#BlackLivesMatter … do they really? – My thoughts, insights & musings

“The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at others expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes Black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we are immediately born into.”

Scott Woods

I am writing this blog from my own position of privilege, I am an educated white male living in an affluent country and I enjoy the conveniences from that affluence. I acknowledge my privilege and that I can only speak from my own perspective and my own experiences. I do not profess to understand the experience of those without the privilege I have nor do I profess to understand the experience of those of us who live with racism, bigotry or discrimination every day. In essence, my privilege is to learn about racism and to write about it instead of experiencing it my whole life.

Please read this blog in the spirit it was shared; with love, compassion and a desire to learn. I wish to state that in no way am I wanting to impose myself on others with my writing but I feel a deep desire to share my thoughts and inspirations with whoever may be reading this and I am very grateful that you are, I warmheartedly wish you all the very best.

My aim is to improve myself and strive to be better each day. Writing is one way I am trying to meet this aim and it is one way I can contribute towards my wish to live in a society that sustainably exists within our planetary limits and that has a loving heart at its core. Hopefully my writing will go some way to showing why this is important and how we can achieve this.

I hope my words inspire some understanding and reflection and above all, some hope.

#BlackLivesMatter … do they really?

Over the last few weeks I have been lost for words to express the helplessness, anger and frustration I have felt, the physical feeling of a tight knot in my gut resultant from my reflections on our systemic racism, oppression, prejudice and bigotry, such evils that are bestowed on so many of our fellow humans. Evil bestowed on people just because they are different. Be it because of the colour of their skin, their gender, their sexuality, the god they may worship, the place they were born.

To try to understand the world in which we live and to gain some broader perspective on life and society, I have often thought over the last few weeks, how would my life be different had I been born black? You know, as a teenager I fantasized of being black … I was very much influenced and inspired by hip hop music, in particular Public Enemy and I wished I could emulate the likes of Chuck D, Professor Griff and Flavor Flav. But now the thought of being black, whilst still based on that sense of respect and awe I’ve had since I was a teenager, is tempered by the systemic injustice I see in the world directed at people for no other reason than the colour of their skin and the realization that it is most likely many of the opportunities and privileges I enjoy would not be available to me. I am thankful for the many indigenous leaders, artists and other commentators for sharing their words and thoughts as this is helping me to understand what it is like to live in their shoes. It is helping me face my own privilege and my own inherent racism. It is telling me that enough is enough. It is time for us all to stand tall and eliminate this curse from our society.

However, I am wary of thinking that maybe now we’ve reached the point where things may finally change for the better. We have been here many times before and nothing has changed. We had a Royal Commission into black deaths in custody 30 years ago yet since that time 432 Indigenous people have died in custody and more than ½ of these people hadn’t even been convicted of a crime. For the sake of our humanity we must fight the insidiousness of racism. As Stan Grant says in his book ‘Australia Day’, “Ideas of race have brought out the worst of humanity – its inspired genocide, holocaust, war, dispossession, colonialism, imperialism, lynchings, slavery, segregation and mass incarceration.”[1] As we have heard often over the last few months in response to the pandemic … ‘we are all in this together’, these words have felt hollow over the last few weeks as I reflect on the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

If we want a just, fair and equal society for all the fight for it will be a long one. The tentacles of white privilege and white supremacy, and many other nefarious perspectives associated with our current paradigm are systemic and institutionalised with many powerful people benefitting from this, and they will fight to keep their privilege and power. I am asking myself, how do we tackle something that has become so systemic in our society? How do we address something that many of us think of as the natural order of things, those people who think life is one big competition and to the winners go all the spoils? How has ‘soul blindness’[2] become such a norm for many of us?

This blog will explore what is racism and how did it come about, the role race and racism has played in Australia and in particular how it has affected our First Nations people and what we can do to address racism which will focus on education, truth telling and power.

