Here, where the Black Lives Matter movement has brought focus to First Nations people dying in custody, media attention has been episodic and too often absent.
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George Floyd’s death and the US Black Lives Matter movement sparked extensive media attention. Why aren’t Australian Indigenous deaths in custody getting the same amount of media coverage?
Mural by Gabriel Marques, Dublin.
Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Like the COVID-19 pandemic we’re facing, racism is present in every nook and corner of this planet.
A mural in memory of Alton Sterling, who was shot several times at close range by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5, 2016.
W. Clarke/Wikipedia Commons
Neither the spurious ‘facts’ about killings of police nor the supposedly ‘colour-blind’ logic of the backlash against Black Lives Matter hold up under scrutiny. Instead, they confirm its point.
South Sea Islanders working in a Townsville cane field in 1907.
CityLibraries Townsville/flickr
Blackbirding is one of many shared Australian histories. Australian South Sea Islanders want to encourage broader community goodwill as we work towards social justice for a forgotten people.
White nationalists at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017.
Robert Dunning/flickr
White Americans have been in denial about the fact that police go after Black men and other men of colour. But the research and statistics kept by state and federal agencies show this happens.
‘We refuse to appeal to the benevolence of White folk for our lives to matter. We remind them every day that we are still here.’
Corey Oakley/flickr
Despite the promise of Black Lives Matter, it has not been taken up as a central political movement by Indigenous Australians.
‘The call for Black lives to matter is fundamentally a call for peace. And peace must not be confused with the momentary quiet of submission.’
Annette Bernhardt/flickr