Her message of justice for all Black and Indigenous people is particularly resonant in light of the recent global protests in response to the death of George Floyd. It has also become a rallying cry in Australia where more than 400 Aboriginal people have died in custody since the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody in 1991.

So, we hope you can take a moment to sit back and watch this slice of the powerful 2017 Black Lives Matter lecture.

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Stay tuned as we continue to explore this topic through an upcoming interview on the legacy of racism and violence against First Nations People in Australia. Well over 400 Aboriginal people have died in custody in Australia since the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody in 1991. This is unacceptable. The Sydney Peace Foundation stands with the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia and around the world. Together, we can stand as allies and in solidarity to work for justice and the pursuit of peace.

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Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors along with co-founders for Toronto chapter – Rodney Diverlus and Longbeach chapter Dawn Modkins were in Sydney to accept the Sydney Peace Prize on the 2nd November at the Sydney Town Hall.

The Sydney Peace Prize citation explains the prize is worthy in light of a global recognition in building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice.

As apart of the BLM community engagement whilst in Sydney, the entourage experienced a deep and profound insight to some of the social justice issues affecting Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) peoples.

Australian South Sea Islanders (Port Jackson) as the coordinating body hosted the Black Lives Matter yarning circle at The Settlement in Redfern on the 31st October. The BLM founders listened to families that travelled some ten hours to share their frustrations and loss of loved ones to ‘Black Murders in Custody’. The families were Chatfield (2017), Whittaker )(2017), Dungay (2015)Murray (1981) and Scott (1984).

Lola Forester facilitated the talks due to her long-standing relationship and bond with the families through reporting their atrocities as the face of the Blackchat national hour on Indigenous radio. Guest speakers were the mothers and families of loved ones who died in custody,  Nathan Moran CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, Ken Canning Indigenous Social Justice Association and long-term activist, Professor Gracelyn Smallwood -James Cook University and 50 years activist, Levitt and Robinson Lawyers as well as Emelda Davis president of ASSIPJ who reiterated the need to work together. The night saw a diverse representation in the room for the black on black talks such as Indigenous, African, West Indian, Asian and African American’s pledging their ongoing support for social justice against people of colour.

Conversations were confronting, emotional and very raw however this was the first time for these five families connected in a forum of this nature that allowed them to share intimate and heart-wrenching experiences with the audiences but specifically Black Lives Matter founders.

Positives that came of this historical event were that the families were provided with a safe space supported by families as some emotions were overwhelming but seen as a sense of relief in being heard on a trusted platform in sharing with the mob. We all listened and grieved then talked about strategies of connectedness, pathways and what support look’s like as we build on this movement.

Professor Gracelyn Smallwood, in particular, spoke in support of the families and touched on the Palm Island riot case recent success and class action along with suggestions of legal pathways for the families.

Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza sent through words of solidarity and co-founder Patrisse Cullors and the BLM chapter representatives Rodney and Dawn shared words of acknowledgement of country, great appreciation and entrusted that stories would be shared and honoured in the USA. There were insights into the parallels in the USA and recent struggles of African Americans and beyond along with words of wisdom around self-care and the importance of rechanneling the energy of frustration into self-determination to fuel the plight o our peoples.

Most importantly there was reaffirmation around staying connecting and turning up as a lifelong commitment to Black Liberation and what that would look like for the inter black global community around movement building and leader-fullness. Co-founder of ASSIPJ Shireen Malamoo says “The energy around this comming together is of great significance and this is the beginning of something big!”

Images by Barbara McGrady. This article first appeared in the First Nations Telegraph on 7 November 2017. 

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Photo: Organisers from a number of activists groups recently met with Black Lives Matter Founders Patrisse Cullors and Rodney Diverlus at the Aborigines Advancement League in Thornbury, Victoria. Photo: Jack Latimore

Malcolm Turnbull’s flat rejection of the Uluru statement hung absurdly and deplorably over our visitors’ time here

The visit of the founders of Black Lives Matter to accept the Sydney peace prize should be leveraged by First Nations, indeed by all people of colour in Australia plus our allies and advocates, as a mechanism to have our agendas infiltrate mainstream forums at an international level and work towards redressing the raft of issues that affect us.

Rather than a crescendo doused in limelight, the presence of Black Lives Matter in Australia should be viewed as a starting point. It has provided a perfect opportunity for community program practitioners, activists and advocacy groups to come together, form stronger alliances and both expose and progress broader public understanding of the complex of race-related (and gender-related) disadvantage and discrimination in this country. These firmer connective networks can and will contribute to delivering a more participatory form of democracy than Australia is used to.

