"If Anyone Called Me a Wog, They Wouldn't be Speaking to Me Alone": Protest Masculinity and Lebanese Youth in Western Sydney Schools.Scott Poynting. Faculty of Education, University of Western Sydney, NSW. Greg Noble, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, NSW. Paul Tabar, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,University of Western Sydney, NSW. AbstractA series of in-depth, open-ended interviews of teenage male secondary school students of Arabic-speaking background in a working-class suburb of Western Sydney expored their identity formation in terms of ethnicity and masculinity. These youth are seen to deploy forms of 'protest masculinity' against hidden injuries of racism and class-based marginalisation, at school and in public spaces. This paper examines the relationships of the young men with other groups of male teenagers, and with young women, as well as with parents and teachers, showing how their masculinities are constructed within social relations of ethnicity and the experience of racism, and conversely how their ethnic identities are powerfully shaped by masculinity. 'Boys' education' initiatives in schools need to take these ntersections into account if they are to go beyond the racism against which the masculine resistance of marginalised immigrant youth is strategically deployed. IntroductionThis paper explores the formation in and around schools of what may be described as a kind of 'protest masculinity' (Connell, 1995:109-119) among groups of male Arabic-speaking background teenagers in Western Sydney, who are marginalised in the labour market and subjected to racism. Presented here are findings from a series of semi-structured, open-ended interviews conducted at home with each of seven male 16 to 19 year-old Arabic-speaking background youths, living and attending school in a south-western suburb with one of Sydney's largest Lebanese migrant communities. With books on masculinity recently becoming a growth industry, boys' education now deeply entrenched as an official 'problem', and yet another media panic about 'ethnic gangs' in Western Sydney, there is a need to consider the 'intersections', of class structures and the social relations of ethnicity, with the gender relations in which particular forms of masculinity are constructed and reconstructed. In the face of contemporary commonplaces that identities are multifarious, fluid, shifting, 'hybrid', Mike Donaldson (1993) does well to reassert that the hegemony of 'hegemonic masculinity' (Connell, 1983:41, 1987) is powerfully structured by class relations. Bob Connell (1995:80) recognises, further, that 'race relations' also play a part in shaping masculinities both marginalised and hegemonic. Avtar Brah (1996:109) makes the important point that 'structures of class, racism, gender and sexuality cannot be treated as "independent variables" because the oppression of each is inscribed within the other is constituted by and is constitutive of the other.' She further notes '... how class contradictions may be worked through and "resolved" ideologically within the racialised structuration of gender' (Brah, 1996:110). The study reported here analyses some such ideological 'resolutions' of contradictions experienced by male Lebanese migrant secondary school students in Western Sydney, who are seen to evince a form of ethnicised 'protest masculinity' in response to 'hidden injuries' of racism. Our interviewees faced a future in a labour market strongly segmented along ethnic lines, for unemployment among Lebanese-background migrants has been four to five times the national average for the past decade (Collins, Morrissey and Grogan, 1995): currently 40% whereas the national rate is 8.8%. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures for the local government area (LGA) in Sydney around which our interviewees live and attend school, show that 19.3% of people come from families with annual incomes of over $50,000, compared with over twice this figure, 42.9%, for Sydney as a whole. The official unemployment rate here was 13.9%, compared to the national rate of 9.2% (March 1995). Of the population in this LGA, 7.5% were born in Lebanon (more than in any other of the 22 listed countries apart from Australia); 42.3% were born in other than mainly English-speaking countries. Some 23.5% speak Arabic as a first language (ABS, 1991 Census). The interviewees were from two distinct friendship groups from two schools in the area: a Catholic boys' high school and a co-educational state comprehensive high school. Ghassan, Paul, George and Nabil, were members of a friendship group at the Catholic school; Mohammed, Ahmad and 'Hussein were members of another friendship group at the state school, which had a high proportion of mainly Muslim Lebanese background students. The data from in-depth interviews with these young men were