crack on the Famine.

The Famine of the late 1840s is Ireland’s defining event, a Holocaust which left two million dead and another two million emigrants in five years. The Irish are touchy if you make jokes about it. Personally I think both the Holocaust and the famine are fair game for jokes, but it depends on the attitude of the teller and who or what is the butt of the joke. Morris’s big butt was if the Irish were too stupid to survive food shortage caused by potato failure, then you shouldn’t trust their opinion on anything. The actual reasons for the famine are complex – and Irish and British attitudes are at fault – but it is this sense of the “stupid Irish” that helps define Australian attitudes to Ireland.

It was an attitude that started well before the Famine. The Irish were a constant undercurrent to those swearing loyalty to the Union flag on Australian shores from 1788. Enlightened marine Watkin Tench laughed at the stupid Irish convicts who escaped from their Sydney prison thinking China was just a hundred miles to the north. When the Irish weren’t been stupid, they were being drunk and that remains equally funny. On St Patrick’s Day, Tony Abbott made several jokes at Irish expense in a “cringetacular” 70-second video including a fake apology for not having “a Guinness or three” with the Irish.

As Collins reminds us, Abbott is a serial offender of Irish jokes and unafraid to use other Celtic stereotypes. In his joke “the English made the laws, the Scottish made the money and the Irish made the music”, the Scottish are mocked for their meanness, the Irish for their irrelevance outside the arts, while the adult English get on with the job. It explains why despite his religion Tony Abbott has no sympathy for the Irish. Abbott is an English Catholic, who, like his mentor BA Santamaria and his friends Cardinal George Pell and Greg Sheridan, tries to keep his religion out of the conversation. Of these only Sheridan is an Irish Catholic, which probably explains why the joke is usually on him. He might be among those Irish, according to Abbott in another joke, who not only lost money on the race, but also on the action replay.

It’s not just politicians. The Age spoke of a “drunk Paddy in $500k flood of tears” adding to a rich history of Australian media discrimination against the Irish, that also dates to colonial times. Though the man’s name was Padraig (the Irish for Patrick, hence Paddy) it stung too much like “grasping Jew” and the financial size of the mess he created allied to the man’s public shame caused his suicide a day later. As Irish ambassador Noel White said, the headline “drunk Paddy” simultaneously took a swipe at an entire national group while demeaning an individual. White reminded Sydney Morning Herald readers the Irish were part of the Australian narrative since European settlement and still come, “young, talented and hard-working” in the Australian cause. But that image is less memorable than being stupid and drunk. The drunken Irishman was popularised by Punch magazine in the 19th century and it still leads to uncritical acceptance of a distorted national stereotype that affects the Irish in Australia. White reminded Australians the stereotype also diminishes those who use it.

Collins cited Peter FitzSimons who, during an impassioned article on getting rid of the monarchy and the Australian‘s “plain” obituary of Colleen McCullough, unexpectedly segues to an Irish joke. According to FitzSimons, “Paddy and Margaret” live “outside Dublin” so their suburban problem is one Aussies are familiar with: loud barking dogs in the neighbour’s yard during the night. Paddy’s solution is stupid and hence Irish but there is a dash of sense in it that makes it funny. Paddy moves the dogs to his garden and says “now we’ll see how dey fookin’ well like it”. Again there is the tree/three problem and foul-mouthed language made acceptable Irish style: “fookin” or “feck”. But what we find funny is not the stupid Irish but the absurd truth that barking dogs annoy neighbours more than their owners. Collins quotes another FitzSimons Irish joke about an antique expert asking “Paddy” what his stuffed dogs would fetch if they were in better condition. “Sticks”, Paddy replies. This punchline is potentially funny but why does the man have to be Paddy? Is it only the Irish who would either misunderstand the question, or understand it but deliberately misinform with the answer? In another FitzSimons “joke of the week” Paddy texts his wife: “Mary, I’m just having one more pint with the lads. If I’m not back in 20 minutes, read this message again.” No doubt FitzSimons thinks it hilarious Paddy is drunk and Mary is stupid.

FitzSimons would defend his right to tell Irish jokes due to his Irish heritage or his Australian heritage, which is half Irish anyway. Collins calls him a “regular one man Charlie Hebdo, keeping the world safe for Paddy jokes”. But what it really shows is endemic casual racism in Australia. Australia is an accepting country but much Australian humour is unreconstructed as “Abo jokes”, blackface on television or cricket signs of “curry munchers” show. The butt of the jokes is anyone who is the “other”. That the Irish remain “the other” in Australia despite 237 years of simultaneous colonisation, tells us more about Australia’s amnesia to its history rather than Irish sensitivity to jokes against it.