Last Friday I met Patrisse Cullors and Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport and flew to Mildura to hear from local mob there about community efforts to improve issues such as family violence and overrepresentation in the justice system. The objective of the trip was for IndigenousX to provide Black Lives Matter with an understanding of what is happening on the ground in Indigenous communities, outside the inner-city metropolitan areas that their itinerary had otherwise confined them to.

In Mildura we gave them a glimpse of the potential of community-led programs so they could take that knowledge with them into a week packed with media appearances and meetings. Cullors and Diverlus also heard from community about their lived experiences, past and present, to provide them with a better understanding of the persistent issues impacting Indigenous communities more broadly.

Together we heard from elders and respected community leaders about the role they play within Victoria’s Koori court and how that program aims to reduce recidivism and overrepresentation within the state’s justice system.

We visited the Meminar Ngangg Gimba women’s shelter and listened to the elders who work there around the clock to assist families escaping domestic violence. We sat with representatives of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and heard what it’s like growing up in Mildura and the state of relationships between the region’s Indigenous youth and police. These conversations, as well as others with different community members, revealed a common thread: self-determined programs that provide Indigenous decision-making roles work better than those not being led by mob.

The cruel irony of Malcolm Turnbull’s flat rejection of the Uluru statement’sproposition for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament hung absurdly and deplorably over each of these exchanges.

Driving back into town after listening to that Murriwarra elder Aunty Margrett Handy-Mitchell recount her experiences growing up in the region, Guardian Australia’s videographer David Fanner asked Cullors and Diverlus if they understood what was meant when Aunty Margrett told them that as a child she used to find her shoes at the “tip”.

“That’s only one generation back,” Fanner said in amazement. We were following Uncle Peter Peterson towards Dareton’s Namatjira mission. “Nama”, as locals refer to it, is an Aboriginal settlement established in 1968 to wipe out the multiple shanty towns that surrounded Mildura. Nama had electricity and water connected in 1992.

During our time in Mildura, and briefly in the video we produced, Cullors and Diverlus explained their perspectives of the black diaspora to me. It was a tale of urgent inequality and disadvantage, of black fear and the violent erasure of diverse culture and diverse bodies. First Nations peoples in this country haven’t escaped that conceptualisation of diaspora either. In fact it’s an ongoing project. The dispersals perpetrated on our old ones during the frontier wars, and again notably in the first half of last century under the banner of the assimilationist white Australia policy, have simply been working more quietly, more insidiously recently. Here too, the state-willed erasure persists unabated.

The bestowing of the Sydney peace prize on the Black Lives Matter movementshouldn’t be interpreted as ignoring any of our domestic race-related human rights issues. It has provided a space to amplify these issues into dominant forums, but more importantly, it has presented the opportunity to draw together and form stronger strategic alliances across our diverse advocacy groups, to form a collective to push back against the commonwealth’s ongoing colonial project, to form a network of resistance operating on many fronts simultaneously.

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Four years ago, three American women started a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after a white neighbourhood watch volunteer was acquitted over the death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Since then, the movement has morphed into a global network with chapters all over the world leading campaigns, rallies and calls for law reform.

“I helped create the #BlackLivesMatter because I was angry, I was fed up with the ways that the United States was treating black people,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors said.

I think the intention was to give a new generation of black people a voice, and to reignite the long-standing movement for black liberation.

Ms Cullors and Canadian chapter leader Rodney Diverlus are in Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize — the first time the award has honoured a movement, not individuals.

In Australia, the pair have heard about over-incarceration, violence and child removals from Aboriginal communities in regional Victoria, and in Sydney.

“It’s really startling to me that anti-black racism and anti-black violence is a global phenomenon,” Mr Diverlus said.

“When we were here, we were hearing a lot from Aboriginal folks, South Sea Islanders, Torres Strait Islanders, hearing about their history and current realities of anti-blackness.”

“We come in really as strangers but in deep solidarity with the people here, with the Indigenous people of Australia, and want to make it known that we see the struggle and we are in solidarity with these folks,” Ms Cullors said.

“I’m learning from folks, what can we bring back Stateside.”

Joe Williams, mental health advocate

Photo: Joe Williams, Mental Health Advocate. (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Wiradjuri man Joe Williams is a former NRL star and now a mental health campaigner, who believes the Black Lives Matter movement has helped underrepresented Australians.

“It’s having a huge effect for our people out here in Australia, First Nations People are starting to speak up about it. We’re gaining confidence in our everyday living and how much our lives actually matter. For a long time we were told they don’t,” Mr Williams said.

Every time we see a person of colour throughout the world, and particularly in Australia, killed, locked up, in a jail cell, that affects us because it takes us back to our ancestors.