supplemented by observations of these groups and their interactions in the public spaces between home and school, and by similar interviews with three members (one Suni Muslim, one `Alawite Muslim, one Orthodox Christian) members of an all-female friendship group of Arabic-speaking background students from a neighbouring state coeducational secondary school. The seven cases focused upon here form part of a larger study of identity and ethnicity among youth of Lebanese, Vietnamese and anglophone Australian background, concerning identity formation, home and school. The interviews explored the young men's senses of ethnicity and masculinity, dynamics within and between friendship groups, relations with their families, relations of ethnicity and gender in and around school, use of language, attitudes and practices in relation to tradition and cultural maintenance. Protest Masculinity The concept of 'protest masculinity' has been advanced by Bob Connell (1995:15-17), who developed the term from Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler's notion of the 'masculine protest', a form of compensatory aggression associated with anxiety over childhood powerlessness. This form of masculinity, Connell emphasises in distinguishing his concept from Adler's psychological one, is a 'collective practice'; it is not 'something inside the person'. It involves 'exaggerated claims to potency' and 'a pressured exaggeration ... of masculine conventions' (Connell, 1995:111). He observes the phenomenon among men in sectors of the working class at a 'desperate disadvantage in the labour market'. It is characterised among the five interviewees in his life-history study (all of whom appear to be 'anglo') by 'violence, school resistance, minor crime, heavy drug/alcohol use, occasional manual labour, motorbikes or cars, short heterosexual liaisons' (Connell, 1995:110). In engaging in such collective practice, Connell asserts, the developing youth builds up 'a tense, freaky facade, making a claim to power where there are no real resources for power' (1995:111). The term has since been extended to explore regional aspects of forms of young men's culture among segments of the working class facing unemployment and poverty in de-industrialised Sheffield in the north of England (Taylor and Jamieson, 1995). Máirtín Mac an Ghaill's (1994) recent ethnography, The Making of Men, identifies an anti-school culture of working-class masculinity among the English 'Macho Lads' group of male students at Parnell School. Here, in an economic context quite different from that studied by Paul Willis (1977) in the British Midlands in 1972-1975, the gendered rejection of the official school culture registers a protest against the very class-determined 'world where we are going to end up in no work, no money with the stupid, slave training schemes' (Mac an Ghaill, 1994:59). Mac an Ghaill's focus on the 'intersections' of class and gender (masculinity) is sharper than that in Willis' (1977) landmark study, where nevertheless the sexism and racism of the 'Lads' is integral to his ideology analysis. Mac an Ghaill's earlier book, Young, Gifted and Black (1988) identified a masculine style of protest against the dominant culture of the school among a group of South Asian (Indian Subcontinent) background male students, the 'Warriors', simultaneously involving social relations of ethnicity and masculinity. Mac an Ghaill (1994:1) notes in an English secondary school 'the white dominant perception of Muslim male students that they were intrinsically more sexist than white males.' Such staffroom folk wisdom is commonly heard in Australia about male Arabic-speaking students, be they Muslim or Christian, in the suburbs such as those in western Sydney with considerable Midddle-Eastern predominantly Lebanese migrant communities. A decade or so ago, very similar 'common sense' was shared among teachers in Sydney inner-city schools with large enrolments of immigrant boys of Southern European notably Greek and Italian background: products of an earlier wave of migration . Such views of the dominant ethnic groups arguably result from a type of ethnocentrism which renders Anglo-Saxon sexism less visible and more acceptable to them than that of the immigrant 'other'. Furthermore, the prevailing (though contested) hegemony in the women's movement of anglo women who tend not to identify with the interests of working-class, non-English speaking background (NESB) immigrants women or men (Kalantzis, 1990), coupled with the current class culture of this movement influential among women teachers (Connell et al, 1982: 112, 114-5, 176), predisposes anglo women in this profession, together with those migrants possessing more 'national, "White" cultural capital' for cultural conflict with working-class, 'Third-World looking' (Hage, forthcoming) NESB male students. Yet, like all ideology, this 'mystical shell' (Marx, 1954:29) must contain a kernel of verisimilitude, or it would not 'work' as ideology it would not be tenable; no one could hold it to be true. To put this another way, ideology reflects aspects of reality (Sayers, 1985), albeit in a distorted way (Larrain, 1979, 1983, 1994), focusing on or highlighting superficial levels or 'layers' of the real and thus obscuring or blurring underlying levels of reality (Bhaskar, 1989; Larrain, 1983:127). A female final-year school student of Lebanese background well aware and articulately critical of racism against her culture told one of the authors in an interview (immediately after she complained of and criticised teacher 'stereotyping' of Lebanese students):
