Kimberly Jones: 'they are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge', The Reasons for Riots - 2020

“So…I’ve been seeing a lot of things talking of the people making commentary. Interestingly enough the ones I’ve noticed that have been making the commentary are wealthy Black people making the commentary about we should not be rioting we should not be looting we should not be tearing up our communities and then there’s been the argument of the other side of “we should be hitting them in the pocket”, “we should be focusing on the black out days where we don’t spend money.”

But you know, I feel like we should do both and I feel like I support both and I’ll tell you why I support both: I support both because when you have a civil unrest like this there are three type of people in the streets. There are the protestors, there are the rioters, and there are the looters.

The protesters are there because they actually care about what is happening in the community they want to raise their voices and there are there strictly to protest.

You have the rioters who are angry who are anarchists who really just want to fuck shit up and that’s what they’re gonna do regardless. And the you have the looters.

The looters are there almost exclusively there just to do just that. To Loot.

Now. People are like, “what did you gain? What did you get from looting?” I think that as long as we are focusing on the “what” we’re not focusing on the “why” and that’s my issue with that. As long as we’re focusing on *what* they’re doing, we’re not focusing on *why* they’re doing it. And some people are like, “Those aren’t people who are legitimately angry about what’s happening, those are people who just wanna get stuff.” Okay. Well then let’s go with that. Let’s say that’s what it is. Let’s ask ourselves, why in this country in 2020 the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope, and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it…that they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is that they’re gonna get is that in that moment when the riots happen and that presents an opportunity of looting that that’s they’re only opportunity for them to get it, we need to be questioning that why. Why are people that poor, why are people that broke, why are people that food insecure, that clothing insecure that they feel that their only shot…that they are shooting their shot by walking through a broken glass window to get what they need?

And then people wanna talk about “well there’s plenty of people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps…and got it on their own…why can’t they do that?”

Let me explain something to you about economics in America and I am so glad that as a child I got an opportunity to spend time at PUSH where they taught me this. We must not forget that economics was the reason that Black people were brought to this country. We came to do the agricultural work in the south and the textile work in the North. Do you understand that? That’s what we came to do. We came to do the agricultural work in the South and the textile work in the North.

Now if I right now decided that I want to play monopoly with you and for 400 rounds of playing monopoly I didn’t allow you to have any money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board, I didn’t allow for you to have anything. And then we play another 50 rounds of monopoly and everything you gained and that you earned while playing those rounds was taken from you. That was Tulsa. That was Rosewood. Those are places where we built Black economic wealth, where we were self-sufficient where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground.

So that’s 450 years. So for 400 rounds of monopoly you don’t get to play at all. Not only do you not get to play you have to play on the behalf of the person that you’re playing against! You have to play and make money and earn wealth for them and then you have to turn it over to them. So then for 50 years you finally get a little bit and you’re allowed play and everytime they don’t like the way that you’re playing or that you’re catching up or that you’re doing something to be self-sufficient, they burn your game, they burn your cards, they burn your monopoly money. And then finally at the release—and at the onset of that—they allow you to play and they say “okay now you catch up.” Now at this point, the only way you’re going to catch up in the game is if the person shares the wealth, correct? But what if every time you seek to share the wealth then there’s psychological warfare against you to say “oh, you’re an equal opportunity hire.” So if I play 400 rounds of monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made and then for 50 years every time that I played, you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa, and like they did in Rosewood…how can you win? How can you win?! You can’t win. The game is fixed. So. When they say, “why do you burn down the community?”, “Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?”…It’s not ours! We don’t own anything! We don’t own ANYthing.

There is…Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night. There’s a social contract that we all have. That if you steal or if I steal then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us! So the social contract is broken! And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burning the fucking football Hall of fame…about burning a fucking Target? You BROKE the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck. You broke the contract when for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth again on our own by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us…when we built it in Rosewood and you came in and you slaughtered us. You broke the contract. So fuck your Target. Fuck your Hall of Fame.

As far as I’m concerned, they could burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

Kimberly Latrice Jones is a YA author who wrote ‘I’m Not Dying with You Tonight’.

I'm not dying cover.jpg
Source: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBGUPgBApio/?...

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.

 

Source: http://www.afl.com.au/video/2017-05-26/ind...

Stella Young: 'And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn', TEDxSydney - 2014

April 2014 TEDxSydney, Australia

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything." (Laughter)

And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall."

 And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.

 And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person."

But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective.

 And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.

So I have lived in this body a long time. I'm quite fond of it. It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment. And I know why it happens. It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. And it honestly doesn't.

And I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?" And the thing is, I am. I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us.

I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen.

I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.

Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m...