“We now have a voice online. Now we have people of colour speaking out about injustices for our people that have happened for hundreds of years in [the US] and our country.”

Keenan Mundine, justice worker

PHOTO: Keenan Mundine, justice worker (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Keenan Mundine was in and out of jail during his teenage years growing up in Redfern, but now works to help other Indigenous offenders rehabilitate and turn their lives around.

He said social media and the Black Lives Matter movement is giving the powerless a voice.

“We can inspire these people who are on social media every day to start their own movement. We can show them the actual bigger understanding of the movement around Black Lives Matter,” he said.

“People are coming from the front line who are being exposed to these traumatic events and having their voices heard, no matter who you are or where you are from.”

Jody Pitt, #justice4Tane

PHOTO: Jody Pitt, #justice4Tane (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Jody Pitt’s family was touched by tragedy earlier this year when her cousin, Tane Chatfield, died in custody in Tamworth in regional New South Wales.

Ms Pitt’s Facebook post about her cousin’s death was shared thousands of times, and her family has used #justice4Tane to speak up about his untimely death.

“It was a mutual decision from the immediate family that we would spread word about Tane’s death on social media. The first post I wrote went viral and I was quite surprised by how quickly it got out there,” she said.

“We can relate to the issue — our black women and more particularly our black men being abused or intimidated by our corrective services or police officials.

“I just feel like we need more Aboriginal youth fighting for this.”

Additional credits: Photography: Jack Fisher and Isabella Higgins. Producer: Anisha Khopkar

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In Australia to accept the Sydney Peace Prize on behalf of her movement — the first time the 20-year-old award is being bestowed upon an organization — Patrisse Cullors said Australia’s racial problems mirrored those of the United States, where Black Lives Matter began four years ago after the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

In an address to journalists at the National Press Club in Canberra, Cullors said Black Lives Matter had grown from a hashtag in the United States to a group with more than 40 chapters worldwide.

“We stand here today as a Black Lives Matter global network committing to be a part of a long legacy of a global black struggle and solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Australia, South Sea islanders and Torres Strait Islanders,” Cullors said.

She urged the Australian government to heed the demands of its indigenous communities because too often people found the government to be a silent bystander or perpetuator of the atrocities black people faced.

“We, black people, we’ve been courageous. Our ancestors have been courageous. We need you — elected officials, appointed officials, and journalists — it’s your turn to be courageous. We need you to make a choice to heal this country, we need you to believe, to listen to the community in Australia, because silence, that’s the silence that often gives way to more murder … more disadvantages.”

Jackie Huggins, co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, said Black Lives Matter resonated with many Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander people, who comprise less than 3 percent of Australia’s population but more than 25 percent of its prison population — 33 percent in the case of women.

“Many people know about the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States, but most aren’t aware aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the most incarcerated in the world,” Huggins said.

Cullors said while in Australia she had learned about its racist past and heard from indigenous people about their own experiences of violence and harassment at the hands of authorities.

“For those of us who experience this type of devastation every single every day, we don’t have a choice,” Cullors said. “When everyone else fails to carry the weight with us, the complicitness, and the benefiting from anti-black racism, the refusal to name anti-black racism, the erasure of our devastation, we are expected to carry that failure, to carry their inability to recognize that freedom for us means freedom for everyone,” she said.

“If you don’t see yourself as an active participant in the liberation of black people, now is the opportunity. All our lives depend on it.”

Australia remains the only former British colony to have never signed a treaty with its indigenous people, which critics say has led to a damaging history of policies being forced on them from the government rather than allowing them greater self-determination.

Cullors’ fellow co-founder, Toronto-based Rodney Diverlus, told the gathering that Black Lives Matter was “a political home for black folks around the world.”

“Wherever you go and see black folks, anti-blackness exists,” Diverlus said. “The systems are failing us. Our governments are not intervening.”

Diverlus related Australia’s racial picture to that of Canada, saying much of Black Lives Matter’s work in his home country was done “to dispel the myth of Canadian benevolence.”

While Canada was “internationally known as the champion of human rights”, Diverlus said, Canada’s black and indigenous people were disadvantaged across the board — “whether it’s in incarceration, racial profiling, employment, education, (or) access to services.”

Still, Diverlus said now was “a particularly exciting time because black folks across the globe are now sharing.”

“We’re sharing resources, we’re sharing tools, we’re sharing organizing tactics, we’re coming together to recognize that as our governments and as our countries suppress us, we have a global obligation to support our own people,” he said.

“We are building an inter-generational movement never seen before … one that is intersectional and fights for all black lives.

