Louis Farrakhan: 'Here are 30 million people who don't wear their own names', Phil Donahue Show - 1990

Phil Donahue: Pleased to welcome you to part two of the Donahue two-part program featuring Minister Louis Farrakhan, who, at the end of our last program, left an awful lot of unhappy people in our audience. Not necessarily unhappy at anything he said, but unhappy because they had no time at all to say anything. So this is our attempt to give you an opportunity to express yourself and ask Minister Farrakhan to respond. Whom didn't we... Yes. Yes.

Audience 1: I would just like to say that I am terrified that even you, someone who is obviously educated, has given up hope completely. When you call upon us, you say white folk, you say black people, Jewish people. Why can't we come together? We obviously can come together. We just have to, we just have to find a way to do it.

Minister Louis Farrahkan: The desire is good. But the reality is the total opposite of your desire. And unfortunately, as a young lady, you are not in the position of power to make the decisions to make America work.

Audience 1: You don't-

Minister Louis Farrahkan: May I? As an audience of intelligent people, I would like to just take a moment to say to you that I really don't think you fully understand what has happened to these people that you look at as second-class or inferior citizens in this nation. Black people who were brought to this country were stripped of their names, language, culture, religion, God, and taken totally away from the history of themselves. Here are 30 million people who don't wear their own names. They wear your names. Who don't speak their own language. They speak English, which is not their language. They never, never were allowed their own cultural expression of Africa.

Don't you realise that when you turn a people upside-down and inside-out, then sell them, not for a day, not for a year, but for 300 years, and deny us the human right to know, to read a book, to learn, to understand. And then after 300 years of that, you allow us into the church. But by that time, you've painted Jesus white, God white, the angels white. And then all these black people have been subjected to a form of white supremacy, which produces in the reverse, a black inferiority. And this is fulfilling what Jesus said as a man, "Thinketh." So is He, and as long as our people think the way they think, we will never be able to do what we as a people should do to correct darkened vision.

Phil Donahue: Over here, please.

Audience 2: Several people in the audience have said the things that he's saying, but you really haven't been specific. What is he saying that you have a problem with? And why is it when a black man stands up to speak for his people and all the people stand up and speak for their people, there's no problem with it. But you're saying, "He said black. He said Jew." When people talk, they talk like that. But why is it when a black man stands up to speak for his people, you feel so threatened? Everybody's paranoid. And you talk about, it's not segregation. We live in Harlem. We live in Watts. We live in Bedford-Stuyvesant. That's a form of segregation. We walk through Bensonhurst, we get killed. So what are you talking about?

Audience 3: What I'd like to say, there was somebody over there in the audience who said that they were afraid. They were scared of when they were talking about the... What he was saying. You see. And what I'm saying is the other day, you asked Mandela that same question about fearing, white people fearing, what will the black folks do and stuff. We should be running down the street, screaming, ramping, and raving. Because when you look at the statistics, who is the one dying? From the policemen, from the KKK, from the skinheads, from the black people. We're getting-

Phil Donahue: If anybody should be scared, it should be the people going-

Audience 3: Right. It should be us who should be scared of y'all sitting in here.
Audience 4: Excuse me. I was brought up in quote, Bedford-Stuyvesant, in my town, but I would like to say what scares us is I think we hear violence.
Minister Louis Farrahkan: May I respond? May I respond, please? I'm sorry.
Audience 5: All right, Minister Farrakhan, would you explain why it is relevant at this stage, in 1990, with all that we've gone through, why it is still relevant to try and to educate or to get white people to understand the plight of black people. Shouldn't the energy be directed to us?
Audience 6: Right on.

Minister Louis Farrahkan: If I may. My work is directly to black people. I spend 99% of my time dealing with us to help us reform our minds and spirit, that we may do for ourselves. However, when you live in a society like this, and we know that in order to affect a solution to a problem between black and white, then there's going to have to be some meaningful dialogue between black and white in order to affect a solution.

The young lady said she's afraid of violence and isn't it sad that we who have been the victims of so much violence, now, whites fear violence from us. We do not have a history of killing white people. White people have a history of killing us. And what you fear... May I say this, sir? What you fear, and it's a deep guilt thing that white folks suffer. You are afraid that if we ever come to power, we will do to you and your fathers, what you and your people have done to us. And I think you are judging us by the state of your own mind. And that is not necessarily the mind of black people.

Audience 6: I'm with you in that you're talking about wanting to have meaningful dialogue and that's a problem, right away. I don't know what's going to make whites happy, for Pete's sake. You're talking about trying to find a solution to your problem. You're trying hard to do that. And we're tuning you right out. We're arguing with you. We're not agreeing with anything. We're not trying to give you a chance. For Pete's sake, what do we want?

Audience 7: As-salamu alaikum. Minister Farrakhan, there's a situation now with one in four black males are in prison or in jail or in some type of probation situation. When I look around, even myself being a black reporter, and they talk about racism of a black and white person go to the job, a black person's going to get the job. I never find that out. And we're in New York City with a black mayor and I still haven't seen it. And when I see Minister Farrakhan, not only the brother's enlightened me, but he gives me hope to not give up, not go get a pistol and stick somebody up. So when I see you, not only are you to lighten the hope, but I think, white America, you need to listen, and please don't harm this brother because we love him.

Audience 8: Getting back to what she said, what exactly do we have a problem with? Before you made a statement, you said that I think that... Well, not of. You said that white people think that you're inferior to us. I don't believe that. I'm part of the youth of America. I am not prejudiced. I feel more prejudiced right now than I've ever felt. Not against black. I am not prejudiced against black people. Some of my best friends are black people. I am... What's the problem with that? You let him speak. Let me speak.

Phil Donahue: You wanted to speak to this young woman?

Audience 9: No, no. I don't want to speak to that-

Phil Donahue: Who wants to talk to her? Yeah.

Audience 10: What do you mean, you feel more prejudiced right now?

Speaker 12: Because the way he's saying, he's-

Phil Donahue: Because why?

Audience 2: What he's saying right now. I mean, I feel that you are prejudiced towards white people.

Speaker 4: Excuse me. Excuse me. I think it's like he said, it might be a fear or misunderstanding that you have, because what fear has he put or what has he actually said here today that makes you feel prejudiced?

Speaker 12: I think that he said that we think that they're inferior. I think it's partly part of your own complex that you have to get over because I don't feel you're inferior. I've nothing against black people.
Speaker 14: Excuse me, excuse me. This is the situation. Every young white adult says, "I have not done this to black people. I have not done that to black people." But your forefathers are the ones who have set us in the situation we are in. Now, what I am saying is this. When Matt Turner stood up, you all rejected him. You killed him. When Marcus Garvey stood up, you all rejected him, enslaved him. He died a broken heart.
Now, what I am saying is this, your fathers have put us in the condition we are in. And today, you are profiting from what your forefathers have done. Now. Now. My grandchildren are going to be raised and your children are going to say to them, they have not done to them, because you are the ones who are going to do to my grandchildren, what they're going to experience if the situation continues. Now, what I am saying is this. When we talk about America falling, what we are saying is this. If you all want to control America, then we must have a land base that we control. You all cannot continue printing the dollar bill and then expect us to abide by your rules when you do not want to give us jobs. Therefore, I am saying that we have now got to come into negotiations and Minister Farrakhan is the man to listen to.
Minister Louis ...: It becomes apparent more and more, as we listen to each other and try to talk to each other, that we don't perceive reality the same. And as we're talking about either reconciling differences or separating, it becomes clear that if two people are looking at the same thing and perceiving it so differently, then the two people are operating under a different stimulus. And so, when the young lady says, "I am prejudiced." To be prejudiced means to judge before the fact. After 400 years of living and experiencing, we're not prejudiced. We are looking at the reality of what we have suffered and continue to suffer.

Phil Donahue: Are you there? Are you there, caller?

Speaker 15: Yes.

Phil Donahue: Thank you for waiting. I am sorry it took us a while to get you, but go ahead. I know you'll be brief.

Speaker 15: I'm a white American, born into poverty, and our repayment. You know, the opportunities are here in America and why can't we just start now? We hear all this violence. Why can't we just talk in a positive way and go forward, instead of remembering all these things that are in the past that are negative, they were not good for [crosstalk 00:12:05] or white people.

Phil Donahue: Yes, Minister Farrakhan commenting.

Minister Louis Farrahkan: According to the state of black America, by the Urban League. "If we started right now," they said, "We could never close the gap to black poverty and white poverty." She said, "Let us start right now. Let's forget the past." Notice this.

When Jewish people remember the Holocaust and want the world to remember the Holocaust. Wait, wait, wait. Why do you want the world to remember? Because if the world does not remember, it is likely to repeat itself, and Jewish persons who suffered from the Holocaust want the world to remember this because the world turned its back while Jews were put in ovens. I, as a black person, want my people to remember what we have suffered and what we continue to suffer so that we will say, like the Jews, "Never again. Never again."

Speaker 16: Okay. I've been listening in this corner right here and I've heard a whole lot of negative things from the white people here. When you were trying to explain yourself, the white people don't want to hear you explain yourself, they drown you out. They start already trying to drown you out and talk over you. There's a certain amount of white arrogance here and they don't want to listen to what black people are saying. They don't understand because they don't want to understand. I've heard a woman here say, "Go back to Africa." Somebody said, "We have a black holiday. What does that mean?" So what? What does that mean? He did not say that, he said, if we have a choice, what some of us can go and some of us can stay. But there's no understanding in here. People are just trying to talk.

Minister Louis Farrahkan Just remember, just remember, to those arrogant persons. When you tell us, "Go back," please remember where you came from. And when you want to relegate somebody to a specific place, just remember what your origin is in this world. Please, I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but I want you to understand that you, wherever you are on the earth, you are not a native anywhere. You came there and took it from the native people who are there. So please don't talk about going back because if others talk to you about that, where would you go?

James Baldwin: 'I am not your Negro" Dick Cavett show - 1968

13 June 1968, New York City, New York, USA

Dick Cavett: I would like to add someone to our group here, Professor Paul Weiss, a Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale.
Were you able to listen to the show backstage?
Prof. Paul Weiss: A deal of it, but then I was behind the [inaudible 00:00:24]. So I did hear only some of it.
Dick Cavett: Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?
Prof. Paul Weiss: I disagreed with a great deal of it. And of course, a good deal I agree with. I think he's overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. There's all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or colour or size or shape or lack of ability. The problem is to become a man.

James Baldwin:: But what I was discussing was not that problem, really. I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man, attempts to become a man.

