Send Her Back

I wrote the following article for the New York Times in response to the recent “Send Her Back” chant at a political rally in the United States. My article was partially quoted in Australia Letter, on 27th July 2019. Read the full article below:

Send Her Back, by Ria Bleathman

I grew up in 1970’s southern Tasmania and endured unrelenting racial abuse during these years. I was called every racial epithet known, even a ‘licorice all-sort’. I was spat at and had an empty bottle of beer thrown at me. Others tried to convince me that I had been adopted. A colleague once told me that my dark skin made me “look dirty” whilst a supervisor suggested that, to help my career, I should “stay out of the sun”.

I was regularly told to “go back to where you came from” but only after I had asserted myself, whenever I fought back. It’s the last refrain of those who expected me to remain the victim.

Not only am I not foreign, but my lineage is completely Anglo-English. My father’s convict forebear was one of the so-called Dorset rioters and transported to Van Diemen’s Land as a convict in 1830 for the term of his natural life. He was effectively a ‘political prisoner’ and therefore convict-royalty. My maternal forebear was an Englishman who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1807 and established a major orchard  on Tasmania’s east coast. There is a street named in honour of my pioneering family. So I am likely to more claims to being ‘Australian’ than those who told me to ‘go back to where you come from’.

Being asked every day “where do you come from?” or “what’s your ethnic background” or “where did you get that sun-tan” or “your fake tan’s working” or “you must spend hours in the sun” diminishes me in some way. These are questions that are not applied to those who are deemed to be white Anglo Saxons. I am deemed otherwise. For them, it seems, I don’t ‘fit’ into a convenient label or category. I am not black but I am not exactly white. Their questions were, and still are, reminders of my “otherness”, my “different-ness” or reasons why I am not like them.

Even when I explain away my background I am then “otherised” by their questions “…but you must have some foreign blood in you?” or “but you come from somewhere else”. Sometimes I surrender and say, “Yes, I’m Spanish” just to be rid of them. They then seem self-satisfied that I have validated my otherness and therefore validated their own sense of self. I guess every dog needs a lesser dog so they can feel more canine.

Despite these people classifying me by their precepts of identity, I did not view my colour as being part of my identity nor is it a measure of the experiences that shaped my life. I looked at my accusers and saw in them something that I did not want to become. Instead, I embraced my difference as a measure of how much I was not them and the greater that difference, the further away from them I was, and the better I felt.

It was something of a badge of honour to have lived with this daily onslaught and not been damaged or harmed in any way. But I was wrong. The ‘Send Her Back’ chants are those same words used to diminish and humiliate me. I never thought I would hear these words again in my lifetime. I hope Australia does not go down the same path as the United States. I hope.