The name is absent

394

23.6 Pseudo-white

.,,. it is only when you become part of the
white society that you become an outcast, a
black man₃ or an Aboriginal. In your own
community you are just another person.

It is only when you walk in the white world
that you become a freak₃ a novelty (Coe, in
Tatz, ed., 1975:106).

At the Commonwealth games in Brisbane, in October, 1982, Senator

Bonner proclaimed himself ^,an elder* of his tribe when trying to
legitimate his authority to persuade activists against an illegal
street march.

He was jeered at as an’Uncle Toni’by young Aboriginal activists.

Gilbert and other Aborigines condemn the pseudo-white, the stool

pigeon, the creature of the government.

They are a people without identity because that
identity has been debased and demeaned. You
kick a man, kick a man’s culture long enough and
he will be ashamed of that image. He will try
to pass himself off as a white man. He will
try to deny his black heritage - his black
association. He becomes a ^,pseudo-white^, (Gilbert,
in Tatz,1975:9).

These bitter statements may very well be a confession of personal

attempt at entering white society with the experience of acceptance
on one level as a ’trained pseudo-white’ and rejection at another
level as being a real part of white society. It is the experience
of a world of ’multiple realities’ not in the sense which SchutZ
speaks (Schutz, 1973:207 ff., 339) but in the sense in which there
is not one world, tout court, but an array of worlds, of socially
constructed meanings, almost all of them with negative connotations
for Aborigines, all offering different identities.

23.7   Negative identity

As a group, Aboriginal people have been acted upon, in the sense

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