“We are energetic, we are vibrant, we are militant, we are unapologetic, we are unconventional. We are online and in the physical.”

Black Lives Matter is being awarded the Sydney Peace Prize “for building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism,” the Sydney Peace Foundation — part of the University of Sydney — said in a statement.

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The government must stand on the side of the original people of this land, and challenge the idea that their lives don’t matter

Of the many remarkable moments on our Australian trip so far, there’s one that stands out.

On Tuesday night, we visited the Redfern community centre to meet with local Indigenous people and hear their stories.

After playing the didgeridoo, Nathan Scott stood up, opened up his notebook and read out his father’s story. He was only six months old when his father Douglas Scott was found hanged in his cell in Berrimah prison in Darwin. The family was told he had killed himself, but Nathan’s mother refused to believe this. For 20 years, his mother fought for justice for his father, but she never found it. The police harassed and surveilled the family when they asked questions, but there were no answers.

And yet, although the family never received justice and it was a great sacrifice for everyone involved, Nathan Scott said he wouldn’t have done anything differently. For him, his fight for his father was a fight for all Indigenous Australian people.

As a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, this was powerful because people often say to us, it’s been four years and police are still killing black people, do you think your movement has failed? My answer is always the same: this has just begun. There is a long road to undo colonialism and racism. It is going to be a long road to achieve the things that we want but it doesn’t mean you stop, it doesn’t mean you give up.

When we started Black Lives Matter, we understood that this movement wasn’t just for the United States but one that could centre black communities around the globe. We don’t see this as a civil rights movement, we don’t see this as relegated to the United States but as a human rights movement which allows us to have a broader conversation about anti-black racism across the globe.

So we have travelled to the UK, through the Americas, to Palestine and now to Australia. Throughout our travels we have seen that black people and Indigenous people are suffering, and, despite that suffering, local governments aren’t standing up for us. Wherever black people are, there is racism and the impacts of racism. Yet wherever black people are, there is resistance. We are still resisting and we are still calling for new ways of relating to us, we’re still calling for care and for dignity.

Black Lives Matter is in Australia to accept the Sydney peace prize, and meet with black Australians. During our trip, the thing that stands out to us most is that Indigenous Australians are facing some of the most horrendous living conditions in the world, sadly similar conditions to those in the US and Canada. Black Lives Matter is pertinent here in Australia and as we have conversations with people, we are realising that.

We have heard about the high incarceration rate of Indigenous people and Torres Strait Islanders. We have heard about the impact that colonialism has had on the family unit and how this has contributed to family violence. We’ve heard about the deaths in custody, and the families who have lost their children held in custody. Many of these family members are calling these murders, because when they are finally able to see their children, they were bruised and battered, with broken bones.

Local government must hold law enforcement accountable for these atrocities. The government can no longer be silent, it must stand on the side of the original people of this land, and challenge the idea that their lives don’t matter.

In the long term, the only way to change the living conditions of Indigenous communities is through divestment – and then reinvestment. Over the years, local governments have completely divested from caring for our communities, so we are calling for a reinvestment in black and Indigenous communities. We’re calling for divestment from resourcing agencies and local public agencies that cause harm and violence to our communities.

What makes our communities safe is for us to have access to healthy food, to feed our communities, to access jobs, and to be able to access public education. This can be achieved through reinvestment in Indigenous communities.

This is a long term struggle against racism. We stand on the shoulders of giants, of black leaders from across the globe, who have put their lives on the line to fight for not just the survival of black people but the thriving of black people.

We see our work as part of a much needed resurgence of a human rights movements in our country, in the US, but also abroad. We are not the first ones to do this, we know we are not going to be the last, we are part of a legacy of freedom fighters.

And while there is heartbreak, there is also hope. I am never numb to the impact racism has on my communities across the world. As I listened to the families that shared their stories on Tuesday at the Redfern community centre, I cried because that could be my family, that has been my family, and so my heart is with the Indigenous people of Australia.

But there is a growing desire for a broad base movement for Indigenous communities across the country. There is a desire to have a conversation in Australia that doesn’t end with talking but that really catapults a new practice in how this country relates to its original people. That is really inspiring. It’s inspiring to talk about how we’ve changed the landscape for our communities in the US and in Canada, and what might be possible here in this country. And this gives me hope.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is in Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize. They will be awarded the prize at the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture on 2 November and appear In Conversation in Melbourne on 4 November.

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The co-founders of the global Black Lives Matter movement have met with Australia’s Indigenous community and say there are parallels between the experiences here and in the United States.

Since it began in 2013, Black Lives Matter has been on the frontlines of protests across the US, leading the fight against police brutality and high incarceration rates among the country’s black community.