Prof. Paul Weiss: All this emphasis upon black men and white does emphasise something which is here, but it emphasises, or exaggerates it. And therefore mixes, or put people together in groups, which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who's against scholarship. And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on colour or religion or this, there are other ways of connecting men.

James Baldwin: I'll tell you this. When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn't care where I went, I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with forty dollars in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there, that it already happened to me here.

You talk about making it as a writer by yourself. You have to be able then to turn up all the intangibles in which you live because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die, and it's very hard for the typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger, visible the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.
I don't know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negros or not, but I know that we have a Christian Church, which is white and a Christian Church, which is black. I know it's not the [inaudible 00:02:37], but the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation, it means I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian Church. I don't know whether the labour unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter. But I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don't know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my life, my woman, my assistant, my children on some idealism, which you assure only exists in America, which I have never seen.

Michael Holding: 'History is written by the conqueror, not those that are conquered', pre Test match comments on race - 2020

9 July 2020, Southampton, United Kingdom

When I say education, I mean going back in history. What people need to understand is that this thing stems from a long time ago, hundreds of years ago. The dehumanisation of the black race is where it started. People will tell you, 'that's a long time ago, get over it'. No. You don't get over things like that. Society has not gotten over something like that.

Think about religion. The image of Jesus Christ is pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes. Where Jesus came from, who in that part of the world looks that way? That is brainwashing, to show you 'this is what the image of perfection is'. If you look at plays from those days, Judas, who betrayed Jesus, is a black man. Brainwashing people to think, 'he is a black man, he is the bad man'.

Go through history. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, everybody knows that, but he invented the light bulb with a paper filament that burned out in no time at all. Can you tell me who invented the filament that makes these lights shine? Nobody knows, because he was a black man and it was not taught in schools. Lewis Howard Latimer invented the carbon filament to allow lights to continue to shine, yet who knows that?

Everything should be taught. In my school days, I was never taught anything good about black people and you cannot have a society that is brought up like that where you only teach what is convenient to the teacher. History is written by the conqueror, not those that are conquered. History is written by the people who do the harm, not by the people who are harmed. We need to go back and teach both sides of history.

Until we do that and educate the entire human race, this thing will not stop. We need to teach and re-educate, as a lot of black people in this world are growing up believing that they are lesser than other people and that cannot be right.

People tell me there is nothing called white privilege. Give me a break. I don't see white people going into a store in Oxford Street and being followed. A black man walks in and someone is following him everywhere he goes. That is basic white privilege.

I don't want people to think I think all white people are racist and walk around thinking racist things. It's not, 'I'm black, I don't like white people', or 'I am white, I don't like black people'.

There was a study done at Yale University in 2016, where they got 130 pre-school teachers to go into a room and watch a video and look out for bad behaviour. There were black boys, white boys, black girls, white girls.

There was no bad behaviour in the video but they had a tracker of the teachers' eyes and at the end, they got the results and their eyes had constantly looked at the black kids, black boys the majority.

One person didn't want the results released, but 129 of the teachers were embarrassed. They did not even know, they were unconscious. The society in which we grow, it is almost osmosis; it seeps into you, and subconsciously affects your mind.

There was a 2014 study, also at Yale, with police officers. They were shown pictures of black kids and white kids - kids meaning early teens. Each police officer was asked at the end how old he thought the black kids and white kids were. On average, the police officers gave the black kids' age four and a half years older than the white kids, guessing the age of the white kids easily.

If you are a police officer confronting a 14-year-old and you think in your mind he is 18, 19 years old, your attitude is going to be different. He is no longer an innocent 14-year-old, he is a senior, approaching adulthood and your approach is going to be different. That is something that has to be tackled.

We know there has been abuse of black people by police officers, not just in England or the US, all over the place. Unless society is cleansed and sorted, we will continue to have this problem.

Meyne Wyatt: 'Silence is violence, complacency is complicity', Q & A monologue on racism - 2020

8 June 2020, Sydney, Australia

I'm always gonna be your black friend, aren't I?
That's all anybody ever sees.
I'm never just an actor. I'm an Indigenous actor.
I love reppin', but I don't hear old Joe Bloggs being called quite white Anglo-Saxon actor.
I'm always in the black show, the black play. I'm always the angry one, the tracker, the drinker, the thief. Sometimes I want to be seen for my talent, not my skin colour, not my race.
I hate being a token. Some box to tick, part of some diversity angle.
"What are you whingeing for? You're not a real one anyway. You're only part." What part, then? My foot? My arm? My leg? You're either black or you're not. You want to do a DNA test? Come suck my blood.
"How are we to move forward if we dwell on the past?" That's your privilege. You get to ask that question. Ours is we can dance and we're good at sport.
You go to weddings we go to funerals.
No, no, no, you're not your ancestors, it's not your fault you have white skin, but you do benefit from it.
You can be OK. I have to be exceptional. I mess up, I'm done. There's no path back for me. There's no road to redemption. Being black and successful comes at a cost. You take a hit whether you like it or not. Because you want your blacks quiet and humble.
You can't stand up, you have to sit down.
Ask the brother-boy Adam Goodes. A kid says some racist shit — not ignorant — racist. Calling a black fella an ape? C'mon man we was flora and fauna before 1967, nah actually we didn't even exist at all. This was a learning moment. He taught that kid a lesson. Didn't like that a black man standing up for himself? Nah, they didn't like that. "Shut up, boy, you stay in your lane. Any time you touch a ball, we're gonna boo your arse. So he showed them a scary black, throwing imaginary spears and shit. Did they like that? They didn't like that. Every arena and stadium booed him. "It's because of the way the flog pays football." Bullshit. No-one booed him the way they booed him until he stood up and said something about race. The second he stood up, everybody came out of the woodworks to give him shit. And he's supposed to sit there and take it?
I'll tell you right now, Adam Goodes has taken it, his whole life he's taken it. I've taken it.
No matter what, no matter how big, how small, I'll get some racist shit on a weekly basis and I'll take it.
It used to be in your face, "Ya boong, ya black dog, coon", kind of shit. "I'm gonna chase ya down the ditch with my baseball bat", skinhead shit when I was 14 years old.
"Nah, we're progressive, now, we'll give you the small, subtle shit". The shit that's always been there. Not the obvious, in-your-face shit. It's the "we can't be seen to be racist" kind of shit.
Security guard following me around the store, asking to search my bag.
Walking up to the counter first being served, second or third or last kind of shit.
Or hailing down a cab and watching it slow down to look at my face and then drive off. More than once. More than twice. More than once-twice on any one occasion — yeah, that shit, I'll get weekly. Sometimes I'll get days in a row if I'm really lucky. And that's the kind of shit I let them think they're getting way with.
To be honest, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered teaching their ignorant arses on a daily basis.
I don't have the energy or the enthusiasm.
It's exhausting, and I like living my life.
But on occasion, when you caught me on a bad day where I don't feel like taking it, I'll give you that angry black you've been asking for and I'll tear you a new asshole.
Not because of that one time, because of my whole life.
At least Adam danced and they still pissed and moaned.
But t's not about that one time, it's about all those times.
And seeing us as animals, that shit needs to stop.
Black deaths in custody, that shit needs to stop.
I want to be what you want me to be. I want to be what I want to be.
Never trade your authenticity for approval.
Be crazy, take a risk, be different, offend your family. Call them out. Silence is violence. Complacency is complicity.
I don't want to be quiet.
I don't want to be humble.
I don't want to sit down.

Trevor Noah: 'Imagine if you grew up in a community where every day someone had their knee on your neck'',The Daily Show monologue, Minneapolis Protests - 2020

29 May 2020, New York City, USA

Hey, what's going on? Everybody? You know, what's really interesting about what's happening in America right now is that a lot of people don't seem to realize how dominos connect, how one piece knocks another piece that knocks another piece and in the end creates a giant wave each story seems completely unrelated and yet at the same time, I feel like everything that happens in the world connects to something else in some way shape or form and I think this Use this new cycle that we witnessed in. The last week was a perfect example of that. Amy Cooper George Floyd and you know the people of Minneapolis Amy Cooper was for many people, I think, the catalyst and by the way, I should mention that all of this is like against the backdrop of coronavirus, you know people stuck in their houses for one of the longest periods we can remember. People losing more jobs than anyone can ever remember. People struggling to make do more than they can ever remember and I think all of that compounded by the fact that there seems to be no genuine plan from leadership like no one knows what's going to happen.

No, no one knows how long they are supposed to be good, how long they supposed to stay inside, how long they’re supposed to flatten the curve. No one knows any of these things. And so what happens is you have a group of people who are stuck inside? All of us as a society - we're stuck inside and we then start to consume. We see what's happening in the world and I think Amy Cooper was one of the first moments, one of the first dominoes that that we saw get knocked down post Corona for many people and that was a world where you quickly realize that while everyone is facing the battle against coronavirus, black people in America are still facing the battle against racism and coronavirus. And the reason I say, it's a domino is because think about how many black Americans just have read and seen the news of how black people are disproportionately affected by coronavirus and not because of something inherently inside black people, but rather because of the lives black people have lived. In America for so long, you know coronavirus exposed all of it.

And now here you had this woman.

Who we've all seen the video now.

Blatant lie, blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten the life of another man and his Blackness what we saw with her was a really really powerful explicit example of an understanding of racism in a structural way, when she looked when she looked at at at at that man when she looked at Cooper and she said to him I'm going to call 911 and I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life. She knew how powerful that was.

And that in itself is telling you know. It tells you how she perceives the police, it tells you how she perceives her perception or her relationship with the police as a white woman. It shows you how she perceives a black man's relationship with the police and the police’s relationship with him. it was it was really … it was it was it was … powerful.

Because so many people act like they don't know what what black Americans were talking about when they said any had Amy Cooper had a distinct understanding she was like, oh, I know I know that you're afraid of interacting with the police because there is a presumption of your guilt because of your Blackness.

I know that as a white woman, I can weaponize this tool against you and I know that by the time we've sifted through who was right or wrong, there's a good chance that you will have lost in some way shape or form.

So for me that was that was the first domino and so now you living in a world where so many people are watching this video. So many people are being triggered because in many ways it was like a it was like a gotcha, you know, it was like a it was like it was like the curtain had been pulled back. Aha.

So you do this because it's always been spoken about but this was like it was powerful to see it being used. And I think a lot of people were triggered by that, a lot of people, a lot of people were like ‘damn we knew it was real but this is like real real’, you know.

I think a lot of people so angry that some of the outrage that came to her was because of her dog and I mean I get it, you know, but it was it was a lot of people felt like a lot of people felt like it would have been great if the dog shelters had the same I guess power or or if police departments were run by the people who run dog shelters because they seem to act like this. They didn't waste time.