The research reported here investigated these kinds of interactions and social relations as they were experienced by the Lebanese boys themselves. Embodying a host of 'hidden injuries' of racism and the generational hardships and dislocations of migrant experience, the forms of masculinity which these young men are fashioning out of the cloth available to them, shape the ways that they express their 'hybrid' ethnicities, as much as the masculinities are in turn conditioned by relations of ethnicity. (Both of these sets of social relations, masculinity and ethnicity, are powerfully structured by social relations of class 'nested' within them, Milton Fisk (1987) insists. Avtar Brah (1996:109) captures the 'intersection' somewhat less reductively with the formulation that structures of class, racism, gender and sexuality are 'constituted by and ... constitutive of' each other.) Moreover, this is not merely a matter of expression and meaning: there are interests centrally involved, and the resultant 'identities' are deployed quite strategically 'We Stay Lebanese Together'In contrast to recurring media depictions of aggressive 'ethnic gangs' (e.g. Howe and Wockner, 1993; Real Life, 1993), our interviewees tended to define the common purpose of their groups as defensive. 'It's just that we always stick by each other. Be there when others like need you. Protect others. Just stick together as one group' (George). Virtually all had experienced racist affront, and in the main had confronted it sometimes pre-emptively. 'At school if anyone called me a wog, they wouldn't be speaking to me alone' (Ghassan). This was seen as a Lebanese attribute, in contradistinction to an Anglo other: 'Like Aussies, they don't stick up for each other' (Mohammed). Mohammed's parents were born in Syria; he was born in Australia, but he identifies as 'Lebanese': 'Around here it's more like you have to be Lebanese or something. Lebanese is sort of like slang for Arab.' He sees this as in his interest:
The boundaries of the group of friends who 'stay Lebanese together' could be even broader: the members' estimates of numbers varied from ten or twenty to thirty, and several agreed that two or three youths of southern European Greek and Italian background were members. Asked what they have in common, Ghassan gave a one-word answer: 'Wogs'. Whereas the boundaries of these friendship groups were somewhat flexible in terms of ethnicity, this was not the case for gender. These were all-male groups. While a key stated purpose and a central activity of the groups was to watch, to meet, to chat to, and to attempt to impress their female contemporaries, there was no question of the girls actually belonging to the group. The significance of both ethnicity and masculinity in group membership was reflected in the Arabic name that one circle of boys gave their group: shi be faz`i, or SBF, meaning 'something that terrifies'. Apart from being 'Lebanese well, most of us', SBF's commonality consisted, according to Ghassan, of: 'We all like to have a good time. I don't know. Like we go out and we muck around, but basically we're good blokes'. Here the Lebaneseness is downplayed in Ghassan's account: 'It's not a racial thing, most of the time it's not a racial thing. Like we've got two Greek people and Italian.' He repeats this in a later interview: 'That's not really strict set up. Saying, "Oh, we're all Lebanese". We all sort of hang together. It just happened because the majority was Lebanese'. In a different context, Ghassan, who was critical of the way some of his confreres more chauvinistically policed the ethnic contours of their group, would himself emphasise Lebaneseness. Asked, 'Would you feel happy if someone of an Anglo background wanted to belong [to your group]? Do you think it would be allowed?', he replied: '... they are just not too bright. I don't know. They are just not our type. They're Australian way and, you know, we're Lebanese, and we have a totally different thing. Like conditions and our language and stuff.' On the one hand, this conception of the group's flexibility regarding ethnicity may serve in the minds of its members