Driving the now-global campaign is its co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, who says the struggle is not unique to the US, citing the experience of Australia’s Indigenous community.

“Similar poverty rates, similar mass incarceration rates, the deaths in custody that are being swept under the rug – these are all things we feel in the US so there is a deep affinity around this resistance and this struggle,” she said at an event in Sydney on Tuesday.

Ms Cullors is in Australia with her Canadian counterpart, Rodney Diverlus. They are here to accept the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s leading award for global peacemakers. It marks the first time the prize has been awarded to an organisation rather than an individual.

Mr Diverlus says the visit has another purpose.

“I think it’s time for us, as brothers and sisters, to stand together in the global fight,” he says.

“We are invested in having a global conversation on the ways we can resist these atrocities and the ways we can fight for human rights for our people.”

The pair will be meeting leaders and advocates from Australia’s Indigenous community.

“What I am excited about is meeting the Indigenous communities here that are fighting, that can see victory in sight and I think that’s powerful,” said Ms Cullors.

Cheryl Axleby is the Co-Chair of the Change the Record Coalition, which calls for urgent action to close the gap in imprisonment rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

She says discussions are looking at the challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, not just in the Australian context but from a global perspective.

“Having our brothers and sisters here is going to give our communities great insight in what they’ve been doing in their own countries and to look at what we can do from here on,” she said.

Antoinette Braybrook, also a Co-Chair of the Change the Record Coalition, says the two communities will be exchanging ideas and experiences.

“We might share different strategies and find different solutions on how to tackle that systemic racism and discrimination.”

Nathan Moran is the CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

He’s hoping the support of the Black Lives Matter campaign will add momentum to the Australian movement.

“Considering our reality – we are three per cent of the population. To achieve any influence we need other brothers and sisters around the planet of a similar background.”

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We say “Black Lives Matter” but shit, the fact that matter is, we just Black matter to them, this shit keep happening.

In a uniquely Aboriginal articulation of the global Black Lives Matter movement, Batdjala rapper Birdz sings not of Rice, Garner, Martin or Bland. Instead he sings of Mulrunji, Elijah, Yock, Hickey and the Bowraville children – each of whom died in seemingly different circumstances.

What ties them together, however, is the indifference to their deaths and the apparent disposability of Black lives in Australia.

Birdz performs his song Black Lives Matter for NAIDOC Week live on triple j.

Much of the media attention in Australia surrounding the US-led Black Lives Matter movement has focused on police brutality and the murder of young African-American men on public streets, captured on smartphones and dashboard cameras.

Meanwhile, the murders of Aboriginal people in Australia have been less visible. If mentioned at all, Aboriginal deaths at the hands of the state are variously framed as “suspicious”, “unknown”, “accidental” or “inevitable”, despite the presence of CCTV footage, protests, perpetrators, witnesses, coronial inquiries and a royal commission.

Further reading: Deaths in custody: 25 years after the royal commission, we’ve gone backwards

Where murder is not even considered manslaughter, where Black witnesses are deemed “unreliable”, where royal commission recommendations aren’t implemented, where coroners refuse to exercise their power to make recommendations, and where White murderers of Black children enjoy the privilege of being unnamed for their own protection, it is blatantly clear whose lives really matter in Australia.

A print ad for GenerationOne that was released in March 2010. GenerationOne/Coloribus

And there really is nothing mysterious about the deaths of Aboriginal people in Australia, either.

The settlers have long insisted that our death was destined, that our race was doomed, and that we, as a people, were vanishing. Our disappearance was

inevitable because it was necessary to sustain terra nullius, the foundational myth of Australia. Black deaths rationalised White invasion and land expansion in Australia.

In a little over 100 years of White presence, they did not feel it was necessary to include us in their Constitution. Having been so successful in their work, they were anticipating our imminent departure – not to another land, but rather to be buried in our own lands.

In our dying, rather than in our living, our bodies mattered most to the colonial project.

Black lives matter: in death and deviance

White indifference to Black suffering has a long tradition in Australia. It remains ever-present, even in the supposedly benevolent contemporary policy agendas of “Indigenous Advancement” and “Closing the Gap”.

We are told by the Australian government:

The Australian government made Indigenous affairs a significant national priority and has set three clear priorities to make sure efforts are effectively targeted – getting children to school, adults into work and building safer communities.

Clearly, what is actually targeted here are Black lives and the unsafe Black body – which, we are told, are incapable of working or attending school. We see the gaze transfixed not on the systems that create disadvantage, but on remedying the behaviours of Black people through compliance to systems that have always failed us – and, let’s be honest, have deliberately excluded us.