They were like, nope. We'd like our dog back lady.

Which I'm going to be honest, I think was that was a that was a … I mean that was a hell of a punishment. Her job is one thing - taking a white lady's dog. That was a nice dog. And so that was the first domino, you know, It was the first domino where I felt like you could feel something stirring.

And all of this again is in the back door of a backdrop. It's coronavirus has happened. The numbers have come out, you know, the story of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. That story is coming all of these things are happening.

And then the video of George Floyd comes out and I don't know what made that video more painful for people to watch; the fact that that man was having his life taken in front of our eyes, the fact that we're watching someone being murdered by someone whose job is to protect and serve, or the fact that he seems so calm doing it, you know.

Oftentimes we’re always told that police feared for their life. It was like a threatened and you know, you always feel like an asshole wouldn't when you like you didn't fear for your life. How … why did you feel about … how did you feel but now more and more we're starting to see that is like not doesn't seem like there's a fear. It just seems like it's you can do it. So you did it.

There was a black man on the ground in handcuffs and you you could take his life. So you did. Almost knowing that they would be no ramifications. And then again everyone on the internet has to watch this. Everyone sees it … it floods our timelines as people.

And and I think one ray of sunshine for me in that moment was seeing how many people instantly condemned what they saw, you know, and maybe it's because I'm an optimistic person but I don't think I've ever seen anything like that. Especially not in America. I haven't seen a police video come out and and just see across the board … I mean even Fox News commentators and and police chiefs from around the country immediately condemning what they saw, no questions, not what was he doing? Not just going. No this what happened here was wrong. It was wrong, this person got murdered on camera.

And then the police were fired great, but I think what people take for granted is Is how much for so many people that feels like nothing, you know, how many of us as human beings can take the life of another human being and then have firing be the worst thing that happens to us. And yes, we don't know where the case will go. Don't get me wrong, but it just it feels like there is no moment of justice. There is no, you know, if you're watching a movie you'd at least want the cops … you'd want to see the perpetrators in handcuffs. You want to see the perpetrators facing some sort of justice.

Yes, they might come out on bail et cetera. But I think there's a lot of catharsis that comes with seeing that justice being doled out when the riots happened. That for me was an interesting culmination of everything. I saw so many people online saying these riots are disgusting. This is not how a society should be run.

You do not loot and you do not burn and you do not … this is not how our society is built and that actually triggered something in me when I was like man, okay Society but what is society? And fundamentally when you boil it down, society is a contract is a contract that we signed as human beings amongst each other.

We sign a contract with each other as people with it’s spoken on spoken and we say amongst this group of us. We agree in common rules, common ideals and common practices that are going to define us as a group. That's what I think is society and it's a contract. And as with most contracts the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.

But if you think of being a black person in America who is living in Minneapolis or Minnesota or any place where you're not having a good time …

Ask yourself this question when you watch those people what vested interest do they have in maintaining the contract?

Why like why don't we all loot? Why why don't why doesn't everybody take widened because we've agreed on things. There are so many people who are starving out there. There's so many people who don't have this, so many people there are people who are destitute. They're people who when the virus hits and they don't have a second paycheck, are already broke, which is insane, but that's that's the reality but still think about how many people who don't have. The Have Nots say, ‘you know what I'm still going to play by the rules, even though I have nothing because I still wish for the society to work and exist.’

And then some members of that society namely black American people watch time and time again how the contract that they have signed with society is not being honoured by the society that has forced them to sign it with them when you watch Armaud Arbery being shot and you hear that those men have been released and were it not for the video on the outrage. those people would be living their lives. What part of the contract is that in society when when you see George Floyd on the ground and you see a man losing his life?

In a way that no person should ever have to lose their life at the hands of someone who's supposed to enforce the law. What part of the contract is that? And a lot of people say well what good does this do? Yeah, but what good doesn't it do - that's the question people don't ask the other way around. What good does it do to loot Target? How does it help you to loot Target? Yeah, but how does it help you to not loot Target - answer that question because the only reason you didn't lootTarget before was because you were upholding society’s contract There is no contract if law and people in power don't uphold their end of it and that's the thing. I think people don't understand sometimes is that Is that we need people at the top to be the most accountable because they are the ones who are basically setting the tone and the tenor for everything that we do in society. It's the same way we tell parents to set an example for their kids. The same way we tell captains or coaches to set an example for their players. The same way you tell teachers to set an example for their students. The reason we do that is because we understand and society that if you lead by example, there is a good chance that people follow that example that you have set.

And so if the example law enforcement to setting is that they do not adhere to the laws, then why should the citizens of that society adhere to the laws when in fact the law enforcers themselves don't? There's a there's a really fantastic chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath where he talks about the principles. what is it, he talks about the principles … the principles of legitimacy.

And he says in order for us to argue that any society, I mean any legal body or any power is legitimate, we have to agree on core principles and those three principles if I remember correctly is: number one, we have to agree on what the principles are. Number two, we have to believe that the people who are enforcing the principles are going to enforce them fairly; and number three we have to agree that everyone in that society is going be treated fairly according to those principles. It is safe to say in this one week alone and maybe even from the beginning of coronavirus really blowing out in America, black Americans have seen their principles completely delegitimized.

Because if you're a black person in America right now and you're watching this, if you're a black American person specifically and you're watching this what principles are you seeing? I think sometimes the thing we need to remember and it's something I haven't remembered my whole life. I liked it. See you you start to learn these things. You know, when you when you travel the world when you read, when you learn about society, I think is that like when you are a have and when you are a have not you see the world in very different ways and a lot of the time people say to the have-nots. This is not the right way to handle things.

When Colin Kaepernick kneels they say this is not the right way to protest.

When Martin Luther King had children as part of his protests in Birmingham, Alabama people said to have children at your protest is not the right way to do things … when he marched in Selma people said this is not the right way to do things.

When people marched through the streets in South Africa during apartheid, they said this is not the right way to do things. When people burn things they say it's not …. It's never the right way because there's never, there is never a right way to protest and I've said this before there is no right way to protest because that's what protest is.

It cannot be right because you are protesting against a thing that is stopping you.

And so I think what a lot of people don't realize is the same way you might have experienced even more anger and more just visceral disdain watching those people loot that Target.
Think to yourselves Or maybe it would help you, if you think about that that that unease that 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 because that's fundamentally what's happening in America.

Police in America are looting black bodies and I know someone might think that's an extreme phrase but it's not because here's the thing. I think a lot of people don't realize George Floyd died … that is part of the reason the story became so big… is because he died …. but how many George Floyd's are there that don't die.

How many men are having knees put on their necks? How many Sandra Blands are out there being tossed around? We don't we don't it doesn't make the news because it's not grim enough. It doesn't even get us enough anymore. It's only the deaths the gruesome deaths that stick out but imagine to yourself if you grew up in a community where every day someone had their knee on your neck, where every day somebody was out there were pressing you every single day. You tell me what that does to you as a society as a community as a group of people and when you know that this is happening because of the color of your skin … not because the people are saying it's happening because of the color of skin, but rather because it is only happening to you and you are the only people who have that skin color. And I know this people who say yeah, but like well, how come black people don't care when black people kill? That man is one of the dumbest arguments ever. Of course they care. If you've ever been to a hood anywhere not just in America, but anywhere in the world, you know how much black people care about that. If you know anything about under policing and over-policing though, you would understand how that comes to be.

The police show black people how valuable their lives are considered by the society. And so then those people who live in those communities know how to or not deal with those lives because best believe if you kill a white person, especially in America, there is a whole lot more justice that is coming your way then if you killed some black body in a black neighborhood somewhere.

And so to anyone who watched that video, don't ask yourself if it's right or wrong to loot. Or don't ask yourself, well, what does looting help? And no, no … ask yourself that ask yourself that question. Ask yourself why it got you that much more watching watching these people loot because they were destroying the contract that you thought they had signed with your society.

And now think to yourself, imagine if you were with them watching that contract being ripped up every single day ask yourself how you'd feel.

Killer Mike: 'It is your duty not to burn your own house down', Atlanta protests press conference - 2020

29 May 2020, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

I didn’t want to come, and I don’t want to be here. I’m the son of an Atlanta City Police Officer. My cousin is an Atlanta City Police Officer, and my other cousin he’s a police officer. I got a lot of love and respect for police officers down to the original eight police officers in Atlanta that, even after becoming police, had to dress in a YMCA because white officers didn’t want to get dressed with niggers.

And, here we are, 80 years later. I watched a white officer assassinate a black man, and I know that tore your heart out. I know it’s crippling, and I have nothing positive to say in this moment because I don’t want to be here. But, I’m responsible to be here because it wasn’t just Doctor King and people dressed nicely who marched and protested to progress this city and so many other cities. It was people like my grandmother, people like my aunts and uncles, who are members of the SCLC and NAACP. And, in particular, Reverend James Orange, Mrs. Alice Johnson and Reverend Love, who we just lost last year.

So, I’m duty bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize. It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth. It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs. Atlanta is not perfect, we’re a lot better than we ever were, and we’re a lot better than cities are.

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. And, we watch it like murder porn over and over again. That’s why children are burning to the ground. They don’t know what else to do.

It is the responsibility of us to make this better right now. We don’t want to see one officer charged. We want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don’t want to see Targets burning. We want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.

As I sit here in Georgia, home of Stephens, Georgia, former vice president of the Confederacy … White man said that fundamental law stated that whites were naturally the superior race, and the Confederacy was built on a Cornerstone. It’s called a Cornerstone Speech. Look it up. The Cornerstone Speech that blacks would be always be subordinate … That officer believed that speech because he killed that man like an animal.

In this city, officers have done horrendous things, and they have been prosecuted. This city’s cut different. In this city, you can find over 50 restaurants owned by black women. I didn’t say minority, and I didn’t say women of color. So, after you burn down your own home, what do you have left but char and ash?

CNN? Ted did a great thing. I love CNN. I love Cartoon Network. But, I’d like to say to CNN right now: karma’s a mother. Stop feeding fear and anger every day. Stop making people feel so fearful. Give them hope.

I’m glad they only took down a sign and defaced a building, and they’re not killing human beings like that policeman did. I’m glad they only destroyed some brick and mortar, and they didn’t rip a father from a son. They didn’t rip a son from a mother like the policeman did. When a man yells for his mother in duress and pain and she’s dead, he is essentially yelling, “Please, God. Don’t let it happen to me.” We watched that.

