Kurt Shean

How would you define prejudice?
 
I would define it as judging before really knowing anything. So the judgements that we have, before we have any real knowledge about anything.
 
 
Does prejudice have a negative connotation?
 
Well definitely. I think that’s what it’s come to  be a negative thing. I think judgment of all kinds has come to be seen as a negative thing. Just recently that I’ve started to realise what that means, that it’s almost like we’ve taken away our ability to judge at all which I think probably the thing is that, and it sounds like what you were saying to that, we are judging, it’s just if we think it’s a negative thing then we kind of have these different layers of things to cover it up; cover up those judgments. So we don’t know, we don’t understand. That brings me to something I’ve noticed, it’s a little bit funny, a little bit interesting about in particular a few indigenous elders that I’ve known, who on some level, I was kind of surprised to see that they were able to deal with people that were just out and out prejudiced.  And what I believe now, is that now looking back, that what they saw was that they understood was that those people understood their prejudices and most people then just didn’t, they were just trying to hide behind them or cover them up, so it’s almost like that thing of better the enemy that you know, than the one that you don’t know.
 
 
Experiences that taught him to understand his prejudices
 
One of the things that comes to mind it was when I was in my 20s, I lived in Washington DC [we say prejudice and we think we’re just talking about racial prejudice, but there are a lot of different prejudices that we have] my flat mate was African American, and it was just a whole different world in a way, that he opened my eyes to; just living with him. One time in particular he took me to a party, and it was the first time I had ever experienced being the only white person in the whole party, and it really showed me a lot of things about myself in that moment. One of the things I realised was that ‘oh so this is what it’s like, in a lot of ways, for African American people walking out in the world, in their lives, everyday’ they just find themselves in a sea you know, they’re the only ones, a lot of the time. And there was also this funny moment where my friend came up to me and said ‘ oh, I have to introduce you to this person, you have to meet this person, you have to meet this guy’, so we go, and then all of a sudden, there I am standing in front of the other white guy at the party, and I thought ‘ yeah of course, he thought we should meet each other because, we’re the white guys’. And then I suppose the other experience I had was I lived on Palm Island, in an Indigenous community in Queensland, as a teacher for a year, and the same thing, you know, that experience of being a minority. And at different times, feeling both my own prejudices, and at times, other people’s prejudices really rise up and I guess one of the big things that I came away from that with, is that I saw that the things that we see as indigenous issues are just more easily visible to us if we are non-Indigenous. We see those and we go ‘oh that’s their issues’ whereas there’s all these issues that we have  as non-Indigenous people. I guess living on Palm Island really helped me to highlight those issues, about disconnection, about alcoholism, about abuse; all these different things that happen in the broader Australian community. One of the crucial things that happened for me at the ed of my time on Palm Island, I had taught this class all year, I had gotten connected to the class and their families; lots of the kids live near their parents and grandparents, and I felt I had really gotten to a point where I could actually work with them and help them. There were a series of reasons why it wasn’t going to work for me to stay, and I remember I was just standing on the jetty one day, talking to this old man about how I was feeling really bad about leaving the kids. And he just looked at me and said “listen, don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine, we’ve always been fine, our only real issue is ? you”. He said “ you go back and you deal with your people”, that was something that hit home very hard, and it helped me to kind of turn everything around and say well it’s obvious that these prejudices that we have about indigenous communities and what goes on in indigenous communities, that those issues are our issues, that they are all of Australia’s issues. I think that another prejudice that we kind of go ‘well that’s their issues’. And I guess in some way that’s the crucial thing about prejudice, that its about separating ourselves, in our minds, to say ‘that’s over there and we’re over here’. Whereas when I started I think I said my definition was about judging, in some ways I’d say also that its about separating. It would be difficult to have a prejudice about something we see ourselves as really connected to. We first have to see ourselves as disconnected from that. It exists inside our bodies; if we try to see this ideologically, if we try to see it politically, we’re missing a crucial part that it is actually happening inside our bodies. Which then comes down to major western prejudice, which is against our bodies. We see the mind as being supreme, and the body as being lesser. I’ll also touch on one thing that Uncle Max, who is the elder that I spent the most time with, is constantly bring our awareness back to is that prejudices around human prejudice and the way that we see ourselves as being superior and being greater than the other creatures of the earth, and the way that that then affects everything. His big thing is that the only way we can come to reconcile with each other; between people and races, is to start by reconciling ourselves with the earth and our connection there. And I think that really shows up. We have a long standing prejudice against people who are closer to the earth, who are living in harmony with the ways of the earth.


In your experience working on an Indigenous community, did it take time to connect?
 
