Letter to a Black Friend

I have come away from our conversation excited, enraged and most of all
compelled.  Compelled to find in my heart my own answers to the questions you
posed, and which you seek (however reluctantly) to answer with violence.

You say at times you have wanted to take a rifle, and take out of your world
that symbol of oppression, the white person.  Your rage comes through
strongly in your words and in your face.  I hear your rage, and acknowledge
your right to it.  You own that anger and it is legitimate, but I cannot ant
will not accept that violence is the best means of expressing it.

You say that land rights will never be ours, that we will always be outcasts.
Your spoke of your own skin as an accident of history, and laughingly showed
us your pain by claiming full ancestry (and crocodile right!).  All white men
are devils, you said, and we laughed.

Are all white men (and women and children) devils?  And does that mean that
we Murris are devils too, us with our white blood?  I don't believe so.

I believe that white men, white soldiers, came and took our land.  I believe
we were raped.  I believe we were shot.  I believe we live in a poverty of
body and spirit.  I believe that the vast majority of Australians don't know
their/our history, and would seek to deny it if we confronted them with it. 
I believe, in short, that we are a colonised people, and that those of us
lucky enough to know our past, know it as a violent and brutal one.  Yes,
these things I believe and will always believe.

But I also believe in more.  Martin Luther King once said that he had the
audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for
their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality
and freedom for their spirits.  He said those things in an era when they were
audacious, when they were revolutionary concepts to Black Americans.  He said
those thing on the basis of religious faith - a faith I don't share - but he
said them with a conviction I can relate to.

I don't believe in King's God, but I can believe in a universal humanness
which is warped by the pain of living in an inhumane world.  I believe in
that humanness, not on the basis of an intellectual idea, but on the basis of
experience.  I believe in it because I must.

It is difficult to express to you, who are so keenly aware of our people's
oppression, a way forward.  It is hard for me to say to you, that although we
live in shantytowns from one end of this continent to the other, that our
oppressors are also the oppressed.  It sounds ludicrous even to my ears for
me to defend those who live in their ignorance on sacred ground, who defile
it with their shit and poisons and mock us who love it.

But I am angry too, and yet my means are peaceful ones.  I am angry too, but
unlike you, I think, I can see a time when our rights to all kinds of
experiences are acknowledged.  I can believe that while we can't go back two
centuries, we can go forward two centuries, and re-create sustainable,
peaceful, strong aboriginal communities.  Importantly, I believe that the
misguided efforts of Migloos to put us down, and our own internalised racism,
can be overcome.  I believe that our injustices can be acknowledged, and
overcome, and that we can live with the white people.

If I am revolted by the racism we have all experienced, if I am revolted by
the violence perpetrated on us, if I despair over the world of conflict and
hatred we have had imposed on our communities, how can I do other than deny
those things power?  How can I take the tools of violence and racism and use
them, without becoming part of those tools, and they a part of me?  I want no
part of them, and I reject them utterly.

You see, I am patronising to the extent that I feel sorry for white people,
and I feel sorriest for those who are the most racist.  If they came for me
with a gun, I would defend myself, but I would still feel that their own
oppressions were the basis of their actions.  I don't believe in devils, I
believe in people who are hurt and have their essential natures distorted.

I think that people with guns,  people with hatreds and people with sad and
violent histories can act in violent ways because they feel powerless, above
all else.  I am convinced that it is easiest to support people in overcoming
that feeling, than it is to overcome oppression by becoming an oppressor.

Look at their faces!  Are they happy?  Do they have the communities they took
from us?  They have material wealth, but they have the sickness of greed. 
They have the land, and they have the sickness of not knowing the land.  They
have the victory, but they have, deep inside, the shame and guilt that they
so strenuously deny about their conquest.

They are oppressed by their very oppressions.  Living with racism and
violence is worst for the oppressed, but look at the oppressors sometime,
too.  I feel sorry for them, because they can conceive of no other way to
live, than to live in fear.  They hate us because they are afraid of us, and
they are afraid of us because they think we are all like them.

What would it be like if they weren't afraid?

What would it be like if we weren't like them?
With love and hope, Melissa