This:

The "Let Them Stay" campaign shifted public opinion in a matter of weeks (transcribed).

"If it had been the old way of doing it, we would have run a campaign about the numbers, how unlawful it was. It would all have been focused on how awful offshore detention was," Narayanasamy says. Instead, they collected human stories about refugees' experience as people. They asked detainees about their kids, about their lives, about "what it feels like to hold a newborn, what your hopes are, that they just like you and me. Speak to the essential anxieties that underpin this debate."

"Unfortunately, you have to prove your humanity," she continues. "The first step after you've been othered is to try and get the person othering you to acknowledge that you are, in fact, human."

This proved uncomfortable for some. Why should they have to prove their humanity?

Narayanasamy explains the foundation for "Let Them Stay," "Not don't let them go back. Not it's all horrible. It's, here is a child. Here is a family. Their story is like you." This woman likes Beyonce, etc.

"It's all authentic memories. We spent a long time, then, talking to people about it. And this woman, you know, they were Iranian refugees, and they'd had a terrible situation, but I had to — I felt horrible — because you're asking people, literally, who've been tortured and traumatized, what's your favorite music?" Narayanasamy says.

They ran stories in Australian Women's Weekly to illustrate people's humanity "to a population to whom the great anxiety and the great debate was about othering them and not seeing them as human. And we just smashed it across everything."

reminded me of THIS.  I'm a believer, I think it works on all kinds of tribes: ethnic/racial and other sociological, class-based, religious, ideological, political...of course there are always the outliers who it doesn't work on because they refuse to see the other as human because they have a lot invested in something else, like victimhood or privilege or specialness. Not suprisingly, those types often haven't read much literature or fiction.

It is 2019. It is sad that marginalized groups are still waiting for whites to recognize the humanity of the “other”.

James Baldwin 1965

During his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley, Baldwin breaks down what it’s like to be taught all your life that Africans and black people are savages, inferior, and were “saved” by the white man. “Of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice. Those were the only books there were.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/11-james-baldwin-quotes-on-race-that-reso...

The media, politicians, and co-workers constantly remind you that you are not accepted as the norm. You have to convince whites that you are human.

Just ran across, struck me that we can learn from other species: Squirrels Relax When They Hear Birds Relaxing

I've always felt that "outrage" begets mainly: outrage. But perhaps that's the way I'm built neurologically. Certainly the last thing outrage in the written word does for me is inspire.

I would like to return to what Tom Sullivan was talking about in his post on Hullabaloo. And hopefully raise the level of the discussion a little to the point he is making and remove it from the single myopic focus of Afro-American citizens grievance against American white citizens privilege or not. Which is not at all the same thing because those are all Americans.

{Forgive me but I feel I need to bring up some inconvenient points as examples for a correspondent on this thread: I think there are actually some subset of Afro-Americans in L.A. who have called Iranian or Arab immigrants towel heads, and I have seen examples displayed in Afro-American movies. I think there are Afro-Americans who have resentment against Chinese immigrants taking up places at colleges, because they are not Americans of long standing. I think there are Afro-American soldiers in Afghanistan who may think of Taliban as less than human. The problems of Afro-Americans are not at all the point here! Perhaps the problems of  how African Americans treat African immigrants to the U.S. might apply, that would be more apropos.]

It was as regards the case of foreign refugees and migrants who wished to come to Australia being stuck in faraway godawful camps which dehumanized them. And many Australians dug in their heels about letting these people in, wanting to keep Australia for Australians already acclimated to Australian culture and these foreigners being in camps some of which were quite brutal, just dehumanized them further, as people very easy to turn down for entry.

The group that Sullivan is writing about found that it was much easier to convince current Australians (of all colors) to accept the foreigners as new citizens if they spoke about mundane, common human stories. To prove basically to the gut reaction of Australians that "they are just like us" and they wouldn't be so hard to live with, they will not change the culture but assimilate to it. Whereas seeing them in the dehumanizing camps made them seem like different, desperate scary people with griveances and perhaps political axes  to grind about their old country. Hence, a story about being tortured in prison is not a good "sell." It's still a scary person from a scary culture, someone that might be so fucked up that they may never assimilate. Whereas if they can talk some pop culture, or some human commonality about loving their family, they seem more real and less frightening.