So, my question for us, on the other side of this camera, is after it burns, will we be left with char, or will we rise like a phoenix out of the ashes that Atlanta has always done? Will we use this as a moment to say that we will not do what other cities have done, and in fact, we will get better than we’ve been.

We got good enough to destroy cash bonds. You don’t have to worry about going to jail for something petty. We got smart enough to decriminalize marijuana. How smart are we going to be in the next 15 to 20 years, to keep us ahead of this curve so that, much like when South Africa suffered apartheid, you had Andy and other politicians that could make sure that Atlanta said, “Coca-Cola, we love you, but if you don’t pull out of South Africa, we’re going to leave. We’re not going to drink Coca-Cola anymore.” Coca-Cola jumped on their side, and apartheid ended.

So, we have an opportunity now because I’m mad. I don’t have any good advice. What I can tell you is that if you sit in your homes tonight instead of burning your home to the ground, you will have time to properly plot, plan, strategize, and organize and mobilize in an effective way.

Two of the most effective ways is first taking your butt to the computer and making sure you fill out your Census so that people know who you are and where you are. The next thing is making sure you exercise your political bully power and going to local elections and beating up the politicians that you don’t like.

You got a prosecutor that sent your partner to jail, and you know it was bullshit? Put a new prosecutor in there. Now’s your election to do it. You want a different senator that’s more progressive, that’s puts marijuana through? Now is the time to do that, but it is not time to burn down your own home.

I love and I respect you. I hate I don’t have more to say. I hate I can’t fix it in a snap. I hate Atlanta’s not perfect for as good as we are. But, we have to be better than this moment. We have to be better than burning down our own homes because if we lose Atlanta, what else we got? We lose an ability to plot, to plan, to strategize, to organize, and to properly mobilize.

I want you to go home. I want you to talk to 10 of your friends. I want you guys to come up with real solutions. I would like for the Atlanta city police department to bring back the community review board, one that Alice Johnson was formerly under, under Chief Turner. We need a review board here because we need to get ahead of it before an officer does some stupid shit. We need to get ahead of it.

That’s my recommendation to my mayor and my chief. Let’s get a review board. Let’s get ahead of it, and let’s give them power. We don’t need an officer that makes a mistake once, twice, three times and finally he kills a boy on national TV, and the next thing you know the country is burning down. We don’t need a dumb-ass president repeating what segregation has said. If you start looting, we start shooting. But, the problem is, some officers black, and some people going to shoot back. And, that’s not good for our community, either.

I love and respect you all. I hope that we find a way out of it because I don’t have the answers, but I do know we must plot. We must plan. We must strategize, organize, and mobilize. Thank you for allowing me some time to speak. I’d like to appreciate our chief, of what she said on YouTube. I thought it was very bold to do. I’d like to appreciate our mayor for talking to us like a black mama and telling us to take our ass at home, and I’d like to thank my friends for convincing me to come here. And, I defer to Joe Beasley now because he knows a hell of a lot more than we do. Thank you all.

Audre Lorde: 'Women responding to racism means women responding to anger', National Women’s Studies Association Conference - 1981

June 1981, Storrs Connecticut, USA

Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.

Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.

Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; Anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.

My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more.

For example:

• I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?

• The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem.

• After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.

• After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,” a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How do you use your rage?” And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her.

• White women are beginning to examine their relationships to Black women, yet often I hear them wanting only to deal with little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nursemaid, the occasional second-grade classmate – those tender memories of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You avoid the childhood assumptions formed by the raucous laughter at Rastus and Alfalfa, the acute message of your mommy’s handkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos ‘n Andy and your daddy’s humorous bedtime stories.

• I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!” And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease.

• A white academic welcomes the appearance of a collection by non-Black women of Color. “It allows me to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women,” she says to me.

• At an international cultural gathering of women, a well known white american woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then ashes off to an “important panel.”

If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and living contexts of other women. When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible for many women of Color – for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework – to participate in this conference. Is this to be merely another case of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy?

To the white women present who recognize these attitudes as familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and survive thousands of such encounters – to my sisters of Color who like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the two most popular accusations) – I want to speak about anger, my anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions.

Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction’).

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.

I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark, resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain silent because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism.

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision af!d our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.

Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.

In this place we speak removed from the more blatant reminders of our embattlement as women. This need not blind us to the size and complexities of the forces mounting against us and all that is most human within our environment. We are not here as women examining racism in a political and social vacuum. We operate in the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit. Women responding to racism is a topic so dangerous that when the local media attempt to discredit this conference they choose to focus upon the provision of lesbian housing as a diversionary device – as if the Hartford Courant dare not mention the topic chosen for discussion here, racism, lest it become apparent that women are in fact attempting to examine and to alter all the repressive conditions of our lives.

Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening-time or the common cold.

So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people – against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.

Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here.

And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric.

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?

Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger at being silenced at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?

It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Most women have not developed tools for facing anger constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups were made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color, age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor. There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt.

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment.

The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.

For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.

But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.

My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It has also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the work and history of Black women was less than a vapor. It has served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results of your own actions.

When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and action.” All these quotes come directly from letters to me from members of this organization within the last two years. One woman wrote, “Because you are Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.” Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.

To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power – it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. Guilt is only another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over. My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.

I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolfs lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.

We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

Katie Hopkins: 'I am not used to receiving awards', Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy, Prank Ceremony - 2020

27 January 2020, Prague, Czech Republic

This was a fake award presentation made by YouTuber Josh Pieters to Katie Hopkins, who is a controversial figure in the United Kingdom for her racist views and inlflammatory commentary.. Pieters invented an organisation and flew Hopkins to Prague for a fake awards ceremony. See full video.

Josh Pieters voiceover: I had to make a speech to really convince her that we were real.

Welcome again. It's been a brilliant evening so far. Thank you, obviously, Katie for joining us. Now, I wish I could take credit for the speech, but it was actually written by my father, Leslie, who is our chairman. He's asked me to say just a few words on his behalf.

“We need freedom of speech from politicians to journalists, campaign groups to creatives, YouTubers to you in this room. Without being able to say what we think, without being able to mock other people, without being able to attack people, we are not free. Which brings me to Katie Hopkins, the recipient of the inaugural Campaign to Unify the Nation trophy. I cannot think of a more worthy recipient, for the tide is changing. The intellectual battle against the woke brigade is being won. The snowflakes are melting and Katie Hopkins and the United Kingdom and far beyond should take a great deal of credit, for the ice caps of political correctness are starting to collapse. Katie has experienced a huge amount of online hate. Some people on the internet really seem to want to bring her down.

[Crowd]: Shame!

There are people out there wanting to ridicule her, wanting to mock her. It is not at all possible to properly outline just what an inspiration you are to us all, Katie. It is an absolute pleasure on behalf of all of the members of the Cape Town Collective for the Freedom of Speech to announce that the recipient for the 2020 Campaign to Unify the Nation trophy is Katie Hopkins.

[Crowd] Woo, Katie.

[Voice over] We had succeeded. We made Katie Hopkins fly 1600 miles to pick up a fake award and put the word (beep) behind her without her noticing. You might wonder if this is a bit mean. For a moment, I did too, but then she made her speech and told us what she really thought.

Katie Hopkins : This is by far the most fun I've had in a very long time.

I am not used to receiving awards. It is strange and it's strange to hear nice things being said about yourself. You sit there and you think, wait a minute, they're saying that about me. Whereas normally, it is kind of an incoming deluge of fireballs coming my way. So it's kind of an odd thing for that to be tipped on its head, but I really do appreciate it.
[Fast cuts]
If you call Muhammad in a school playground in the UK, 2000 kids come running and you don't want any of them.
Epileptics are all weirdos. They're up there with the Asians.
The Eastland is fairly shitty in the best of times.
82% Muslim. What can I say? Most people are raping their own mother. I guess Muslims are different.
So she, I believe her name was [offensive mock Arabic babble], her fiance, I believe his name was [more mock Arabic babble] and where they practise, because they're such retards, other places where people get stabbed a lot or try and rape their own mother or have five wives.
[About Greta Thunberg] How dare you? Autistic (beep) wench.

Thank you very much!

[Drinking games]
.
[Vocieover Josh Pieters] You might ask what the whole point of this thing is. Why did Archie and I fly Katie Hopkins to Prague and give her a stupid fake award? The truth is there's an awful lot of hate in this world and people like Katie Hopkins spread that hate and make money from it, and she can do that because she has freedom of speech.

But so do I. So I used it to combat her spreading of hatred by playing on her ego and making her look a little bit silly. Anyway, to finish off, here's a message from our chairman:

Leslie Pieters: Hi everyone. Leslie Pieters here, the chairman of the Cape Town Collective for the Freedom of Speech. It's with great sadness that I have to report that Katie has been banned on Twitter and as a result there of, she can no longer be a member of this society. Goodbye.

Michael O'Loughlin: 'We are bending towards justice', Indigeonous Round, 2017

25 May 2017, AFL Studios, Docklands, Melbourne, Australia

Video starts at 5.04

Welcome everyone.

Thanks for taking the time to listen to an old hasbeen.

Hopefully you'll take something away from my stories, and some of the guys I've looked up to over the course of my career, and obviously, my life.

I experienced racism playing for Salisbury North under 12s on a cold Adelaide morning in 1988.

I was an eleven year old kid. Having a reasonable game. Getting a few touches. Feeling okay about msyelf and my footy.

Then I hear a voice from behind, it's a kid's voice. "Make sure that abo doesn't touch the ball again.'

I responded with fists. I started swinging, wanting to lash out, to hurt somebody, hurt the person who had without any provocation decided to hurt me.

My mum was in my ear after that game. 'You can't respond like that my boy. You can't respond with violence.  You gotta know they're gonna use it as a tactic. That's the way they're gonnatry to stop you and unsettle you.'

That was my introduction. There's not an Aboriginal player who's played the game who doesn't have his own version.

I see those old videos of Robbie Muir, the old Saints legend, going berserk in the mud at Moorabbin, and I can imagine, week in week out, what he must have put up with. And Chris Lewis, who missed 23 matches, 23 matches!, with suspension. He faced it every week too. 'You black so and so." Every week.

So oppositions knew what they were doing. They were targeting players, good players, and using their skin tone, their aboriginal heritage against them.

Twenty years later, Dermott Brereton apologised to him, face to face, on national television. The apology is to Dermott's credit. The original behaviour is not acceptable. Lewis's tormentors knew what my Mum knew. That racism could be used as a tactic. To quote Dermott: "We got word from a team that 'Lewy' had been put off his game by taunts, racially based, so we thought 'anything to curb this bloke's brilliance'.

It was Martin Luther King who said that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice.'

