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By Lamisa H. The manner in which the hijab has been regurgitated, repurposed and represented is just another way that the private worlds of young women have come up for discussion in the public sphere. To put on my scarf is a personal decision but as I have grown with it, it has become politicised. The inherent visibility of the hijab dilutes its spiritual significance when having to observe it in the everyday mundane. Over time, the space between the private, political and public spheres, for me, has been shortened and I need to find the balance. Over the last few months, I have become acutely aware of how much I attain my news, entertainment and self-value all from one social media platform. This is what Eva Illouz terms emotional capitalism, as our private spheres have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange and equity. We see this everywhere in the feminine realm: to self-help books, skincare regimens, talk shows and dating sites. I see this in the world of influencers that we all aspire to, follow and mimic. What happens when you throw the hijab into this equation? And how does its hyper-visibility exist within consumer spaces? Do I wear it for me, or for others? The hijab is now part of my being. When I wear it, I can’t deny the set of expectations that come with it - the image I’m selling to my friends, family, colleagues, my students and the people on the train. I forget that I have something on my head, and almost get exhausted when people comment on it. It's like having to acknowledge your nose constantly. Despite wanting to deny its political meaning, it’s something I need to come to terms with. Throughout the years, I have become completely desensitised to my hijab, but ultimately, it is a socio-political identifier I choose to make every time I step out the door. I don’t think I would ever take it off, and I haven’t ever seriously thought about doing so. I don’t struggle with the aesthetic of the scarf, I’ve made it my own, and I couldn’t imagine myself in the public sphere without it. In the socio-political climate that we're in, we build our hijab into the identity we choose to present to the world. It is a struggle to maintain the balance between how you would like to present it and keeping the hijab's authenticity intact- a fine line. I respect the women who decide to take it off. It’s actually a great strength, to be able to have the courage to go against the particularly constructed ideal everyone had of you. The Best Decision I Made for Myself I loved the way the hijabi women around me carried themselves: with conviction and I had always envisioned that for myself. But my reasons for choosing the hijab were never aesthetic. It was a personal and eager choice at the age of 15, and it was an innocent time in my life when I was surrounded by people who took the time to grow in their faith with me. My mentors took my friends and I on a spiritual getaway by the beach, where we prayed, woke up for the sunrise every morning, read books on faith and discussed spiritual topics as a group. The communal faith inspired me so much that I decided it was the right decision for me. So I put it on with my two best friends on Eid day. My maths tutor at the time asked me why I put the scarf on and I didn’t know how to explain it to him. How could I tell a white man that spiritual enlightenment compelled me to? That same night, I found a Yasmin Mogahed quote that resonated with me: it’s exactly how I felt. I ended up posting to my Instagram (now deleted) and with my mum egging me on, I decided to send that to my white man tutor in a short message. He never replied to it (lol). This was the quote: What the Hijab Gave Me See, I used to be seriously self-conscious about the male gaze, ever since I was young. As I was approaching my senior years of high school, and going through puberty and feeling uncomfortable under the male gaze, this self-consciousness started to become unhealthy. I used to have to walk past this intimidating group of high school boys after school every day. I mentally prepared myself and even rehearsed what kind of expression I needed to have while I walked past them. Suddenly, everything about me was on display. I didn’t put the scarf on as an intentional resistance to this, yet the first time I walked past the group with my hijab, those feelings stopped existing. The hijab stopped me from seeing myself from the male gaze. I walked past them with confidence, without a care because I didn’t care what they might have thought anymore. I knew I became inconspicuous to them, instead of a spectacle to be judged. This is obviously not the way I feel now. We all know now that the hijab has become attractive in of itself, symbolising an elegant sort of beauty that a lot of women I know present. It also takes a lot of effort, as you get older, to not view yourself through the male gaze. Recently, I realised that the hijab helped me shape my views of beauty much more than I had given it credit for. The hijab unknowingly allowed me to practice body neutrality all these years. I wholeheartedly appreciate that as an adolescent, I didn’t have the pressure of feeling like I needed to show my body. I had the freedom to overcome those insecurities in my own time, without the pressure of people’s gaze. The hijab protected me from focusing on my body image for too long. I’m grateful that as an adolescent, I spent my time thinking about alternate traits; tapping into my hobbies, investing time to improve my mental health, and spending time developing strong female friendships. So, is the hijab my personal brand? Yes, but this is a reminder for me that it cannot be reduced to that. Even though the hijab has been politicised in the public sphere, I need to remember the reason I put it on was never to assert my identity but to strengthen my faith. Illustration by @pinkcrescentstudios Editor: Tahmina R.

By Irisa R. and Tahmina R. Over the last month we have focused on how we need to unite with our individual actions; through donations, petitions, protesting and unlearning our own internalised prejudices. In doing this, we’ve turned our attention to what we consume online. Before, we thought it was as clear as; share what is necessary and actionable. As a part of this effort, we have tried to lay off the rush of consuming content and are trying instead to learn about movements and experiences with context. Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd coined the term context collapse. It is when we are given a few pieces of a puzzle and expected to construct the image on our own. Or, even more dangerously, when we are handed a very specific piece, with the intention that it will either confuse us or distract us. Content that is embedded with our post-modern, vintage, yet glossy filters creates a feeling of instantaneity. It “flattens the past, present and future into a constant... present and everything gets drowned out by an alarm bell.” The problem with this feeling of urgency is that it undermines the necessity of needing more information. Jenny Odell, a groundbreaking writer and artist, reflected on how, ‘scrolling through our feeds we can’t help but think; what are we supposed to think about all of this?” She’s right, a lot of this action at times creates a mind-numbing feeling of dread. Recently, we were consuming horrific content on the plight of Uyghur Muslims. From having a quick scroll through our feed, the only pieces of information that are available to us, reminded us that there is no international body, corporation or country that is truly paying attention. Although these alarm bells are true and powerful, they fail to contextualise what is happening. It doesn’t explain the why, or the how, or the who and most importantly; the thoughtful and necessary action needed. Why Xinjiang? The Uyghurs are the largest Muslim minority in China, where there are over 80 million Muslims. They are ethnically more similar to Central Asian peoples, and they speak a Turkic language. The Uyghur people live in Xinjiang, which is located in the west of China. In 1928, the Communist Party of China (CPC) promised the people of Xinjiang self-determination and autonomy when they came into power (creating the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). This never came to fruition. A tale as old as time - or as old as American foreign policy. Natural resources. Xinjiang is home to the biggest mining deposits of oil, gas and uranium in all of China. In a region half the size of NSW, these resources have brought huge levels of Chinese investment, rapid economic growth and large waves of Han Chinese settlers to the region, which have diluted the local Uyghur culture. Since the rise of the CPC, they have always emphasised that ‘communists are atheists and must unremittingly propagate atheism.’ Xinjiang shares their border with India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Russia, and Mongolia and this, along with the mineral resources, makes it extremely strategic. In better controlling the religious population, the CPC developed a way to classify these ‘threats.’ The ‘red market’ were CPC - sponsored religious associations that were legally allowed to exist. The ‘grey market’ were religions that were not explicitly banned but they were completely dependent on the parties desires. The Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Muslims and Baha’i peoples all fell into the latter category. At first, the CPC ordered the creation of the Islamic Association of China (IAC) and the purpose of this was to “recruit, train, and appoint officially-sanctioned religious clergy who would disseminate CCP party guidelines to the religious community.” The name of the game was to indoctrinate from within. During the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958 - 1962, the IAC were formally removed and its purpose was to effectively ban the public practice of Islam. All mosques were destroyed and all religious practices like praying, eating halal and Eid celebrations were banned. It became clear that openly practicing your religion was a crime. During the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Xinjiang saw how neighbouring Muslim majority Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were able to gain independence and began to mobilise. In response, the Chinese Government launched the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign, which was met with a further consolidation of power over the region. Call It What It Is - A Genocide Satellite images have identified enormous complexes incarcerating close to 1.5 million people, meaning that 1 in every 10 people in Xinjiang are currently imprisoned. Adrian Zens, an academic focussed on exposing the crimes being committed, has called this ‘the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious group since the Holocaust.’ The CPC has sent Government officials into Uyghur homes, where they imposed new legal penalties on Islamic identity by banning long beards, the hijab and naming their children with Muslim names. Media outlets like The Guardian, the ABC and New York Times use terms like ‘re-education camps’, ‘abuse’, or ‘detention camps’ that silence and misrepresent the events taking place. By using evasive language, it is responsible for misinforming the public. Men, women and children are being incarcerated. Of the crimes committed in these camps, the most brutal are forced sterilisation, widespread sexual assault and forced abortions. Among these, they are also being forced to drink alcohol and eat pork to prove their ‘re - education.’ The birth rate for Uyghurs has decreased significantly, and in parallel, their children are being separated from them and put into ‘boarding schools,’ which force them to learn Mandarin, and the doctrines of the communist party as a way to erase their Uyghur identity. Many of the men and women are also being detained in factories and forced labour camps. These camps produce the food that we buy here in Australia. For example, the garlic sold by Nature C at our large supermarkets are grown and cultivated in these camps. Moreover, their labour is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, including Apple, Nike, BMW, Samsung and Sony and are harbouring one of the most brutal forms of modern slavery. Last year, the Xinjiang Papers were leaked and within the 400 pages were orders to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins”. Where a memo sent out in 2017 by then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party, Zhu Hailun, who was in charge of the camps, ordered to: "Never allow escapes" "Promote repentance and confession" "Increase discipline and punishment of behavioural violations" "Make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority" "Full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots" Riding the coattails of the US’s ‘War on Terror’, the CPC constructed the narrative that Uyghur Muslims were in need of ‘re-education.’ Cheng Jingye, China’s ambassador to Australia, said, “so what has been done in Xinjiang has no … difference with what the other countries, including western countries, [do] to fight against terrorism.” To better contextualise this silencing, we need to recognise that the rhetoric of the War on Terror has been used to justify some of the most egregious crimes for almost two decades. Just last year, the US Senate passed the Uyghur Bill of 2019 demanding the US to impose economic sanctions on the Chinese to condemn abuses against the Uyghur Muslims and to call for the closure of the camps. Australia, along with the UK, condemned the camps at the UN, however, they failed to enact any laws that require them to push for economic sanctions against China. Similarly, our national media has not reported on the Uygher camps in the last three years. Only recently, after BBC reports on it did Channel Seven respond with a similar report. Knowing is Resistance Our news does not censor, but it removes context. In a time of over-information, our context for news is flattened and this has seriously impacted our awareness of the Uyghur Muslims. This was one issue where we were so comfortable for so long to know so little and this is our beginning to changing that. The most effective way to challenge this would be to encourage economic sanctions in the form of; embargoes, sanctions and tariffs on all businesses that are using the forced labour in the camps and Chinese imports. However, this would require a shift in public sentiment, and that starts by us first understanding the circumstances under which these camps have emerged. When things are deliberately hidden, concealed and also manipulated, it all begins with first knowing.

