Australia, it's time to talk about our racism
It feels like this is a conversation I'm only beginning to have; a conversation I’ve somehow been in the middle of ever since I was eleven years old. I was in a social studies class sitting on the floor of an air-conditioned classroom watching a documentary. An Aboriginal woman was weeping about the children that were taken. There was a strange salty ball knotted in my belly. When the program finished and the lights were turned back up a kid next to me said that ‘All Abos are drunks anyway, they can’t look after their children.’ A chorus of agreement rose in the room. Mostly I remember the shock; still soaked in the woman’s tears I stared around my class of upper middle class white kids. It was the first time I noticed racism. I still don’t really understand it. Mostly because our nation is busy avoiding the topic. We’re a happy-go-lucky country of friendly mates giving everybody a fair-go. We are most certainly not racist. Which makes what I’m experiencing in the Northern
