Voice Referendum: Lies Fuel Racism Ahead of Australia's Indigenous Vote
Original Story: BBC News
Newsflash⚡ directly copies the world’s top headlines and imagines the stories behind them.
This story explores institutionalised racism and the nature of ignorance in the context of Australia’s recent historic vote.
Steven remembers when they apologised for it, when they apologised for the government which took away babies. The prime minister got very emotional about it, looking very remorseful, in that three-piece suit of his. Steven was sure he was a nice enough guy. You often end up a nice enough guy, when you’re allowed to know your mother for more than two months. It was hard to have anything against him, specifically. He was doing his best, and he must have worked hard to get to Prime Minister - that is to say, he must have had things he cared about. Steven did not have many such things. He watched the apology from beginning to end.
Steven’s first memory was actually of a television - the one they put in the corner of the lounge, probably about 1993, when he was six. He didn’t remember what he used to watch, he just remembered the angle of the screen, how it was jammed into the corner of the room, and didn’t quite fit. Children’s toys often ended up thrown behind it, and the carers had to come and fish them out of the wires. It was at a funny sort of diagonal angle. Steven liked it a lot. He would sit there as long as he was allowed - usually between two and five p.m. - and watch the cartoons that were being broadcast from the big cities. This was, as far as he could recall, his first conscious memory.
In theory, he knew about his origins before that. His nose was the first clue, then that resilient, brown shade of his skin, and then his ears. Most people could tell his origins by looking at his ears. He was used to it.
He worked as the manager of a little bar now, on the outskirts of Sydney, out towards Preston. A roadside joint that caught truck-drivers and served grease-food. Nowhere special, but Steven was proud of the place. It stopped him thinking too much. He led, in all honesty, quite a happy life. He had customers he liked, and had managed to scrape together some friends through his community work. He was doing alright, despite his ears. There was no need to think about it too much. Simple, repetitive actions were the key. And Steven led a simple, repetitive life. Nothing much happened, and nothing much needed to.
But now there was this referendum. And to make things worse, it was one he could vote in. Steven had made a decent life for himself. There was nothing simple, or repetitive, about voting in a process that everyone was calling “historic”, “revolutionary” and “fair.” He was thirty-five years old. Really, he thought, what was the point? Why vote in something he’d never had control over? Why vote in something other people had always controlled? Why bother with a vote, when all it did was piss people off?
And it really did piss people off. Even the folks with the default ears. The customers he liked would tell him, out of sheer concern, what was being spread around, in people’s front rooms and behind the screens of the internet. Steven would listen, not saying much in reply. Steven knew about the reform - he’d read about it, sure. (Sometimes a strange, curious urge came over him; it had left him in a funk for several days.) And it was only modest. But people were making it seem much more severe than that, Frank said. They don’t want your kind “clogging things up”, Terry told him. And Bertie, in his usual, cut-the-shit sort of way, had said it was plain and simple racism, which he’d “never understood.” Steven had shrugged, and went on drying the glasses. So what if there were people making death threats, so what if there were people who said they’d raped his mother. So what? So what if they stared at his nose? So what if they wanted him dead, so what if there were no jobs, so what if his brothers were alive, but in some jail cell, somewhere, probably? So what if they were still abducting children? So what. Really, so what.
In fifty years, they’d probably apologise for it.
Part 2: Australians Vote No In Historic Referendum
read the original story (BBC News):
Voice referendum: Lies fuel racism ahead of Australia's Indigenous vote - BBC News
The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of the author. The stories themselves are based on imagined events. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is fictitious and should not be taken as representative.
And not just in Australia. Most everywhere someway somehow