I think that's true when it comes to indigenous Australia and footy. To the AFL's and the football community's credit, we are bending towards justice.

I played 303 games of AFL footy with the Swans, and not once was I subject to racial abuse by another player. Not once.

My first game was in 1995, just a few years after the incidents involving Chris Lewis in the early 90s.

Something changed in terms of what was acceptable on the footy field. And we know what it was. It was indigenous footballers saying enough is enough. Footballers like 'Magic' Michael McLean, who spoke up and said enough was enough. Like Michael Long, on that famous Anzac Day, calling out racial abuse and demanding an end to it. Like Nicky Winmar, raising his jumper to his vilifiers and pointing to that flawless black skin. 'I'm black and I'm proud'. Pain, defiance, courage, and the possibility for change - all in one photographic moment. May they cast the image in bronze one day.

These men agitated for change, and the AFL responded.

It created Rule 30, the first sporting body to make a rule prohibiting racial vilification. It transformed the workplace for aboriginal footballers, and the results have been staggering.  Indigenous players now make up 11% of the AFL, with the number growing year by year. No longer are we thought of as erratic, or risky. We work and train as professionally as the other 89%. Some have a particular flair that sets them apart – Eddie Betts, Cyril Rioli, and of course Buddy Franklin. The noise in the stadium shifts gear when these players approach the ball. The Sir Doug Nicholls round is about celebrating the indigenous contribution to our indigenous game. In 2017, footy without aboriginal players just wouldn't be footy.

The relationship goes the other way too. Aboriginal Australia needs the AFL and its footy role models. So many of the current crop of indigenous stars are revered in their communities. They return there as heroes, as role models, leaders, beacons of hope and possibility for kids who love footy. Kids who are sometimes doing it tough in a country that hasn't closed the gap in health and education, between indigenous and white Australia.

2017 marks 50 years since the referendum changing the Constitution so that Indigenous people could be counted in the census. Only fifty years, fifty years!,  regarded as proper Australians, as people!

Carlton champion Syd Jackson was born in desert country around Leonara in WA. He and his sisters were taken from their family, and raised in the missions. White people named him Syd after an actor of the times called Sid James. He was given 1st July as a birthday, because that was the start of the financial year. When Jackson was picked to tour Ireland with a combined Australian team in 1968, he didn't have a birth certificate which meant he had no passport. Tour organisers petitioned the Prime Minister, who organised the document. Syd Jackson carried that passporteverywhere for years, because it was a symbol that he was a valid Australian, that he counted.  

Syd is a hero of mine, as are other indigenous football pioneers like Polly Farmer and Barry Cable.

As are the women and men who fought for our voting rights. People like Faith Bandler, Uncle Charlie Perkins, Jack and Jean Horner and Sir Doug Nicholls himself.

2017 also marks 25 years since the historic Mabo decision. it led to the Native Title Act, a revoking of the racist legal fiction that was terra nullius.

These were necessary steps, important steps. It's progress born of the activism and courage of people like Auntie Lowitja O'Donohue and Uncle Eddie Mabo.

It's the leadership of Senator Mick Dodson and Linda Burney.

It's the unwavering love and commitment of an educator like Aunty Alice Ridney, teacher of a thousand, transformer of lives. Aunty Alice was Australia's first aboriginal school principal, and like myself, belonged to the Kaurna and Nurungga Nations. She sadly passed away a fortnight ago. Australia a better place for her life lived.

For all the positive steps, I still feel frustration for the racism that plagues Australian society, and our wonderful game.

My best friend in footy, and in life, the great Adam Goodes. What happened to Adam in 2015 still fills my heart with sadness.

For all the positive change the AFL and players had enacted over two decades, Adam, as an Australian of the Year and outspoken advocate for our people, became a magnet for those who wanted to resist the positive force of change.

The booers were bullies and cowards. They could do it under the cloak of the masses. They were causing pain, they knew they were causing pain, and yet it continued. They defended themselves by saying that it was 'just booing', that they had a right to boo, that Adam's reaction was thin-skinned and an example of political correctness gone mad. But they kept it up, and they wore down the resilence of an unbelievalbe player.

And so a great of the game, a legend of this era and of all time, was hounded into retirement by an unrepentant section of the football loving public. That happened less than two years ago. As Stan Grant put it in his famous speech about Adam, 'every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history.'

Yet we are getting there.

Fans are calling out fans when they hear the unacceptable howls of racial hatred. Club are swift with punishments when incidents come to light. The players are a united front, led by the aboriginal stars, educating the public, telling them that it is no longer going to be tolerated.

And yet Eddie Betts gets targeted just a few weeks ago.

We still have a way to go.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

We will get there, as a country and as a code.

We will get there, because we're basically a nation of fair and decent people.

We will get there because men and women like Sir Doug Nicholls, Faith Bandler, and Adam Goodes were brave when they had to be.

To quote Barack Obama: "We honour those who walked so we could run.  We must run so our children soar.'

Thank you very much.

Valerie Kaur: "What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?", Interfaith Watch Night Service - 2016

31 December 2016, Metropolitan AME Church, Washington State, USA

Valerie Kaur is a Sikh activist and lawyer. The interfaith service was called after a series of hate crimes in the United States, including earlier that week when a 39-year-old Sikh man shot in his driveway in Kent, Wash., by a man wearing a mask. The man said, “Go back to your own country' before pulling the trigger.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. (The beloved community belongs to divine Oneness, and so does all that it achieves.)

On Christmas Eve 103 years ago, my grandfather waited in a dark and dank cell. He sailed by steamship across the Pacific Ocean from India to America leaving behind colonial rule, but when he landed on American shores immigration officials saw his dark skinned, his tall turban worn as a part of his Sikh faith, and saw him not as a brother but as foreign, as suspect, threw him behind bars where he languished for months until a single man, a white man, a lawyer named Henry Marshall filed a writ of habeas corpus that released him on Christmas Eve 1913.

My grandfather Kehar Singh became a farmer, free to practice the heart of his Sikh faith — love and oneness. So when his Japanese American neighbors were rounded up and taken to their own detention camps to the deserts of America he went out to see them when no one else would. He looked after their farms until they returned home. He refused to stand down.

In the aftermath of September 11th when hate violence exploded in these United States, a man that I called uncle was murdered. I tried to stand up. I became a lawyer like the man who freed my grandfather and I joined a generation of activists fighting detentions and deportation, surveillance and special registration, hate crimes and racial profiling. And after 15 years with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I thought we were making a nation safer for the next generation.

And then my son was born. On Christmas Eve, I watched him ceremoniously put the milk and cookies by the fire for Santa Claus. And after he went to sleep, I then drink the milk and ate the cookies. I wanted him to wake up and see them gone in the morning. I wanted him to believe in a world that was magical. But I am leaving my son a world that is more dangerous than the one I was given. I am raising — we are raising — a brown boy in America, a brown boy who may someday wear a turban as part of his faith.

And in America today, as we enter an era of enormous rage, as white nationalists hail this moment as their great awakening, as hate acts against Sikhs and our Muslim brothers and sisters are at an all-time high, I know that there will be moments whether on the streets or in the school yards where my son will be seen as foreign, as suspect, as a terrorist. Just as black bodies are still seen as criminal, brown bodies are still seen as illegal, trans bodies are still seen as immoral, indigenous bodies are still seen as savage, the bodies of women and girls seen as someone else’s property. And when we see these bodies not as brothers and sisters then it becomes easier to bully them, to rape them, to allow policies that neglect them, that incarcerate them, that kill them.

Yes, rabbi, the future is dark. On this New Year’s Eve, this watch night, I close my eyes and I see the darkness of my grandfather’s cell. And I can feel the spirit of ever rising optimism in the Sikh tradition Chardi Kala (ever-rising high spirits) within him.

So the mother and me asks what if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?

What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push we will die. If we don’t push our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. (The beloved community belongs to divine Oneness, and so does all that it achieves.)

Stan Grant: "This week Australia is a boy in a hood strapped to a chair", Wallace Wurth lecture, UNSW - 2016

29 July 2016, UNSW Kensington Campus, Sydney, Australia

The lecture was given only a few days after damning allegations were revealed on ABC's Four Corners program about treatment of Indigenous children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Australia's Northern Territory.

There was a speech I had planned to give tonight. I wished it to be a speech rational and measured.

In this speech I would have appealed to the best of Australia – to what Abraham Lincoln would have called the better angels of our nature.

In this speech I would have wished to locate Indigenous people within the framework of the grand tradition of liberal western democracy.

In this speech I would have spoken of Hegel's idea of man "not being at home in the world".

I would have asked how we – the first peoples of this land – could be at home in a world imposed upon us.

In this speech I would have spoken of Edmund Burke's template for society – that it be a covenant between those living those who have passed and those yet to come.

What is this covenant that would link my ancestors and my children – for us it would not be the glory of nations won but of nations lost.

How then after having our world upended could I pledge allegiance to what has supplanted us?

In this speech I could have touched on those thinkers who are the pillars of western democratic ideas – I would have told of wrestling with John Locke and JS Mill.

How they have inspired me yet left me reeling from their implicit harsh judgment of the society and culture that I am drawn from.

I would have told of feeling both drawn to the steadfastness and stoicism of conservatism yet wonder how so many of those who lay claim to the mantle conservative today can be so mean spirited and have a deficit of generosity.

This speech would have looked to contemporary thinkers like Australian Duncan Ivison.

Ivison strives for a theory of justice that enables us to feel at home in the world when we are no longer alienated from the institutions and practices of this society – that being at home in the world is not just having to be resigned to accepting or accommodating injustice.

I would have quoted the late American philosopher John Rawls and his idea of reconciliation through public reason – of people being able to endorse the institutions and practices of society and not merely tolerate them.

I would have explored what American political scientist William Connolly has termed the 'vital centre of the nation'

I would have returned to John Stuart Mill – the Mill who could speak of a centre that could "soften the extreme form and fill up the intervals between us"?

This speech I wished to give would have sought amity with a tradition that has excluded us.

In this speech I would have sought those things that can unite us not those things that divide.

In this speech I would have chosen carefully my words.

In this speech I would have sought less to inflame and more to comfort.

I cannot give that speech it is best saved for another day.

That speech would have come from my head but I wish to speak from my heart.

Some of my own people have criticised me for being too faithful to diplomacy.

They find fault in my hope or optimism. To my critics I give Australia too much credit.

In another week I might challenge them – but not this week.

This week they are right.

This week I have struggled to contain a pulsating rage.

I have moved from boiling anger to simmering resentment but the feeling has not passed nor do I wish it too.