But before I get into all that, let’s just be real for a moment. I like to think of myself as an open minded and fair person, I am progressive and I align with the ideals of liberalism, I rate other people on the basis of their character and I believe I am authentic in the way I treat all people equally and I always look for the best in people. But I am a racist. This is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is the truth. I cannot deny that on occasions my thoughts are tainted by a racist slur. Whilst I pull myself up each time this happens, and whilst it doesn’t happen often and is never something that I verbalize, it happens. I hate myself for these thoughts and I wonder how they can occur with everything I believe in, with everything I have learned over the years and for what I want for our world and for humanity. Maybe it’s been hardwired into me through the society I have been brought up in but it’s probably just my own lazy thinking that allows these thoughts to occur. But not only that, I am also silent when I hear derogatory racist language which is not an uncommon occurrence where I live. There is my privilege playing out right there as I don’t want to engage in the inevitable confrontation that will follow if I call out these comments. But by ignoring them I am just another part of the problem and let’s face it, a hypocrite. To be part of the solution I must address my apathy in these situations. I guess the behaviour that I am willing to ignore is the behaviour I accept and if I am to be true to my values, I can no longer accept racism or any other type of discrimination when it presents itself. This is a challenge I have to confront. Anyway, enough of this introspection…

Racism is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called ‘races’ and that there is a fundamental link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality and that some races are naturally superior to others. I’ve read that racism is a quite recent concept but I’m not sure about that. Apparently there is no clear evidence of racism in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages and perhaps it only started to become a thing when the Jews were first discriminated in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, however the Irish might have something to say about this as the English have displayed anti-Irish sentiment since the 1100’s so maybe that’s where this all started. I think the fear of the other has probably been a part of humanity ever since we started to settle in one place and this fear has grown and manifested itself into our psyche ever since leading us to where we are today. Our history is littered with war, conflict and oppression and I guess you can’t do that without thinking you are superior of others, or fear them, or both. I am dumbfounded to think we can judge another on the basis of the amount of melanin in their skin, or by the shape of their eyes, it’s like saying a person with a big nose, or crooked teeth, or is bald is to be distrusted, it’s ridiculous. The only reason we have people with different skin colours is due to the climate our ancestors evolved in. Where it was colder our skin lightened. Climate, coupled with the fertility of the land influenced how we evolved as societies, be it settled or nomadic. The variety of climates and geography found throughout the world has created such a diversity of cultures, which is a wonderful thing and is something I marvel at and believe we should be proud of and to celebrate our humanity, is it not something to be afraid or suspicious of.

Anyway, what I have learned is that as Europeans started to arrive in North America and the Caribbean they found an abundance of land but had no labour to exploit it. The Europeans felt free to steal any land they came across given that Pope Alexander VI had decreed that land not ruled by Christian Kings was free to be claimed, thus any land not ruled by a European was fair game. They initially used Irish bonded labour (as alluded to earlier, anti-Irish sentiment had been reflected in British law for centuries) but the demand for labour exceeded what was available in Ireland leading to the commencement of the Atlantic slave trade. To justify such behaviour concepts such as race and racism have come to the fore. The British Empire is effectively responsible for our current concept of race and racism as Barbados was the first English colony to create a set of slavery laws. The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 established the concept of ‘black’ and ‘white’ and the racial hierarchy between them. Blacks were deemed slaves, property in perpetuity whilst white people would be labelled indentured servants, property for the duration of their contract.[3] By the late 1600’s as the labour needs of land holders increased it was in Virginia where they also legislated a new class of people into existence; the whites. By giving whites certain rights and taking other rights from blacks the language of race first appears in legislation in the US and as we now know, this thinking had spread across the world and been the source of all manner of discrimination and prejudice ever since.

The official rationale for enslaving Africans was they were heathens but in true Christian fashion this was also justified through interpretations of the Bible.[4] I find it astounding that whenever we do something abominable to other people, religion is usually the justification behind it.

