violence against foreign students
9 Feb 2010
Eating Our Way To Racial Tolerance
An online campaign is urging people to show support for Indians in Australia by eating curry, but Mel Campbell isn't sure that's really getting to the heart of the matter
On Wednesday 24 February, "ordinary Melburnians" are being urged to dine at their local Indian restaurants in order to protest against racially motivated violence and express solidarity with Melbourne’s Indian community.
Vindaloo Against Violence’s website says the project is a peaceful and easy way to show that the majority of Melburnians welcome the presence of Indian citizens in their city.
"Everyday Australians don’t accept racially motivated violence," Vindaloo Against Violence founder, Mia Northrop, told ABC News. "I think we want to shift the focus from what Indians need to be doing to protect themselves in terms of their safety, to finding out why is this happening in our society."
This is a timely aim indeed. At a forum held over the weekend, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland advised international students in Australia that to minimise their risk of being violently attacked, they should: "look poor" by not wearing or carrying obvious valuables; avoid suburbs where they might encounter poor people; and not work late at night in the hospitality and service industries.
Gautam Gupta, secretary of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia, was not impressed by the last piece of advice. "It’s a workplace. Every workplace should be safe," Gupta fulminated to the Age. "I think it’s a ridiculous idea. It is blaming the worker. It is blaming the victim."
Listening to Overland’s advice, what struck me is that it’s the same sort of tip travel guidebooks give Western backpackers in developing countries and stems from several assumptions. First: as a traveller, you are essentially intruding on local culture and must alter your behaviour to avoid causing trouble. Second: you won’t be here for long, so you mustn’t drop your guard and feel "at home" during your brief stay.
By contrast, Vindaloo Against Violence aims to remind the international media — especially in India, where the recent attacks were portrayed as symptoms of a generally racist culture in Australia — that we do recognise the reciprocal nature of what it means to play the host, to welcome. The project aims to reassure observers that we are generous hosts who take seriously our responsibility to make Indian citizens feel at home here.
But will Vindaloo Against Violence actually achieve anything more than making Northrop and other participants feel less helpless? Does it actually convey a genuine feeling of welcome?
At first I was very encouraged by Vindaloo Against Violence. I discovered it through Twitter and retweeted the website. Other people retweeted my retweet. I felt proud, like a good citizen.
What I initially liked was that Vindaloo Against Violence wasn’t aggressive, antagonistic, critical or hand-wringing. It was celebratory and inclusive, designed to appeal to the kinds of politically disengaged people who generally feel that public protests are for unionists, students and confused hippies. "[My husband and I] wanted something that the maximum number of people could get behind, so it just kind of popped into my head," Northrop told the ABC.
It also seemed to recognise that food is often the grassroots level on which cross-cultural encounters happen and that the dinner table can be a space of productive discussion. It was like that TV ad in which people of all ages and cultural backgrounds park themselves in the street for a massive, communally catered feast.
But then I started to worry about its being tokenistic. After all, "raising awareness" is something white people like. Vindaloo Against Violence doesn’t really ask people to change their ways of thinking, or even necessarily their habits — many people would already enjoy a Wednesday night curry. As Christian Lander of the Stuff White People Like website says, awareness raising is the perfect way for white people to feel as if they’ve protested without actually changing anything. "In other words, white people just have to keep doing stuff they like, EXCEPT now they can feel better about making a difference."
Vindaloo Against Violence also upends the key tenet of many traditions of hospitality: that the onus is on the host to welcome the guest. It asks instead that we show hospitality to Indian people by enjoying their hospitality. So, ultimately, Vindaloo Against Violence’s idea of "we welcome you" is "you welcome us".
Another reservation I have about the project is that it has a tendency to reduce the cultural presence of Indian people in Australia to those jolly service industry folk dishing out butter chicken and saying, "Thank you, come again!" in lilting tones. To the extent that it does this, it’s an insult to the totality of that presence. What about Indian academics? Indian health professionals? Indian retailers? Indian hairdressers? And so on.
Furthermore, the majority of Indian citizens at risk of violent crime do not work in the pleasant, mildly exotic, hazily cross-cultural milieu of Indian restaurants. They work more broadly in the service industries that lubricate the machinery of Australian cities, industries that white Australians largely refuse to work in, such as taxi driving, convenience stores, service stations and fast food restaurants.
And participating in these industries — overwhelmingly out of economic necessity — is what puts young international students in situations where they can be intimidated, bashed, robbed and murdered.