Focusing on Black lives in this instance both lays blame on, and makes claims of, Black deviance from White norms, values, standards and expectations. The deviation from Black lives to White lives sanctions a “new” targeting of Black lives by the state, and necessitates the continuation of White control over us and our lands.

Black deviance (statistical or otherwise) has been a useful narrative device for the settlers.

Black deviance supports claims of White benevolence, in which White people are simultaneously positioned as our aspirational goal and saviours. It suggests to us that Black lives matter to them. Yet in emphasising our deviance, the sins of a system that White people uphold and benefit from remains unnamed and unnoticed.

Only last month we witnessed the routine deployment of Black deviance to sustain White virtue in the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s own marketing.

The Black lives we see are not her students, but they need not be. Black lives only matter when they prop up claims of White intellectual and moral superiority, and it is in a state of deviance that our bodies, that our troublesome children and their neglectful parents, are suddenly hyper-visible.

But Black deviance doesn’t just make settlers look good: it rationalises them taking greater control over the lives and lands of Aboriginal people. Let’s not forget that it was via mythologies of Black deviance that the Northern Territory Emergency Response (otherwise known as the Intervention) was introduced and the Racial Discrimination Act suspended.

Despite the Intervention’s inherently racist nature, it was framed as a benevolent act to Black women and children. Through the narratives of Black deviance and allegedly neglectful #IndigenousDads, attention was shifted away from the actual abuse of Aboriginal children within the youth justice system in the Northern Territory.

Further reading: Ten years on, it’s time we learned the lessons from the failed Northern Territory Intervention

Black deviance has worked well for the Australian health system too, in rationalising the enduring and appalling health inequalities that Indigenous peoples suffer. Much like the education system, the health system asserts a public moral stance of benevolence to avoid scrutiny over its ongoing refusal to care properly for Aboriginal people.

The coronial inquiry into the tragic death of Ms Dhu in police custody ruled that it was also medical staff who “disregarded her welfare and right to treatment during her three visits to hospital in as many days”.

The failure of the health system to provide care to Aboriginal people is nothing new. And access to basic health care has been a long and hard-fought battle led by Indigenous activists across Australia over many decades. It was not until 1989, after two centuries of invasion, that the first National Aboriginal Health Strategy was devised.

Since 2013, the current National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan has had, as its vision, a health system free of racism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But a cursory glance at coronial inquiries into Aboriginal deaths in hospitals in recent years reveals any number of preventable deaths that came about through an indifference to Black lives and Black suffering.

From the excessive use of restraints to the refusal to provide appropriate health care, the names of the deceased remain unknown to most Australians – as do the crimes of the healthcare professionals responsible, thanks to the health and justice systems that protect them.

Even in death, descriptions of Aboriginal victims at the hands of the state frequently focus on Black deviance as a mitigating factor.

Vernon Ah Kee/Milani Gallery

Black deviance operates as an alibi for racism and White supremacy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, where Black deviance was successfully deployed to deflect attention away from the role of police brutality.

The inquiry found that not one of the 99 Aboriginal deaths investigated was a result of “unlawful, deliberate killing of Aboriginal prisoners by police and prison officers”.

Instead, we were told that 37 of these deaths were attributable to disease, while 30 were self-inflicted hangings and 23 were caused by “other forms of trauma, especially head injuries”. Another nine were associated with dangerous alcohol and drug use.

Consequently, much of the attention around Black deaths in custody has focused on the apparently inevitable deaths of sick Aborigines rather than the violence of the state. But when police officers threaten Aboriginal men with tying a noose around their neck and publicly mock Aboriginal people who have died in custody as a result of alleged “self-inflicted hangings”, it is little wonder that Aboriginal people are sceptical.

Black lands matter

White benevolence really does feel brutal for Blackfullas in this country. So, it is hardly surprising that the Black Lives Matter movement, with its emphasis on countering racism and White supremacy, has a certain appeal for Blackfullas.

Co-founder Alicia Garza explains that the movement seeks to tackle the “deep-seated disease” of racism through a deeper conversation around citizenship:

We really need to be talking about this question of citizenship, which I think is huge. I feel like what Black folks are fighting for in this moment is what we’ve been fighting for the whole time – which isn’t citizenship, like papers, but it’s citizenship like dignity. Like humanity. Right? And access.

Despite the promise of Black Lives Matter, it has not been taken up as a central political movement by Blackfullas in Australia. Perhaps it is because, as a people who are both Black and First Nations, we cannot embrace an emancipatory agenda that is silent about the significance of the relationship between Black lands and Black lives.

Blackfullas are not seeking a revitalised citizenship that recognises our dignity and humanity – we are insisting upon our sovereignty as First Nations peoples.