to contrast with their perceptions of the cliquiness of those who subordinate them in class and ethnic relations: 'Australians or Pommies ... sort of rich people ... sticking their nose up, thinking they were better than us.' On the other hand, it contrasts also in a different way with their views of the more recently settled and more marginalised immigrant groups, the 'Asians' , who are seen to stick together in exclusive groups, speaking their own language with this sort of sticking together seen in more or less negative terms and quite differently from the way that SBF 'stay Lebanese together'. It was not only young women of any ethnicity that could not belong to these groups. Those young men displaying certain deprecated styles of masculinity were also excluded: 'People who can't belong to the group are some people which we would call the 'nerds', and they would just be inside, shy people, not talk to the girls' (Ghassan). Said Mohammed, of the other group, 'It's got nothing to do with religion, or what country you're from. It comes back to who has got the nicest girl. Are you a stud? You can get girls or you can't get girls.' Mohammed, asked what, if anything, he felt as positive about the Anglo students, replied, 'The way they get girls sometimes.' Common Sense and Contradictory ConsciousnessIn the interviews, ethnicity was de-emphasised in places, and loomed large in others. It might be presented as less important than masculinity in a particular context, then appear as a strong determinant of the forms of masculinity in another context. What Connell et al (1982:182) wrote about class and gender relations applies just as well to masculinity and ethnicity: 'They abrade, inflame, amplify, twist, negate, dampen and complicate each other'. The youths' stories, of course, with their inconsistencies and contradictions, reflect the various situations in which these social actors find themselves. Contradictory consciousness is consciousness of and in contradictory social relations. Gramsci's theory of 'common sense' is useful in accounting for this phenomenon of 'contradictory consciousness'. Common sense is defined by Gramsci (1971:419) as:
Ghassan, who is himself small in stature and academically inclined, says Lebanese (meaning Lebanese males) 'are strongly built' and that 'Lebanese don't excel much in the academic areas ... Lebanese are not capable at all'. Ghassan's image of Lebanese operating here is of working-class migrants of peasant background, whereas he is the son of a small businessman. He can at the same time operate with this image of Lebaneseness, and think of himself as Lebanese. Paul says, 'Like, say the Lebanese family, you have a sister and she can't go out, but her brother can go out. But the sister is different. ... The Lebanese see like the daughter is like precious, you know. The boy they don't care. They don't give a shit'. Yet later in the same interview, he complains of his own conflict with his parents 'about going out and that. Like they want me home at a certain time and that'. Of his sisters, he says, 'Well, one of my sisters is married now, but the other one, they give her freedom. She is a bit older ... She is 19.' The attributes he ascribes to Lebanese families contradict with his descriptions of his own family. Most of our interviewees rejected and resented 'stereotypes' about Lebanese and deployed similar stereotypes themselves elsewhere in the interviews. This is Hussein: 'Mostly what happens, what you hear about the Lebanese, they think everybody's the same. Like the Lebanese bash everybody at Bankstown. They think they steal. One or two Lebanese do that and they think everybody's the same.' This is also Hussein on fighting: 'There was a lot of Samoans and black people in Apia. ... Mostly the Lebanese just hate them; fights start from anger.' The majority of our informants have been offended by racist harassment or insult from police, who, like teachers (as discussed below), often reify their culture and label them as deviant. Paul relates such a provocation, which ensued in a (possibly exaggerated) 'fight': Paul: My friend was parking in a 'No Standing.' He was dropping someone off. The police said to him, 'Can you move your car'? He said, 'Yeah I'm just dropping someone off'. He goes, 'All you wogs are the same'. Caused conflict there. Interviewer: Did you do anything about it? Later, Paul, in discussing discrimination against the Lebanese and how it might affect his future, nevertheless takes for granted the essentialising and criminalising assumptions of his tormentors:
