'Activists' 'migrants' 'natives'

The last few days Sally has been staying at my place. She is interested/involved in migration issues in a way similar to me and is here in Athens for a few days before spending a month in Patras as part of her studies and activism. So, we are having some interesting chats about stuff!

Yesterday we continued talking about how you overcome the hierarchies that exist between ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’ and ‘activists’. Exarchia is very much a little bubble of ‘activists’, but it is also a district isolated from the violence migrants experience in Athens. Exarchia is a fairly white neighbourhood. So one of the ways that hierarchies are perpetuated is through a physical separation. This got me thinking about my Greek class, and also about the Afghan occupation...

Talking to a friend after my Greek class earlier that day, I was saying how I wished we could find some practical way of showing solidarity to those students who still aren’t coming to class these last weeks. He said that he didn’t think there was anything the centre could really do; too little resources and too little free time; That also this was their struggle and they needed to organise themselves to find a way to overcome it.

But after our conversation I was thinking how that is exactly the way of looking at it that perpetuates the hierarchy / divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’; it’s an issue that we can choose to engage in or walk away from. The people living in Omonia or Victoria or Agios Pantelimonas

don’t have that choice. Every day there is the violence of poverty and physical attacks and they don’t have a choice to ignore it. So far, many of the students at the Greek class seem to have ‘chosen’ to stay at home. The real conflict between migrants and natives in Athens is the result of a whole multitude of processes. The presence of migrants is a visible part of it. But this act is far from the beginning or the end of the processes that led to it. It’s not just their struggle because we are also a part of that process and to view it that way is also to perpetuate the idea of ‘migrants’ as scapegoats. They get the rough end of a stick that we are complicit in creating.

We all contribute to creating the situation that migrants and natives face on the streets of Athens, and Exarchia, as a place central to creating the idea of an activist community, actually feels very isolated from the realities of life for them.

So the more I turn these ideas over in my head, the more I come to the conclusion that in order to show solidarity you need to ditch your ability to walk away from it all and remove the spatial divide between yourself. Why am I living in Exarchia? Why am I not living in Victoria?

Does this bring us a step closer to true solidarity? Is solidarity similarity? Is this a step towards breaking down – as much as possible – the barriers between us?