Even as I write, my words are powered by a coursing fury. My hands hover above the keyboard in a clenched fist.

This is an anger that comes from the certainty of being.

This is an anger that speaks to my soul.

This anger I know to be just.

This speech tonight does not look to Lincoln's first inaugural – then the great American president spoke words of brotherhood to a fractured nation on the eve of war.

"We are not enemies but friends", he said.

"We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

How I wish I could say that tonight. Another time – yes – but not tonight.

For this speech I look to Lincoln's second inaugural.

Here he stood before a country bloodied and worn.

Victory was at hand and slavery at an end.

But this president was tired.

His country lay in ruin. His assassin lurked in the audience.

Lincoln leaned on the gospels to lay at the feet of the nation the sin of slavery:

"Woe unto the world because of offenses – for it must needs be that offences come, but woe to the man by whom those offences cometh."

Woe to the man by whom those offences cometh.

What offences we have seen this past week.

How can I stand here and speak to the idea of our place in an indissoluble commonwealth when this week my people have been reminded that our place is so often behind this nation's bars.

This week we know what Australia looks like.

This week Australia is a boy in a hood strapped to a chair.

This week Australia is Aboriginal boys tear gassed, locked down and beaten.

These are the images on our television screens.

These boys who look like my boys.

I watched my teenage son as he saw this unfold before him. I saw him lose his place in the world – with each scene of horror he became less sure of his country.

For he has been raised not to believe in our worst.

He has been spared the fate of so many of his people.

But on that night he wondered at the difference between himself and the boys on the screen.

For in these boys he sees something of himself and he asks how his country can allow this.

When I saw the boys I saw a tragedy my son had escaped but I saw a reminder of a brutality his grandfather and my grandfather had endured.

I saw in those boys the broken bones and stab wounds and dark ink jail tattoos of my father.

I recalled the story of my mother's father dragged from his bed by police accused of drinking.

The same man arrested and tied to a tree like a dog.

There are those who would rather I not speak of these things.

There are those who accuse me of having a nostalgia for injustice.

A nostalgia for injustice – as if these wounds on the body and soul of my mother and father are things of memory.

As if we choose to cling to suffering – as if this injustice is a thing recalled and not a thing lived.

A nostalgia for injustice – such a charge could be levelled only by someone certain of his place in this country.

A certainty denied to a people – the first people – still searching for ours. Estranged in the land of our ancestors.

It could be levelled only by someone who sees injustice and brutality as something to be pondered and not endured.

It is a charge brought by people comfortable in their own history while they tell us to forget ours – to get over it.

These are people who value their traditions exalt their heroes and deny ours.

I wonder: would they dismiss the memories of the Jewish people so lightly?

Are the Jewish memories of suffering too, merely a nostalgia for injustice?

These are people who proclaim themselves conservatives but with their meanness debase the very traditions they claim to uphold.

These people who seize on difference – gay, Muslim, Asian, black – to vilify, divide and demonise.

All the while reserving for themselves the right to define our country and set the price of inclusion.

They are the people who wrap their words in civility to mask the beating heart of their bigotry.

How do these people square their supposed conservatism and professed love of country with the words of British conservative writer Roger Scruton when he says: "individuals must be free which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them."

Yet these people seek to redesign us to tell us who we should be and how we should think.

These people would tell those boys on our television screens this week – the boys crying in agony - that they live in an imagined world of pain.

They would tell them that they are to blame for their treatment.

They would tell the family of a 10-year-old indigenous girl who takes her own life that they live in an imagined world of sadness.

They would tell our people in overcrowded housing in communities ravaged by violence and drug and alcohol abuse that they revel in their misery.

They tell me I have a nostalgia for injustice.

No, we have no nostalgia for injustice because we have not first had the chance to forget.

Polish Nobel prize winning poet Czeslav Milosc spoke of his people carrying the 'memory of wounds'.

The memory of wounds – as Milosc wrote –perhaps all memory is the memory of wounds.

Certainly for us these memories sit deep within our soul.

Rather than long for these memories – rather than seek them out to give meaning to my identity in a perfect world I would wish them away.

But what has been done cannot be undone.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

The scars of my father and the memory of my grandfather – these stories and images – the graveyard crosses of people gone too young are seared into my minds eyes as surely as the charred flesh and the stench of blood from a lifetime of reporting haunts my night's sleep.

The memory of a hooded, bound boy in a cell is now similarly burned in my consciousness.

Australia was redeemed in part from complicity in this disgrace only by the national outrage.

The Prime Minister responded by calling immediately for a royal commission.

It may meet a minimum requirement for action but forgive us if we lack faith.

We have been poked and prodded for two centuries.

We have been the subject of endless inquiry.

The heads of our people rest still in glass jars in foreign museums and our skeletons contained in cardboard boxes – the artefacts of inquiry.

Two decades ago we held a royal commission into black deaths in custody – it was supposed to end the culture of incarceration.

Today almost every face – man woman and child – behind bars in the Northern Territory is black.

Nationally, barely 3 per cent of the population comprise a quarter of those in jails.

It is not to excuse their individual crimes to make plain the fact that every one of those people – indigenous people – are a product of this country's history.

It is a history still yet to be given its full account.

It is a history still yet to puncture the public consciousness.

It is a history born of terra nullius – the founding of a nation on the lie of the empty land.

It is a history lamented in the 1960s by anthropologist W.E.H Stanner as the "'great Australian Silence".

It was he said: "A cult of forgetting practiced on a national scale."

Half a century later his words ring just as true.

Rather than this royal commission how more necessary is a truth and reconciliation commission.

A full reckoning of our Nation's past, that may set loose the chains of history that bind this country's first and today most miserably impoverished people.

In my caution I have argued against such things fearing it would harden division.

Now I accept that we need this mirror into our soul.

How can we continue to look at endemic child suicide, intractable disadvantage and our choking jail cells as mere pieces of a policy puzzle scattered on a board devoid of the outline of our troubled past.

If we are to remember the fallen of Pozieres and Fromelles, then surely we can remember the fallen warriors who resisted the invasion of their lands on this soil 200-plus years ago.

We can remember my people the Wiradjuri and the martial law of Bathurst.

We can recall the words of William Cox given the first land grant on the plains west of the Blue Mountains.

"It is better that all the blacks be shot and their carcasses used to manure the ground which is all the good they are fit for."

And shot they were – and poisoned and herded over cliffs – others ravaged by disease.

Half the population wiped out in a matter of years in what the Sydney Gazette reported as an "exterminating war."

And this is just the story of my own blood – each of our hundreds of nations has its own similar history.

This truth telling would make good on the demand of French philosopher Paul Ricouer:

"We must remember because remembering is a moral duty, we owe a debt to the victims. By remembering and telling we stop them from being buried twice."

Stop them from being buried twice – Australia's war dead are etched on walls of remembrance: 'lest we forget'.

Our dead lie in fields forgotten - histories still untold.

Without such truth where is our reconciliation?

Is it just to be measured in economic statistics?

Must closing the gap be the only measure of our justice?

Without such truth what is this thing we are calling recognition?

I sit on the referendum council and this week the word itself: recognition has felt small.

In this week it reeks of incremental shift when we cry out for fundamental change.

What is this perversity – that we should ask Australia to finally recognise us?

That we should ask for others to decide whether we have a place in a constitution that was designed for our exclusion?

This recognition lives in the netherworld of symbolism when so many of the lives of our people are crushed by a real world that has never truly recognised them – that has rendered them invisible: out of sight and out of mind.

We are asking Australia to recognise us when most Australians still admit to having never met an Indigenous person.

They may likely hang a dot painting on their wall having never touched the hand of the painter.

This recognition doesn't speak to my father – he recognises himself when he speaks with the power of his language: still alive when Australia would have seen it silenced.

Balladhu Wiradjuri Gibbir – dyirramadilinya badhu Wiradjuri! I am a Wiradjuri man – proudly Wiradjuri.

In this week: how can this recognition excite our people, weary of a struggle for rights so long denied.

Support for this recognition feels insipid and its supporters can speak only an air of resignation that the best we can get is less than we deserve.

I had thought that recognition may complete our nation – that it may fill the unfilled void.

I saw it as a chance for Australians to recognise ourselves. I am prepared to say that I put too much store in the power of this symbolism.

Now my arguments feel timid.

Recognition on these terms feels like betrayal of those who have fought for a justice more deserving: more dignified.

Recognition risks shrinking our ambitions to fit a miserable national mood where the polity has lost faith in its politicians.

This recognition is hostage to politics and politics is often the enemy of the truth.

This recognition demands finding common cause with those who have no interest in enlarging our nation but containing it.

This recognition demands a dispiriting compromise with those who seek to do nothing more than the least they can do.

To give full flight to our aspirations would be to court failure.

What a damning state of affairs in a country that remains the only commonwealth nation not to enshrine the sovereign rights of its first peoples.

Are we really so stricken with lethargy on this subject?

Must we be comfortable with our laggard status?

Do we not look to New Zealand or the United States or Canada and ask why we too cannot negotiate treaties?

Treaty even unattainable sings to the heart of indigenous people here in a way that recognition cannot.

If recognition is then to mean anything then we need to infuse it with the urgency of now.

It needs to speak with hope to the hooded beaten boys in dark prison cells.

It needs to rise above the transactions of our daily lives to sing in our hearts.

It needs to whisper to the conscience of our political leaders.

If it is to mean anything it needs to be imbued with the power to reorder our lives…to give real voice to the first peoples.

If the constitution is our rule book then we need to rewrite those rules.

Anything less will speak to the poverty of our spirit not the breadth of our vision.

Can we do this? That part of me that wants to believe struggles with what my eyes this week have seen.

Those boys: links in a chain that has bound us for 200 years.

This recognition: what is it without truth?

To quote the poet Milosc: "Crimes against human rights never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of friendship between nations."

Can we confess these truths?

My people have spoken this country's confession even when no one would listen.

Our heroes have sought to fill out this country. They have held its greatness to great account.

Our warriors of the frontier: Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Yagun, Jandamarra, Tunnerminnerwait and so many others who resisted invasion and whose names should fall from the lips of schoolchildren as easily as Captain Cook, Arthur Phillip or Ned Kelly.

Their spirit has lived in those who have followed.

Joe Anderson – otherwise known as King Burraga of the Tharawal people – who said in 1933:

"All the black man wants is representation in federal parliament. There is plenty of fish in the river for us all and land to grow all we want."

Victorian Aboriginal leader William Cooper who in 1937 petitioned King George for representation in Parliament.

The years have not diminished our struggle. We have fought on many fronts.