These are the sorts of workplaces that compel their staff to treat pissed-off (or just pissed) dickheads with politeness and deference. And they are the sorts of workplaces which tell these dickheads that there’s someone lower than them in the social pecking order — someone they’re entitled to pick on.
Perhaps instead of allowing Indian people to wait on us in Indian restaurants as a way of showing welcome, we should be working to change the way we treat our humblest hospitality workers generally. We must recognise that these workers, if they come from other countries, are our guests when they’re outside the workplace, that they’re not our servants when they’re in it, and that making them feel welcome here means honouring and respecting them.
In Greek mythology, the gods would sometimes disguise themselves as poor travellers, punishing and rewarding their hosts according to how well they lived up to the Greek ethic of hospitality. It’s a shame that we have no vengeful gods to watch and punish everyday cruelties. However, the groundswell of support shown to Vindaloo Against Violence shows that in our media and online social networks we do have other powerful observational forces.
While it has its problems, part of my hesitation in criticising Vindaloo Against Violence is that I can’t think of anything better myself. But I do feel strongly that any grassroots attempt to change international perceptions of Indian-Australian relations must sacrifice some of our own thoughtlessness in order to make our guests feel more at home.
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Oh dear! While the idea of uniting to show support for Indian-Australian relations is a great one, the strategy employed here reminds me of an old sketch from Not the Nine O’Clock News where Rowan Atkinson parodies an ultra-conservative and xenophobic politician. He says something along these lines:
“I like curry, I do, but now that we’ve got the recipe is there any need for them to stay?”
I agree, it is a token action only. However it is better than nothing, and the popularity of it as a tweet item (if that is how you talk about them? I don’t tweet!) will also help to raise awareness and keep the subject of racism in people’s minds so hopefully they will look at their own or other people’s actions and think about what it means to not be racist.
We deserve the oppobrium because of our exploitative approach to foreign students—even if the Rudd government itself may be just the inheritor of Howard’s and Costello’s particularly short-termist nasty policies. This is the result of long term policy neglect and will only be changed over the long term.
I had a slightly different take on this in Crikey last week (google: “Foreign students: Cité Universitaire”).
An earlier version of the article discussed the possibility of such a Cite U campus having a fabulous collection of restaurants for each Asian country. Unfortunately I have to report that the central restaurant at the Paris Cite U was pretty awful—if very cheap. Alas, not a good model though that was a long time ago.
Silver Rebel
I won’t be eating curry on the 24th to change any international opinions about Australia being racist, but in solidarity with our many Indian students and other Indian community members in the ‘poor’ community of Footscray. *
The irony is that since the large influx of Indian students in Footscray, as a 50 something female, I feel much safer travelling home alone from the CBD by train because of their numbers and their happy and peaceful presence.
Yes I’m white, yes I like curry, yes I’m an old hippy but no I’m not confused like Mel as to whether VaV is a good thing to do.
*Apparently Indian restaurant client numbers have dropped 50% since the spate of recent attacks on Indians as most people who eat at them are Indian.
I stayed for two months in northern India, some years ago. Then it was dusty, dirty, very corrupt, violent and full of men trying to rip off travellers. Most Indians were quite poor but decent in a somewhat desperate way, understandably.
Recent visitors to India have told me things are still the same, but many more people are much more greedy, perhaps because of increased Western influences.
I’m really glad more Indian students’ families are able to afford to educate their kids in Australia as long as they return home to use their skills to help raise the standard of living for the vast majority of Indians, the neglected poor.
Australian politicians should be more responsible and not dangle a carrot of easy living to interfere with these students’ duty to help their own needy folk. I like Indians in India. Namaste.
I think our public transport system (including taxis) and other public spaces needs more survelllance cameras and perhaps even some vigilante groups (like they use in New York on the subways) to dissuade violent attacks.
There should be more power given to community survellance groups to isolate racists and violent extremists before they ever get a chance to commit these heinous crimes on their innocent victims, with a disproportionate number of their victims being of Indian descent.
And I believe many Australians are still in denial about the small, but dangerous minority that are blatently racist and so until we accept that they actually exist, we will never be able to rid ourselves of this blight on our society.
I don’t see how ANY form of twee protest is going to reach the ignorant, drunken yobs who beat people up and steal from them, WHATEVER the nationality of the victim.
I like the “Not the Nine O’Clock News” Rowan Atkinson’s curry muncher parody.
I decided to go out for a curry on Monday night as part of my own important grassroots protest, Saag Against Stuff White People Like. But I undid my humanitarian efforts by ordering a chicken tikka masala instead.
Still, I left a tip!