Buoyed by shifting political winds, ‘Deport!’ is the new ‘Go back where you come from’ echoed by racists | Ghassan Hage

There is a rise in racist rhetoric surrounding deportation. This is clearly influenced by the increased use of deportation against immigrants and asylum seekers worldwide, particularly in the United States.

But my concern here is not so much the governmental practice itself as the racist language that it has helped disseminate and legitimise: I write something on X, and some random racist who dislikes what I wrote decides that because my name is Ghassan Hage I must be a potentially deportable subject and simply writes “deport” as a comment. Nasser Mashni, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, notes in Crikey that “deport” is “the comment most often left on anything I post”.

On the face of it, there is not much difference between the exclamation “deport!” and the racist injunction, “Go back where you come from.” Both seek to delegitimise someone’s national belonging and fantasise their removal from national space. But despite the similarities there are important differences.

In White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, I argued that “Go back where you come from” was at the heart of the fantasy of white supremacy of subjects who felt entitled to decide who should stay in the nation and who should leave it. Nonetheless, it should be noted that at the time I wrote this, in the 1990s the exclamation operated more like a lament: “I am entitled to tell you to go back where you come from, but I have no means of forcing you to do so, even though I wish I could.”

Apart from not caring where the other “goes back” to – a significant point I leave aside here – “deport!” oozes an entirely different sense of power. One can immediately note that, formally, the exclamation is directed not at the racialised person but at the state. “Deport!” imagines a relation of complicity between the racists and the state whereby the racists can call upon the state to act on their behalf. In practice, however, the racialised person remains the principal addressee. The message is: “Look, I am asking my state to deport you.” Whereas with “Go back where you come from” the racist fantasises a claim of ownership of the nation but not necessarily of the state, with “deport” there is a claim of ownership of both.

As I did in White Nation, I am using “fantasy” in a psychoanalytic sense to understand the way subjects frame their pursuit of both what is desirable and possible. The latter is important: racists are not delusional when their fantasy registers a shift in the political culture of the state. It is the significance of this transformation in racists’ relation to an increasingly racist state that I wanted to highlight here. Those who look at Pauline Hanson’s current discourse and see a continuity with her 1990s pronouncements without noticing the sense of power that permeates her pronouncements and that derives from this shift, miss something important.

This transformation also affects the relation of anti-racists to the state. In Australia, there has historically been a difference between First Nations anti-racism and immigrant anti-racism. The latter has tended to have more faith in the state. Today, particularly in the shadow of the state’s pitiful response to the pulverisation of Gaza and its inhabitants, immigrants from colonised background have increasingly come to experience the institutionalised racism of the state in the way First Nations people do: more as a harmful ecology, a form of generalised toxicity that is being diffused throughout the societal environment than just an event or a structure.

While thinking through the way racism in the shadow of Gaza has become more of a toxic ecology, I read an ethnography of sewage workers in Paris, Basses Oeuvres, by the anthropologist Agnès Jeanjean. I found it particularly stimulating and suggestive. In one passage, a sewage worker draws a distinction between garbage workers and sewage workers. Garbage workers, he argues, can maintain a certain distance between themselves and the garbage they handle. Sewage workers can’t. “On est dans les égouts et on a les égouts en nous” (“We are in the sewers and we have the sewers in us”), he said.

To the extent this distinction holds, we might say we anti-racists today are more like sewage workers than garbos. We must continuously work on de-polluting ourselves and de-polluting our anti-racist instruments and strategies, even as we are trying to de-pollute – and decolonise – the environment in which we live.