Of course, to those in power, the aristocracy, who were used to the idea of keeping peasants under control, the idea of subjugating another person or race and to assume superiority over them in order to create more wealth and power would not be questioned and probably regarded it as the only noble thing to do. Norton says it more eloquently than me, when she said they would have seen “…the plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king.”[5]

From an Australian perspective I’d like to note here that race has been a part of the Australian Constitution ever since its inception, Section 51(26) gives the Commonwealth Government the ability to make laws with respect to the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.[6] I also note that the White Australia Policy was only officially dismantled in 1973, less than 50 years ago.

Stan Grant identifies that race gained power as an idea during the Enlightenment which was the time of a philosophical movement ‘that sought to liberate us from superstition, to demolish hierarchy, to elevate reason and bind us to a universal humanity where the individual was freed from the bonds of tribe.”[7] Enlightenment was freedom and according to Kant if it had a motto it was ‘dare to understand’. However, as it turned out, the age of reason was also the age of discovery and race became the justification for colonialism. I guess the enlightenment was only supposed to be for white people, or to be more precise, for wealthy white people.

I admire and am inspired by the likes of Descartes and Spinoza who influenced the likes of Kant, Voltaire and Rousseau who were prominent figures during this time and I enjoy grappling with the questions they have asked of us. Along with the likes of Locke, Hume and Mill they laid out the platform for liberalism, democracy, human rights, globalisation, but also on the other hand; patriarchy, white privilege and structural inequality.[8] Unfortunately some of these great philosophers who have provided us with amazing advances in our thought and understanding of our world have also been linked to some of the worst of humanity; Hegel to Nazism and totalitarianism, Nietzsche to alt-right nationalism and Kant to racist imperialism.[9] This is a shame, but their ideas are greater than those who have appropriated them and I will continue to learn from them.

What is apparent is that race has an intrinsic influence on our world as the making of racism, and the ideas of black and white, is the making of the world we now know. The idea of race is synonymous with our materialistic, capitalist society and I will explore these broader ideas later. But for now I want to focus on Australia and the role race and racism has in our history and society, in particular how it has affected the First Nations people of this great continent.

Rachel Perkins in the third instalment of her Boyer Lecture in 2019 identified the absurdity that is the foundation of contemporary Australia. Perkins said this, “The foundation of contemporary Australia which we mark on Australia Day begins something like this … We have an unpopulated land that they know is populated, with no treaties offered as the land was illegally acquired as British property. And the war that will shortly begin as a result of the establishment of the colony cannot be declared a war, even though thousands die, because the parties are deemed to be British. It’s the sort of madness you might find in a Monty Python movie, and would be laughable if the consequences were not so utterly tragic”.[10]

The application of terra nullius set in train the telling of our history on the basis of flawed truths that still influences our nation today. This, coupled with the ‘great Australian silence’ that is described by William Stanner in his Boyer Lecture of 1968 whereby our sense of our past, our very collective memory had been built on a state of forgetting and removing Aboriginal people from our history, has left many of us ignorant to the facts of our past and oblivious to the frontier wars, massacres and other atrocities dealt out to our First Nations people. Some people, even when presented with these facts still refuse to acknowledge this aspect of our history, such is the influence of our cult of forgetfulness.[11]

Whilst the invasion of land was the overarching trigger for conflict and the frontier wars, Perkins also highlights the example of Tasmania where there were other triggers, the most dominant being the systematic rape, abduction and murder of indigenous girls and women brought about due to the gender imbalance in the colony which was something like 8 men to one woman.[12] To have your home stolen and for your mother, sister and/or wife raped and murdered in the process is a horror no human being should endure but sadly, is probably still being played out somewhere in the world today. The horror imparted on our First Nation people has been significant and has continued through to today. We have seen it in our prejudices, segregation, massacres, stolen generations and deaths in custody. The following quote from Senator Patrick Dodson tells it like it is today …