Collins says Irish jokes died with the dinosaurs but I disagree. They are still there – and the Irish are telling them. My own Irish jokes are self-deprecating but the Irish are never reduced to “Paddy” and they are not quite the butt of the jokes. Abbott is unintentionally on the money when he claims Bill Shorten’s straying from a political point was an “Irish joke”. Irish absurdism turns the joke upside down, making the world look stupid. Collins should ignore the idiocy of Morris and Abbott. The joke will eventually be on them and their decrepit views.

Peter Jackson: The tragedy of Australia’s black fistic idol

The great black boxer Peter Jackson never forgot his first defeat. That loss to Bill Farnan in 1884 in Melbourne was Australia’s first heavyweight fight with gloves. Years later on his deathbed in Roma in Western Queensland, Jackson discussed the fight at great length with doctor Guy L’Estrange. Jackson was already a famous and feared fighter and expected to win, despite carrying a leg injury. But Farnan beat him in three rounds.

Jim Corbett v Peter Jackson.

We don’t know what rundown Jackson gave L’Estrange before he died in 1901, aged just 40. But there is evidence foul play was involved. In its eulogy for Jackson, boxing magazine The Referee suggested Jackson was nobbled in the Farnan fight and had been “given a dose”.

The loss spurred Jackson onto greater things. Born in 1861 at Christiansted on the island of St Croix in the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands), this kid from the Caribbean found himself in the strange world of Sydney, aged 16. Standing six feet tall, he was gentle and easy going and didn’t like a fight. But his weakness for food led him to Larry Foley’s Hotel. Larry Foley was one of Australia’s first boxing champions, undefeated at bare-knuckle fighting. He liked the look of Jackson and tried him out in the back shed. Foley gave Jackson a job and the training he needed in ringcraft.

Jackson became as good as his mentor in bare-knuckle and would sometimes fight with his right arm bound. Four months after the Farnan loss, the pair held a rematch. The bout was indecisive with police stopping the fight in the sixth round after spectators stormed the ring. Farnan retained his title by default but lost it to Tom Lees two years later in 1886. Jackson beat Lees later that year to take the title. Foley gave him a special belt to celebrate the win, now in the possession of a Sydney collector.

Having conquered Australia, Jackson went to America to take on the best in the world. He arrived in 1888 and had an 18-round victory over black Canadian George Godfrey. Godfrey had previously tried to fight John L Sullivan but world champion Sullivan refused to fight black boxers. Jackson had the same problem. Sullivan would not “lower himself to fight a nigger” and Jackson left frustrated for England.

Jackson chalked up two years of victories in England and returned to the US hoping to get another chance to take on the champion. But Sullivan still would not get in the ring with a black man. Jackson fought Sullivan’s main contender, Gentleman Jim Corbett. Jackson, five years Corbett’s senior, was ill for ten days before the fight in May 1891 and had a sprained ankle. Yet he slogged it out with Corbett for a 61-round energy sapping draw. Most observers said Corbett had the worst of it.

Corbett went on to defeat Sullivan and become world champion and he remembered the Jackson fight in the biography The Roar of the Crowd. “That night I thought Peter Jackson was a great fighter. Six months later still tired from the fight, I thought him a greater one. I still maintain he was the greatest fighter I have ever seen,” Corbett said.

Jackson never lifted the world crown. After the Corbett draw he went back to England and defeated snarling Australian-Irish fighter Paddy Slavin to lift the British and Commonwealth titles in a difficult bout. The pair had bad blood since Sydney days and hated each other intensely. In the eighth round Slavin broke Jackson’s rib and a splinter punctured a lung. In intense pain, Jackson seemed beaten but rallied in the tenth to take control. He pounded Slavin to pieces. The referee insisted the fight continue until Slavin was knocked out but the damage was fatal to Jackson.

The punctured lung never repaired and Jackson went on a downhill spiral. He appeared in vaudeville, gave boxing exhibitions in circuses and, as Jeff Rickert and Raymond Evans said about him in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History, acted as a grey-wigged Uncle Tom in stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Suffering from tuberculosis, his last fight was against the powerful Jim Jeffries in 1898 and Jeffries knocked him out in five rounds.

Though Jackson retained Danish citizenship, he returned to Australia in 1899, his career in ruins. He trained fighters in Sydney but his TB worsened. On doctors’ advice, he retired to the dry heat of Roma, Queensland, a shadow of the giant he once was. He died on July 13, 1901 at Argyle Cottage, a privately run sanatorium later demolished to make way for the southern end of Roma’s airstrip. On the death certificate Dr L’Estrange put his occupation as “retired pugiligist” and the cause of death as pulmonary phthisis exhaustion.