Lamisa. H My Performance as a Brown Muslim Woman To position myself in a white world, society has labelled me the ‘brown muslim woman’, and I have adopted this identity with open arms. By this I mean that my embodied experience has meant I have always been positioned as ‘the other’, standing in opposition of some Mainstream Norm. I have learnt to use these socio-political identifiers, especially online, as a means to amplify my voice. I have learnt to use it as a means to champion the voices of others similarly labelled. I have learnt to use them as a way to connect with others. However, I have come to wonder if this sparknotes version of myself is reductive? I realised that I habitually construct a polished projection of an idealised self. I present myself in the way the social setting demands. Our identities are much like a performance we give, catering to the different audiences in our lives. Sociologist George Herbet Mead, conceptualised this formation self in terms of the ‘me’ as the social self, and ‘I’ the response to the social self. Basically, this means that selfhood is not innate but rather formed through social interaction with those around others. Through performing our identity the way others have understood it you continue to construct and affirm this identity. I realised I had built my own identity through this ‘performative-ness’. As a woman observing the hijab, I feel like I have been able to gain interesting insight into the formation of social identity. See on the one hand, the spiritual significance of the hijab is undeniably sacred and personal, yet the continued dominance of orientalist and Islamophobic imagery and paradigm in the Western mainstream consciousness, has meant that my personal and private choice inevitably reflects on the hijab's collective visibility and its conception by others. So basically, I perform my identity in the way I keep up with my Instagram, in my attempts at activism and advocacy, and when I place the hijab over my head to step out the door. The performance of identity is not inherently a bad thing. However, when you define yourself through these external markers, it raises the question if you have come to conceptualise yourself as an ‘Other’. If you have come to mistake performance of identity as identity itself. In the social media age, where we have to act to exist, this is easier to do than ever before. My Performance as an Activist Last year I wrote a piece about climate action on a private and public scale, asking myself to turn intentions into actions. I made everything I did visible, sharing every little eco-switch from my keep cup to my ethical toilet paper (shoutout @whogivesacrap #pleasesponsorme). However, a year on, and I feel like I have completely put aside the whole movement. I moved on swiftly onto the next cause that was calling me to pay attention and ‘do something’. In the end, despite my genuine intentions and efforts at activism, I wasted my energy on big proclamations and promises that were left behind as I became more educated on the nuances of the issues. While still invested in wanting to consume ethically, I have had to reflect on my initial performative fervor, and consider how much I really care about the climate crisis, or am I trying really hard to convince everyone (including myself) that I do? There is a distinct difference between doing something, and the expression of doing said something. And although this sounds really obvious, it often isn’t. Especially, when social media blurs the line between action and opinions on action. For myself, I really had to interrogate whether I am politically engaged in a meaningful way, or if I just appear to be? Have I convinced myself that speaking out and showcasing political action is akin to the reality of actively being so? To do or ...to seem like you’re doing ?? There’s that quote that's been circulating “it's not enough to be not racist, you must be anti racist”. I had always thought, as a woman of colour, that I have an inbuilt anti-racism chip. But the difference between being ‘not racist’ and anti-racist, is that anti-racism consists of tangible, meaningful action outside the realm of the internet. I make my posts and I have important discussions with my family and friends, and my ‘solidarity’ tends to end somewhere after that. But like the Sydney train service, the struggle is staying consistent. To be a true ally and show actual solidarity is to be proactive and maintain momentum. Author Jia Tolentino writes, “Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them.” I took one quick look at my Instagram, and knew that I had definitely fallen for this reward mechanism-- the feeling where I post something and feel good in the moment and then place the real work in the background of the other things I need to do. The word for this phenomena is performative allyship. Although I mean well, the only person it serves most of the time, is me, myself and I. When I post, it is a microscopically meaningful action and an expression of genuine principle. Yet it is also to signal that I am good. I make that post because it is intrinsically what is expected of me in order to be labeled a good person-- a politically aware person. Performative allyship, at its worst, is like a ladder laid on its side blocking the way. It is an obstacle that real action needs to wade through. The most outrageous example in recent times was posting of black squares under the hashtags #BlackoutTuesday and #BlackLivesMatter that proliferated on social media in the wake of the BLM protest of 2020. The squares were an easy, cost-effective way corporations, brands and individuals with a presence on the internet, could show their 'wokeness' and masquerade as activists without breaking a sweat. The terrible irony of the whole thing was that the initial idea of the collective action event initiated by Jamila Thompson (Senior Director of Marketing at Atlantic Records) and Brianna Agyemang (Senior Artist Campaign Manager at Platoon), was to show solidarity with the BLM protests by halting the music industry. Thompson and Agyemang, both black seniors in the music industry, were trying to hold the multi-billion industry which routinely and predominantly benefits from Black art accountable. Business operations within the music industry and other major brands were meant to pause under the hashtag #TheShowWillBePaused. It was intended to highlight the way these entities were obligated to "protect and empower the Black communities that have made them disproportionately wealthy". Instead we got what we got, and performative allyship was not only useless in the creation of change it actually proved detrimental, and resulted in experienced Black activists having to counteract its effect. This is not to minimise the positive movement social media has enabled. But we need to be more critical of the things we consume. I want to ask myself these questions when I make a post. Do I read and deeply understand everything that I share? And what is my purpose in sharing it? If it is to raise awareness, then great! But if it's to add to the noise in order to assert my identity, then I need to stop and think about how else I can make an impact. All the world's a stage, but can we be more than merely players? The more self aware I become of my performance of identity the more I can see the way this affects the way I exist in the world. The way I showcase everything from my religious existence, to my racial existence, to my political existence. I may not spend my free time sitting at home, thinking about my ‘brownness’ or my ‘womanness’ or my ‘muslimness’, yet when I interact with the world around me, it is through these identifiers that I am visible. When I describe the team that makes up The Pvblication in a nutshell, I am often inclined to say “ 6 women of colour”. Sometimes I even add our ethnic background for a little extra seasoning to create a better connection with our target audience.When I am engaged politically more often than not it is in the online sphere. That in itself is not bad, but it not is not nearly enough. Ultimately, our performance of identity is a powerful tool to communicate with the world. To assert yourself, and proudly own the identifiers that were historically used to subjugate. However, we must go beyond the performance of identity alone, and be more critical of ourselves, our viewpoints, and to differentiate actions from appearance of actions. Amazing editor: Mariam H. Further Reading Tolentino, J., 2019.Trick Mirror. [S.I.]: Random House Publishing Group, pp.1-29.

Palwasha A. When you think about it, everything in the modern world can be boiled down to a story. It’s not the products we buy, or the people we are being asked to support- everything comes down to the narrative that has been constructed around it. This is why marketing gurus are paid so much to find a gap and fill it with just the right story that will sell us the product, the person and the ideology. The narrative surrounding billionaires and the accumulation of extreme wealth has been so ingrained into our understanding of morality and how the world works that many of us never questioned it, until Kylie Jenner’s controversial “self-made” Forbes cover launched the topic into the stratosphere. The cover became a rallying cry for the “girlboss”, of the payoff for the “hustle”, but there was a glaring hole with the level of wealth this particular “girlboss” was accumulating. We started to ask “what exactly is a billionaire?” and began a widespread conversation about how impossible it is for any one person to earn that level of wealth through their own labour, without the extreme exploitation of others’ work and quality of life. So then we started to ask: how exactly does Kylie Jenner, and every other billionaire, deserve wealth at this capacity? The Billionaire as The Aspiration, The Role Model, The (Astaghfirullah) god on Earth Let’s begin by unpacking the idea that accumulation of extreme wealth can be “deserved”. That being wealthy denotes worthiness or value to society. In our capitalist world it makes sense that we’ve been taught to aspire to Being Rich, and can justify skimming over the fact that we have not one example of a billionaire whose wealth has been gained ethically. Wealth disparity is at the most horrific level it’s been since the 1930’s. The 26 richest people on the planet have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population. This statistic alone should mean we are all collectively mobbing the gates of every billionaire’s heavily guarded mansion as we speak, and forcing them to account for their existence French Revolution style. So why aren’t we? Allowing billionaires to exist goes against every other pattern of human nature that people follow- we are literally in support of the protection and hoarding of extreme wealth for another person, when that wealth would otherwise be redistributed to directly benefit ourselves. Not in a vague way where our quality of life could maybe be improved, but in fact would be made better drastically in every single way. It all comes down to the tale that’s been spun. The story of the billionaire, and the narrative running the world today, is that wealth and the hoarding of it are not dirty things, but something every person is capable of reaching and more importantly “deserves” to reach. It’s why the average Joe, who works a 9-5, roots for the billionaire. Because one day that might be him. If we just work hard enough, if we quit whining, embrace the hustle and earn our success. Packaged nicely and sold to us as the Australian/ American /Immigrant Dream, you name it, that’s how it’s marketed, as the dream we can all reach. But Pal, you might argue, they did earn their money. Yes, now they’re profiting off their workers, but that’s what we strive for isn’t it? To do our hard work and then get to a place where other people can work hard for us, thanks to that early work we put in. Bill Gates created the computer software that we use today and have for the last decade, Oprah worked her way up from nothing to become the name in daytime television. People deserve to be able to reach for the stars in terms of their goals in this world. Thank you, reader, for hypothetically raising this point. The rich have tried to sell us the myth that billionaires gained their money through good old fashioned, hard work. And of course, people deserve to be rewarded for their work. But in fact, there is actually no possible way to become a billionaire through your own work. It necessitates the exploitation of the work and quality of life of masses of other people. People are not billionaires because they are good at something- the accumulation of such enormous wealth can only exist in a structure wherein rampant injustice and inequality reigns, which is what we’re living in today. The Myth of The Good Billionaire Why do billionaires love philanthropy and hate taxes? Something we can thank eternal douchebag Jeff Bezos for is his almost complete lack of desire to even play at the pretence of being a good person. The guy just doesn’t care. He doesn’t try and fall into the PR-friendly category of “the nice wealth-sharing billionaire” and for this one thing we can thank the soulless man who denies his thousands of workers a living wage. Because in his demonic wealth-gaining existence, we can see how effective the usual spin around billionaire philanthropy is. Bill Gates, the “cool” billionaire who has fun with Ellen (a measly multi-millionaire) is known for dedicating a portion of his fortune to fighting infectious diseases, consistently giving to charity and creating programs in the tech space to benefit many communities. He is the poster boy for the “good billionaire”. But there is a dark underbelly to his philanthropic efforts. The fact is that he directly benefits from the outcome of his philanthropy, and herein lies the problem. Bill Gates, like many other billionaires, is known for using these charitable donations to avoid or pay meagre amounts on his taxes because there are financial systems in place for the already disgustingly rich that allow him to do so. In an episode of Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj exposes how billionaires actually give money. Big philanthropy, he states, is not the same as you or I making a donation through Change.org. Big philanthropy actually allows billionaires to pay less on almost every kind of tax. Their donations are also almost never in cash form but through something known as a Donor-Advised Fund. Hold your horses for this absolute financial clownery. “A DONOR-ADVISED FUND, or DAF, is a giving vehicle that allows donors to make a charitable contribution, receive an immediate tax deduction and then recommend grants from the fund over time.  Donors can contribute to the fund as frequently as they like, and then recommend grants to their favourite charities whenever makes sense for them.” The billionaire’s love of charity and simultaneous hatred of taxes is the difference between spending money to show that they are helping “the less fortunate” while directly benefiting themselves, versus fulfilling their obligation or responsibility as a citizen functioning in a democratic society. The point is that wealth redistribution would make this philanthropy unnecessary in the first place. Their version of charity is unethical, immoral and places them in a position to be the arbiter of right and wrong, what is just versus what is not. To quote The Guardian, “there’s a statistic floating around social media that if you made $5,000 a day every day, starting in 1492, when Columbus arrived in America, you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos, who is worth a net $110bn post-divorce.” They are now able to wield a level of power that is largely unregulated, and they actively shape the world that we live in today to make it the best place for the billionaire to make more money. Their influence in our social systems is the reason we even feel the need to discuss the concept of the billionaire rather than destroy it outright. We wouldn’t accept a vigilante deciding who gets to die and who does not, so why in the world are we entrusting billionaires with the exact same thing? Billionaires are the parasite and symptom of a bigger problem. The same group of people who has lobbied for, fought for and clung to an economy of injustice have marketed themselves to us as saviours, as in fact the solutions to the very problems they are still busily causing. - Anand Giridharadas The capitalist structure romanticises the existence of the billionaire as fundamentally imperialist because it allows nations of the Global South to be drained of resources for the profit of private corporations headquartered in the Global North. An example of this is Bangladesh, one of the most deregulated nations in the world. This means there aren’t proper regulations protecting workers from exploitation, making it now a hotspot for modern slavery. This is why billionaires are a parasite of a bigger problem. They use every form of modern slavery available to make more money for themselves to hoard, and when occasionally the horrible truth of their wealth accumulation makes itself known, they make a charitable donation or sweet PR stunt to create a smokescreen, giving people something nice to focus on. An example is the rise of the recent #PayUp controversy, wherein Bangladeshi workers were not paid for garments they created during Covid19 by the companies they made them for, like Kylie and Kendall Jenner’s clothing line. It has been estimated that the $420 dollars a Bangladeshi factory worker is likely to make in a year is what Kylie Jenner makes in just over a second. Capitalism and colonialism have their roots intertwined. The idea that this is in any way acceptable is a direct result of systemic racism and white supremacist structures that for so long have ruled our world. It essentially boils down to already wealthy white people reaping the monetary benefits of disadvantaged black and brown people’s work. There is no “well at least they’re getting paid something, right?” They are stuck in this inescapable cycle because of the racist capitalist structures in our world that make it okay for non-white lives to be sacrificed for the monetary gain of a few in the Global North. The same system that creates the billionaire keeps these people who work the hardest living below the poverty line. Billionaires shape our governments, our education systems, every single social system that we interact with during our lifetimes has been moulded by the ultra rich to keep the money and power flowing directly into their own pockets at the expense of everyone else on the planet. It’s the reason we don’t feel truly educated by our school system. Writer Anand Giridharadas states, “we have made choices as a society, to be more friendly to the Robert Smiths of the world, than the 400 kids he helped”. A person’s billions don’t just buy them mansions to die for or space programs, they also buy them influence, and they wield it in ways we ordinary folk don’t get to see behind-the-scenes of. A Final Note By now you’ve figured out that the examination of billionaires was really a way to trojan horse in the bigger issue of wealth disparity. To refer back to a snippet of the ever-incredible Patriot Act, the billionaire behind GoPro states, when confronted with the controversial truth of his “charitable donation”: “that’s how the world works. Ultimately, it’s not whether it’s fair or not, it’s just how you manage it, and I try not to get too caught up in all of that.” The turd is right. It is the way the world works. And so long as we are okay with the world working this way, it will continue to do so. The fight against racist power structures goes further than the systems that are immediately apparent to us and we need to keep learning about these narratives in order not to buy into them and to question them. There is no “success” element to making our money off the backs of others, and to create a fairer world we need to ensure we don’t partake in unethical mass money-making practices when we are eventually in positions to do so. Instead we actively fight to dismantle them, by lobbying for fairer policies, more intense regulations and heavier taxation on immense wealth. Or we could, you know, just eat the rich. Editor: Mariam H.