“The vicious cycle remains. Indigenous people are more likely to come to the attention of the police. Indigenous people who come to the attention of the police are more likely to be arrested or charged. Indigenous people who are charged are more likely to go to court. Indigenous people who appear in court are more likely to go to jail. Indigenous youth now comprise over 50% of juveniles in detention. The statistics speak for themselves. The cold hard fact remains an indictment on all of us.”[13]

We have never had a relationship based on mutual understanding, compassion and respect between the First People and white Australia and our nation was founded on the basis of indigenous voices being excluded. We need to embark on a truth telling process so we can address our history and recognise the good and bad of our past. I agree with Rachel Perkins that the stories of the frontier wars need to be told and depicted at the National War Memorial in Canberra, this would go a long way to us coming to terms with this aspect of our history, to build common understanding and mutual respect. Apparently the War Memorial refuses to recognise the Frontier Wars but the statistics themselves indicate their significance, in Queensland alone 30,000 First Nation people and 1,500 settlers died during the Frontier Wars in that state, in comparison we lost 521 soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Not only do I believe we need a truth telling process to reconcile our past but we must learn from indigenous cultures from across the world to help us rewrite our current mission statement for humanity as a whole, which is currently very much influenced by materialism and neoliberal capitalist ideology. The knowledge built up by the indigenous people of our land over tens of thousands of years could very well be a catalyst for us to not only live on our great continent in a more sustainable and harmonious manner but also live on our planet in a more sustainable and harmonious manner. To enable this to occur, Pascoe identifies that we must, “…allow the knowledge that Aboriginal people did build houses, did cultivate and irrigate crops, did sew clothes, and were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter gatherers. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were intervening in the productivity of this country, and what has been learnt during that process over many thousands of years will be useful to us today. To deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander agricultural and spiritual achievement is the single greatest impediment to intercultural understanding and, perhaps to Australian moral wellbeing and economic prosperity.”[14]

Of course, racism in Australia is not only found in the way we have treated the First Nation people. The Chinese were first subjected to our prejudice during the gold rush years culminating in two major anti-Chinese riots at Buckland Park in Victoria in 1857 and at Lambing Flat in NSW in 1861. Irish Catholics were systematically excluded into the 1900’s and post WWII it was the immigrants from southern Europe, then it was the Vietnamese and most recently our Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern countries who have had to face the wrath of our racism.

So what are we to do to address this?

Firstly, I believe that education is a key part of addressing and eliminating racism from our society. Michael Holding, one of the great West Indian Fast bowlers whose test career spanned from 1975 to 1987 highlighted this during the first test between England and the West Indies[15] earlier this year. He says that we must learn about our history and recognise that the current situation we are in is a result of the dehumanisation of black people for centuries. We only teach what is convenient and history is written by the conqueror, not the conquered, it is written by those who do the harm, not those that are harmed. He talks of the systemic brain washing that has taken place citing the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus is portrayed as pale skinned, blue eyed and with blonde hair but where did he come from, who from the Middle East actually looks like this? Why is it that we have to portray Jesus as a white man when he couldn’t have been?

We need to teach all sides of history – for all of humanity otherwise our racism will never stop. In the interview with Holding he also highlighted the example of who invented the light bulb. Whilst Thomas Edison invented the light bulb he did so with a paper filament that would not last long. The person who invented the carbon light bulb filament that enabled light bulbs to stay illuminated for long periods was Lewis Latimer, a black man. This part of the story is never told. This makes me wonder how many Australians know about David Uniapon, he is the man depicted on our $50 note. Uniapon was a Ngarrindjeri man known as the Australian Leonardo Da Vinci for his mechanical ideas, taking out provisional patents for 19 inventions. His most successful invention was a shearing machine that converted curvilineal motion into the straight line movement which is the basis of modern mechanical shears. His other inventions included a centrifugal motor, a multi-radial wheel and a mechanical propulsion device. He also created drawings for a helicopter design based on the principle of the boomerang and spent much of his life attempting to achieve perpetual motion. Unaipon was also the first Aboriginal writer to publish in English. Some of his traditional Aboriginal stories have recently been republished in their original form, as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines.[16] I also wonder how many of us know of William Barak[17], a Wurundjeri man who was the first to use English and the methods of the new society to campaign for Aboriginal social justice in the 1800’s. He is also a renowned artist with his work on permanent display at the National Gallery of Victoria. How many of us know of William Cooper[18], a Yorta Yorta elder whose campaign for Aboriginal rights commenced with the Maloga Petition in 1887 but it was during the 1930’s that he began a remarkable political campaign pushing for indigenous rights and recognition including being one of the organisers for a ‘National Day of Mourning’ in 1938 in response to planned celebrations to mark the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of European settlement. How many of us know of Pemulway, Windradyne, Yagun, Jandamarra and Tunnerminnerwait, the warriors of the frontier wars who resisted invasion. All of these names should be known by us all similar to the likes of Captain Cook, Arthur Phillip and Ned Kelly.[19]