Jackson was due to be buried at Roma but there was a last minute change of plan. Another black West Indian boxer, Jack Dowridge from Barbados, known as the Black Diamond, sent a telegram asking for the body to be sent by train to Brisbane. A band escorted Jackson’s casket to Roma railway station with a procession of sporting bodies and dignitaries. In Brisbane, the procession went from Dowridge’s hotel to Toowong Cemetery where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Dowridge, with the help of journalists and Jackson’s former coach Foley, raised funds for a Jackson memorial. After a public subscription, Sydney mason Lewis Page carved a dazzling white Carrara marble monument over Jackson’s grave with an image that looks nothing like Jackson. The inscription repeats what Shakespeare’s Antony said about Julius Caesar: “This was a man”.

The best tribute was paid by Jack Johnson, an “uppity” black boxer from Galveston, Texas who achieved what was denied Jackson. On Boxing Day 1908, a white Australian crowd in Sydney was stunned when Johnson defeated Canadian Tommy Burns to become the world’s first black heavyweight champion. A few weeks later Johnson went to Brisbane and Dowridge took him to visit Jackson’s grave in Toowong. A.E. Austin of the Brisbane Courier said Johnson spent a quiet few moments in silent contemplation at the grave of his brother-in-arms. “It was an impressive sight to see the living gladiator kneeling for a moment over the tomb of he who was Australia’s fistic idol”, Austin wrote.

Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about five of the nine plaintiffs in the Eatock v Bolt case revealed in Justice Bromberg’s s 149-page judgement. Today, it’s the turn of the other four.

Larissa Behrendt
Behrendt is a NSW law professor and author. Her father and paternal grandmother were Aboriginal. Her paternal grandmother lived in an Aboriginal camp before she was taken away by the Aborigines Protection Board. Her paternal grandfather was English and her mother and maternal grandmother were Australian. Bolt erred when he said Behrendt looked “almost as German as her father” based on the surname. Her father was a prominent, well-respected member of the Aboriginal community and an expert on oral histories. He was always part of her family and her mother was strongly supportive of her Aboriginal identity. Behrendt was 11 when her father reconnected with his Aboriginal family and told her about his languages, dreamtime stories and Aboriginal traditions. Behrendt said she “identified as Aboriginal since before I can remember”. She experienced racism at school where she was teased for being “black”. She was motivated to become a lawyer because her grandmother was forcibly removed from her family. She became a doctor in law at Harvard Law School and was not the beneficiary of any special admission program for Aboriginal people. She won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous writing. Bolt called her a “professional Aborigine” who is “chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Aboriginal television service”, a reference to the National Indigenous Television Service (NITV) for which she receives $20,000 a year. Behrendt said she took the position because Aboriginal people needed a voice in contemporary Australia. She said Bolt’s reference to her as “mein liebchen” was particularly offensive, patronising and denigrating. She said the articles sent a message to young people that if you are light-skinned and identify as Aboriginal you will be publicly attacked and criticised. She said that message was intimidating.

Leeanne Enoch
Leeanne Enoch is the Red Cross Queensland director for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships. Her father is Aboriginal and her mother is Australian. Her cultural upbringing was dominated by her father’s side of the family and she always identified as Aboriginal. She grew up on North Stradbroke Island where her mother (whom she resembles) was accepted as part of the extended family. Her mother supported her Aboriginal identity and education in Aboriginal culture. As the eldest grandchild of the eldest son, she was groomed for cultural responsibilities from a young age. Enoch has always been recognised as an Aboriginal person but faced challenges about her identity at school after her family left Stradbroke. Many thought she was adopted and she experienced racism from people who didn’t realise she was Aboriginal and likely to be deeply offended. Enoch was a teacher for 10 years assisting with Aboriginal cultural awareness programs. She worked in Aboriginal social policy and stood in elections for Labor. Initially dismissive of Bolt’s article, she became more alarmed when she realised everyone in her family and community would see it. Her father and many relatives were upset. She was distressed by the effect on her children, particularly her fair-skinned oldest son who is going through identity issues of his own. Enoch said it was highly offensive Bolt said she was “not really Aboriginal” because of skin and hair colour. Because Bolt suggested she identified as Aboriginal to further her political career he was saying her hard work, skill and talent were of no significance.

