David Penberthy: Anti-racism protest timing may be off but the message is spot-on
Sadly, protests around the country have probably been a public relations failure in terms of encouraging wider thought about the historic treatment of indigenous people, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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The circumstances surrounding last week’s Black Lives Matter protests were a you-know-what-flavoured sandwich of epic proportions for authorities in the middle of a pandemic.
Like many people, I had some strong criticisms of the handling of the protest by SA Police and the State Government. The protest sent poor signals – both to future protesters, who have no interest in obeying a special set of emergency laws, and also to law-abiding people, who, in noble contrast, have been maintaining social distancing at significant emotional and financial cost.
But no one can fairly suggest that there was anything easy about the nature of this decision. We faced a choice between a peaceful protest that would annoy the hell out of a lot of people and send confusing mixed signals, or a potential riot in the middle of our city.
Having said all that, I found myself in the weird position of being deeply annoyed by the timing of last week’s riot, and pretty much 100 per cent in favour of the sentiment behind it.
If you can push the pandemic to one side – and you should try to if you don’t want to live in a country that’s in a recurring state of unreconciled conflict as in the US – you should have a think about why it was that so many people felt such a compulsion to rise up across the world in response to an atrocity in Minneapolis.
The easy, dismissive approach is to label these people as rent-a-crowd agitators, thrillseekers and hooligans. This us-and-them construct ignores the fact that, overwhelmingly, the protesters were decent people who felt repulsed and enraged by what they had seen, again, at the hands of America’s justice system.
Globally, the protests went further than that. Especially for indigenous people in Australia and people of African descent in the US and Great Britain, as they went to a centuries-old sense of being treated legally as second-class citizens, or not even citizens at all.
Much was made of the mayhem at the protests in Britain and the defacing of Churchill’s statue as a “racist”.
Whatever you say about his policies towards India, you would have to credit Churchill with having some spectacular runs on the board when it came to fighting fascism.
But when the protesters in Britain turned their attention to the statue of slave trader Edward Colton and hurled it into the Bristol Harbour, my question wasn’t how could they tear that statue down; rather, it was how could anyone put that statue up?
It is beyond belief in this supposedly enlightened age in a great democracy such as Britain that a bloke who made his fortune buying and selling living, breathing humans could be venerated in bronze in a town square.
There are parallels here in Australia for the historic mistreatment of indigenous Australians. I would suspect the spontaneous affinity felt by so many here with what happened in the US has less to do with the specifics of policing or incarceration, but the cumulative loss of self-worth that comes from having to claw your way for centuries towards level pegging in the citizenship stakes.
It is barely a generation since this country formally extinguished the absurd and racist legal fiction that was terra nullius, an empty land, which was used to argue that Aboriginal native title could not exist in a country that had no inhabitants in 1788.
You don’t have to go back far from the Mabo decision to a time when indigenous Australians were barred from having their own bank accounts or holding certain jobs and, as non-people, were not counted in the census.
In our more recent history, the sustained abuse of Adam Goodes, fuelled by his apparent audacity in speaking up against racism, showed that we still have a capacity for cruelty at worst and indifference at best.
As so many of Goodes’ teammates and friends said at the time, whatever your views on race issues, the bloke was clearly hurting and begging for the ridicule to stop, yet we allowed a nationwide bullying exercise to run unabated.
While we belatedly came to apologise to the stolen generation, it’s still common to hear people complain about the veracity of its existence – even when presented with the stories of actual people who were taken away from their parents on so-called humanitarian grounds.
And while I am still not sold on the idea of shifting Australia Day from January 26, regarding the proposal as a symbolic gesture that won’t force any material change, it is easy to see why the date grates so much with indigenous people, as the manner in which the British settled this country was more akin to an invasion than some welcome open-arms arrival.
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Against all this, the brutal cop with a knee on a black man’s neck is not so much the starting point of our current problems but the end point. It’s the justice system’s way of casually personifying a form of treatment that involves centuries of work by nations and parliaments.
A cop in Minneapolis does something like that, and his colleagues stand by doing nothing, purely because the four of them simply think that they can.
They think that way because history has told them it’s OK to think that way.
Sadly, the protests we have seen around the country have probably been a public relations failure in terms of encouraging wider thought about the historic treatment of indigenous people.
The protests were regarded as an insult to the hard work of so many in abiding by social-distancing rules, and now come with the unpleasant bonus that at least one protester, in Melbourne, was COVID-19 positive and may have infected others.
It’s a pity this message was mangled, as it’s an important one, if we are to avoid becoming as miserably and permanently divided as the US.