In 1963 the Yirrkala bark petitions were recognised by the Australian parliament.

The Yolngu People asserted the ownership of their lands and the right to be heard.

In 1966 Vincent Lingiari walked off Wave Hill station to demand equal pay and won his land when Gough Whitlam poured the sand through Vincent's fingers.

Charles Perkins led a bus load of students to smash segregation outback New South Wales.

In 1972 a group of activists pitched a tent on the lawns of parliament house.

In 1988 Yolngu leader Gallarwuy Yunnipingu presented the Barunga statement to Prime Minister Bob Hawke demanding what the Yirrkala people had demanded in their petition to the Queen: a treaty.

Eddie Mabo a man from Murray Island took his battle to the highest court in the land and did not live to see his claim vindicated: this was indeed his land.

After the apology to the stolen generations Gallarwuy Yunnipingu gave a speech talking about what he called 'serious business': a final settlement.

Still we wait.

This week we ask again: how long do we wait?

I don't put myself in this pantheon.

I live in the enormous shadow they cast.

So I turn to words; the words of a man I turned to as I began this speech.

I turn to the speech I had hoped to give.

I recalled the words of Lincoln's first inaugural, his appeal to his nation's better angels.

I return to the words of the weary Lincoln. The Lincoln at the start of his second term, a man whose death stalked him as he spoke.

"Let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."

Mandang Guwu – Thank you.

Stan Grant was a guest on episode 8 of the Speakola podcast, talking about his Australian Dream speech.

Chaim Herzog: 'This resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance', Tears up UN Resolution 3379 - 1975

10 November 1975, United Nations, New York City, USA

Resolution 3379 before the third committee condemned Zionism as racism. This is the Israeli response. The resolution was reversed by the General Assembly in 1991.

It is symbolic that this debate, which may well prove to be a turning point in the fortunes of the United Nations and a decisive factor as to the possible continued existence of this organization, should take place on 10 November.

This night, 37 years ago, has gone down in history as the Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Crystals. This was the night of November 10, 1938 when Hitler's Nazi stormtroopers launched a co-ordinated attack on the Jewish community in Germany, burnt the synagogues in all the cities and made bonfires in the streets, of the Holy Books and the Scrolls of the Holy Laws and the Bible.

It was the night when Jewish homes were attacked and heads of families were taken away, many of them never to return. It was the night when the windows of all Jewish businesses and stores were smashed, covering the streets in the cities of Germany with a film of broken glass which dissolved into millions of crystals, giving that night the name of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Crystals.

It was the night which led eventually to the crematoria and the gaschambers, to Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and others. It was the night which led to the most terrifying holocaust in the history of man.

It is indeed fitting, that this draft, conceived in the desire to deflect the Middle East from its moves towards peace, and born of a deep, pervading feeling of anti-Semitism, should come up for debate on this day which recalls one of the tragic days in one of the darkest periods of history. It is indeed fitting that the United Nations, which began its life as an anti-Nazi alliance, should, 30 years later, find itself on its way to becoming the world centre of anti-Semitism. Hitler would have felt at home on a number of occasions during the past year, listening to the proceedings in this form and, above all, to the proceedings during the debate on Zionism.

It is a sobering reflection indeed to consider to what this body has been dragged down, if we are obliged today to contemplate an attack on Zionism. For this attack constitutes not only an anti-Semitic attack of the foulest type, but also an attack in this world body on Judaism, one of the oldest-established religions in the world, a religion which has given the world the human values of the Bible, a religion, from which two other great religions, Christianity and Islam, sprang - a great and established religion that has given to the world the Bible with its Ten Commandments; the great prophets of old, Moses, Isaiah, Amos; the great thinkers of history, Maimonides, Spinoza, Marx, Einstein; many of the masters of the arts; and as high a percentage of Nobel Prize winners in the world, in the sciences, the arts and the humanities, as has been achieved by any other people on earth.

One can but ponder and wonder at the prospect of countries, which consider themselves to be part of the civilized world, joining in this first organized attack on an established religion since the Middle Ages. Yes, to these depths are we being dragged by those who propose this draft resolution to the Middle Ages.

The draft resolution before the Third Committee was originally a resolution condemning racism and colonialism, a subject on which consensus could have been achieved, a consensus which is of great importance to all of us and to our African colleagues in particular. However, instead of this being permitted to happen, a group of countries, drunk with the feeling of power inherent in the automatic majority, and without regard to the importance of achieving a consensus on this issue, railroaded the Committee in a contemptuous manner by the use of the automatic majority, into bracketing Zionism with the subject under discussion. Indeed, it is difficult to speak of this base move with any measure of restraint.

I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people. They do not need to be defended. They speak for themselves. They have given to mankind much of what is great and eternal. They have done for the spirit of man more than can readily be appreciated in a forum such as this one.

I come here to denounce the two great evils which menace society in general and a society of nations in particular. These two evils are hatred and ignorance. These two evils are the motivating force behind the proponents of this draft resolution and their supporters. These two evils characterize those who would drag this world organization, the idea of which was first conceived by the prophets of Israel, to the depths to which it has been dragged today.

The key to understanding Zionism lies in its name. In the Bible, the westernmost of the two hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion. The period was the tenth century B.C. In fact, the name "Zion" appears 152 times in the Old Testament referring to Jerusalem. The name is overwhelmingly a poetic and prophetic designation. The religious and emotional qualities of the name arise from the importance of Jerusalem as the Royal City and the City of the Temple. "Mount Zion" is the place where God dwells according to the Bible. Jerusalem or Zion, is a place where the Lord is King according to Isaiah, and where he has installed his King David, as quoted in the Psalms.

King David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel almost 3,000 years ago, and Jerusalem has remained the capital ever since. During the centuries the term "Zion" grew and expanded to mean the whole of Israel. The Israelites in exile could not forget Zion.

The Hebrew psalmist sat by the waters of Babylon and swore "If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." This oath has been repeated for thousands of years by Jews throughout the world. It is an oath which was made over 700 years before the advent of Christianity, and over 1,200 years before the advent of Islam.

In view of all these connotations, Zion came to mean the Jewish homeland, symbolic of Judaism, of Jewish national aspirations.

Every Jew, while praying to his God, wherever he is in the world, faces towards Jerusalem. These prayers have expressed for over 2,000 years of exile the yearning of the Jewish people to return to its ancient homeland, Israel. In fact, a continuous Jewish presence, in larger or smaller numbers, has been maintained in the country over the centuries.

Zionism is the name of the national movement of the Jewish people and is the modern expression of the ancient Jewish heritage. The Zionist ideal, as set out in the Bible, has been, and is, an integral part of the Jewish religion.

Zionism is to the Jewish people what the liberation movement of Africa and Asia have been to their peoples. Zionism is one of the most stirring and constructive national movements in human history. Historically, it is based on a unique and unbroken connection, extending some 4,000 years, between the People of the Book and the Land of the Bible.

In modern times, in the late 19th century, spurred by the twin forces of anti-Semitic persecution and nationalism, the Jewish people organized the Zionist movement in order to transform its dream into reality. Zionism, as a political movement, was the revolt of an oppressed nation against the depredations and wicked discrimination and oppression of the countries in which anti-Semitism flourished. It is indeed no coincidence at all, and not surprising, that the sponsors and supporters of this draft resolution include countries which are guilty of the horrible crime of anti-Semitism and discrimination to this very day.

Support for the aim of Zionism was written into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and was again endorsed by the United Nations in 1947, when the General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority for the restoration of Jewish independence in our ancient land.

The re-establishment of Jewish independence in Israel, after centuries of struggle to overcome foreign conquest and exile, is a vindication of the fundamental concepts of the equality of nations and of self-determination. To question the Jewish people's right to national existence and freedom, is not only to deny to the Jewish people the right accorded to every other people on this globe but is also to deny the central precepts of the United Nations.

For Zionism is nothing more - and nothing less - than the Jewish people's sense of origin and destination in the land, linked eternally with its name. It is also the instrument whereby the Jewish nation seeks an authentic fulfilment of itself. And the drama is enacted in the region in which the Arab nation has realized its sovereignty in 20 States, comprising a hundred million people in four and a half million square miles, with vast resources.

The issue therefore is not whether the world will come to terms with Arab nationalism. The question is, at what point Arab nationalism, with its prodigious glut of advantage, wealth and opportunity, will come to terms with the modest but equal rights of another Middle Eastern nation to pursue its life in security and peace.

The vicious diatribes on Zionism voiced here by Arab representatives, may give this Assembly the wrong impression, that while the rest of the world supported the Jewish national liberation movement, the Arab world was always hostile to Zionism. That is not the case. Arab leaders, cognizant of the rights of the Jewish people, fully endorsed the virtues of Zionism. Sheriff Hussein, the leader of the Arab world during the First World War, welcomed the return of the Jews to Palestine. His son, Emir Feisal, who represented the Arab world in the Paris Peace Conference had this to say about Zionism on March 3 1919:

"We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement... We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home... We are working together for a reformed and revised Near East, and our two movements complement one another. The movement is national and not imperialistic. There is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a success without the other."

It is perhaps pertinent at this point to recall, that in 1947, when the question of Palestine was being debated in the United Nations, the Soviet Union strongly supported the Jewish independence struggle. It is particularly relevant to recall some of Mr. Andrei Gromyko's remarks on May 14 1947, one year before our independence:

"As we know, the aspirations of a considerable part of the Jewish people are linked with the problem of Palestine and of its future administration. This fact scarcely required proof.. During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering. Without any exaggeration, this sorrow and suffering are indescribable. It is difficult to express them in dry statistics on the Jewish victims of the fascist aggressors. The Jews in the territories where the Hitlerites held sway, were subjected to almost complete physical annihilation. The total number of Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazi executioners is estimated at approximately six million..."

"The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high principles proclaimed in its Charter, which provides for the defence of human rights, irrespective of race, religion or sex..."

The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners, explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration. Those were the words of Mr. Andrei Gromyko at the General Assembly session on May 14 1947.

How sad it is, to see here a group of nations, many of whom have but recently freed themselves from colonial rule, deriding one of the most noble liberation movements of this century, a movement which not only gave an example of encouragement and determination to the people struggling for independence, but also actively aided many of them during the period of preparation for their independence or immediately thereafter.

Here you have a movement, which is the embodiment of a unique pioneering spirit, of the dignity of labour, and of enduring human values, a movement which has presented to the world an example of social equality and open democracy, being associated in this resolution with abhorrent political concepts.

We, in Israel, have endeavored to create a society which strives to implement the highest ideals of society - political, social and cultural - for all the inhabitants of Israel, irrespective of religious belief, race or sex.