I would definitely say it did take me a while, and that on some levels was a thing of getting to know people. But I did see a clear difference between myself and the other teachers there, in that as time went on I made more friends in the community and id have people coming over to the house quite often, and that didn’t really happen with the other teachers; they wouldn’t necessarily have that connection and it definitely made a difference. The principal’s wife was a Palm Islander and he had a perspective in that way and he talked about talking to the kids about their parents and talking to the kid’s parents so in a way trying not to be the only authority in their lives, if I had a connection to their mums and dads, then it was that interconnection that gave true authority. I definitely found that the more I was able to work with that, that it worked much better for them. And just that thing of dropping some of the ideas of how it’s supposed to be, that the teacher really is disconnected from the students, and definitely allowing more connection to happen. I mean it was harder in some ways because that takes time and effort, but it was definitely very helpful. That prejudice comes out when people aren’t connected; it was the teachers who were the least connected to the community who had the most prejudice. It’s kind of a vicious cycle, because you have the least connection, you have these greater prejudices, and because you have these great prejudices you’re going to find it difficult to connect to people as well. So it just keeps going round and round. In that scenario to be able to let in this notion that maybe it was about looking at yourself rather than at the community, and looking at where you’re coming from. That’s another big thing that Uncle Max was constantly saying to people was to find out where you’re from. Find out where you’re connected to. I think singularly he’s been the biggest influence in me beginning to search out and discover about my Celtic roots, my Slavic roots. That’s one of the things that’s always run through to me. I think it’s a quote by James Baldwin, an African American philosopher that said “no one was white until they came to America”. There are no white people in Europe, there’s French and there’s German and there’s Slavic people and Celtic people, but there were no white people. Whiteness was created in the new world. I think that kind of a prejudice to, is to kind of believe that we can know people and connect to people because they’re racially similar to us, but that might not be so true, if we look at the connections a little deeper, we may not be as connected. That was the purpose of whiteness in a way, to connect people who would have been disconnected. In a way it could be seen as a positive thing, but it was almost always used as ‘you were white because you weren’t black or brown’.
I think sometimes they talk about it as colourism, almost distinct to racism, where people who are light-skinned are given that higher status.

We got a DNA test done as well, and discovered that there’s Nigerian connection in my heritage, and looking back and going ‘oh that would have been like great, great, great, great grandparents, it would have been right at the time of the slave trade. And just imagining that scenario, is that at some point there was like a grandmother who possibly, which was a common thing that happened was the raping of slaves by their owners. So then the grandmother was obviously African; black Africa, and the mother might have been brown and that grandchild could have possibly looked entirely white. That thing of having to deny their grandmother, and to then take up being white, and at that time it was to be a human; to be white was the only access to being a full person. That’s the other thing that’s probably interesting about what’s going on right now, and I think this is stirring up the question about prejudice as well, is that we’re starting to get a picture, and I don’t know if you’ve talked a bit about critical race theory, this thing of really looking at the systematic effects to racism over the years and the way there we are now at a position where I think in the last 50 years we have tried to see everybody as equal. There’s this interesting paradox that then happens there, in that we can then go ‘oh well if we’re all equal then everybody should have the same chance, and so if black or brown people aren’t succeeding as well as white people its just because they’re not as capable’. That then puts on this new layer of prejudice, because we can’t uncover and see the way that systematic oppression has this long-term effect.


Not staying entirely quiet and at least stating an opposition to that idea, helps people to know that you don’t accept that.
One thing I discovered when I was teaching on Palm Island, I got to a state of being burnt out, and I realised it was because I just got into everything, I was just up for any argument, any issue. I had this one experience recently where I was at a camp with Uncle Max and there were 70 Indigenous men from all over southern Victoria. Again it was a situation of being one of maybe three white people in the camp and it was wonderful, but the one part that I found was challenging was at one point we were visiting some sites and as we were driving along we pulled into a couple of small country towns to get things and all of a sudden I was looking and going ‘oh, I’m seeing things from a very different side here, I’m viewing the town from being with the Indigenous men’ and seeing what it looks like for them. The way that people would look at them, and there was a combination of people who were fine with them, there were some who were maybe overly friendly which was a funny thing too, and then people who were just really uncomfortable to be around. At one point there was actually an incident where these police drove up, and it was one of those really obvious things where they were obviously coming and talking to us. Later in the evening I was talking to some of the men and I was like ‘I can’t believe this’, I was stomping my foot a little bit, and realising looking at them ‘oh well this isn’t anything new to you, you knew all of this, you know what it’s like, you’ve experienced this every day.’ The next day one of the guys said “you’ve only been black for five days and already you hate those white bastards” meaning he realised I was getting quite upset, in a way I was feeling a prejudice against the white community members. I’ve realised that since that experience being on that camp, there have been moments where I really have struggled, and realised that I’m looking at my own prejudice against other white people. And I think that’s the realty too, that can happen as well as another type of prejudice and having to work through that and come to the other side of it.