We refuse to talk about our lives independently of our land. We remind them every day that we are still here in this place – and it is their presence on our lands that poses the real problem, not our lives.

We refuse to appeal to the benevolence of the colonisers for our lives to matter, because we know that their existence on this continent remains legally predicated upon our non-existence.

That’s why I’m with Birdz on this one:

Shit. The fact that matter is, we just Black matter to them.

You can read the first article in the series here.

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Black Lives Matter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer intentionally and systematically targeted for demise.
– Black Lives Matter mission statement

On July 13, 2013, hundreds of thousands of people – mostly Black people – flooded the streets of US cities following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

For weeks, we had been glued to our televisions as police and “friends” of Zimmerman tried to disparage the high schooler – to make the victim some kind of predator. But we had seen his face. We saw his eyes dance, his brown skin glisten, and his smile warm hearts. He was a child, a lovely, beautiful boy-child who looked like our own children. And Zimmerman had no right to steal his life, regardless of what a court says.

In 2012 Trayvon Martin was shot for ‘looking suspicious’. He was 17. Michael Fleshman/flickr, CC BY-SA

So, the verdict came down, and we erupted. Our spirits filled with the righteous indignation of generations past. Transgenerational memories came rushing back of Emmett Till.

Trayvon was born to Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, but he was ours – all of ours.

Black bodies filled the streets, disrupting traffic, inhibiting White shoppers and making the normalcy of White American middle-class existence less certain.

As our ranks swelled and our presence became more intentionally targeted at White epicentres of escapism (including tourist attractions like Hollywood and Highland), we began to understand the power of disruption. In disrupting these spaces, we refused to allow our collective pain to be confined to Black communities. Others may not see their own children in the face of Trayvon, but they would not be permitted to dismiss us.

On the third day of protest, in the midst of our first freeway shutdown, a text message found its way to a few of us. It read like words from the Underground Railroad: “Meet at St. Elmo Village at 9pm” (a Black artist community in mid-city Los Angeles).

The message was from Patrisse Cullors, a young, powerful, emerging organiser in Black Los Angeles whose work had centred on ending sheriffs’ violence. Her text was passed onto other organisers by Thandisizwe Chimurenga, a Black independent journalist who had been most recently active in the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant.

As the summer night settled in and demonstrators scurried from highways, dodging the police who came in with sticks, beanbag guns and tear gas, the mamas collected our young children, walked home and prepared to go back out that same night.

A movement, not a moment

I was late to the meeting. By the time I arrived, a few dozen folks, including about ten of my spirit-children/students were closing out discussions of what it means to build “a movement, not a moment”.

Many of us had been involved in what Brenda Stevenson terms “episodic organising”, or demands for justice that are limited to a person or a moment in time. But what we came to embrace that night is that the murder of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant before him, Devin Brown before him, Tyisha Miller before him, Margaret Mitchell before her … and so many others, was not accidental.

Perhaps the names and specifics of each case unfolded independently, but the system of American policing was designed to produce these outcomes. The system is brutal, murderous and violent. Only by transforming the way that we vision justice can we realise peace.

So, we committed to building a new peace movement – one that was driven by the way that Trayvon had embedded his spirit in our collective souls and opened itself to the chorus of voices whose bodies had been stolen by the state before and after him.

All of this intuitive work had already happened prior to our gathering in the courtyard, and remains hugely important to the building of this movement. For a movement to grow, it must be organic, flowing from the hearts of the people.

Every transformative struggle for justice has been rooted in heart work. Attempts to insert causes into communities ring as false and ultimately fall flat.

The work of organisers, with the most effective organisers being part of the communities that they seek to organise, is to tap in to the souls of the community, hear the collective outcries and distil the issues and cast them in the context of a larger vision. They work to harness the energy as the movement builds and seize the time as communities make demands and arrive at solutions.

Civil rights, Black Power and Black Lives Matter organiser Greg Akili says that organising is “getting people to move on their own behalf and in their own interest”.

As the intuitive work was happening in the streets, Patrisse was assembling with Alicia Garzaand Opal Tometi to organise us, visioning beyond the moment and strategising how to build a new iteration of Black freedom struggle.

No justice, no peace

Our mission emerged organically. It was summed up in the words penned by Alicia: “Black lives matter”. We have a right to our lives. Our children have a right to live and walk freely, without being hunted by the state, agents of the state, or wannabe agents of the state.

This is not debatable. There are no two ways to see it. This is one of those very basic, fundamental truths.