Mark McMillan
Mark McMillan is a lawyer and an Arizona Appeals Court judge for American Indians. He has an English father and a mother of Aboriginal descent. He was raised by his mother until he was eight and then lived with his maternal grandmother in Trangie, near Gilgandra, NSW. McMillan and his siblings all knew they were Aboriginal. They were told stories about their Aboriginal relatives, including their maternal great grandmother who was the last Aboriginal local language speaker. His family was involved in the Trangie Aboriginal Land Council and two years ago McMillan was elected to the Board of the Council. Like the other eight plaintiffs, he experienced racism and was called an “Albino Boong”. In 1996 he worked at ATSIC as a clerk. Three years later he was awarded an Aboriginal undergraduate award and studied law at the Australian National University. He was selected to participate in further study through an exchange program in Canada. He was admitted to the bar in 2001 and found a research position with Larissa Behrendt at Sydney UTS. In 2003, he was accepted to the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program. McMillan found Bolt’s suggestion he was “not Aboriginal enough” offensive and inferred he only identified with his Aboriginal heritage for political gain. He was also infuriated by Bolt’s insinuation he was a “a gay white man with a law degree” and “just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout” which was offensive and humiliating. McMillan was humiliated when forced to assure his American employers he was indeed Aboriginal.

Pat Eatock
Pat Eatock was born in Brisbane in 1937 and is now retired in NSW. Her mother is Scottish and her father had Aboriginal parents. Her father was ashamed of his background and it was never discussed at home. They were also afraid authorities would take away the children if they ever found out their black heritage. Eatock identified as Aboriginal since she was a teenager and told the court much of her Aboriginal identity was formed by negative experiences. At Primary School in Ingham, “white kids” played on one side of the playground fence and “black kids” on the other. Eatock and her sisters were put to play with the white kids. When teachers saw their father the Eatocks were taken out of the “white” playground and put in the “black” one. Some parents then complained about “white” children on the wrong side of the fence and they were put back in the “white” playground. This was Pat Eatock’s first identity crisis. She left school aged 14 and identified as Aboriginal so she would not be accused of hiding her background. She worked in factories until marrying in 1957. She cared for her children until 1973 when she went to university where she encountered a different kind of racism. People made racist remarks about Aboriginals in her presence which she found stressful. She would tell people she was Aboriginal or wear clothing associated with Aboriginal issues. Encounters with Faith Bandler inspired her to get involved with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972 and 1973. She stood for election in the Australian Capital Territory as an independent Aboriginal candidate. Eatock graduated with an arts degree in 1978 and worked for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. She became a lecturer in Aboriginal Community Development in 1991 and got a disability support pension in 1996. She still volunteers for Aboriginal issues and lives modestly in a one bedroom Department of Housing flat in Sydney. Eatock said she was horrified, disgusted, angry and sick in the stomach when she saw Bolt’s articles. She said Bolt disconnected her from her Aboriginality and denied her life’s work and ethics. She has been more disadvantaged than advantaged by identifying as Aboriginal and has had only six years of employment since 1977. She said the articles were racist and she remains deeply offended.

These stories show racism was casual and endemic in Australian society. The nine, more than most, suffered for their background by not neatly fitting the stereotype of being black skinned. Judge Bromberg quoted the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2003 Report on the Protection of Human Genetic Information which said ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are social, cultural and political constructs, rather than matters of scientific ‘fact’. Bromberg said the ‘blood quantum’ classification for determining Aboriginality was common in Australian law until recent times. “It is a notorious and regrettable fact of Australian history that the flawed biological characterisations of many Aboriginal people was the basis for mistreatment, including for policies of assimilation involving the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families until the 1970s,” Bromberg said. “It will be of no surprise that a race of people subjected to oppression by reason of oppressive racial categorisation will be sensitive to being racially categorised by others.”

Eatock v Bolt :The stories of the nine plaintiffs – Part 1

The stories of the nine plaintiffs has been lost in the outpouring of emotion for and against the racial discrimination judgement against fact-free columnist Andrew Bolt.

One of the nine, Graham Atkinson, said in court Bolt’s articles reduced Aborigines “to that invisible group of people that government policies or government authorities tried to create in the past”. It is not just Bolt who makes them invisible. The Aboriginal plaintiffs continue to be written out of the argument following the controversial case. Eatock v Bolt offered the chance for nine Aboriginal people to tell their stories and they are the most haunting and illuminating part of Judge Bromberg‘s 149-page judgement.