There are two moments in this process. One is a moment of what Gramsci would call 'good sense', a counter-hegemonic impulse which criticises, or at least opposes, dominant, received folk wisdoms. Yet this transformatory potential is blocked through a sharing by the 'subaltern strata' of the inherited 'common sense' which appears to belong to all, but actually operates in the interests of the dominant. We turn now to focus on two areas of social experience in connection with which these young men express such antinomies in relation to masculinity and ethnicity: conflict and fighting with other adolescent groups, and relations with teachers and other adult authorities. 'Lebs Rule'Ghassan: Some people in my group are more stricter than others ... they think that Lebanese are the best and, you know, the strongest. They constantly speak of others behind their backs. Like they would say, 'Look at that dumb nip', or something. ... Like they would say Lebs are the best, or 'Lebs rule', something like that. ... Or 'Lebanon is paradise'. ... on the classroom blackboard, in actually Lebanese. People tend to resort to such ideology precisely when they do not 'rule'. In another Sydney suburb, "Greeks rule', is graffitied outside the local high school. The school is named after an English explorer; the target for the graffiti is the monument bearing his head in bas-relief the very symbol of the domination of Britishness in Australia today. This sign of resistance was provoked not because the immigrant graffitists believe that they 'rule' in a racist society, but because they resent being ruled over. The moment of anti-racism can become subverted in an expatriate chauvinism, or in racism directed at other, usually more recently arrived, immigrants ('dumb nips'), or at indigenous people ('the Aborigines go and get drunk and that. That's what they do; they live on beer.' Paul). The 'rule' of the 'Lebs' is displayed in masculine confrontations with groups of young men, invariably characterised by other ethnicities, and usually over domination of various public spaces or over interactions with young women. For this purpose, the otherness of these ethnicities has to be emphasised, and this is done in very reified and one-dimensional terms. Thus, for Paul, their more settled immigrant Italian and Greek rivals are ' ... showoffs ... The Europeans ... think they are a lot better, because they come from a big country. They think they are good or something'. This is the same Paul who recognises Greek friends as members of their mainly Lebanese group: 'you don't have to be Lebanese; we've got some Greeks'. A typical scenario for an altercation would be at the Italian sports club in the inner city, frequented by the youths. 'One of my friend's cousin's girlfriend was there. And this bloke was talking with her and dancing with her. ... I think he was Greek or Italian. He was a wog. My friend went to hit him. He pushed him.' (Ahmad). Ahmad explained that the group supported his friend, but broke up the fight: they were not on home territory. 'Asians' predominantly those of more recently arrived South-East Asian background are seen conversely in this context, not as posturing with superior airs, but as criminalised, dangerous. They 'do drugs and eat noodles' (Paul). For their outlandish eating habits, they are named riz 'rice', delivered in Arabic. Paul tells of a fight that occurred at the railway station, 'Lebanese versus the Vietnamese.' The issue was 'to say I am stronger than you are. Like, this is our area. Nobody can be here except for us.' Jim Walker (1988:47) recounts the argument that working-class (presumably male, youth) territoriality 'is a basically apolitical response to the problems working class communities face in an environment over which they have limited power'. A similar argument can be made for such ideological processes serving to hide the injuries of racism experienced by the immigrant youth we interviewed. This is an operation of ideology in the sense of an apparent resolution, at the ideational level, of real social contradictions. There is a sort of 'inversion' at work, in which ' men and their relations appear upside-down, as in a camera obscura' (Marx and Engels, 1976:36). In this case, the subordinated appear as the 'rulers' at least in one moment of their 'common sense'. This 'inversion of consciousness' reflects the 'inversion of objectified social practice' (Larrain, 1983:125) in this case, of class exploitation compounded and obscured by racism. Multidimensional 'intersections' of different types of social structure have effect here at the same time. An alienation overdetermined by class contradictions appears as ethnicity and is enacted in relations of masculinity. Avtar Brah's (1996:110) enjoinder to inquire how such '... class contradictions may be worked through and "resolved" ideologically within the racialised structuration of gender' is the challenge ahead of us. 