Show me another pluralistic society in this world in which, despite all the difficult problems among which we live, Jew and Arab live together with such a degree of harmony, in which the dignity and rights of man are observed before the law, in which no death sentence is applied, in which freedom of speech, of movement, of thought, of expression are guaranteed, in which even movements, which are opposed to our national aims, are represented in our Parliament.

The Arab delegates talk of racism. It lies not in their mouths. What has happened to the 800,000 Jews who lived for over 2,000 years in the Arab lands, who formed some of the most ancient communities long before the advent of Islam? Where are those communities? What happened to the people, what happened to their property?

The Jews were once one of the important communities in the countries of the Middle East, the leaders of thought, of commerce, of medical science. Where are they in Arab society today? You dare talk of racism when I can point with pride to the Arab ministers who have served in my government; to the Arab deputy speaker of my Parliament; to Arab officers and men serving of their own volition in our defence, border and police forces, frequently commanding Jewish troops; to the hundreds of thousands of Arabs from all over the Middle East crowding the cities of Israel every year; to the thousands of Arabs from all over the Middle East coming for medical treatment to Israel; to the peaceful coexistence which has developed; to the fact that Arabic is an official language in Israel on a par with Hebrew; to the fact that it is as natural for an Arab to serve in public office in Israel as it is incongruous to think of a Jew serving in any public office in any Arab country, indeed being admitted to many of them. Is that racism? It is not. That is Zionism.

It is our attempt to build a society, imperfect though it may be - and what society is perfect? - in which the visions of the prophets of Israel will be realized. I know that we have problems. I know that many disagree with our Government's policies. Many in Israel, too, disagree from time to time with the Government's policies, and are free to do so, because Zionism has created the first and only real democratic State in a part of the world that never really knew democracy and freedom of speech.

This malicious resolution, designed to divert us from its true purpose, is part of a dangerous anti-Semitic idiom which is being insinuated into every public debate by those who have sworn to block the current move towards accommodation and ultimately towards peace in the Middle East. This, together with similar moves, is designed to sabotage the efforts of the Geneva Conference for peace in the Middle East...

We are seeing here today but another manifestation of the bitter anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish hatred which animates Arab society. Who would have believed that in the year of 1975 the malicious falsehoods of the Elders of Zion would be distributed officially by Arab governments? Who would have believed that we would today contemplate an Arab society which teaches the vilest anti-Jewish hate in the kindergartens? Who would have believed that an Arab Head of State would feel obliged to indulge publicly in anti-Semitism of the cheapest nature when visiting a friendly nation?

We are being attacked by a society which is motivated by the most extreme form of racism known in the world today. This is the racism which was expressed so succinctly in the words of the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, in his opening address at a symposium in Tripoli, Libya, and I quote: "There will be no presence in the region except for the Arab presence."

In other words, in the Middle East, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, only one presence is allowed, and that is the Arab presence. No other people, regardless of how deep are its roots in the region, is to be permitted to enjoy its right of self-determination.

Look at the tragic fate of the Kurds of Iraq. Look at what happened to the black population in southern Sudan. Look at the dire peril in which an entire community of Christians finds itself in Lebanon. Look at the avowed policy of the PLO, which calls, in its Palestine Covenant, for the destruction of the State of Israel, which denies any form of compromise on the Palestine issue, and which, in the words of its representative only the other day in this building, considers Tel Aviv to be occupied territory.

Look at all this and you see before you the root cause of the pernicious resolution brought before this Assembly. You see the twin evils of this world at work: the blind hatred of the Arab proponents of this resolution, and the abysmal ignorance and wickedness of those who support them.

The issue before this assembly is not Israel and is not Zionism. The issue is the fate of this organization. Conceived in the spirit of the prophets of Israel, born out of an anti-Nazi alliance after the tragedy of the Second World War, it has degenerated into a forum which was this last week described by one of the leading writers in a foremost organ of social and liberal thought in the West as, and I quote:

"rapidly becoming one of the most corrupt and corrupting creations in the whole history of human institutions... almost without exception those in the majority come from States notable for racist oppression of every conceivable hue...

"Israel is a social democracy... its people and government have a profound respect for human life, so passionate indeed that, despite every conceivable provocation, they have refused for a quarter of a century to execute a single captured terrorist. They also have an ancient but vigorous culture, and a flourishing technology. The combination of national qualities they have assembled in their brief existence as a state is a perpetual and embittering reproach to most of the new countries whose representatives swagger about the United Nations building. So Israel is envied and hated, and efforts are made to destroy her. The extermination of the Israelis has long been the prime objective of the Terrorist international; they calculate that if they can break Israel, then all the rest of civilization is vulnerable to their assaults."

And then he goes on to conclude:

"The melancholy truth, I fear, is that the candles of civilization are burning low. The world is increasingly governed not so much by capitalism, or communism, or social democracy, or even tribal barbarism, as by a false lexicon of political cliches, accumulated over half a century and now assuming a kind of degenerate sacerdotal authority... We all know what they are..."

Over the centuries it has fallen to the lot of my people to be the testing agent of human decency, the touchstone of civilization, the crucible in which enduring human values are to be tested. A nation's level of humanity could invariably be judged by its behaviour towards its Jewish population. It always began with the Jews but never ended with them.

The anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia were but the tip of the iceberg which revealed the inherent rottenness of the regime which was soon to disappear in the storm of revolution. The anti-Semitic excesses of the Nazis merely foreshadowed the catastrophe which was to befall mankind in Europe.

This wicked resolution must sound the alarm for all decent people in the world. The Jewish people, as a testing agent, has unfortunately never erred. The implications inherent in this shameful move are terrifying indeed.

On this issue, the world as represented in this hall has divided itself into good and bad, decent and evil, human and debased. We, the Jewish people, will recall in history our gratitude to those nations, who stood up and were counted, and who refused to support this wicked proposition. I know that this episode will have strengthened the forces of freedom and decency in this world and will have fortified them in their resolve to strengthen the ideals they so value. I know that this episode will have strengthened Zionism as it has weakened the United Nations.

As I stand on this rostrum, the long and proud history of my people unravels itself before my inward eye, I see the oppressors of our people over the ages as they pass one after another in evil procession into oblivion. I stand here before you as the representative of a strong and flourishing people which has survived them all and which will survive this shameful exhibition and the proponents of this resolution. I stand here as the representative of a people one of whose prophets gave to this world the sublime prophecy which animated the founders of this world Organization and which graces the entrance to this building:

"...nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isaiah ii, 4)

Three verses before that, the Prophet Isaiah proclaimed

"And it shall come to pass in the last days... for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." (Isaiah, ii, 2 and 3)

As I stand on this rostrum, the great moments of Jewish history come to mind as I face you, once again outnumbered and the would-be victim of hate, ignorance and evil. I look back on those great moments. I recall the greatness of a nation which I have the honour to represent in this forum. I am mindful at this moment of the Jewish people throughout the world wherever they may be, be it in freedom or in slavery, whose prayers and thoughts are with me at this moment.

I stand here not as a supplicant. Vote as your moral conscience dictates to you. For the issue is not Israel or Zionism. The issue is the continued existence of the Organization which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a coalition of despotisms and racists.

The vote of each delegation will record in history its country's stand on anti-Semitic racism and anti-Judaism. You yourselves bear the responsibility for your stand before history, for as such will you be viewed in history. But we, the Jewish people, will not forget.

For us, the Jewish people, this is but a passing episode in a rich and an event-filled history. We put our trust in our Providence, in our faith and beliefs, in our time-hallowed tradition, in our striving for social advance and human values, and in our people wherever they may be. For us, the Jewish people, this resolution, based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as such.

Stan Grant: 'But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history', Ethics Centre IQ2 debate - 2015

27 October 2015, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Australia

This speech was delivered in an IQ2 debate with the topic, 'Racism is destroying the Australian dream'. Also for the affirmative was Pallavi Sinha. For the negative was Jack Thompson and Rita Panahi. The full debate is here. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming along this evening, and I'd also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.

In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. it looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of a country do we want to be.

And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstand.

Thousands of voices rose to hound an indigenous man, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year.

And they hounded that man into submission.

I can’t speak for the what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos.

We heard a sound that is very familiar to us.

We heard a howl.

We heard a howl that of humiliation has echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival.

We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.

The Australian dream.

We sing of it, and we recite it in verse.

Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.

My people die young in this country, we die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.

We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons, and if you are a juvenile it is worse, it’s fifty percent. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.

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. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time, go to the Sydney Gazette, and look it up, and read about it. Martial law was declared, and my people could be shot on sight.

Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.

The Australian dream.

The Australian dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation . It is there in terra nullius.  An empty land. A land for the taking.

Sixty thousand years of occupation.

A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind.

A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics, none of it mattered.

Because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. And when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder.

We were fly blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used.

Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said ‘it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth’. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with instruction ‘bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’.

They were smoothing the dying pillow.  

My people were rounded up and put on missions, from where, if you escaped. You were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here, it happened on the mission that my grandmother and great grandmother were from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River.

Read about it. It happened.

By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the Constitution, save for ‘Race Provisions’ -- which allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.

The Australian dream.

By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes, and they burned those homes to the ground, and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as ‘The Night of the Burning’.

In 1963 when I was born, I was counted amongst the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.

Now you will hear things tonight, you will hear people say, ‘but you’ve done well!’

Yes I have, and I’m proud of it, and why have I done well?

I’ve done well because of who came before me.

I’ve done well because of my father, who lost the tips off three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table, because he was denied an education.

My grandfather, who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.

My great grandfather who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson - my father - jailed for it!

My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town, until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over over the graves of the three children he’d buried there.

That’s the Australian dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian dream, not because of it; and I have succeeded because of those people.

You might hear tonight, ‘but you have white blood in you.’ And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would  tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.

The Australian dream. We’re better than this.

I’ve have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I’ve spent a decade in war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country, we are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I were sitting here, where my friends are tonight (gestures to opponents] I would be arguing passionately for this country.

But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.

The Australian dream.

We have our heroes.

Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation.

Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers, and say ‘this is my country’.

Cathy Freeman lit the torch for the Olympic Games.

But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history.

Of course racism is killing the Australian dream! It is self evident that it is killing the Australian dream.

But we are better than that.

The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, ‘no more’, they are better than that.

The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that.

The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that.

My children and their non indigenous friends are better than that.

My wife who is non indigenous is better than that.

And one day I want to stand here, and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone in this room, Australians all let us rejoice.

Thanks you.

Stan Grant was a wonderful guest on episode 8 of the podcast, talking about this speech.