One of the greatest ways to educate ourselves is to travel and I have been privileged to be able to travel throughout Europe and Asia. I think it was Mark Twain who said that travelling is the enemy of prejudice and I would agree. But I think Henry Rollins who has visited nearly every country in the world says it best when he says “knowledge without mileage is bullshit”. When you travel you have the opportunity to celebrate diversity and to gain an understanding of other cultures and people. Through understanding we can let go of the fear we have of other people. Once this pandemic is over and we can travel again I am keen to visit Vanuatu. My initial attraction to this country is Mount Yasur which is one of the most active volcanoes in the world and you can wander up to the crater rim without all the safety barriers and rails that are so prevalent in our Australian nanny state. But I have since learned that 75% of people from Vanuatu still live a traditional life and I’d love to learn more about that. This lifestyle has led to Vanuatu being described as the happiest place on earth, where there is no time and you just have to worry about shelter and food, and there is an abundance of food. The distinction between the traditional lifestyle and the one we are more accustomed to is identified in the following quote I heard in a travel documentary about Vanuatu, “In the village you do whatever you like, in the city you have to have a job.” Anyway, I digress…

Education can also help us see past the barriers we put up seeking certainty.

“There are those who seek certainty; who divide the world up and take sides. I don’t trust certainty; I know that in certainty, ignorance and deceit lie. Give me questions more than answers.”[20]

We live in a complex world yet we rarely think in complex terms. One way to think in complex terms is to acknowledge that people and groups can be both good and bad at the same time and two opposing viewpoints can both be partially correct and partially incorrect. Evidence can be complicated and suggest contradictory conclusions. Our minds will try to push us to be comfortable on one side of the fence or the other and we shouldn’t fall into this mental complacency. Our lives are complicated, complex and uncertain, and pardon the pun, not black and white. It’s easy to simplify everything to us versus them, and our mainstream media are experts at presenting the world in this manner exacerbating conflict and promoting fear. Through education we can advance our thinking capability, to vertically develop, the outcome being the ability to think in a more complex, systematic, strategic and interdependent manner. We can learn to take the time to think deeper, be more observant, interpret our world from a range of perspectives, to embrace our complexity and revel in the nuance. We should be prepared to sit in the uncertainty and not rush to the extreme which is a common theme for much of us at the moment exacerbated by seeking confirmation bias[21] as well as expressions of outrage that are especially prevalent on social media. As Grant has identified, “when debate turns to hysteria, no one listens.”[22]

Another related issue we need to address is our cognitive dissonance. Sometimes we hold a core belief that is very strong. When we are presented with evidence that works against that belief, or certainty, the new evidence will not be accepted as it will create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, this is cognitive dissonance. We feel it is important to protect that core belief, so we will rationalise, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.

There are many perspectives to what it is to be Australian and we have a diverse story to be told; be it Indigenous, British or Immigrant. The diversity of perspectives is one of the things I love about Elefant Traks[23], their family of independent artists bring many of these perspectives to my consciousness through their music. The indigenous perspective has been marginalised and their perspective needs to be given some preeminence if we are truly to embrace what it is to be Australia, the same could be said about the immigrant perspective as well.