By Irisa R. The idea that young people who are passionate about a cause, literally any cause, are blindly speeding down a dead end road, destined to be replaced with bitterness, is a dangerous myth. It’s dangerous because it operates on the assumption that we can live a life, free of any ‘politics’. In high school, I would try my best to stay out of any political discussions. I was the Other on so many fronts. As a Brown, Muslim girl, how could I possibly be seen to be objective? At sixteen, we were sitting in a humanities class speaking about the morality of war, when my teacher took it as an opportunity to go on a tirade about the necessity of the Iraq war and she asked us, ‘if you were controlling the lever to a runaway trolley barrelling down the train tracks and you could either kill an Iraqi civilian or an Australian soldier, who would you choose? This one moment drastically changed my mindset. I realised that no matter how small I made myself in a conversation, or how hard I tried to stay away from talking about politics, that by staying silent I was passively supporting what she was saying. I had wrongly assumed that I could choose to be apolitical, that by not participating in conversations, or actively trying to understand the systems that controlled my way of life, I was limiting their power. This mindset is what I look back on and call blind optimism. It was training my brain to see the world through rose tinted glasses: it was hope without any direction. It assumed that a ‘happy-go-lucky’ mindset could wish away anything bad in the world and that staying out of politics was the only sensible choice. The philosophy of nihilism captures this idea that, 'the world is crap so we might as well get on with our life and accept that this is the best we will ever get.’ The Australian Election Survey, which is a research project that monitors post - election sentiments, found that the disillusionment with the political process has reached an all time high. It found that close to 40% of the participants were either disinterested in politics, or they believed that anything they did was futile. Myth #1: “I’m Just Not a Political Person” Staying away from politics thrives on the assumption that you can choose to opt in or out of politics. Yet, every decision we make is innately political. Recently, I went through my pantry and my wardrobe, looking at where I spent my money in the past year. Every action I had ever made, from where I eat, to where I buy my clothes, to the shows I watch, to the music I listen to, is innately political. These choices seem inconsequential in the moment, often made on a whim. However, even the everyday items that we fill our shopping carts with are embedded with political meaning. Every time we buy Coon cheese, a brand named after a racial slur since its creation in the Jim Crow era in America, we unwittingly endorse this branding choice. Even something as simple as sugar has an exploitative history. The largest Australian company manufacturing sugar, CSR (Colonial Sugar Refining Company), was built on the backs of enslaved Indians and Fijians who were forced to work on sugar plantations. So, when I bought CSR sugar to bake my apolitical cake for my apolitical friend for an apolitical party, I still made a choice to support this company. When I decided to buy a shirt from Zara, unknowingly, I was supporting the use of sweatshops, even when some of these sweatshops were a thirty minute drive from my own Auntie’s house in Dhaka. When I used to turn on the movie ‘The Blind Side’ (2009) a line - by line, textbook version of the white saviour complex, wrapped up in the body of a very palatable (and very white) actress Sandra Bullock, I again made a choice. I chose to see a young African American man be reduced to a ‘dumb athlete’ whose only strength came from his athleticism. The real Michael Coen came out and explained that he was always academically strong, despite the movie’s portrayal of him as struggling to string a few words together. Every book you read and every movie you watch is a choice. Being apolitical can only ever be a mindset because passively or actively you are promoting a political stance whether or not you want to. Myth #2: “An Apolitical Mindset Allows You To Be Neutral And More Logical” There is an implicit understanding that being ‘apolitical’ is smarter, more rational and more logical, because you ‘aren’t taking a side.' In contrast, people who are actively advocating for change are seen as angry, impassioned and running on a hamster wheel towards an unattainable goal. This also operates on the assumption that if you are personally affected by an issue, then your judgement is inherently tainted by your lived experience. Interestingly, Michael Satir and Kim McGuire found in their text The Lived Experience of Hate Crime that readers, and viewers, are less likely to perceive lived experiences as useful. We subconsciously believe that people who are living outside of the parameters of an experience are able to see things more clearly and make a more balanced argument. This discounts the obvious fact that lived experience is imperative to understanding how systems of oppression operate. An interesting way to explore the assumption that being apolitical is the same as being rational, is particularly gendered. Simone de Beauvoir explored in her book The Second Sex that, ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him...he is the absolute and she is the other.’ A study conducted by the Global Media Monitoring Project, an organisation that monitors the media’s coverage of women across the world, found that countries with a portrayal of political women as cunning, manipulative and emotionless, were less likely to elect female candidates. For example, when Sarah Hanson-Young, at the age of 25, became the youngest person to win an Australian seat in the Senate, she was immediately criticised for being, ‘too intense and too loud.’ Her male opponents both on late night news and on the Senate floor would specifically target her, ‘dress, body and supposed sex life.’ Writer Clementine Ford looked at nearly every article that was written about Julia Gillard, when she served as Australia’s Prime Minister, and found that the language used was overwhelming, ‘sexist in nature, from questioning [her] reproductive choices to critiquing [her] wardrobe and [her] sexuality.’ It isn’t surprising that growing up with these portrayals of women left us feeling disillusioned. It might come to little surprise that two years ago when Essential Research conducted a survey of women between the ages of 10 to 25, to determine how willing young women were to get involved in politics, it found that only 2% of girls between the ages of 10 to 14 listed politics as a future career option, and this dropped to 0 percent for women aged between 18 - 25. Zero percent. Myth #3: “It’s Just A Waste Of Energy” The common statement that, “we shouldn’t waste our energy, we won’t actually make a difference” is a very individualistic concept. The idea that unless we personally see the change, then why would we even try to make a change. Unless we can see that the time and effort we are investing, automatically translates into a tangible difference in a very short period of time, then why would we even try? However, the citizen is only ever as powerful as the collective, and everyone can’t be The Martin Luther King Jr or Eddie Mabo of their generation. Social media definitely hasn't helped. It has allowed movements backed by years of work, advocacy and effort, to be condensed down into one video, or one story or one photo. It has convinced us that change should be quick, fast and always within our grasp. However, we need to unlearn this narrative. We don’t need to be awarded, lauded or idolised to know that what we advocated for, donated to or supported was just and necessary. Myth #4: “You Can Be Political But Only In The Way That I Want” Danijela Kambaskovic, writer and academic, coined the term, ‘conscientious escapism.’ It is the idea that for some communities, their existence is politicised to such an extreme that they spend their whole life trying to disassociate from those experiences. Kambaskovis spent her first twenty eight years living in modern day Serbia, having lived through the Bosnian Genocide and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, she explained that once she came to Australia she didn’t want to buckle down and perform poetry only about the experience of being a migrant and living through war. Instead she chose to spend most of her academic life teaching Shakespeare. Here she illuminated an interesting point, about who we expect to be political and when we demand it of them. This idea reared its ugly head during the Black Lives Matter movement, where the populations experiencing the burden of police brutality were demanded to speak out. Danzal Baker (better known as Baker Boy) an Aboriginal artist and rapper from North East Arnhem Land, was called out for not speaking out. He spoke about the exhaustion of living a politicised existence saying, ‘please think about the way you are communicating with POC around you, especially at this time...for some of you have amplified my trauma, anger and sadness.’ Just like every inequity, we must acknowledge that we place greater expectations on some to speak out and less on others, simply because their existence has been politicised in a way that does not allow them to be quiet. Their existence isn’t a tool for us to learn through. Someone taking time for themselves because the news is traumatising for them, is not the same as being apolitical. If everyone can’t always afford to do something but everyone can afford to say something. When is it right to speak out and when it is just adding to the noise? This is a really difficult question. Rachel Cargle, a leading academic and activist in African American studies, explained that we should ask ourselves; is the information already accessible? Is it actionable? If so, is it so underreported that spreading awareness is an act of resistance on its own? Speaking out does not need to be immediate for it to be meaningful. In How to Do Nothing: Resisting The Thought Attention Economy, Jenny Odell explained, ‘it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.' Saying something is not a means to an end, it is simply a middle point, a point of re-education and then comes the hard work. So, What Should We Do? As a starting point, being political is just being vulnerable, it's an acceptance that you may need to acknowledge that there are inherent power dynamics in place. In our piece Colourism we speak about how a person can be a victim in one story and benefit from a system in another. We don’t need to be a politician to recognise that how we spend our money and what we speak about carries weight. Do we have to check every company we buy from, every movie we watch and every item of food we eat? That’s impossible. It’s really hard, it feels disillusioning and tiring at times and sometimes I just give in because continuously checking can start to feel like pushing a boulder uphill. But we need to remind ourselves; it isn't comfortable and it isn't always easy but it's necessary. We are making these choices whether or not we actively think about it. If everything we do matters, then we need to make sure we could stand by every one of our choices. Editor: Mariam H.