Now take that point and step it up some. Let's talk about Australian culture! And how it differs from others. And what is normal to it. I just ran across this wonderfully complex and nuanced post by a person with black skin in Australia, who explains how it is not the same as being an Australian black, and incredibly, it is in response to gaffes along these lines by Roxane Gay in her visit to that country, being an American and not understanding how Australian culture might differ:

Are there Black people in Australia?’

• By Natasha Guantai ( a teacher of English, History and Philosophy at a secondary college in northern Melbourne. She blogs on issues of race, identity and colonialism at guantai5.wordpress.com.)
• 10.Mar.15 @ Overland.org.au

Acclaimed author Roxane Gay is currently touring Australia. A couple of weeks back, before leaving the US, she tweeted ‘Are there Black people in Australia?’ Not an unreasonable question, you might think, considering that she is a Black woman likely to be speaking on race while in Australia.

Yet, the tweet was met with concern that she was questioning the existence of Indigenous people in Australia. Gay clarified, ‘I mean, like people of African descent’. There were plenty of people willing to share their limited knowledge of African Australians, There were also many who felt that Gay’s follow-up only compounded the offence of her first tweet, by implying that Indigenous people are not Black. Gay apologised.

This twitter exchange is the result of a collision between two narratives of Blackness. In much of the world, ‘Black’ refers to Africans, or to members of the African diaspora, often in the context of a country in which whites are dominant. Thus we have Black Americans, Black Canadians, Black British, etc.

In the dominant Australian narrative, Blacks are regarded as Aboriginal. This is a narrative with little space for non-Indigenous Black Australians. Barack Obama, who like me had an absent Kenyan father, is Black American. But, according to the main Australian narrative, I am not Black Australian.

When I was young, non-Indigenous Blacks were treated as anomalous. In recent decades, following an increase in Black migration, non-Indigenous Blacks have increasingly been cast as migrants: probationary Australians who are required to prove themselves to ‘real Australians’ through displays of gratitude and compliance, and who are judged ineligible to speak with authority on Australian experience, regardless of whether they are actually migrants.

This subsumption of non-Indigenous Blacks into the category ‘migrant’ obscures the fact that we have a distinct racial identity – as Black. I have had non-Black migrants speak on my behalf regarding my Black identity. These migrants assume to speak for me because they assume that as I am Black, I must be a migrant. But I do not share their experience of being migrant any more than they share my experience of being Black. I do not even have the same racial experience as Black migrants or their Australian-born children. Unlike many African migrants, I have not been racialised in a non-white country.

My experience of being Black in Australia is also different from that of migrants of African descent who were born in other white-dominated countries such as the US or UK. I have not been racialised as Black within the context of another country. There are Aboriginal people who tell me that they use ‘Black’ as a way of highlighting their experiences as a result of, and in contrast with, white Australia. Similarly, I am Black primarily due to my relation to white Australia. My experience, while obviously different from that of Indigenous Australians, is nevertheless of an Australian Blackness.

Gay’s critics felt that her apparent equation of Blackness with the African diaspora implied an ignorance, even an erasure, of Indigenous Australians. The dominant Australian narrative has the same effect in the opposite direction. The African diaspora has been on this continent from the beginnings of British colonisation, but the narrative that limits being Black Australian to being Aboriginal obscures this fact. Other Australians do not have their racial identity overwritten this way – least of all white people, the originators of this narrative.

As Roberta Sykes explains, ‘Black’ is inclusive of all Black people. While I understand the offence that Gay caused through her choice of language, I am also grateful that Gay asked whether I exist. She has brought attention to the fact that Black Australians of African descent have been overlooked and misrepresented in this country. Neither migrant nor Indigenous, we are also Black Australians.

It's like The Guardian reads Digby's blog (wisely deciding to go with pictures instead of words)