Scrolling through my Facebook feed, Twitter feed and email inbox, I’m seeing and reading a lot about the #blacklivesmatter movement in the US.
In case you missed it, it’s a push back against the daily and disproportionate violence against black people in the US.
Everyone from celebrities (Kanye, Beyonce, Jay Z) to normal people ordering their Starbucks under the name “BlackLivesMatter” so that baristas call it out, have pushed the movement into the nation’s conscience, to a point where it’s now a large and vocal modern civil rights movement.
Image: Getty.
It's filtered into the Australian psyche, too.
To a point where it's expected that over 5000 Melbournians will take to the streets this weekend to support the movement, in a protest outside the State Library.
So here is the question: Why don’t we have Black Lives Matter movement in Australia?
When Adam Goodes gets called an ape on the football field, we get riled up, we write op-eds, we wring our hands over the undercurrent of racism in this country - absolutely, it's an important conversation to have.
But are we missing another conversation? A difficult, complex, sad and fraught one? An unpopular conversation; filled with questions that seem to hard?
Conversations about Aboriginal deaths in custody, rates of family violence, desperate poverty, drug and alcoholism, the alarming rate of Indigenous suicide here.
I don't claim, as a white woman, to even begin to understand the depth and scope of problems for Indigenous Australians.
So I rang Tauto Sansbury, a Narungga man whose been working in advocacy for aboriginal people for over 30 years.
I asked him, straight up: "Tatuo, I’m a white middle class woman, do I even dare speak about this? With no understanding and no answers and no idea how to help?"
And he said really plainly: “Well, do you CARE about this as an issue? "
"If you do, then yes. You can talk about it. And you should."
So I did. (Post continues after audio.)
Over 20 years ago there was a Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.
When the report was released in 1991, Aboriginal people were eight times more likely to be imprisoned. They’re now 15 times more likely.
In Australia, just three per cent of the population is Indigenous, but they make up 27 per cent of the prison population.
Aboriginal women make up the fastest growing prison population here.
Image: Flickr
The Royal Commission made 339 recommendations for reform - most of which Tatuo tells me have not been implemented.
There’s been a substantial increase in the numbers of Aboriginal people dying in custody in the last five years, and a confusing google search (the information not easily discoverable) tells me 340 have died since the Royal Commission.
If we added to that the number of Indigenous women killed from family violence, the numbers of criminal justice related deaths would be higher still.
Did you know children as young as eight years of age are suiciding? In WA, Indigenous suicides are eight times the national rate.
These are all facts that barely register with the public.
There’s currently a change.org petition calling for a Royal Commission into Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander suicides that has around 20,000 signatures.
It's not on the homepage, you'll have to search for it. And in doing so, you might see that there is double the support for a Domino's pizza petition on there.
I know Australian history and American history are not the same, but, we do have a problem and those problems need to be broken down.
The answers aren't easy, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking the questions:
Will there be a black lives matter movement in Australia?
Does there need to be?
Or are we, as a society, not ready to have that discussion?
Monique Bowley is the host of Mamamia Out Loud, the award-winning weekly podcast. It covers everything from pop-culture to politics. Subscribe in iTunes, download it on your favourite podcast app (like the Mamamia Podcast App) or listen to the full episode here:
Top Comments
For any cause that aims to address inequality to be successful, it has to be adopted and owned by the people it is aimed at helping.
Have the Indigenous and non white people in Australia said they want this? Or is it another attempt by well meaning white people to push an agenda onto on white people - because *we* think it's a good one?
White people have a long history of taking control and doing what they think is important - because that would be important to us. In cases of inequality, those who are not part of that group need to stand back and ask what the group members think is important to them? What steps do they want to take?
Perhaps Indigenous peoples don't want a carbon copy grassroots group from America. Perhaps they would prefer to address the issues in a different way - maybe through education in schools and with white people sitting down in groups and just listening to their stories. I don't know, but neither does any other white person if we haven't asked!
The success of Standing Rock in the US right now is precisely because the Native Americans took control of their own cause. They initiated it, they defined it and they decided how it would play out. White people have taken a back seat (as well they should), and that has contributed to their success.
If you really believe the lives of our Indigenous and other non white citizens is important, then get educated and get involved in THEIR groups, in THEIR actions. It is THEIR experience of inequality, let THEM tell us what they need to help heal that.
As you can probably see in the comment section, most Australians aren't ready to admit the institutionalised racism of other countries, let alone Australia. I guess it's a bitter pill to swallow. There are several solidarity movements among Aboriginal Australians, and several hundred (probably thousands of) campaigns for change. Unlike a lot of other indigenous and minority groups around the world, there is a huge amount of diversity in Aboriginal Australia. There are over 200 Aboriginal groups in Australia, all with different land, languages, customs and ideas. I don't really know why we don't have this movement as strong here, I am so afraid of the Australian government's tendency to follow the American government, and I don't want guns to come back to this country the same way they are in the US. I know that will only make it worse for our people and other ethnic minorities. To all of you who are saying #allLivesMatter. Of course they do, the movement is not saying #BlackLivesMatterButWhiteLivesDon't, it is identifying an issue that is killing hundreds of people a year needlessly, and asking for change. I ask you what you would do if the tables were turned? If your sons were being murdered for selling CDs at a corner, if your husband was shot in his car in front of your daughter, if your brother was held down by four policemen and shot repeatedly; and you knew it was solely because of their race. This is not a question of whether white people matter, we know they matter, white people have been mattering for most of human history. Most of the human history we know is written from a white perspective. It is time to acknowledge that black Americans are more likely to be shot by police than white Americans, and admit that there is something wrong with that.
It's true more blacks than white are shot by police in America. The black population according to the FBI at 13% of the population commits more than half the crimes in the US. It's also true most of those killings occurred in an exchange of gunfire between police and criminals.
The murder toll in just Chicago from Nov 2001 to end of 2015, at 7001 is close to the 8250 combat losses for the same period in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Chicago is a war zone with thousands of black on black deaths. But black lives matter only when a cop is firing back?
Where were these Black Lives Matter protesters after the slaying of Chicago’s little Tyshawn Lee, the 9-year-old lured into an alley and shot to death by a black man seeking gang-related vengeance against his father?
Did little Tyshawn’s murder at the hands of a black gangster–an all too common occurrence in Chicago–not warrant wall-to-wall news coverage or Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson-style calls for “justice”? No. Why? Why didn't Tyshawns life matter to the movement?