The case for silence.

Silence = violence.

 Let’s just stop for a minute.

I’ve seen this slogan in memes and social posts and placards in every platform. We see it, it rhymes and boom: repost, repost, repost. Silence doesn’t equal violence. Silence is sacred. It is the space between words, it’s the pause, the no-thing that makes sound precious. Silence is a place of reckoning, of contemplation, of joy, grief, respect, confusion and turning in. There are so many words in the world right now, so much noise, but what is actually transmuting to action and sustainable co-designed change?

 For all the vigorous, emoji filled posts accusing people of wilfully destroying marginalised communities through their silence, I gently and consciously want to address the power of silence and dialogue to move towards change. We don’t need more accusations, more judgement, more comparison, more division and separation, we need to listen, to ask, to understand our part and be accountable, then to act in lockstep with the needs of Indigenous Australians, not what we think is right.

 Silence is complex and nuanced, and to indiscriminately make it the problem is to miss the iceberg for the tip. Yes, 100%, we must address systemic racial inequity. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, we must be courageous and vulnerable and step in when we see injustice and the mechanisms of privilege being wielded and weaponised without intervention, always.

Yes, we need to give up our privilege, which means radically assessing the distribution of wealth, health, education and power across all of the structures the majority of us inhabit silently and comfortably. For the same reasons that woman are not 50% of boards and corporate executives, these structures are resilient and protected in subtle ways by all those who gain from power and privilege,

In Australia, the Indigenous community has told us, unequivocally what it needs in relation to being able to have conciliation and strengthen culture. They have told us so many times through all the mechanisms available and have watched over and over as these ideas and statements and pleas are relegated to a drawer in a cabinet and another round of government comes along and starts the cycle all over again.

We have been un-silent across generations by taking their children, (still) not recognising their sovereignty, incarcerating their people at disproportionate rates, sending in military interventions to solve a problem we made at colonisation and refusing to give the people who we stole the country from a constitutional voice to parliament. What part of that isn’t violence?

That the recent protests about the ongoing deaths in custody come off the back of an American tragedy is telling in the lack of action that has happened since 1991 when the Royal Commission on deaths in custody released its recommendations. Why haven’t we been protesting en masse every time another family loses one of their beloved people in an Australian jail cell or back of a paddy wagon? The communities and families impacted haven’t been silent. They have been highlighting the issues plaguing them for decades, but the majority who could do something, didn’t. Is silence violence, or is inaction when you have the power to change but choose not to a far more insidious violence? Yes, it’s time to seize the momentum of the lens being shone on the terrible fissures in what we like to believe is a civil society, for sure. But what are you going to do with all this awareness to make change? Once the placard is put in the garage and the photos of your activism uploaded to Instagram, what then?

Our cultural problem is we yearn for a slogan (especially if it rhymes), to put a salve on the action bias that makes us feel better, there, we did something. Phew. I’m not dismissing the power of activism and rallying, it absolutely has its place in engagement, visibility, disruption and alignment. But like climate change before it, and the rallies and petitions that accompanied that moment in time, we have a systemic problem that needs actual dismantling from above. That system needs us and them to stop making false barriers and separations, and to value human life and the collective joy of existence above possessions, wealth and the deep illusion of their happiness and permanence.

 If COVID has taught us anything, it is that where there is a will, we can shut down a country, ground a global fleet of airlines, fund billions to keep people’s livelihoods afloat. It took a pandemic and the threat of mass deaths to do so, but what if we count up the bodies from all of the injustice just in Australia – suicide, malnutrition, domestic violence, neglect, drugs, deaths in custody, far more than COVID and yet we accept these as part of what it is to be Australian.

I’m as guilty as every other Australian who hasn’t engaged often and meaningfully with their local mobs, who hasn’t sustained outrage at all the intergenerational inequities and doggedly pursued Parliamentarians for legislative and constitutional change and made it a part of every policy. Who hasn’t learned about the language of the first nation country they live on and the actions they can take to pay respect to their customs and stories that create it. I’ve done none of that. Yet.

I’ve been thinking about the problem of white privilege and what I can practically, respectfully and purposefully do for a while. It has been growing with urgency within me, the recognition that I do more in international settings than I ever have in my own country. That knowing is unpleasant, I’m sitting in the problem, in discomfort. Silently. While on someone else’s country that I ‘own’. I’ve been silently holding space to light up my own shame and guilt and work with it to understand how my privilege holds me separate and apart from being able to be an ally in word and in deed.

 Is this violence? No. It’s an attempt to understand the problem so as not to contribute to more post-colonial imposition. Do I feel awkward and insensitive and stupid from ignorance and like I might fuck up conversations and actions along the way. Yes. Will it stop me from trying until we get real change? No. Do I need to promote my brand by broadcasting to the world what I’m doing – hell no. That will be the silence of being in service, the deed not the doer.  Can we all take a moment together to do this work, and like the alchemy of standing together in protest globally continue to reject status quo of division and inequity? We can. Will we? I hope so.