Mariam H. and Tahmina R. While the conversation on police brutality in the US of A has only recently reached the mainstream, we have yet to acknowledge the role of the police in the violent colonial dispossession of Aboriginal lands, the carrying out of the stolen generation and mass incarceration. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has told the Australian public not to “import” the movement and to stay at home. But ignoring something does not make the problem go away. Not only is there a race problem in Australia, but our history has been whitewashed and sanitised beyond recognition that our leaders can deny history without a trace of irony. The police are not only responsible for law and order, but integral to the formation of the State as it exists today. It is a stabilising power with the purpose of grafting norms and expectations onto the collective psyche. The modern police is a highly networked institution that transcends every social relationship. Which is why, in order to understand the full force and effect of it, if you have not lived or experienced police scrutiny, surveillance or discrimination, it is difficult to conceptualise exactly how invasive and oppressive this display of power can be. The Legacy of the Police For many, the police as it exists today is integral to a modern democracy. It is seen as synonymous with the concept of ‘law and order’. The early police arose in Europe at a time when citizens were subjects and people without property were effectively right-less. This institution is far older than any other in our modern democracies (emerging in the 15th century and really getting into the swing of it by the 18th century with the Polizeistaat). At its core, it has always been concerned with the idea of regulating ‘good order’. This original mandate has continued to today. Unlike the ‘law’, the success of the police is not measured by the achievement of justice but rather the strengthening of order and state power. While order is often understood as ensuring the welfare of society through, for example, the prevention of crime, in its broadest sense it is a normalising power. It is the state’s enforcement of the status quo. This is the legacy of the police. In the 19th century, the police shifted their focus from the prosecution of criminality to an all-encompassing crime prevention. In this more punitive and security mindset, there is much more discretion to decide exactly who and what has the potential to be a threat before it even exists. The target is identified before they even become a target. So here is where it gets crazy. Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, argues that there was a shift from punishment to a system of control and correction to reflect the change in the way governments wanted to govern. Instead of governing people, they sought to govern through people. The Carceral network To understand the way the police operate as an institution, it helps to understand their placement within the carceral network. This network is a key component of power in modern society, and through its various disciplinary techniques it allows for the creation of a Norm. Among its most significant roles is that it successfully makes the power to punish, seem not only legitimate but natural. Think of fully armed police in riot gear pepper spraying a group of unarmed teenagers. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that social institutions exercise power and discipline on the bodies and souls of their subjects through ‘le regard’ — the “gaze.” For Foucault, the individual is essentially a product of this monitoring and control. This surveillance produces “docile bodies” which Foucault defines as bodies that can be monitored and psychologically controlled, that are then trained to self-govern. Put simply, we are the sum of what we abstain from doing for fear of being seen, judged, or punished. Race in the Police State The interaction between race and the police state is by design. It is a product of our shared colonial history barely in our rearview mirror, and the continuation of a racialised hierarchy that is built on ideas of white supremacy. To deny this is to tell me that a rollercoaster is a slide. In short, it’s delusional and historically inaccurate. At the individual level, this disciplinary power is felt through racial profiling that leads to the incarceration of specific bodies instead of others. Collectively, it is felt through intergenerational family and community trauma caused by hyper-incarceration and over policing. Audre Lorde writes that racial prejudice can “deeply scar the psyche, inscribing into the very bodies of people their understanding of themselves and their place in a racialised hierarchy.” The police are integral to this process. To understand the relationship between policing and race, we need to look beyond each individual uniformed officer and question how society shapes interactions between different racial and ethnic groups. It is only then that we begin to understand the role of the police. At this stage, in modern history this really shouldn’t be news to anyone, yet popular media persists in its failure to recognise the colonial context within which they are writing. Tune into the interchangeable faces of channel 7, 9 or 10 and hear similar perspectives parroted with minor changes, that just add that little extra garnish of upper class racism wrapped up in concerned paternalism. A Self-Sustaining System The majority of Australian news media report in ways that erase or undermine the historic and discursive role of racial and colonial violence that has caused our current problem of mass Aboriginal incarceration. Australian history is, to put in the most genteel way, a tale of brutality and genocide, that every once in a while we redecorate through symbolic gestures like reconciliation. Then we float right on out and eagerly discuss ‘American problems.’ In Australia, the role of the police in the colonial project was to push the ‘frontiers’ and consolidate power over land that was yet to be brought under British rule. In upholding the meta-narrative of law and order to justify over policing, we deem this history and its ongoing consequences acceptable. Dominant criminology that rationalises Aboriginal over incarceration as a product of dysfunction and deviance does not acknowledge the role of the state in constructing these risks in the first place through systematic discrimination and segregation of resources. It is victimisation by the state and re-victimisation by the carceral network. In the 2017 ‘Pathways to Justice’ report, the Australian Law Reform Commission said that adult incarceration cannot be fully addressed without a national review of Aboriginal children in child protection. When parents are incarcerated their children are put into state care and this has ongoing intergenerational effects for entire communities. Ninety per cent of Aboriginal youth who appear in a children's court go on to appear in an adult court within eight years — with one third going on to receive a prison sentence later in life. Grandmothers Against Removal state, “far more children are being taken today than during the Stolen Generations… Aboriginal children are 28 times more likely to be in prison than non-Aboriginal children.” This is how the penal system becomes a self-sustaining entity, bringing certain populations within its folds and keeping them there. But ‘Not all Police’ …? Calls that ‘not all police’ are bad is counterproductive. The problems with modern policing are not with individual officers. The profession is more than the individuals that make it up and must be understood for the role they play in governing society and the systemic choices to over police and over incarcerate vulnerable populations. The carceral network as an institution produces vulnerabilities and legitimises them by producing and reproducing certain discourses as truth. It is the association of black and coloured bodies with criminality that is being resisted in questioning the legitimacy of the police system. It is the difference in the perception of citizens as objects of administrative control versus seeing them as subjects of the law. Questioning the legitimacy of the police in a police state is an attempt to resist what would otherwise be an affirmation of this history and complicity in the crimes being committed under its protection. Reference List Anthony, T 2013, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment, Routledge New York. Australian Law Reform Commission 2017, Pathways to Justice—Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, Final Report No 133 . Carrington, K, Hogg, R and Scott, J et al, R 2019, Southern Criminology, Routledge, New York. Cunneen, C, Baldry, E and Brown, D, et al 2016, Penal Culture and Hyperincarceration, Routledge. Day, K 2009 ‘Masculinity and Race in Public Space’, in M. Lee and S. Farrall (eds) Fear of Crime: Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety, Routledge, Oxon. Foucault, M 1986, 'Disciplinary power and subjection', in Steven Lukes (ed.) Power, Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M, 2008 ‘Lecture One: 10th January 1979’ in Michel Senellart (ed), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79, Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, M 2014, ‘The Carceral’, in James Farganis The Readings in Social Theory: The Classical Tradition to Postmodernism, 7thedn, New York: McGraw-Hill. Foucault, M 2009, ‘Alternatives to the Prison,’ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 12-24. Kerr, A and Wright, E 2015, ‘Police State,’ A Dictionary of World History, Oxford University Press. Mladek, K 2007, Police Forces a Cultural History of An Institution, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Purdy, J 1996 Postcolonialism: The Emperor’s New Clothes, SAGE Publications, UK. Skolnick, J 1975, Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, Wiley, New York. Wright, E 2006, ‘Police State,’ A Dictionary of World History, Oxford University Press.

By Jessica L. In galleries that I’ve visited I would always take the time to view the works on display. I would read through the little white blocks of texts or listen intently to the guided audio tour trying to immerse myself within the art before me. When it came to looking at Warhol’s mundane stack of Brillo Pads I pondered about mass-consumption. I took photos of Grayson Perry’s intricate quilts to further examine the details. In Marina Abramovic’s In Residence at the Walsh Bay Piers, I locked eyes with a stranger in meditative competitiveness to understand what stillness meant. In all my time passing through these galleries and art spaces I would contemplate deeply with all the artworks and yet I would only glance at the displays of Aboriginal Art. When I was studying as a Fine Arts student my tutorials and theory classes always reminded us that we needed to be respectful with Aboriginal Art under all circumstances. Reminding us profusely that “Aboriginal symbols or totems are sacred and important, they cannot be used recklessly and only certain clans can use them”. What was instilled in all of us was respect and a stern warning to tread lightly and reverently with Aboriginal art. I ended up hearing these sentiments very often around the campus, in my classes from mainly Non Aboriginal lecturers, Tutors and students. Yet at the same time amongst fellow students we found ourselves looking at Aboriginal Art in this performative pleasantry. “Yes it is Aboriginal Art, needs to be respected, designed with meticulous dots and lines now let's move on”. Aboriginal Art did not speak to us as profoundly, we did not treat it individually, it did not serve our understanding and it was easy to consume for a bunch of students who just wanted to pass the class. We were told what their art was about. We just didn’t want to understand it. What is the white gaze? The white gaze is when we view white culture to be the highest standard that all cultures, experiences and creations should be measured by. When we view oil paintings made by French artists to be “High Art” we respectfully agree and engage with our white gaze. When we see unique styles of basket weavings made by different Aboriginal clans and think “Grecian pottery is more skilful” we are exercising our white gaze. As Malik Pitchford writes “The white gaze serves to limit the cultural expression of Blacks by way of white ethnocentricity.” By placing European art centre stage, it becomes a yardstick to measure all art. As POC we have adopted the white gaze from the media we consume, the environment we are raised in and the cultural ideas that have been instilled in us as a result of an educational system which exclusively engages with European history, art and culture. The white gaze funnily enough is not limited to the race of the individual, but is rather a consciousness that can be inhabited by anyone. An East Asian person can perceive Aboriginal artwork in the same Eurocentric framework as that of a white person. The internalised value that we have placed in culture is that White experiences, knowledge and culture is superior and that everything else needs to be considered by that measure. Our Encounters with Aboriginal Art Aboriginal art under the white gaze can be reduced to just pure abstraction. When we see the painting, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri made by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, at first glance we are simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Our eyes are not willing to be pulled into the direction of the wavy lines crossing the work, the different hues of brown and ochre in amorphous blobs and the tiny dots that disperse throughout the canvas. What we have grown up seeing is the defined and detailed forms of Western paintings, becoming habituated with this type of straightforward visual communication that has rendered us uncomfortable with navigating the things which are more vague and secretive in form. There is no face that stares at you and beckons you to stare back, there are no distinctive shapes that form trees, mountains or cities. It is not indicative of the modern world of our familiarity but rather a world that has been deemed by white supremacy and colonisation to be primitive, making us subconsciously encounter these works as though they are less worthy of our understanding and engagement. The critics, curators and the audience can view Aboriginal art in the frame of abstractionism, expressionism or any other artistic movement do so in order to derive a semblance of meaning by imposing on them the theoretical lenses used to characterise European art. There is nothing “wrong” about that but it has a role to play in denying what gets lost is communication between the viewer and the creator as ‘up to interpretation’. The possible avenues for understanding the work in the way it was meant to be received diminishes. Most of all, this prioritises the personal experience of the viewer to the work, giving creative authority to YOU rather than the artist. For Aboriginal artists their work is reduced to its aesthetics and their meaning is simplified or worse, erased. Experiencing this in a modern gallery is similar to looking at 50,000 year old cave paintings in Walingnya and only hearing the tour guide say, “this is ancient, this is important, this is special” without wanting to ask: “why?” Whitewashing Black Art As there are more art spaces dominated by white curators and collectors, the opportunities to present works by Black and Aboriginal creatives are limited by how they appeal to the desires of their audience. Black creatives are required to conform to an expected narrative in order to exhibit their work successfully, which often results in the whitewashing of this work and subsequent erasure of the important histories which led to its creation in the first place. For Aboriginal creatives it might be fulfilling the aesthetic demand for abstract expressionism paintings that serve as a good and inoffensive accent to a mundane white wall for an office. It doesn’t matter what the intentions of the artist are, what matters is if they fulfil our consumer expectations. The ways in which we disengage with the work is often discreet and unacknowledged. For African American musicians their work is often decontextualised or appropriated to serve the intentions of their audience. It is using Beyonce’s “Formation” as runway music for an all white fashion show. It is a white woman stealing her African American maid’s personal story and turning it into a book and a movie deal starring Emma Stone “with” Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. In Australia, Aboriginal aesthetics have been commodified in the international art market. The style can be imitated by non-Aboriginal people and still maintain the supposed “authenticity” of what we presume Aboriginal art to be. It is the appropriation of Aboriginal branding on inauthentic goods sold in Paddy’s Markets for tourism. Basically it is the $20 acrylic painted kangaroo “boomerang” that you buy for your distant relatives. The fakes industry is responding to the demand for works that have the look of Aboriginal Art with little interest in anything more than their tokenistic appreciation or consumable aesthetic. We Need to Stop Calling Them ‘Dot Paintings’ When we see the Aboriginal ancient rock paintings and meticulous dot paintings we infer very little from them. The aesthetic alone affirms our understanding of what the white gaze has for so long called ‘dot paintings’. Yet we would never label the paint splatters of Jackson Pollock nor the cubism of Picasso or any expression of non-Black or Aboriginal creatives in such reductive ways. Papunya Tula is the technique involved in dot paintings which originated around the Northern Territory. It was an art movement that started in the forced assimilated settlement of Papunya, where the Pintupi and Luritja people, but also Warlpiri, Kakatja and Anmatyerr groups lived together. This technique is what gave rise to the contemporary aesthetic of Aboriginal art and is what is in demand for the art market. Yet underneath all the meticulous dots and trailing lines is sacred knowledge that takes expertise and awareness to unpack. This technique works as cultural preservation of stories, rituals and maps for sacred sites for Aboriginal people to communicate within their communities. For us outsiders it is a map that we cannot navigate, something beyond our understanding and excludes for a good reason. Yet just because the meaning is inaccessible to us doesn’t mean we should treat the work in such a shallow and passive manner. It is true that we as outsiders will never be privy to the knowledge and stories of Aboriginal people. Just because we may not know the secrets behind every Papunya Tula painting, that in itself is not a reason to justify our disengagement with the art. Black and Aboriginal creatives will continue to create works long after the BLM hashtag stops trending. The question we need to be asking ourselves is “will we be consuming it for our own benefit?” or “will we be listening, learning and engaging in a meaningful way?” Learning to Unlearn I remember entering a dark room in the MCA several years ago illuminated with four large screens displayed side by side. Each screen displayed different angles of a single event composed of footage from newsreels and other sources. It first displayed a lush green island only to be followed with protestors shouting, police scrambling, fires combusting and riots rising. What was unfolding before me was the story of an Aboriginal Man who died in police custody and the events that ensued afterwards. I sat in the dark just watching and listening, unable to move and unwilling to turn away my gaze. Watching the chaos unfold as the people screamed at a crime left unresolved committed by the abusive powers of the police. I didn’t understand what was happening in that installation but later I found out that this was about the 2004 Palm Island Riots. Tall Man by Vernon Ah Kee drew the definitive line in the sand for me that not only could I never understand the experiences of an Aboriginal Person but that the anticipation of drawing a parallel between my world and theirs is the very start of the problem with reproducing the white gaze in our encounters with Aboriginal art. I didn’t realise how lifelong my disinterest in Aboriginal art was. Throughout high school art excursions I always found myself evading their work because I believed that if “you’ve seen them once , you’ve seen them all”. Even in university studying Fine Arts, being constantly exposed to the works of Aboriginal Artists and being educated on them was not enough to instil any profound interest in me. Experiencing Ah Kee’s installation in that darkness woke me up from that constant state of ambivalence. Although I never had the chance to correct this in school, in our local museums or even during my fine arts degree, I am trying with true humility to lean into my own discomfort and engage. Some amazing artists I’ve found along the way are like Daniel Boyd’s “We Call them Pirates out here”, posters from Redback Graphix in collaboration with Marie McMahon “ You are on Aboriginal Land 1984” and Richard Bell’s “Embassy, 2013”. But there are thousands more out there and with each genuine encounter we begin to unlearn our white gaze. Start that process of unlearning with these awesome readings: Aboriginal Creatives Bold, brilliant Indigenous Australian women's art – in pictures In Open Cut exhibition, protest art challenges visitors to take action Art Critiques Why is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music - Wesley Morris Beware of the White Gaze - Malik Pitchford Aboriginal art: is it a white thing? Fake Aboriginal Art Fake Aboriginal Art: Ethics and Appropriation Netflix series After Life, from Ricky Gervais, features 'unethical' piece of 'fake' Aboriginal art Edited by Tahmina R.