'Dumb Lebs' Ghassan recounts the injury of being called 'you dumb wogs' by [Anglo] 'Australians'. He says that, at school, 'some Vietnamese would call us, "You dumb Lebs"'. Paul complains, 'Teachers hate the Lebanese', and feels that teachers treat them with harsher discipline than the 'Aussies'. He says, of a workplace during school Work Experience, 'They think that Lebanese aren't intelligent. They were shocked to see a Lebanese in Engineering'. George observes that the teachers treat 'the smart people' with kindness and respect, 'but us, they don't give you a face or anything.' The other boys, as well as the girls interviewed, reported similar experiences. The much maligned conclusion of Marx and Engels that, in any epoch, the ideas of the ruling class become ruling ideas (1976:59, 1968:51) can be usefully extended to domains of ethnic and gender domination: the ideas of the dominant become the dominant ideas. This simple formulation can encapsulate complex cultural processes not only of 'external processes and pressures of exploitation', as Stuart Hall puts it, 'but the way that internally one comes to collude with an objectification of oneself which is a profound misrecognition of one's own identity' (1995:8). We have elsewhere analysed these types of ideological shift by introducing the concept of 'self-othering' (Noble, Poynting and Tabar, 1997). In these conceptions, the subordinated, while perhaps sometimes criticising and seeing through or beyond elements of the dominant ideology, will at other times take for granted those same aspects of 'common sense'. In Paul Willis's (1977:119-184) terms, the 'penetration' through these ideological elements in the white, British, working-class male youth culture which he studies, is rendered 'partial' by 'limitations': ideological manoeuvres in which patriarchy and racism play key roles. It is not often recognised that this formulation of Willis's is compatible with Gramsci's notion of a kernel of insightful 'good sense', potentially critical and radical, being held back by an incoherent folklore of 'common sense'. In Gramsci's account, the 'man-in-the-mass'
Thus, for our interviewees, their criticism of the racism in being labelled 'dumb Lebs' was only partial. In certain contexts, they operated with this very concept themselves. Thus Ghassan:
Willis's (1977) 'Lads' deal with the putdown, the insult, the 'hidden injury' (Sennett and Cobb, 1973) in the school's casting them as stupid, by rejecting school itself as stupid, and by inverting its value system. Those appearing to teachers as 'bright' and diligent, in this manoeuvre of the Lads become 'Ear'oles' sycophantic and effeminate. Physical strength and manual labour are celebrated; deskwork and mental labour is denigrated as unmanly. For the Lebanese male youths in our study, these attributes were ethnicised. Asians could be studious 'nerds', but it was unthinkable for Lebanese to be so. For Ghassan, who was himself studious, this involved some strategic construction of identity. He literally draped himself in the Lebanese flag, after a fight at school between one of his group and an Asian. A flag-carrying member of SBF could not, by definition, be a 'nerd'. For Paul, on the other hand, there was simply a relaxed approach to the 'no nerds' rule: nerds can be part of the group as long as 'they have to do what we have to do'. Heaps of Words According to Mohammed, Asians are 'smart', and the Lebanese resent that. Asian gangs are 'toughest', too, he noted a perception shared by most of our informants. The anomaly of macho toughness and nerdish studiousness belonging to the one essentialised racial nature is discussed below. Here we should note the ideological move by which the position of those immigrants historically subjected to the longest and most virulent Australian racism , the 'Asians' (Curthoys and Markus, 1978; Castles et al 1988:18, 128-135), appear 'on top' .
In another context, in the very act of exchanging racist insults, the Asians are seen by the Lebanese boys to 'have something in common' with them:
Here the (Anglo) 'Australians' are seen to be 'on top':
Yet this is again inverted: while the young men of the dominant culture are seen to be 'on top' in the relations of power represented in language, this insight is only partial. In the Lebanese male youths' hierarchy of masculinities, the Anglo boys appear to be 'below' both themselves and the Asians: they cannot stick together, they cannot fight. Violence compensates for the words that are not available; it ameliorates the humiliation of racism. The meaning that the youths attach to this violence, 'resolves', in ideology, really unresolved contradictions occurring at the 'intersection' of masculinity and ethnicity, as well as class relations. In yet another context, a violent clash between male youths of two subordinated 'ethnicities', was reported as leading to a settlement, a detente, based on mutual respect of each group for the other's toughness and solidarity. Ghassan relates how a member of the 'Lebanese' group at school was stabbed by an Asian in a playground fight over a cigarette.