Anita Heiss
According to Bolt, the choices made by Anita Heiss were “lucky, given how it’s helped her career”. Heiss is a NSW author whose maternal grandmother and great aunt were part of the Stolen Generation. Her mother was Aboriginal (not part-Aboriginal as claimed by Bolt) and her father was an Austrian who became a part of the Aboriginal community. Their marriage produced six children, three fair-skinned including Anita and three darker-skinned. Her colour didn’t stop the racial abuse. At school she was called an “Abo”, a “Boong” and a “Coon”. Others reacted badly when she told them she was Aboriginal. At university she became conscious of injustice to Aborigines and did a PhD on indigenous literature and publishing in Australia. Heiss served on numerous boards and committees involved with indigenous issues. Heiss told the court about the irony of having been discriminated against for being dark and now being discriminated against because she is not dark enough. She was also offended by Bolt’s “blood quantum” approach to racial identity and its focus on how people look.

Bindi Cole
Bolt said Bindi Cole “rarely saw her part-Aboriginal father” and chose “the one identity open to her that has political and career clout.” Cole is a Victorian artist who lived with her single English mother till she was seven, when she became unfit to be a parent. Her mother always told her that she was Aboriginal. She then went to live with her Aboriginal father’s family for four years, living with her grandmother and her large family who were all Aboriginal. Cole kept close ties with the family even after she moved back with her mother, aged 13. Cole studied to become an artist and photographer in 2001 and is recognised within the Koori community and the broader Australian art community as an Aboriginal artist. In 2008 she and exhibited a series of photographs called “Not Really Aboriginal” misunderstood by Bolt. The series questioned the perception of the stereotypical look of an Aboriginal person based on her personal experience of being fairer skinned. Cole said she was intimidated by Bolt’s articles and insulted by his phrase “distressingly white face.” The article affected the whole Aboriginal community and her aunt rang to ask her “why are they saying that about us?”

Geoff Clark
Victorian man Geoff Clark is the former chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. His mother is Aboriginal and his father is Scottish-Australian. His parents never lived together. Clark and his two sisters were raised by his Aboriginal grandmother at Framlingham, near Warrnambool. Framlingham is one of the longest established Aboriginal communities in Victoria established in 1861 and Clark has lived there most of his life. Here he watched his grandmother making traditional medicines, baskets and food and he went hunting and fishing with his uncles. Relatives and elders passed on traditional knowledge of sacred sites and stories and he is now a custodian of this knowledge and an elder of the Tjapwhuurrung people. Clark was exposed to prejudice at high school in Warrnambool. His classmates talked about their grandfathers shooting and poisoning Aboriginal people and told him he was too white to be Aboriginal. This casual racism motivated his involvement in Aboriginal issues. He was a delegate to the Convention of the International Labour Organisation dealing with the rights of indigenous people. He was elected Victorian ATSIC representative in 1999 before becoming national chair. Clark said Bolt’s articles were the essence of prejudice and racism in Australia.

Wayne Atkinson
Wayne Atkinson is a Victorian academic whose parents are from the Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung Peoples. One great-grandfather was born in Mauritius of Indian heritage. Atkinson was raised by his maternal grandmother in an Aboriginal fringe camp on the riverbanks of Mooroopna. He spoke English and Aboriginal languages at home and experienced racism at school. He dropped out at year eight to work in unskilled jobs. After a decade, he began studying his history and culture and worked for his community. He is now a senior elder of the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation, a principal claimant for their native title claim and teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. Atkinson told the court the idea he was not sufficiently Aboriginal was extremely offensive and he was frustrated after 30 years of teaching about his culture, people do not accept who he is. He said Bolt affected a huge number of people in the Aboriginal community with the content of his articles.

Graham Atkinson
Graham is Wayne Atkinson’s brother and a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council and chair of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation. Being Aboriginal was not something Graham had to think about growing up until he and a cousin were the only Aboriginals at a technical school. Students taunted him with “Blackie”, “Abo”, “Boong” and “Nigger”. His parents and siblings strengthened his self-esteem and pride in his identity. He also experienced racism in the army in Vietnam. In 1977 he was one of only three Aboriginal students at Melbourne University and he graduated with a degree in Social Work and later he gained an MBA. He told the court he was offended Bolt said he identified as Aboriginal only because Thomas James had married his (and Wayne’s) great-grandmother. He said the attribution of identity based on skin colour as making no sense.

Part 2 looks at the stories of the other four plaintiffs.

Centre-right has landslide win in Hungarian election

The centre-right Fidesz Party has won power from the ruling Socialists after winning over half the vote in Sunday’s Hungarian parliamentary elections. Fidesz performed as well as opinion polls predicted and won 52.8 of the vote which translates to a healthy majority of 206 seats in the 386 seat legislature. The socialists were routed and ended up with just 28 seats barely two more than gained by the far right Jobbik Party. The Greens also passed the threshold to get into parliament, securing five seats. A second round of voting follows on April 25 to elect another 121 members but Fidesz already has the numbers to rule outright.