By Palwasha A. “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses.” - Audre Lorde As immigrants or children of immigrants, as individuals inhabiting brown bodies in a predominately white society, it can be comfortable to slip into a position of moral righteousness during discussions of racism and systematic oppression. As though by virtue of identity, our own associated discrimination and baggage of historical injustice, we are exempt from deeper critical self-reflection on our role in allyship or how we play into and enable anti-Black racism. The experiences of POC and the Black community is not the same. In some part due to the consistent categorisation of all races but the perceived white default as “other”, it can be easy to perpetuate the notion that all racism is felt the same way. It is not an easy task to confront your own privilege, but it is necessary in dismantling the power structures that keep Black people down. How do People of Colour have privilege? It's become the controversial buzzword of our age, and we’ve all heard of white privilege. But what does it mean that non-Black POC are privileged? In order to properly understand our own privilege as non-Black POC, we have to realise that we do not experience anti-Black racism. On the contrary, we actually benefit from it in many ways, and that is why it is on us to educate ourselves and step up. When Black people fight the patriarchy and fight against racist power structures, it benefits us all. But when tackling oppressive power structures that were created to keep them down, they are alone, and the rampant anti-Blackness in communities of colour means that we are not exempt from having actively contributed to their ongoing oppression. Because all POC have been cast into the homogenous “other” group, against the perceived white default and our identities are categorised collectively under the “diverse” umbrella, we can internalise the message that all racism against POC is the same. We may know that there are issues that specifically affect East Asians or Arabs, but we are ignorant of the fact that Black people are consistently put at the bottom of this constructed racial hierarchy. As POC writer Almass Badat explains, “I didn’t explicitly pick up on [the anti-Black racism in my community] because it was no different from what was being promoted in the wider media, and although I do remember trying to disassociate myself with it, I accepted that this was just the way things were. Back then, I failed to see that my acceptance came at the cost of someone else’s denial.” When POC are told that their struggle is not the same as a Black person’s, the general reaction is offence. When you’ve experienced racism first-hand, it can be difficult to understand that we uphold anti-Black sentiments through colourism and the model-minority myth, to name a few of the covert examples that position the Black community at the bottom of a constructed racial hierarchy. Just as white power structures are allowed to thrive because of the silence of white people, they also rely on NBPOC silence and desire to fit into them. As Mina McMahon and her fellow WOC activists explain in this incredible resource for the BLM movement in Australia-- An excellent place to do more reading, linked here): “Dismantling white supremacy begins with acknowledging your own implicit biases and choosing to act against the oppressor. Silence is an immense privilege; one that directly upholds and perpetuates the systems and structures of white supremacy. Identifying and acknowledging privilege is something that non-Bla(c)k people should do without shame. Dismissing privilege means that you are complicit in a system that you may not even agree with.” We must not align ourselves with their separate struggle. BIPOC showing up to our fights against white privilege benefits us all, and then they suffer from a whole separate set of issues that we will never experience, and that will not change unless we add our voices to the rising cacophony for systemic change. Our anti-Black reality in Australia Australians being outraged at the way the US treats its Black citizens while intoning how thankful they are that those same things don’t happen here is about the same level of horse-blinder wearing as Tel Aviv citizens protesting Black deaths in the US and Priyanka Chopra’s allyship. During Sydney’s BLM protest and vigil, Aboriginal Australian leaders started a chant that rang throughout the crowd over to the police standing at the sidelines. “Four hundred and thirty-four…. Four hundred and thirty four…” This is the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia in the last 30 years. 434 deaths and not a single police officer ever held criminally responsible. The filmed death of George Floyd in the US, in all its horror, spurred people in Australia (and around the world) to finally educate themselves on and confront the fact that our justice systems are actively oppressing Black and indigenous citizens. This requires a necessary upheaval of the sanitised and incorrect history we are taught in the school system here, that Aboriginal Australian oppression is as a thing of the past, a necessary but very sad occurrence wherein a primitive people were effectively wiped out to allow for widespread European settlement on the continent. In 1991 there was a royal commission (major public inquiry) into the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Since then there have been 434 Aboriginal deaths in custody, a number so staggering and at odds with population statistics that it lays our ongoing shame as a nation bare. In 2018 The Guardian made a database to make all these deaths searchable, and the results were shocking. Since updating it further in august 2019, they found that in many measures, things had gotten worse. “On Thursday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released data showing the daily average number of Indigenous people in prison had risen 5% from the second half of last year, from 12,322 to 12,902. The proportion of Indigenous people who were in prison on remand – meaning they had not been convicted or sentenced – had gone up. This is concerning because we found that more than half of the Indigenous people who have died in custody since 2008 had not been convicted of a crime.” -The Guardian, 2020 Now, Indigenous women account for thirty six percent of all women behind bars in Australia. At a cursory glance, an uneducated person would assume that this is because they are committing more crimes. This is not the case. As writer Greg Jericho reported, based on the latest prison statistics released Thursday, “In New South Wales, while Indigenous people make up 26% of all people in prison, they only account for about 15% of all crimes committed in that state.” They surmised that this is a direct result of the systemic racism within our society that influence employment, income, health- “all the things that may put people in situations where they are more likely to commit crime combined with a justice system that appears to both seek them out more, views their actions more as crimes and then treats them more harshly.” The conclusions that have been drawn from these investigations into Black deaths in custody can be boiled down to “interactions of Aboriginal Australians with our justice system must be minimised” because once they’re in, the risk of their coming out reduces at an insane rate. But if interaction with the justice system needs to be minimised to protect an entire group of people from injustice by the justice system, does this not then necessitate an entire upheaval and reform of our justice system? A justice system that does not work for all is no justice system. The same outrageous cases originating from America that gain traction on social media are present within our own country but are left mostly to Aboriginal activists to fight against with limited government resources. For example, during their research, In South Australia, The Guardian learned of a family who have been waiting more than five years for the results of a coronial inquest into the death of a loved one, a 68 year old man who had died in Yatala labour prison in April 2015. The necessary steps have not been taken by state or federal government to make either the necessary changes to ensure less BIPOC interaction with law enforcement or to further address the systemic racism that leads to their ongoing oppression by law enforcement and so it is up to the people to actively work to make it clear that change must occur. Australians need to mobilise now and POC Australians must not consider themselves exempt- as thousands gathered to protest Aboriginal deaths in custody across Australia, another shameful death, this time of a 40 year old Aboriginal man, occurred in custody at Acacia Prison in WA. Having been made aware then, of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Australia’s oppression of BIPOC, it becomes clear how bad we’ve allowed it to get when hearing our current prime minister cautioning Australians against “importing a movement from the US”. This is the leadership that we voted in, something we allow to happen every day that we’re not speaking up, not showing up and allowing our country to be defined by and remain in the grip of the genocidal history that it still defines itself by. How To Show Up/Speak Up So we’ve posted. We’ve donated, we’ve marched, we’ve signed petitions. These are all important but it can feel like screaming into an echo chamber, especially social media activism. You’re oftentimes expressing your views to a majority that share your same views, passing information back and forth to each other and changing not very much. Aboriginal people will not stop dying in custody because we’ve marched, and because more of the country has finally tuned into the oppression they’ve already been experiencing since Captain Cook stumbled his blotchy self onto Australian shores. In order to show up in a real way, we have to get uncomfortable. A revolution does not happen overnight and it’s our responsibility, once we’re aware of oppressive racist power structures, to constantly be ready to take action against them in support of our Black brothers and sisters. Everyone can post a black square. True allyship happens when we’re forced to get uncomfortable. This means tackling the racism within our families, our friends and our communities. It means actively learning as opposed to waiting for people to teach you. Check in on those you know who are traumatised, listen to and take direction from Black activists. Do not think you know, because we can be unaware of how much our own thought process and understanding is shaped by our privilege. Step back and listen. Do not ever expect another person to educate you, especially a person personally affected by the trauma of the news. We have more access to information from every corner of the world than we have had at any point in history, and it should be utilised. We are in a truly incredible place to be able to educate ourselves and grow our own knowledge of the systems we move within, how they’ve come about, and how we can do better. This is specifically for non-Black people-do NOT shut yourself out of conversations with racist family members, friends, etc. You are in a position where you can genuinely use your inherent privilege to affect change. It may and will likely be a difficult and uncomfortable conversation. Allyship should get uncomfortable. We need to call out the anti-Blackness in our communities. Here are some steps you can take in ensuring that you have as productive a conversation as possible: Theres a way to dissent respectfully, especially when it comes to people we love who are acting in the way that has never been contested. We can’t let sentiments of “stay out of the sun, you’ll get too dark” or “they’re fine, but we can’t marry them” or praying for fair-skinned babies to keep being handed down, especially when the children affected by them will grow into a new generation with internalised self-hatred and the cycle will continue. 1. Patience, patience, patience. A lifetime of internalising racism isn’t overturned overnight, but as allies it is our duty to have necessary conversations with those who listen to us. Be kind in your explanation, as shouting matches are about as effective as political pundits. Open their minds to different perspectives. People are generally resistant to understanding the concept of privilege, defending their viewpoint with how hard they've had it in life, how nothing was handed to them. This allows you to explain that this is not what privilege is, and then define. 2. Ask them to empathise Reframe a situation into something the other person has some sort of life experience with and can understand is a fantastic starting point for changing an opinion. What if it was you? "We don’t need to worry about police using an everyday interaction as an excuse to brutalise us, we don’t need to worry about leaving a store without buying anything." This can lead into talk of more covert privilege examples, until they understand that racism is not individual acts of racism, but a continuously oppressive system that they are complicit in. Allow them and yourself room to learn and grow but don't use how the fact that it's so easy to make mistakes as an excuse to back away. We cant really afford to give ourselves excessive excuses when people are having to suffer the results of our collective ignorance daily. 3. Hear them out The difficulty is in hearing them out. Frustration is a given. It's always going to be difficult having to listen to ignorance, but listening is helpful in then urging them to challenge exactly what they’re afraid of. In taking on a person’s racist views by educating rather than yelling, we are using our privilege to dismantle and change their opinion. If not theirs, then influencing the people listening. Sometimes arguing with a racist, a homophobe, a sexist, etc. is like trying to make sense come from a brick wall. But it’s necessary regardless because hate speech cannot be allowed to be given breath. There are people listening and there will be people affected by your inaction. Afterword As first, second or third generation immigrants to this country, we need to take up our role in fighting for the rights of the true custodians of this land. When confronted with their reality, so many of us feel absolved from it’s implications- we didn’t steal the land, our ancestors were not complicit in the horrors against them. But we are living, working on, and wholly benefitting from the pain of their colonisation and their ongoing pain now. Their erasure allows us to go about our lives on soil that was never ceded, unimpeded. And this privilege that we have, aside from the inherent duty that every human being has to fight for equality for all, is what makes us responsible. We are not separate from the issue. We are complicit. If you’re wondering what you’d do during the periods of history where grave injustice was occurring in your own country, you don’t need to wonder. You’re doing it now.

