Thread by @z_rose

Hey, @TatianaTMac! You said after your talk yesterday that you didn’t have enough info to understand why saying that any person with ethnic heritage from a colonising group is part of the oppressing group is a statement that harms aboriginal Australians. So, here’s some info!

(I think I’m representing what you said accurately, didn’t write it down verbatim. Feel free to correct.)

Following white settlement/invasion in 1788, we entered what are now called ‘the frontier wars’. They were very nasty, but the white people didn’t think of it as ‘war’.

...so there was never a treaty, the conflicts just eventually became less over time. The last major frontier war events were massacres of aboriginal people, which were still happening in the 1920s.

Starting in about 1910, white Australians starting stealing aboriginal children.

The records aren’t comprehensive, but it was between one in ten and one in three aboriginal kids. This lasted until the 1970s.

The original motivations for stealing the kids was to breed the blackness out of them. Paler kids were targeted over darker ones for this reason.

Eugenics was on the rise at the time, and the assumption in white Australia was that black people were so inferior that when combined with white ‘blood’, the strong white blood would completely override the black blood within a couple of generations.

People made charts.

“Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will be quickly eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race...

... and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white.”

That’s a government official in 1933. That quote and other useful (basic) information is here: smh.com.au/national/caugh…

Was it genocide? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Genocide is a crime of intent - it requires group A to be intentionally trying to make group B not exist. White Australians were so convinced that black Australians were inferior they assumed blackness...

...would die out naturally, and if anything they were there to speed things along.

Worth pointing out that aboriginal Australia is the oldest living culture on Earth.

I think it’s genocide, that’s not a word in common use in Australia yet.

In short - a lot of aboriginal Australians have white ethnicity because they or their parents were stolen from their families with the intention that they only be permitted to have children with white people in order to breed aboriginality itself out of existence.

So when someone - in this case, you - says, in Australia, that to have any white ethnicity is to be in the oppressing group, it’s not just ignorant, it actively causes harm. To people.

That statement un-tells a story that aboriginal Australia has fought really hard to tell.

A lot of Australians really don’t like hearing the story *at all*. They didn’t like it the first time, they don’t like it now, and they will accept any mechanism that helps them to un-hear it.

Statements like yours are just the kind of tool those people are looking for.

I know you didn’t know this, because you said so, but now you do.

There’s a lot of good books about the stolen generations, fewer about the frontier wars. Bruce Pascoe’s recent ‘Dark Emu’ is a wonder. S2E8 of Get Krack!n (ABC) might the best 21 minutes you could invest in this.

I’m not going to ping any aboriginal Australians on this thread because they spend enough time trying to teach people about this stuff, but there’s loads on twitter and they’re worth listening to.