We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers.
Ten things I need to read this weekend.
Haasts Bluff country, Albert Namatjira (1936)
1. The Redfern Speech, Paul Keating (1992)
“It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.”
2. Letter from a Region in My Mind, James Baldwin (1962)
“To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
Related:
Stranger In The Village, James Baldwin (1953)
How To Cool It, James Baldwin (1968)
“What is happening in this country among the young, and not only the black young, is an overwhelming suspicion that it's not worth it. You know if you watched your father's life like I watched my father's life, as a kid much younger than I watches his father's life; his father does work from eight to five every day and ends up with nothing. He can't protect anything. He has nothing. As he goes to the grave, having worked his fingers to the bone for years and years and years, he still has nothing and the kid doesn't either.”
4. Racism and The Australian Dream, Stan Grant (2015)
“I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges.
It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains.”
Related: A Better Australia
5. The Indigenous All-Stars Pre-Game War Cries (2020)
6. Fear of a Black President, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012)
“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.”
Related: The First White President
7. Myself When I Am Real, Charles Mingus
Related: How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
7. Reflections on the Color of My Skin, Neil deGrasse Tyson
“I talk a lot. But I don’t talk much about any of this, or the events along this path-of-most-resistance that have shaped me. Why? Because throughout my life I’ve used these occasions as launch-points to succeed even more. Yes, I parlayed the persistent rejections of society, which today might be called micro-aggressions, into reservoirs of energy to achieve. I learned that from my father, himself active in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.”
8. The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.
“Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.”
Related: Patti La Belle - If You Don’t Know Me By Now
9. Trevor Noah On George Floyd, Amy Cooper & Racism In Society
“What a lot of people don’t realize is the same way that you might have experienced more anger and more visceral disdain watching those people loot that Target -- think about that unease you felt watching that Target being looted. Try to imagine how it must feel for Black Americans when they watch themselves being looted every single day.”
Related: The American Nightmare
10. Killer Mike’s emotional speech at Atlanta Mayor’s press conference.
“I’m mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw.”
Real Quick:
I spent some time talking to friends who work in the advocacy/not-for-profit sector about which organisations to support locally here in Australia. The recommendation came back for Change The Record - an organisation dedicated to addressing the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people. Through Twitter this week we were able to generate $15,000 in donations to the organisation.