Whilst I believe education is vitally important on a number of levels, well it is vital for everything as everything can get better through education, it is not the panacea that will cure all of our racist sins but it is a great place to start. I believe education and addressing our history needs to be coupled with truth telling and I am inspired by the idea of creating a Makarrata Commission which is an essential outcome sought by the Uluru Statement. Makarrata is a word in the Yolngu language meaning coming together after a struggle, facing the facts of wrongs and living again in peace. Essentially, Makarrata is a peace making process and is long overdue for our nation. We can look to the example of South Africa for how to approach this process. South Africa had a truth and reconciliation commission that was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the focus being forgiveness and reconciliation. Without forgiveness, Tutu said, there is no future. Justice was not sought even though it may have been easier but it would have triggered vengeance.[24] I think a Makarrata Commission and speaking truth would be a powerful process for Australia and could have far reaching positive impacts on our culture, as Norton identifies, “There is something powerful in reconciliation, and in the hard work of accepting and speaking truth. Maybe something that can help humanity, here where we live on the brink of biological collapse.”[25]

Another way we can approach a Makarrata Commission is to embrace the concept of ‘Strong back, Soft front’, I first learned about this concept listening to Wendy Haylett’s ‘Everyday Buddhism’[26] podcast. Strong back, soft front requires us to show up even though we don’t know the outcome, it’s the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid – all in the same moment. We can’t cling to the old structures, we need to face forward into the change and lean into the pain. For many of us it will require us to handle the discomfort of addressing our white fragility[27] and to recognise our complicity in the systemic racism which will cause discomfort, defensiveness and disbelief. In a small way I feel the pain of my own racism, but it pails into insignificance to the pain inflicted on other humans through our systemic racism. We also need to exhibit humility by acknowledging mistakes, not in a way that burdens First Nation peoples with making us feel better, but in a way that demands nothing of First Nation peoples only of ourselves.

Truth telling through a Makarrata Commission is a vital process we need to embrace and as Grant says, “It is possible to speak of a country’s shame and still have love for that country. I can no more deny the greatness of Australia as a peaceful, cohesive, prosperous society than my fellow countrymen and woman can deny the legacy of neglect and bigotry and injustice that still traps so many indigenous people.”[28]

Whilst our attitude and approach to racism can be addressed through education and truth telling the underlining cause of racism is that of power. As Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) says;

“Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus if you are anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power of racism, the power of sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”[29]

The broader challenge for all of us is to think critically about the systems that shape our lives and to recognise that mere gestures and saying the right things is not enough. Furthermore, we can’t just pretend that race is irrelevant so that racism will somehow just magically go away. The current issues with Western Civilisation, be it racism and white supremacy, our economy, distribution of wealth and political representation are all linked to our global consciousness and current capitalist paradigm resultant from a long history of conquest, divide and conquer, and the need to control and have power over others. We need radical structural reform that goes to the very core of how we perceive and organise our society. It is this challenge that drives me towards thinking of what our new ’ism’ could be to ensure we can live in a society that sustainably exists within our planetary limits and that has a loving heart at its core. I have written a blog about what the path to this new ‘ism’ may be, here is a link to it.

We are also seeing something fundamentally altered about power in our democracies, especially in America but also here in Australia. In a democracy, power should not be autonomous and can’t be self-perpetuating or self-justifying. All power should be grounded in something other than itself but we are seeing the use of power without this context. We see white political culture being militarised, resulting in the sanctity of police power and the legitimisation of state violence. Coupled with a sense of entitlement and the accumulation of epistemic power we have a culture of unaccountability. How else could we get to the situation whereby a police officer can casually murder another man in full view of the public by holding his knee on their neck for 8 minutes. I also see this altering of power in the endemic corruption of our political class, especially at a Federal level, as another example of the unaccountability that results from a sense of entitlement coupled with the corporatisation of our government.

