New idiocy alert in the annals of how to blame others for your own problems
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/lateral-violence-explained-how-to-deal-with-its-many-forms/f6s54whcpWhat is lateral violence and how do we deal with its many forms?Experts in the field identify that colonial violence is at the root of it all. Let's have a yarn about it.
It’s something that can affect our people deeply. From their mental and physical well-being to their sense of self, spirit and identity.
Lateral violence is commonly described as infighting between people from the same group who have historically been oppressed.
Paakantji woman, Dr Theoni Whyman, has investigated lateral violence and its effects throughout her academic career.
"It can look like gossiping, or sabotaging or undermining somebody else's work," she said.
"In my research, another kind of way that people identify that it shows up is when other Indigenous people are kind of tearing somebody else's Indigenous identity down."
Other examples can include both verbal and non-verbal gestures, spreading rumours, shaming, backstabbing, organisational conflict, isolation and exclusion, as well as physical violence and bullying online.
Trying to survive colonial violenceFor the Head of the Department of Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, Professor Bronwyn Carlson, the spotlight is put on the wrong party.
"Instead of turning on and looking at other Aboriginal people and bringing each other down, we need to turn it back on the government, and remember who the actual oppressor here is and who's making these things possible for us to be denied,” she said.
"Lateral violence is us trying to survive colonial violence.”
Dr Whyman elaborates.
"The settler colonisers that came here enforced their idea of who is 'a true Indigenous person' was and then marked everybody against that," she said.
"They marked mob as a half-blood or a quantum or you know, you had one-sixteenth heritage and they kind of defined who an Indigenous person was so that they could reduce us.
You are not seen as Indigenous enough"[They] reinforced this idea that there we're less Indigenous people and that we were a dying race. We've kind of adopted those settler colonial ideas, probably unknowingly, of who an Indigenous person is.
“Some of the systems that settler colonisers set up here, like rounding us up and putting us on missions, and restricting our access to resources. And then telling people that they're not truly Indigenous if they didn't fit their stereotype of who an Indigenous person is."
"That's where the names come from like city black or coconut, you are not seen as Indigenous enough."