The second round of voting is important as they are in sight of a two-thirds majority it needs to push through vital reforms. The victory will see Fidesz party leader Victor Orban take the prime minister’s job for the second time. The Oxford educated Orban is a veteran of Hungarian politics despite being just 46. He was a foundation member of Fidesz (an acronym of FIatal DEmokraták SZövetsége which means “Alliance of Young Democrats” ) in 1988 at the end of the Communist era. He took over the leadership of the party two years later in the first free elections and became Hungary’s second youngest ever Prime Minister in 1998 after he led a Coalition to victory. He oversaw Hungary’s admission into NATO but was beset by scandals which saw him lose office in 2002. Fidesz were defeated again in 2006 but with his leadership secure Orban was in a position to capitalise this time round on electoral dissatisfaction with the Socialists’ savage budget cuts.With unemployment at 11.4 percent and an economy contracting by 6.3 percent in 2009 Orban faces a massive task to avoid the same fate despite his strong mandate. Fidesz campaigned on cutting taxes, creating jobs and supporting local businesses but was hazy about how to deliver a promise to create a million jobs in 10 years. Fidesz has also said could double the deficit target set by the IMF and EU as part of a rescue package by slashing local government and implementing efficiencies in health care and education.

The election’s other big talking point was the rise of Jobbik. The anti-semitic and anti-gypsy party came from nowhere in the last four years capitalising on discontent with the major parties. Led by 32-year-old history teacher Gabor Vona, the party tapped into nationalist sentiment of shame over Hungary’s reputation as a sick economy. Jobbik campaigned on a platform of blaming Jews and the Roma for Hungary’s ills and their rise brings back uncomfortable memories of the Nazi era. Much of their support was in poor rural areas with high unemployment and they were helped organisationally by the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) a paramilitary group with black uniforms similar to that worn by the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s original Nazi party. Though the Guard was disbanded by court order last year for breaking association laws, it continues under an assumed name. Vona is a founding member of the Magyar Garda.

Orban has said he is deeply unhappy with Jobbik’s rise and has no plans to bring them into a coalition. He will be relying on an improvement in the economy to curb their growing appeal. Orban said good governing was the best defense against the far right. “I am convinced that the better the performance of the government is, the weaker the far right will be in the future,” he said. However it is also likely Orban will restrain Jobbik’s influence by embracing its social conservatism and family values and adopting its tough attitudes on law and order.

The BBC and Nick Griffin

When Nick Griffin and fellow British National Party candidate Andrew Brons won two seats at the recent European elections there was no rioting or storming the gates of parliament. Yet when Griffin was invited to talk on the BBC last week all hell broke loose. Television succeeded where the ballot box did not and the appearance of Britain’s fifth largest party on the BBC caused national soul-searching and riots that besieged the broadcaster’s London headquarters. Opponents were furious the venerable broadcaster was legitimising a far-right wing group by giving them the “oxygen of publicity”. Anti-fascists protesters failed to shut the program down. Supporters said the BNP deserved to be heard, and free speech advocates defended Grffin’s right to appear on Question Time while expressing a Voltaire-like disagreement with every word he uttered. (photo of BBC riots by Reuters)

The entire affair seems overblown given how irrelevant the BNP are. The party won 10 percent of the European election vote in heavily working class areas where the Labor Government is on the nose. Its overall vote was actually down on the 2004 election. It is likely many of this year’s protest votes will swing back at the next general election. The BNP are a lunatic fringe for the disaffected with few coherent policies. It’s now illegal membership criteria requires all members be part of the “Indigenous Caucasian” racial group (based on looks alone) and want everyone who is not so Aryan to go “home”.

Membership of the party is currently closed while apparatchiks write a new constitution to be presented to members for acceptance. The BNP’s limited appeal is based (as was the National Front of the 1970s) on the notion Britain is being “swamped” by “others”. The party will never win an election or gain any sort of power. While their views might be repugnant, they give voice to the frustration of many who want to blame someone else for their own inadequacies.

What the controversy really showed is the immense power of the national broadcaster. Popular media such as the BBC can amplify any subject matter. According to www.ranking.com, bbc.co.uk is one of the world’s 25 most used websites and the second most accessed news site (after CNN). Its British television stations remain hugely influential and eight million people watched Thursday’s episode of Question Time which featured Griffin and other British politicians including Labor Lord Chancellor Jack Straw.