Another role of power is to dictate or takeover the narrative of events and we have seen this in the reaction to the #BlackLivesMatter movement with the response of ‘all lives matter’. This intrigues me because if all lives really mattered there would be no need for the black lives matter movement in the first place. I can’t help but think that those who are undermining the narrative of #BlackLivesMatter are doing so from a position of mean spiritedness and have a deficit of generosity or maybe it’s their cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias playing out. I wonder, do ‘all lives matter’ until they shouldn’t have come here illegally, or do ‘all lives matter’ until a person dies of an overdose and then it’s ‘addiction is a choice’, or do ‘all lives matter’ until you are gay and then ‘it’s against my religion’. For me racism, sexism and homophobia are not opinions as I don’t believe we get to disagree about someone’s identity and human rights. I see this related to the debate around political correctness, which is really about the power to define. The definers want the power to name and the defined are now taking that power away from them. I relate political correctness to just having good manners but for some it’s become another reason to promote division and derision in our society.

“We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.”

Neil deGrass Tyson

My final point is we need to reflect on our connection and not our differences. The truth is we belong to one human family and when we know ourselves to be connected to all others acting compassionately is the natural thing to do. Just think, for us to be born today, from 12 previous generations we needed a total of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 or so years. Go back another 12 generations and we have 16,769,024 ancestors. We are all connected somewhere along the line.

As the Dalai Lama has said, “We are all part of human society, so the purpose of our lives is not to make trouble, but to serve others in any way we can. We’re all driven by self-interest to some extent, but cultivating concern for others is a wise way of fulfilling our own self-interest.”

“What is race? Same consciousness, different colour vehicle. That’s all is it.”

David Icke

In conclusion, our white privilege has created this situation and only we can change it. If racism is to be fought white people have to fight it. Racism is often framed as a problem of people of colour, rather than a problem for them. We must confront the fact our nation was founded on the basis of the exclusion of indigenous voices and the history of our politics is that when politicians don’t like what they hear from indigenous voices they shut them down. We must give them a voice and embrace a Makarrata Commission.

The biggest force of white supremacy is the normalisation of systemic racism. We need to recognise that systemic racism is part of us. It is there in the over incarceration of our First nation people, the exploitation of migrant workers, the persecution of Muslim Australians and the demonisation of asylum seekers. We must first acknowledge that systemic racism is sewn into the fabric of our country, and once we do that, then we can start to address it, confront it and ultimately, eliminate it.

Acknowledging systemic racism will make us feel uncomfortable but need not make us feel guilty or powerless. We must revel in the nuances and uncertainty while being mindful that being white isn’t a crime and being a person of colour doesn’t give moral high ground. It will be a painful process for many of us but as Mark Manson wrote, “When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.”[30]

The saddest thing I feel is that the ‘system’ cannot reform itself and we are so entrenched in the capitalist economy and the materialistic culture and all the superficial stuff that comes with it. I come back to the question I asked at the start of this blog, how do we tackle something that has become so systemic in our society? The answer may begin with focusing on what we can control and for me that is to focus on the core values we all should live by; humility, kindness, service and wisdom and to remember that kindness, patience, love, enthusiasm, and a positive attitude are contagious. With regard to racism we need to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever we find it and we don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist.

I am committed to finding the solutions that ensure we can live in a society that sustainably exists within our planetary limits and that has a loving heart at its core. For such a society to evolve, racism must be eliminated but this will be a long, difficult and arduous task and I hope this blog provides some food for thought for how we can head down that path.

To sum it all up, for me, it all comes down to something David Icke has said, “Life comes down to two choices, fear or love”. I choose love, what do you choose?

To end this blog I encourage you to read the Uluru Statement (attached below), it ends with a powerful invitation for us to strive for a better future for all and I guess that’s my great hope, that we can create a better future for all of us who love and share this great country and more broadly, a better future for all of us who love and share our amazing planet.

The Uluru Statement 2017

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.