The feminist struggle against the oppression of women has expressed itself in a commitment to gender equality — to winning equal rights for women, to gaining more access for women to jobs, to equal pay and to ending violence by men against women.
All of these struggles have been hard fought and have been important struggles. But for the big majority of Indigenous women, racism has a much greater impact on our lives than sexism. Indigenous women are dying up to 20 years younger than non-Indigenous women. We are dying from preventable diseases in a wealthy, First World country. We are being locked up in prisons at a much greater rate than non-Indigenous women. On average, Indigenous women and men are the poorest in the country.
For Indigenous women in Australia, our emancipation is closely linked to the struggle against racism and for land rights. We cannot speak about the liberation of Indigenous women in Australia, unless we first speak out and oppose the racism of both Coalition and Labor governments.
Many white people, including many white feminists, conceive of racism as being the expression of individual prejudice against black people by white people. They therefore fall into the trap of thinking racism can be overcome through individual acts of "consciousness-raising" or individual expressions of "reconciliation".
Racism, however, is a social practice that is used to support the structure of capitalist social relations, which are organised around the production, and accumulation of private profit. As Malcolm X said: "You can't have capitalism without racism."
Racism has been used by capitalists to pit working people — including working women — against each other by denying to people in non-white racial groups benefits and life opportunities available to whites, turning the former into a super-exploited labour force.
The Australian pastoral industry, for instance, was built on the super-exploitation of Aboriginal workers, most of whose wages were retained by their employers or placed in government-run trusts and never paid to them. The same thing happened to Aboriginal women domestic servants. This was a system of virtual slave labour which lasted into the 1970s. Yet until very recently, there was little, if any, outcry about this legalised theft of workers' wages by the predominantly white trade union movement.
For Indigenous women in Australia, our struggle is therefore not just against gender oppression. It is a struggle to also overcome oppressions based on racism and economic exploitation, as well as a struggle to overcome the legacy of colonialism.
The heart of the struggle for Indigenous women in Australia is to be rid of all forms of social oppression, all of which are born from a society divided between exploiters and exploited.
To win our full emancipation, the women of the world, what ever their race, need to be part of a feminist movement that fights not only for gender equality but also for the rights of all people to be free of racism, poverty and exploitation.
To win our full emancipation, women need to be part of a feminist movement that links up with all the oppressed of the world, whatever their gender.
To win our full emancipation, women, whatever their race, need to be part of a feminist movement that recognises that the strongest movement for the liberation of women is one which includes both women and men who are committed to fighting not only for gender equality but for ending a system that has enabled a tiny minority of people to become obscenely rich through the exploitation of working people's labour.
Once this becomes the heart of our struggle, then we will be part of a movement that has the potential to truly liberate women.
Kim Bullimore
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 4, 2004.
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