In Britain there has been a strong tradition of public ownership of media going back to the invention of broadcasting in the 1920s. The BBC was created with a government-appointed board of governors and funded by an annual licence fee. Under John Reith the BBC established a high-minded tradition that eschewed the position of the popular tabloid newspapers in favour of high culture. Committed to the avoidance of sensationalism, it did not hire its first newspaper journalist until 1932. According to Michael Schudson the BBC forbade discussion of birth control in the 1930s and 1940s under its government-regulated monopoly. In the face of changing social values and competition from ITV in the 1950s it was discussed along with divorce and other controversial topics. Competition gave the BBC something to worry about other than their political paymasters.

The BBC rose to the new challenge with a topical political question-and-answer radio program. “Any Questions?” started on the Home Service in 1948 and runs to this day. The program was stopped for 10 minutes in 1976 when far-right politician Enoch Powell appeared and anti-fascist protesters threw bricks at the church where the show was recorded. Three years later, the format was tried on television as Question Time. Three panel members from each of the main parties were joined by a non-politician to face questions from the audience. In 1999, a fifth panel member was invited either from the minor parties or another non-politician. Over 30 years the show has become Britain’s flagship political panel show.

The BNP have been persona non grata until their recent European and council victories. When Griffin finally appeared on the show, it was almost an anti-climax. The BNP leader was sensible enough to leave his more outrageous opinions in the dressing room and he tried to steer a course of sensible reaction to an immigration crisis. Like most politicians he used as many words he could to say as little as possible. He claimed he was a “moderniser” who simply wanted to end immigration. He was also nervous and the target of intense questioning and jeering from the crowd.

Nearly every question was related to BNP politics and Griffin was pilloried by a multi-cultural audience. One person told him that “the vast majority of this audience finds what you stand for to be completely disgusting.” The libertarian Brendan O’Neill in Spiked called the debate “surreal” and a “cultural lynching of Griffin by members of a political elite bereft of ideas and lost for words.” He saw it as an act of moral distancing that established a sense of “us and him” that made Griffin a “voodoo doll they can stick pins in to try to ward off their own political misfortunes.”

Griffin will probably feel the pain of these pinpricks is worthwhile and the BNP will gain traction from his appearance. The party’s issues will temporarily get on the agenda. Many will sympathise with the way Griffin was torn apart on the program and others will react positively to his racist message. Nevertheless the BNP will always be a fringe party handicapped by Britain’s first past-the-post election system. The BBC was right to allow him on Question Time. Broadcasting asserts a right to public access. By encouraging more people to keep informed it encourages more participation in public life. More participation will likely mean more unsavoury voices in the public sphere but it is crucial they be heard. Anything less is toxic to democracy.

Antic Hey Hey: On blackface, racism and disguise

Channel Nine’s Hey Hey Its Saturday was juvenile unfunny entertainment in the 1980s and 90s and hasn’t improved with age. But the Michael Jackson skit last night had less to do with racism than it was about disguise. It was offensive to Harry Connick Jnr, the program guest from New Orleans there to judge the act. Connick acknowledged the damage wasn’t intentional. He was worried less about the racism than how the skit would affect his reputation back home. He said he would not have gone on the show if he had known about the act. Connick told the audience cheering the act “We try to hard not to treat black people as buffoons”. Though as some believe about Connick’s own president, Americans don’t try hard enough. (photo by Dequella manera)

The buffoons were six doctors known as “the Jackson Jive”. Channel Nine introduced them as a “tribute” to Michael Jackson. Five men in blackface presented themselves (see video at Crikey) as the black Jackson brothers and one front man was the “whitened” Michael Jackson of later years. Twenty years ago the same sextet performed on Hey Hey with a “black” Michael Jackson. Two decades ago, the six were medical students. Today they are all now pillars of the medical community. One is a radiologist, another a neurologist, a third is an anaesthetist, and there is a psychiatrist and a cardiologist.

Fittingly, Anand Deva, the man who played “Michael Jackson”, is now a plastic surgeon. Also providing irony is Deva’s own ambiguous colour. Deva is Indian and he said the group of doctors were from multicultural backgrounds. He apologised and said the skit was not meant to cause offence. As Andrew Bolt says, it’s no defence against charges of racism to claim you’re Indian. But Bolt also says Deva had the right to lampoon the Jacksons as a fair target but had no right to mock blacks generally.

A blackface skit was never going to be the best way to do that in front of a southern American guest. Channel Nine’s insensitivity was appalling but at least they scrambled a quick on-air apology. After an ad break, host Daryl Somers admitted blackface was an insult to Connick’s “countrymen”. Graciously accepting the apology, Connick worried how the Jive would be treated if they turned up looking like that in America. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Through Twitter and Youtube (which did not exist in Hey Hey’s heyday), the skit quickly moved beyond what Crikey called “slack-jawed suburbanites and pensioners” to travel around the English-speaking world.