By Fatimah Hossaini Lead Editors: Tahmina R. & Palwasha A. Fatimah Hossaini is a revolutionary photographer who we at the Pvblication have admired for a long time, and we are honoured to introduce her as our first collaborator. Fatimah’s work conveys the romanticism that shapes the way so many of us experience our cultural identities. Her camera sees the world in vivid colour, where the beauty and spirituality of the past is combined with the vitality of the contemporary art scene to create art that makes us feel that we are discovering something incredibly rare with each look. We’re honoured to have her, as she takes us on a journey through her incredible artwork and explores the work of three of her central and south asian contemporaries. This is The Pvblication’s first digital gallery: Welcome. Fatimah’s Artistic Journey The first time I held a paintbrush, I was fourteen and living in Tehran. Living a refugee life wasn’t easy – I had a profound interest in art from a very young age but it was barely possible for us to get a proper education in art until I turned fourteen. I was not destined to be an artist – a woman like me, born into an Afghan family seeking refuge in Iran after years of war in Afghanistan. My parents dreamed of me becoming an engineer. I was a mathematics major and received a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Tehran. However, I knew that being an engineer was not my calling in life because deep inside, I loved art. I had this instinct and passion for it. Therefore, I gathered all the courage in me to pursue my passion. When I decided to enrol into my second bachelor’s degree in photography, I went from one male dominated field to another. I started from scratch and went through another four year degree. During that time, I found my voice through the lens of my camera. I have built my artistry through years of carefully curated images, with the desire to show my global audience images from the Global South that contrast the norm of what is expected. One of the biggest decisions I made was to return to my roots, to go to Kabul, in 2013. It was the first time I had felt the soil of my ancestral land, after twenty-two years of living as a refugee. I had the honor of being a lecturer at Kabul University in 2018 whilst developing my portfolio and in 2019 founded ‘Mastoorat’, one of the first female founded art organizations in the country, committed to the promotion of the arts and culture in Afghanistan. Mastoorat’s main objective is to provide educational opportunities for Afghan artists, promote their art and use the soft power of art to create a more forgiving narrative of the country. It’s named after the first school for girls in Afghanistan by queen Soraya during the Amani dynasty. I believe my passion to pursue staged photography comes from my exposure to visual arts, where I am allowed to be led by my imagination. My work touches on themes of identity, gender and migration. As an Afghan woman artist, who works to empower Afghanistan’s art society, I want to break the boundaries and work as an international artist so that the rich Afghan art and culture can be introduced to audiences across the world as something that inspires and connects us all. First Collections (2015-2017) The burqa was one of the symbols I began with in my art, to deconstruct it, better understand its role and purpose in Afghan society. It was the blue fabric that became synonymous with the image of Afghan women. However, it was not an accurate symbol for Afghan women and it was not how I wanted to be portrayed on the global stage. I wanted to be part of the movement in reclaiming the identity of Afghan women. Below is a still from my photo series Burqa which explores femininity within Afghan society. ‘Burqa Behind the steering wheel’ / 2015, staged and captured in Tehran, Iran As time passed, the Burqa became a cliché for me. I couldn’t accept it as the symbol for Afghan women. When I commenced my next collection, “Khurasani Reflections”, I wanted to focus on showing the rich culture of pre-war Afghanistan. This photo series features women in their traditional garb from Afghanistan’s different tribes. In this collection, which is captured in my studio in Tehran, I have mixed the traditional garbs of Afghan women. ‘Khurasani Reflections’ 2015 – 2017, staged and captured in Tehran, Iran For instance, an Uzbek woman wears Hazaragi jewellery, Pashtun scarf, and a Qazalbash hat to capture the different faces of Afghan women, and highlight our ethnic diversity while showing the rich cultural heritage within our textiles. The fabrics, jewelleries and styles are from different regions of Afghanistan. In this collection, the different clothing styles of Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and Qazalbash women are displayed. ‘Khurasani Reflections’ 2015 – 2017, staged and captured in Tehran, Iran Photography Since Her Return to Kabul (2018-present) When I returned to Kabul in 2018 with the mission of working as an artist in Afghanistan, I immersed myself in finding new parts of my motherland that I had not been exposed to. I returned to the same war zone my family escaped from, knowing that I wanted to produce art that could inspire future Afghan generations with focuses that were outside of war, conflict and struggle. I wanted to bring dignity back to how Afghanistan. The move was one of the biggest decisions of my artistic career. I found myself discovering the heritage streets of old Kabul, highlighting the civilizations that have passed through Afghanistan. ‘Koche Kah Foroshi’ (bird market), ‘Koche Morgha’ (chicken street) and ‘Burj e Shahrara’ are some of the most famous landmarks in Kabul and were a marvellous experience to shoot at. I was also able to find material from different periods of Afghan history to include in my shoots. ‘Pearl in the Oyster’ 2019, staged and captured at ‘Koche Morgha’ in Kabul, Afghanistan It was the images of ancient towers, palaces, and some urban symbols such as the Kabul taxis, markets, street food and vendors and the street style of the elderly men who line the streets as day labourers, that inspired me so much. ‘Pearl in the Oyster’ 2019, staged and captured at ‘Koche Morgha’ in Kabul, Afghanistan In my latest photo series, the photoshoot for which is ongoing, I have created images of Afghan women, with their exclusive clothing against traditional backdrops. Their beauty and femininity will be showcased and framed into an artwork of Afghanistan’s diverse culture and traditions. ‘Pearl in Oyster’ 2018 – 2019, staged and captured at ‘Koche Kah Foroshi’ in Kabul, Afghanistan These faces with their unique looks, aside from breaking taboos and the cliché image of the Burqa, will be captured with respect to their traditions. Women who may be calm, shy, coquettish or feminine. This photo series will highlight the beauty of femininity, and specifically, reflect a different face of the Afghan woman, who have usually been seen as a victim. The beauty and resilience of Afghan women alongside our forgotten cultural objects will be captured and displayed. ‘Pearl in Oyster’ 2018 – 2019, staged and captured at ‘Koche Kah Foroshi’ in Kabul, Afghanistan A Journey Through the Contemporary Asian Art Scene: Our Favourites. I have worked in this region for years now and these are some of my well-known contemporaries from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran who are all inspired and motivated by their experiences. For instance, Iranian artists tend to be inspired by current political issues. In Pakistan, it's different, their artistic expression is mostly driven by their colonial history. In Afghanistan, contemporary artists post-Taliban are focused on war, personal and cultural identities, nationality, gender, and pluralism. Shamsia Hassani is Afghanistan’s first female graffiti artist. Through her artworks, Shamsia gives Afghan women a different face with power, ambitions, and willingness to achieve her goals. Her work has brought in huge waves of colour and appreciation of the post-war era. Hassani’s graffiti in Kabul, Afghanistan Her artworks have inspired hundreds of Afghans to bring in their creativity through her graffiti festival, art classes, and exhibitions in different countries around the world. Hassani’s latest artwork, Kabul, Afghanistan For more, visit: https://www.shamsiahassani.net. Saira Wasim Saira Wasim is a contemporary artist from Lahore, Pakistan and is currently living in the United States. Wasim uses the miniature style of painting, extensively used in historic South Asia to make political and cultural art. ‘Europa’ ink and gouache on wasli paper, 2015 painted in Lahore, Pakistan Wasim says: "My work uses the contemporary miniature form to explore social and political issues that divide the modern world. This series, ‘Battle for Hearts and Minds,’ illustrates the clash between imperialism in the West and fundamentalism in the East, and questions the underlying motivations and uneasy alliances that keep this conflict going. My work offers a voice against this ignorance and prejudice. It pleas for social justice, respect, and tolerance through the use of caricature and satire.” For more, visit http://www.sairawasim.com/. ‘East versus west,’ gouache on wasli paper, 2007 painted in Lahore, Pakistan ‘Noor Jehan 2’ gold and gouache on wasli paper, 2001 painted in Lahore, Pakistan. Dedicated to the Queen of Melodies. Parviz Tanavoli Parviz Tanavoli is lauded as the father of modern Iranian sculpture. Since 1989 he has lived and worked both in Tehran and Vancouver, Canada. In 2005, he created a small piece of sculpture called Heech in a cage to protest the war crimes committed against American-held prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in 2006 began work on his piece to honour the victims of the Israeli-Lebanon war. Different angles of ‘Heech’ sculpture on display in Tehran, Iran Tanavoli is known for his three dimensional representations of the Farsi word heech. Composed of three Persian characters in the Persian calligraphy style of Nasta'liq, the three letters he, ye and če are combined to produce the word, which translates to “nothing”. For more, visit https://www.tanavoli.com/. Different angles of ‘Heech’ sculpture on display in Tehran, Iran A Final Word. Fatimah Hossaini is the kind of creative who we here at The Pvblication genuinely admire in our personal lives, and thus are so proud to showcase on our platform. She is an artist who moved back to the warzone her parents left. She made this decision because she saw the gap in the world’s narrative about Afghanistan and she wanted to showcase her Afghan roots in a truer light, to be part of the movement in bringing her countrywomen’s voices to the fore. Her art is a coming together of her history and the desire to change a present she cannot accept, and in it we see the power of a woman who looks at a seemingly insurmountable obstacle and rolls up her sleeves. In the visual journey she takes us on through the arts and culture scene in Central and South Asia we see how art is used to give expression to lost voices and forgotten histories. Fatimah’s reflections on some of her favourite contemporaries around the Asian art scene in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan is an invaluable insight into thriving movements and revolutionary inspiration that we don’t often get exposed to here in Australia, and Fatimah herself embodies the spirit of this art movement driven by resistance. Check out the rest of Fatimah’s work: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fatimahhossaini/?hl=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/HossainiFatimah?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fatimah.hossainii

By Jessica L and Irisa R. (Editor) It’s interesting- when we first think of racism, we think of all the events that occur in America. We tend to distance ourselves from the racism in our own country, because we don't want to acknowledge it as an issue. In the supermarket aisle you see a bespectacled man standing casually in the bread aisle. He is looking around nonchalantly, adjusting his glasses as he looks up and sees two women carrying hot cross buns. He moves closer to them and appears to be asking them a question before quickly leaving. The two women look blankly at each other, and one asks the other, “Did you hear what he just said to us..?” “F***king ChingChong…” If you were there, you really would not have been able to tell that this man was a racist, you would assume he was someone’s middle aged uncle. This happened several weeks ago; my friend and I were buying groceries when a racist man verbally harassed us. My friend reacted angrily but I was unnervingly calm and ambivalent, almost unshaken by our circumstance. I simply treated it as something to be swept under the rug. This incident fulfilled my expectations that somehow the xenophobia it unearthed seemed to be as contagious as the virus itself. A friend of ours was kicked by another passenger on the bus, who accused her of carrying the virus. My cousin was on the train home with another Asian woman when she was threatened with a glass bottle. Compared to other sinophobic incidents like those, I thought my situation was not anything burdensome. That incident simply became something to sweep under that already lumpy rug of mine. The bespectacled racist found us at the registers. He had a smug look on his face and we tried to out - walk him but he picked up his pace until he was just close enough to hiss, “Go back to where you came from.” A Tale of Sinophobia Sinophobic sentiments were rampant in newspapers, filled with claims that Chinese immigrants were notorious gamblers, addicted to opium, were stealing the jobs of European workers or threatening the livelihood of white Australians. This anti-Chinese vitriol was enough to slowly incite attacks and riots, like the Lambing Flat Riots, against the Chinese community. Like other minorities, they were constructed as the contemptuous villains in this fairytale of White Colonial Australia. From the very beginning, Sinophobia was linked to public health concerns. For example, quarantines were imposed on compromised countries to reduce the spread of infection but what continued to fester was the idea that inhabitants of those countries were disease - ridden. That they were invasive. Politicians have always encouraged these paranoid sentiments, even suggesting that leprosy was contracted through Chinese made furniture. During the late 1800s, Australia quarantined boats full Chinese people for fear that they were all carriers of smallpox and leprosy. The Sinophobia reached such a heightened craze that it led to enforcing anti-Chinese immigration laws in 1888, which denied them citizenship, voting rights and