By such processes, these groups carved out their own territory in the school grounds, and in the local shopping centre. At school, 'There's the basketballer groups. They have the basketball courts. You get the Asians. A lot of the Asians are next to the basketballers. Smart people, they hide away somehow. You can't really see them you know. And the Lebs are a big group. They stand out' (Nabil). The centre of a nearby suburb is similarly divided up: 'In the square, Lebanese, but around the train station and bus stops, out of the square, Asians. Fully Asian' (Ahmad). Most of the time, there is mutual respect between the groups over this masculine possession of respective territories, and a workable reciprocity of border crossings. The defining boundaries, after all, are fairly fluid the 'Leb' who was stabbed was in fact of Greek ethnic background. Respect A key term in the discourse of the young men was 'respect'. Respect governed language: it called for the use of their parents' mother tongue in conversation with family elders and friends. Respect called for adherence to such parental restrictions as curfews, experienced as onerous by the adolescents. Respect for their religion Catholic or Islamic disciplined sexual relations. Invariably when the word was used by the interviewees, it was bound up with ethnicity. Filial respect is thus not just respect of son for father or mother, but embraces a respect for the culture and ethnic traditions to which they feel an allegiance, an ethnic solidarity, even when they are experienced as burdensome constraints. This solidarity can be seen as defensive in the midst of a racist society (as with the youths' peer groups), and tied to self-respect in so far as it is experienced by the young men as part of their identity.
As fellow 'wogs', Greek and Italian background immigrants are seen to accord, and are accorded, a substantial (though lesser) measure of respect, in the hierarchies reported by the young men. 'Asians', while not fellow 'wogs', are at least fellow immigrants, facing discriminations and difficulties which they hold in common, and are therefore granted a significant (though still lesser) degree of respect.
'Aussies' were said by the interviewees to be held in little respect at all and this was repeatedly stated in connection with the observation that this dominant ethnic group did not treat them and those of their own ethnicity with respect. Teachers who respect the 'smart' kids but 'don't give you a face', police who say 'All you wogs are the same' all are responded to with a withholding of respect which preserves dignity in the face of racist humiliation.
Lebanese and Italians. Like they would say to the Australians, 'It's your fault my father was persecuted when he first came here'. Like he was called a wog or whatever. There is that reverse racism thing. Like now the Lebanese have grown and they would say let's get them back or whatever (Ghassan). It is important to stress that this is a gendered, a masculine, reassertion of dignity in the face of racist affront (the father, not the mother, figures in the example) and it is performed in schoolboys' ways. 'Sometimes I was with my father, like someone would persecute him, but he wouldn't sort of react. He would just say it doesn't matter or whatever. I would retaliate. I wouldn't sort of take anything' (Ghassan). It is as if, in experiencing diminution as humans, through racism, these young men are experiencing diminution as men: offence to their humanity is an affront to their manhood. We conjecture that it is the young men's opposition to this that is experienced by many women teachers as ethno-specific sexism. There is a need for empirical investigation of this question, by interviewing (especially women) teachers of male Lebanese school students such as those interviewed here. This withdrawal of respect, or actively and deliberately behaving disrespectfully towards anglo authorities, restores a feeling of power to a less powerful social group. It can be seen as an ideological inversion, where the ability to grant or reserve respect is felt to be important by a group who, unlike teachers or police, are not in a position to demand the outward demonstration of respect. We believe that there is also a need for ethnographic research with fathers of male migrant young school students like Ghassan, Paul, George, Nabil, Mohammed, Ahmad and Hussein. We hazard that their senses of themselves as men as providers, as heads of families undergo critical changes in the processes of immigration and settlement, as the effects of the labour market and the commodity society drastically impinge on traditional familial relations, disrupting the family balance of forces and rearranging identities. We can reasonably expect that the experience of lack of honour and respect in the world of work is compounded for these men with the feeling of loss of honour and respect in the family. It is probable that these crises of working-class, ethnic masculinity are visited in consequential ways on the manhood of the next generation. References
AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS, 1991 Census of Population and Housing. Canberra. BHASKAR, R. (1989), The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, second edition Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. BRAH, A. (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting identities. London and New York: Routledge. CASTLES, S., KALANTZIS, M., COPE, B. AND MORRISSEY, M. (1988) Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia Sydney: Pluto Press Australia. COLLINS, J., GIBSON, K., ALCORSO, C., CASTLES, S. AND TAIT, D. (1995), A Shop Full of Dreams: Ethnic Small Business in Australia Sydney: Pluto Press Australia. COLLINS, J., MORRISSEY, M. AND GROGAN, L. (1995), 'Employment'. Chapter 4 in Z. Antonios et al (eds), 1995 State of the Nation: Report on People of non-English Speaking Background Canberra: Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner, 43-100. CONNELL, R.W. (1983), Which Way is Up? Essays on Class, Sex and Culture Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. CONNELL, R.W. (1987), Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics Sydney: Allen and Unwin. CONNELL, R.W. (1995), Masculinities Sydney: Allen and Unwin. CONNELL, R.W., Ashenden, D.J., Kessler, S. and Dowsett, G.W. (1982), Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. CURTHOYS, A. AND MARKUS, A. (eds) (1978), Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Working Class in Australia Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. DONALDSON, M. (1993), 'What is Hegemonic Masculinity?', Theory and Society 22: 643-657. FISK, M. (1987), 'Why the Anti-Marxists are Wrong', Monthly Review, March, 7-17. GRAMSCI, A. (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci New York: International Publishers, (ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith). HAGE, G. (1991), 'Racism, Multiculturalism and the Gulf War', Arena 96, Spring, 8-13. HAGE, G. (forthcoming), The White Nation Fantasy Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. HALL, S. (1995), 'Negotiating Caribbean Identities', New Left Review 209, 3-14. HANSON, P. (1996), Maiden speech to the Australian Federal Parliament, 10 September. HOWE, M. AND WOCKNER, C. (1993), 'Schoolyards become the devil's playground', Daily Telegraph Mirror, May 10. LARRAIN, J. (1979), The Concept of Ideology London: Hutchinson. LARRAIN, J. (1983), Marxism and Ideology London: Macmillan. LARRAIN, J. (1994), Ideology and Cultural Identity Cambridge: Polity Press. MAC AN GHAILL, M. (1988), Young, Gifted and Black: Student-Teacher Relations in the Schooling of Black Youth Milton Keynes: Open University Press. MAC AN GHAILL, M. (1994), The Making of Men: Masculinities,sexualities and schooling. Buckingham: Open University Press. MARX, K. (1954), Capital, Vol. 1 Moscow: Progress Publishers. MARX, K. AND ENGELS, F. (1968), Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Selected Works Moscow: Progress Publishers, 35-63. MARX, K. AND ENGELS, F. (1976), The German Ideology. In Collected Works, Vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 19-539. NOBLE, G., POYNTING, S. AND TABAR, P. (1997), 'Youth, Ethnicity and the Mapping of Identities: Strategic Essentialism and Hybridity Among Male Arabic-Speaking Youth in South-Western Sydney', unpublished paper. REAL LIFE (1993), 'Vietnamese youth criminal gangs', August 11. ROBINSON, K.H. (1996) Sexual Harassment in Secondary Schools. Unpublished Ph D thesis, School of Sociology, University of New South Wales. SARUP, M. (1996), Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (ed. T. Raja). SAYERS, S. (1985) Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge Oxford: Basil Blackwell. SENNETT, R. AND COBB, J. (1973), The Hidden Injuries of Class New York: Vintage Books. TAYLOR, I.AND JAMIESON, R. (1995), ' "Proper Little Mesters": Nostalgia and Protest Masculinity in De-industrialised Sheffield', paper presented to the British Sociological Association Annual Conference on 'Contested Cities', University of Leicester, 10-13 April. WALKER, J. C. (1988), Louts and Legends: Male Youth Cultures in an Inner-City School London: Allen and Unwin. WILLIS, P. (1977), Learning to Labour: how working class kids get working class jobs. London: Saxon House. |
|
|