The world was not impressed. Gawker said blackface in America is “one of those things that you can only show if you’re talking about how awful it is because, well, it is pretty awful.” The Guardian wrote that the corollary of Somers’ apology to Connick’s countrymen was blackface in Australia was “perfectly acceptable”.

Gawker and The Guardian were over-reacting in their scramble to the high moral ground. The truth about blackface is more complex. Blackface is not perfectly acceptable in Australia and is very rarely shown on television. But it is also not a long time since the genre was popular in Australia as it was in the US and Britain. Historian Lyn Murfin says blackface is a difficult topic to write about in a politically correct age. It dates to the 19th century when racism was a social phenomenon that did not know itself and had not been publicly named.

Blackface emerged in antebellum America as a “dirty” rebellion against the anal retentiveness of capitalist Protestant culture. “Minstrelsy”, to give it its proper name, took off after the Civil War and its rise was linked with baseball. The two occupations shared a language, a colourful culture and both announced the arrival of black men as powerful entertainers in the 1870s. Minstrelsy served a dual function. Firstly, it was a mask of blackness that represented the first uniquely American cultural aesthetic. Secondly, it framed American race relations by lampooning abolitionists and black citizenship. It took the black rights movements of the 1960s to finally push blackface underground.

Blackface was an early arrival to Britain with the 1836 arrival of T. Daddy Rice and his Jump Jim Crow act. Despite continual cross-Atlantic traffic, minstrelsy in Britain developed along distinctive lines. The Kentucky Minstrels transcended the genre’s visual imagery with their British radio show. The Black and White Minstrel Show was hugely popular on BBC television from 1958 to 1978 and the stage show ran another ten years beyond that.

Blackface also has a long history in Australia. On the tense night Ned Kelly was hanged, hundreds of people crammed into Melbourne’s Apollo Hall where they paid a shilling to listen to Ned’s sister Kate and brother James. The hall was full despite the press downplaying the speakers as “relatives to that reckless scoundrel”. Apollo Hall was in a lively area of Bourke Street next to the Eastern Market and was primarily a blackface venue. The Georgia Minstrels sub-leased the hall to the Kelly siblings. According to Melissa Bellanta in “Australian larrikins and the blackface minstrel dandy”, there is no suggestion the minstrels performed the night Kelly died. But Bellanta said the choice of venue was appropriate as the family was often described in terms of blackness.

Occasionally an African-American would perform at Apollo Hall but usually the troupe were white people who “blacked up” using burnt cork. Their minstrelsy’s combination of character songs, ballads and burlesques attracted huge crowds and appealed to a more diverse audience than in America or Britain. A standard feature of each show had leading characters delivering a stump speech in “nigger” dialect.

This was stylised African American speech as imagined by white Australians. But there weren’t many black Americans in colonial Australia. Their role at the bottom of the ladder was taken by the Irish and the Indigenous. Kelly’s family were poor white trash who missed out on the Australian gold boom of the 1850s and 60s. Ned and brother Dan were “blackguards” and loved the attention of their two years as outlaws. While they were on the run, a play called “Catching the Kellys” used white actors with black faces to portray the black trackers who failed in their attempts to hunt down the gang. At the end of the play, a plot twist revealed the blacks to be Irish.

The play showed blackface in Australia moved easily between caricaturing Aboriginals, Southern American slaves and the Irish. As far back as the medieval period, blackness signified a range of despised qualities so blackface had a history that pre-dated the first American minstrel shows. Minstrelsy was initially the preserve of the lowest classes. In New York and London, as in Australia, minstrel-acts were found in the cheapest saloons. In England, they migrated to music halls by including popular songs in their repertoire. Writing about madness in nineteenth-century America, Benjamin Reiss said popular black minstrelsy was a proletarian provocation often sanitised by white supremacists to fit their notion that blacks were backward. It is no wonder blackface became frowned upon in the more race-conscious 1980s and 1990s.

Historian David Roediger says the purpose of the minstrel mask is to maintain control over a subversive act as much as to ridicule. Is the Hey Hey offence a class related issue? Are those who don’t like it also upset by Orson Welles blacked up to play Othello? Why does it matter a white American took offence at an Indian dressing up as an Afro-American on a vacuous Caucasian-produced television program? Meanwhile few people pay attention to the need to solve genuine racial issues like life expectancy in Australia’s most deprived community.