further prevented any Chinese persons from entering the country. By 1901, The Immigration Restriction Act (or commonly known as the White Australia Policy) prevented any non - white immigrants from settling in Australia. The quarantining of ethnic persons was justified through the language of “sanitary” and “unsanitary”, allowing xenophobia to possess a level of medical justification. Sentiments of “Dirty, Public Health risk, diseased” eventually developed into a starter pack of rhetoric, waiting to be racially weaponised. “You brought the disease here, F***kwits.” So what if he’s racist? Growing up you would hear the subtle racism. You would hear the stereotypes of tiger mums & Kung Fu dads, the twang of “chingchong” or accents in offensive jokes. The micro-aggressions were annoying, frustrating and disheartening but they were simply moments that could be swept under that rug. It was never a knife at our throats, just snide judgements and caricatures of East Asians mentioned in daily conversations. So we learned to laugh at the jokes. Sometimes we would make jokes at our own expense in hopes of distancing ourselves from the discomfort of confrontation. Recently, there have been countless “No More Asians” posters plastered over telephone poles, bus stops and buildings. Reminiscent of the rhetoric of the 1880’s newspapers, with their concerns for the Australian economy and their desperate plea to save the ambiguous “Aussie Culture”. But I just saw it as a micro-aggression, if I started reacting in anger with every micro-aggression my day would come to a screeching halt, always dependent on the haughtiness of a racist. So I acknowledged the existence of such offensive sentiments targeted at people like me and I moved on with my day. The local council filled with naive heroism publicly declared that these posters were unacceptable and proceeded to rip them down, as an act of “solidarity”. But this isn’t enough, it feels like the symptom of the problem is being erased but the reality of the sentiments are still there. With the media reporting on East Asians eating “bat soup” with abhorrent disgust and Trump’s latest tweet of wisdom about the “China Virus”, our gaze is pulled into the chaos of the 24/7 news cycle. The constant exposure to this vitriol, leaves us in this paralysing state of inaction. Stanley Cohen coined this term, ‘Implicatory Denialism,’ where you deny or minimise the psychological, political or moral implications that consequently arise from certain events or situations. Implicatory Denialism is when we brush off racial slurs as just an inconvenices or when politicians dismiss anti-racist speech in an attempt to distance ourselves from the fact that COVID - 19 has only uncovered the racism, it hasn’t created it. It’s when our own Prime Minister responded to the rise of anti-Asian racism with, ‘The virus started in Wuhan, in China, that’s what happened, that’s just a fact. That’s just where it started.” Scomo just called it the “China Virus” without the minimalism of Trump. What fills the vague gaps is a dog-whistle to racists, saying to them that “It’s not racist if it's true”. Is it even a hate crime? The spectrum of racial abuse is not always criminal, sometimes it sits at the strange intersection of violence and a microaggression. On the NSW police website there is a section on “Hate Crimes” filled with information regarding “Why people don’t report?” and reasons to report such incidents. There is a presumption that after a racist incident you need to report it to the police, but to do so you have to ask yourself; would I go to court for this? You also have to ask yourself “in that situation did you feel unsafe or threatened?”, because the answer must be a “Yes” for it to be a hate crime. You must have been emotionally distraught in order to truly accuse someone as a hate crime perpetrator. When hate crimes do eventually get to court they are rarely prosecuted, in Australia there have only been three people from Queensland who have been convicted of hate crimes whilst in NSW there have been no convictions. This does not mean Queensland wins the title for the-Most-Racist-state, rather it solidifies the inadequacy of NSW when providing clear avenues for reporting. The reality is POC’s xenophobic experiences are not communicated or acknowledged to the fullest extent in our current system. You need to be the perfect victim otherwise how can we prove a “hate crime” truly happened. Alternatives of reporting are available from organisations such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Asian Australian Alliance. These organisations are collecting data to quantify the number of hate crimes to prove that sinophobia exists. The problem though is that while data is being collected it is not enough to understand the extent and frequency of sinophobia and the overall xenophobia in Australia. The data is not fully regulated as there is no official agency responsible for recording racism. The lack of cohesion between organisations leaves us in a shrinking room. We never have the evidence to legitimise the growing problem of sinophobia. At the shopping centre, security guards encouraged my friend and I to report the man to the police. But we were five days late and our circumstances no longer fit perfectly into the legal requirements to be classified as a hate crime. We should have said “Yes we felt unsafe”. We should’ve been willing and ready to take this matter to court. But the incident was lacking in criminality; it wasn’t a physical threat, it was just tolerable verbal abuse not warranting the intervention of judges and juries. So we filled in the survey from the Asian Australian Alliance instead of reporting to the police. This still felt inadequate. What we really wanted was for an authority to legitimise discrimination. What Now? In times of crisis systematic racism is amplified, and in Australia it is inseparable from its colonial history. With every retelling of our experience we find ourselves unpacking unacceptable slip-ups in our system’s response to xenophobia. Yet it is important to realise there will never be a quick fix to the two hundred year old problem of racism because there is still so much history left unexamined and trauma left unacknowledged. To start unpacking the problem of xenophobia requires us to be aware of our own complicity in the system. When the racist man started turning his back towards us hiding his smug grin, my friend stood her ground and fiercely shouted, “We can hear you!” I didn’t realise it at the time but what she said couldn’t have been more perfect. She didn't need to insult him and she didn't want to just brush it off as another glass shard underneath that already lumpy rug. It would have been another poster removed, another joke waiting for a laugh and another person brushing off a micro-aggression to get through the day. She wanted him to know and everyone to know that what he said cannot and will not be ignored. I now expect nothing less from the systems put into place to protect all POC. And if that system were to fail us all, leave us unsatisfied and in a constant state of debilitating injustice after injustice, what should we do? We can only hope to fix it for everyone else. For those who have experienced anti-asian racism and want to report it here are the links below: Asian Australian Alliance Human Rights Commission For violent incidents, please call the police. Background Reading Achiume, E., 2020. OHCHR | States Should Take Action Against COVID-19-Related Expressions Of Xenophobia, Says UN Expert. [online] Ohchr.org. Available at: [Accessed 17 May 2020]. Coates, M., 2020. Covid-19 and the rise of racism. BMJ, p.m1384. Cohen, H., 2020. Why Are So Few Hate Crimes Prosecuted In Australia? - ABC News. [online] Abc.net.au. Available at: [Accessed 17 May 2020]. Cohn, S., 2012. Pandemics: waves of disease, waves of hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.*. Historical Research, 85(230), pp.535-555. Devakumar, D., Shannon, G., Bhopal, S. and Abubakar, I., 2020. Racism and discrimination in COVID-19 responses. The Lancet, 395(10231), p.1194. Evlin, L., 2020. Victims Of Coronavirus-Fuelled Racism In Australia Are Speaking Out About Its Impact. [online] SBS News. Available at: [Accessed 17 May 2020]. Fidler, D., 2005. From International Sanitary Conventions to Global Health Security: The New International Health Regulations. Chinese Journal of International Law, 4(2), pp.325-392. Iwamoto, D. and Liu, W., 2010. The impact of racial identity, ethnic identity, Asian values, and race-related stress on Asian Americans and Asian international college students’ psychological well-being. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57(1), pp.79-91. McLaughlin, T. and Serhan, Y., 2020. The Other Problematic Outbreak. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: [Accessed 17 May 2020]. 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The Lancet, 395(10232), pp.1250-1251. Zhou, N., 2020. Survey Of Covid-19 Racism Against Asian Australians Records 178 Incidents In Two Weeks. [online] the Guardian. Available at: [Accessed 17 May 2020]. 1857 'THE CHINESE.—IMPORTATION OF DISEASE.', Adelaide Observer (SA : 1843 - 1904), 29 August, p. 5. , viewed 15 May 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article158114513 1881 'The Chinese aud the Small-pox.', Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), 28 April, p. 3. , viewed 15 May 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article107209865 1887 'WHY THE CHINESE DON'T GO.', Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW : 1876 - 1954), 15 September, p. 4. , viewed 15 May 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article135984907 1888 'THE CHINESE QUESTION. 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By Irisa R. and Lamisa H. When we first started talking about colourism, emotions that we had buried, started resurfacing. We had spent our lives fighting against colour bias, but we realised that it's hard to unlearn what we've spent our whole lives internalising. Especially when, a billion dollar industry is betting on us all to believe that dark skin is undesirable. Irisa; Did you ever want to be forsha? Lamisa: Yeah, all the time. Being a darker Bengali amongst our community, I always struggled and felt like the runt. In my predominantly white public school, I would make jokes about how the flies were attracted to me because I looked like a tree. Or how when I returned from a day in the beach I was basically a 'charcoal chicken.’ My friends would laugh, and I would laugh with them. It’s so strange, I wish I could have told my younger self otherwise. Irisa; Oh god, your friends laughing with you just broke my heart a bit. Alice Walker first coined the term colourism in her groundbreaking novel In Search Of Our Mother’s Garden. She defined it as discriminating on the basis of skin colour within your own ethnic group, where it manifests in 'prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their colour.' The problem right now, is that not enough people view this as an issue. It means that Lupita Nyong’o gets rave reviews (and an Oscar!) but her skin is still whitened in magazines. It’s the fact that famous Bollywood actress Kajol felt she needed to whiten her skin to be successful. Or where K- Pop idol Kwon Yuri has her skin constantly lightened in magazines and fan edits. Do You Like The Colour Of Our Skin? Lupita Nyong’o defined colourism as the "daughter of racism" and this encapsulates how interconnected these two structures are. A person’s skin colour is an irrefutable visual fact, and something that just exists whereas race is simply a quasi-scientific construction used to classify and degrade a certain race of people. Whether we like it or not, our skin colour is a loaded signifier of identity. We derive value from it and it affects us both in private and public interactions. Irisa; Yeah, I remember at the end of year 12, I came back from a holiday where I had allowed myself to tan to my natural colour. I felt really confident with how my skin looked but when I came back to Sydney one of the first things I was told was, 'you have become too Kalo (black)’ and that ‘it doesn't look nice.’ At the time, it really rattled my confidence. So many of us dismiss colour bias as an unfortunate but acceptable part of our lives. We look at it almost like a personal problem, but that does not minimise its social, economic and political impact. Vedantam’s novel, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, discussed how even the most liberal-minded progressives agree that the colour of your skin determines who gets ahead and who stays behind. It can solely determine where you will work (or whether you will even be hired), who you will marry and whether you have the opportunity to make a number of these choices for yourself. It’s not a coincidence that the most successful people are light-skinned counterparts of the black and brown community. Amani Al Khatahtbeh, an Arab American activist and the founder of Muslim Girl spoke poignantly on the issue of colour bias, 'privilege has been on my mind a lot this year: If I was a Muslim woman with darker skin...then I doubt I’d be getting as much airtime as I am right now. Maybe not nearly as many people would care about hearing what I have to say.' Did Colourism Appear Out Of Thin Air? To try to identify the exact trajectory of colourism is like trying to trace the origins of racism, it can feel pointless. However, we need to understand how this issue precedes us in order to tackle it. For every country where the colourism mindset runs rampant they have a shared history. Beyond the Pale proved that countries colonised by Europeans, ‘cemented and generalised the privilege attached to light skin.' Essentially, there may have been colour bias pre - colonisation but Europeans embedded colourism into the structures of the societies and the laws in the countries they colonised and they colonised 80% of the world. There are other factors that set up these countries ripe and ready for this colourist mindset. When the British colonised India they institutionalised the caste system, what once was an issue that was isolated from community to community and varied in impact and practice was mechanised and used as a tool to oppress. They used this tactic, or something similar in the other hundred countries they colonised stretching from Sri Lanka and Egypt to Jamaica and Kenya. Similarly, America’s involvement in the Vietnam and the Korean war capitalised on pre - existing colour bias by marketing Western skin and features as 'ideal'. The first clinics for double eyelid surgery opened during the war along with the initial sales of skin whitening products. The film Parasite reflects how