Philosophy.Com

The return of assimilation

This text recalls an old idea once the core of conventional thinking. The text says:

"AUSTRALIANS used to talk about "smoothing the pillow of the dying Aboriginal race". The racism of that idea has been thrown on history's scrap heap, but the underlying pessimism of that attitude has survived in a strange way. Most people who accepted indigenous Australians as equals in principle still didn't expect any solution to our endemic problems. Least of all did they expect a solution worked out by indigenous people."

The old idea isassimilation. It has its roots in the dispossesion of Aborigines from their lands and the nineteenth century idea of the Aborigines eventually dying out. However, assimilation has not died, nor has it been thrown on history's scrap heap. Assimilation never went away. It went backstage. It has new life with talk of genocide, multiculturalism and the national security state; a new lease of life in an Australian conservatism that is structured around Anglo nationalism.

Assimilation (sometimes the word integration was used) was a way of governing aborigines after 1945 and it represented a break with the older policy of protection on reserves in which the disappearance of the Aboriginal people was a stated aim of public policy. Assimilation replaced the older biological notions of race and biological determinism (character traits based on blood) that had become discredited. Assimilation meant absorption--- the absorption of indigenous peoples into mainstream society: the future for Aborigines lay in them becoming a part of a homogeneous Australian society, not being placed outside it in reserves.

What did assimilation as a process of being absorbed into Australian society mean? As a mode of governance it meant that Aborigines were to live like white Australians. They were to become a part of a single Australian community with the same rights and responsibilities, observing the same customs, and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties.

Assimilation meant the denial of cultural difference. The affirmation of cultural diference gives us multiculturalism.

It does not take much to rejig assimilation to make it a political response to non-European migration. The non-white migrants were welcome here provided they lived like white Australians, observing their customs and habits, having the same loyalities etc. The social cohesion of the liberal state was premised on everybody being Anglo-Australians----the cultural patterns of the migrants had to be destroyed and replaced by the cultural patterns of the Australian way of life.

What is problematic about assimilation is the cultural assumption that the European (ie British) way of life was superior to all others--Aboriginal way of life, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian way of life. The future of the non-white peoples lay in discarding their remnants of their "archaic" way of life. That is why all were expected to become British; expected because it was a better way of life. What is best for immigrants and those granted asylum is that they abandon their distinctive cultural beliefs and practices and adopt those of the Anglo-Australian majority.

Lefty liberals who live within the Enlightenment tradition continually dismiss Australian conservatives as yesterdays men. It is said that they are uncomfortable with with, and disdain, the major change in social values and cultural beliefs over the last 40 years. They belong to the baggage of history.

This is a misreading. It dismisses rather than tries to understand. It is too caught up in the genocide episode surrounding the Bringing Them Home report of the 1990s, and the various denials about genocide happening in Australia.

Assimilation is alive and well in Australian conservatism. It is a core strand of this political tradition. This strand says that we Australians live in a threatening world. We are anxious, if not terrified, because the terrorists could strike at any time. Australia is a target. We need to feel as one. One-ness is necessary for the national security state. There is no room for the political affirmation of cultural difference. What is required is an unsullied Union Jack flying proudly over the Australian continent.

What assimilation means is that the conservative conception of a sense of belonging to the nation-state was historically premised on an Australian ntionalism is an ethnic white nationalism, and not on a civic one based on citizenship. Today it premised on an Anglo-nationalism. A nationalism that affirms its superiority to the barbarism of the Nazi's, the Balkans, Cambodia and Islam.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 23, 2003 10:25 AM | TrackBack