the modern day struggle of class aspirationalism is experienced in the bodies of darker skinned Koreans. An implicit but powerful statement about how co-dependent class and colour continues to be. It’s In Our Culture A preference for a light shade is so deeply embedded in the fabric of so many cultures and devastatingly most of our lessons on colour bias begin in the home. The article Globalisation and Whitefacing in Asia explores how the skin whitening industry repackaged wealth, success and opportunity and sold it as whiteness. Most American, Australian and European cosmetic brands jumped on this bandwagon and continue to market their products in South Asia and East Asia as lightening products or more overtly as whitening products. Convincing us that whiteness can now be attained by anyone and everyone which will allow us to stand apart or more simply above the ‘darker ethnic mass’ (if you can’t beat them join them). Lamisa: Umm yea I was so so young, maybe seven, when I was first introduced to ‘Fair and Lovely.' I remember thinking, ‘woah, there’s actually something out there that could fix me.' I don’t know why my mum didn’t question it. I asked my Aunty to buy it for me as a gift and I would rub it into my baby face. A few years later we returned to Bangladesh for a wedding and at the beauty parlour the lady powdered my skin until it looked shaada. But when I looked in the mirror, I was so horrified that I started crying. It just didn’t look like me. Money, Money (Must Be Funny In A White Man's World) We need to push for a ban on all these products but how can that be possible when it generates between 10 to 20 billion dollars a year? The banning of advertisements won’t stop the sales of skin-whitening creams, because the demand is still there, where the World Health Organisation found that 60% of Indian women use lightening creams and 77% of Nigerian women use whitening creams. The world still associates light skin with beauty. The majority of the Bollywood industry fails to speak out against colourism. Fair and Handsome, founded in 2005, is supported by the biggest movie star in the world, Sharukh Khan. Imagine if this same man starring in these advertisements walked away from a skin-lightening cream instead of recommending it? Seema Hari explains, an action like that would in itself change so many minds and we agree. Now this issue is borderless. An Instagram account of ‘Whitenicious’, one of the most problematic accounts out there promote thinly-veiled colourism, with the founder explaining, “it’s a personal choice to want to change your skin colour." This account boasts 105k followers and is followed by countless celebrities. But this ridiculous standard of beauty excludes the majority of the world’s population, only benefitting the companies that feed off these insecurities. Our Good Mates Bollywood and Hollywood Lamisa; When did you first realise that you wanted to pursue this idea of lightness? Irisa; Mmm it’s difficult because I’m sure watching both Bollywood and Hollywood films from as young as I can remember already taught me that women with lighter skin are more successful, find love more easily and are just in general happier. But when I was about fourteen, I would lather on layer upon layer of sunscreen and refuse to play sports outside on days that I declared were ‘too sunny’ because I never, ever wanted my skin to tan to its natural colour. I wanted to look like the people I saw on screen and they always happened to have lighter skin. Bollywood film director Ghaywan explained how the fact that colourism isn’t even addressed is exactly the problem with the current entertainment industry. With Hollywood it’s almost common knowledge, where Zendaya, a lighter skin actress, expressed, “I’m Hollywood's acceptable version of a black girl", and when Oprah asked Lupita Nyong’o whether colourism still existed in Hollywood she just responded with a I-can’t-believe-you-would-even-have-to-ask-that, ‘hah!’. While Bollywood is not the root cause for the preference of fair skin, its continued patronage has contributed to the growth of the fairness cream industry in India. It’s almost more insidious because as sociologist Sanjay Srivastava explains colourism isn’t even seen as a problem, ‘brownface’ and ‘blackface’ is used as a common trope for entertainment purposes. It steadily reinforces the association between dark skin and undesirability. Resistance Against This Colourist Mindset There has been a stream of resistance against colourism in recent years. Famous Bollywood Actress Nandita Das launched a Dark is Beautiful Campaign and the University of Texas launched an #UnfairandLovely. These two movements seek to redefine what is considered beautiful. This week Nina Davuluri, an Indian American who won Miss America, is releasing a new series on colourism called COMPLEXion that will highlight the effect and extent of colourism around the world. Cosmetic companies like LiveTinted and Fenty were founded on the basis that they would accomodate for every shade, changing the cosmetics game permanently and forcing other brands to catch up. But we also need laws to protect us. The Therapeutic Goods Act in Australia protects consumers from seeing, or purchasing, products that overtly market themselves as ‘skin whiteners.’ Recently, Bangladesh banned eight whitening creams that have a percentage of mercury that is 600 times the permissible limit. Following suit, India introduced a Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisement) Bill which seeks to prohibit marketing any skin whitening products. It is definitely a step forward, but progress is slow. Unless our culture evolves these laws are just aspirational. Lamisa; Just two days ago, a shop owner told my aunty, “Your daughter is so beautiful, she doesn’t even look Bengali”. I wish I could have told her that she was discriminating against her own ethnicity and that this was colourism disguised as a compliment. Irisa: Yes this is so true! It’s just frustrating. Once I asked my mum how it felt to be considered forsha in a community that adored it. She laughed and then said, "well I grew up in Sydney in the 70s and because of the way I looked people used to call me ‘Blackie’ and everything else you could imagine so when people would compliment my skin, I would just have to go to school the next day to be insulted for my skin. It's a vicious cycle so don't ever let it get to you." The Political Is The Personal Personal growth can't be conflated with political action but it's a damn good starting point. Irisa; When did you start resisting this mindset? Lamisa: I started resisting it when the people around me told me to love my skin and my features. Now, I wear sunscreen to protect it and not as a way to stop getting darker. Yet, the colourism still manifests in different ways. I try not to choose filters that make my skin lighter but I wouldn’t necessarily choose a filter that makes me look darker. I still sometimes fall into equating light skin with beauty when I see it in other people. It is a frustrating experience. We need to first decolonise our minds. Address it in our own communities, connect with other advocates, and ensure the generations younger than us don't aspire to this idea of lightness. Last of all, colourism needs to be handled in the same way as any other structural issue. It isn’t about self-actualisation or loving your skin. It is about pushing for laws that prohibit marketing and selling skin lightening products. It’s about holding these cosmetic companies accountable when they use colourist marketing tactics. It’s also about being this type of friend in every story. Lamisa; My primary school friend Amani had these beautiful sea green eyes, I used to describe them as dazzling eyes, and I remember once turning to her saying, ‘omg I wish I had your eyes,’ and she turned to me and said ‘why would you want my eyes? Your eyes are so beautiful, they look like the night sky’, and after that I never thought about the colour of my eyes in the same way. Some interesting background reading; Aisha Phoenix 2014, ‘Colourism and the politics of beauty’, Feminist Review, vol. 108, no. 1, pp. 97–105. Das, P 2020, 'Ban On Fairness Cream Ads | Effect On Market, Advertising And Society,' [online]. Available at: [Accessed 11 May 2020]. Davids, LM, van Wyk, J et al 2016, ‘The phenomenon of skin lightening: Is it right to be light?’, South African Journal Of Science, vol. 112, no. 11-12, pp. 1–5. Paul, A 2016, ‘'Beyoung the Pale? Skinderella Stories and Colourism in India’, vol. 14, pp. 133–145,150. Sarkar, M., 2020, 'Why Does Bollywood Use The Offensive Practice Of Brownface In Movies?. [online] CNN. Available at: [Accessed 11 May 2020].

Palwasha A. & Tahmina R. (Editor) “So long as there is still a tomorrow, a next moment, there is hope, there is change, there is redemption. What is lost, is not lost forever” - Yasmin Mogahed. And so begins Ramadan; it’s like this month calls us to forgiveness. While many Muslims fast during this month, how many of us devote our effort and our time toward practicing forgiveness in all its forms? Ramadan is an emotional experience for many Muslims, a turning of our faces to light in the hopes of finding greater peace and strengthening our connection with our creator. It’s a time to reflect on our habits and to try to improve them in the month that we’re most encouraged to do so. A part of this process is examining our treatment of others; we reflect on our relationships with our friends, families, colleagues and forgiving them for any resentment we hold as well as beseeching their forgiveness ourselves. But how can we, in seeking forgiveness in all its forms, allow this mindset to transcend into our relationship with ourselves? What is the necessity of forgiving ourselves? When someone ‘fails’ in a way that they cannot reconcile with their faith, more often than not we fall into patterns of punishing ourselves for our missteps. The necessity for forgiving ourselves then becomes one of the most important things we can pursue in our practice of our faith. This is an active process and it is not as simple as passively accepting that ‘we all make mistakes.’ To quote Yasmin Mogahed, “oftentimes people misunderstand the concept of forgiveness as ‘turning the other cheek.’” This is not the case. Forgiveness is not an act that enables falling into or continuing bad habits, but rather giving ourselves space to move out of them. One of the most essential aspects of fasting is the practice of self-discipline. This same self-discipline is the cornerstone of practicing forgiveness of oneself. It is not a single epiphany or something that can be crossed off on a to-do list - it is a process that requires consistent reflection and a promise that we will strive to build new habits around the way we think and speak of ourselves. It’s definitely easier spoken of than accomplished. Why is this particularly difficult for women? The onus of perfecting our observance of our religion more often than not falls unevenly on women and when at some point in their lives they inevitably fall short, they do not have the same resources and assurances as men do that there is still room for them to explore and experience their faith. Islam is a faith that preaches forgiveness, but many of the cultures that carry it forward can be incredibly unforgiving. We therefore cannot talk about forgiveness in our faith without addressing the fact that both are experienced at the same time and cause, especially for women, hidden shame that is never addressed. One informs the other and sometimes one conflates the other. In so many spaces, as women, we internalise that our margin of error is smaller in faith. Even in our own communities, we see how the pressure of gossiping eyes is put on girls from birth, in a way that it never is with males, even well into adulthood. The result is that young girls looking for answers to some of the most conflicting questions have to rely on lectures that fail to consider them in their making and prevent them from feeling that they have a space to grow in their religion. Many of us can think of instances where we’ve felt that our religion was being used against us as a way of encouraging fearfulness. As women, finding faith on our own terms is behest by a myriad of obstacles. Many of these problems are borne of patriarchal cultures and one of the most damaging consequences of this is that it puts men in control of women's redemption arcs. But in a mind where you are crippled by fear, there can never be the peace that comes with forgiveness. How do our communities play into unforgiving cultures? We all know the importance of separating culture from religion, but it is difficult to always remember this. Although passing judgement of another’s practice of their faith is strictly prohibited for us, it is something that has become so prevalent in our communities. It is easy to guess someone’s ‘practice’ from an observation, conversation or making assumptions. But just as we cannot look at someone and assume they are inferior, we also cannot assume that they are superior. In moving beyond these barriers of judgment, we create for ourselves the space to better realise and practice our faith free of feelings that we are not good enough. When people stray from their visions of who they want to be, it cannot be the be all or end all of their faith and if it is, there is such a loss. A Final Word. Now imagine… That instead of relying on material that could wholly alienate them from their faith, children with difficult questions stumble upon writing that promotes forgiveness in our faith as something that is attainable at every stage of our relationship with Allah (swt). “Whoever draws close to me by the length of a hand, I will draw close to him by the length of an arm. Whoever draws close to me by the length of an arm, I will draw close to him by the length of a fathom. Whoever comes to me walking, I will come to him running. Whoever meets me with enough sins to fill the earth, not associating any idols with me, I will meet him with as much forgiveness” - Sahih hadith reported by Abu Dharr (ra). Writing this piece caused us to reflect on many of our experiences in nurturing our faith. We hope that reading this will allow you to walk away with an understanding of the necessity of forgiving yourself on this journey and moving the conversation away from hierarchies of spirituality and more towards the internal journey of connection with Allah (swt) that it is. In creating this space, it will make it easier for everyone, regardless of how closely they resemble goodness in the eyes of their community or even themselves, to remember that religion, spirituality and the very act of striving is something that no one can be excluded from.