Getting to freedom and getting to justice, however, is a much more challenging charge. We are heirs of struggles that are also black-and-white: calls to end chattel slavery and lynching, demands for basic civil rights and voting rights, and the constant call for the end to police brutality.

While a hawk’s-eye view of these demands offers very obvious conclusions, the complication becomes the entrenchment of systems that produce unjust outcomes.

In How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning Marable offers that “the system exists not to develop, but to underdevelop Black people”, with each advancement for White society coming at the expense of Black freedom.

So, while there are clearly just outcomes, like ending slavery and lynching, ushering in civil rights and voting rights, ending police brutality and now demanding an end to state-sanctioned violence against Black people, such demands require a fundamental transformation of a system that preys on and benefits from Black suffering.

Recurrences of state-sanctioned violence against Black people are not accidental. Annette Bernhardt/flickr, CC BY-NC

While Black freedom movements, including Black Lives Matter, are clearly working for what is just, the disruption that they pose to current systems is often cast by that system as problematic, even violent.

Because systems are designed to protect themselves, they utilise their vast powers to contort the messages of those who seek to challenge them. They use the laws that they created, the media that they control and the social structures that they erected to present those who challenge them as essentially “enemy combatants”.

Examples of this date back to the hefty bounty put on the head of Harriet Tubman, the bombing of the office of Ida B. Wells, the 40 times that Martin Luther King was imprisoned, the assassinations of King and Malcolm X and the targeting, imprisonment and exile of members of the Black Panther Party, including Huey P. Newton and Assata Shakur. Today, Black Lives Matter organisers and other Black freedom fighters are the new targets.

The call for Black lives to matter and for an end to state-sanctioned violence against Black people (and by extension all people) is fundamentally a call for peace. And peace must not be confused with the momentary quiet of submission. The kind of peace sought by Black Lives Matter results from justice.

Peace cannot be compelled or forced. It is earned when the people benefit from and see themselves as a part of the societies in which they are housed. Peace is not a tactic of struggle, it is an outcome.

As we struggle for a world where Black lives are no longer intentionally and systematically targeted for demise, it means that the systems that prey on us must be not simply reformed but re-imagined and transformed.

Peace calls for an end to incarceration and criminalisation in favour of real public safety solutions. Peace calls for the meeting of basic human needs, including safe housing, clean water, healthy food, and medical care. Peace calls for quality education as a universal right and the ability to engage fully in the arts, culture and spirituality.

Peace requires revolutionary vision – and Black Lives Matter is a peace movement.

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“This recognition honors the tireless work of thousands of Black folks who have been organizing and mobilizing for Black life across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and around the Globe. It recognizes the impacts that our movement has on the global fight against anti-Black racism and the incredible contributions our movement leaders have made to their local communities and sociopolitical landscapes.

This prize is for all of us.

We are grateful to be welcomed by and to share space with Australia’s Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and South Sea Islander community elders, activists, families of state and police violence, service providers, cultural producers, youth, and children. Many similarities can be drawn on the realities facing Black and Indigenous people in the US, Canada/Turtle Island, and Australia. We are here listening, exchanging, and amplifying whenever we can.”

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The Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLM) will be awarded the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize in November. The Movement for Black Lives, of which BLM is part, has galvanised the globe from California to London to Australia, and #BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a rallying cry for a new chapter in the long Black Freedom struggle. But how much do you really know about this important movement? Here are 10 things you should know about its origins, leaders, and purpose.

1. BLM IS ABOUT LOVE

Black Lives Matter started with a love letter.

In 2012, 17-year-old , unarmed Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch who felt Travyon, walking home after buying a pack of Skittles at a nearby service station, was ‘out of place’ in the middle-class area. Zimmerman was acquitted for all charges.

Alicia Garza retells the experience: “Trayvon could have been my brother. I immediately felt not only enraged, but a deep sense of grief. It was as if we had all been punched in the gut. Yet soon people shrugged, as if to say: “We knew he was never going to be convicted of killing a black child,” and “What did you expect?””

Turning to Facebook, Alicia wrote a ‘Love Letter to Black Folks’: “We don’t deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where black lives matter. Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter.”

In a matter of moments, fellow community organiser Patrisse Cullors created the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and Opal Tometi created the website and social media platforms that soon connected people across the country. Black Lives Matter was born, and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter started spreading like wildfire. A year later, it went viral during the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, when people took to the streets with a simple demand: Stop Killing Us.

“As we say ‘Black Lives Matter’, you see the light that comes inside of people from Black communities and other communities. People are like, ‘I’m going to stand on the side of Black lives.’ You see people transforming, and that’s a different type of work. For me, that is a spiritual work, a healing work. What a great time to be alive.”

Patrisse Cullors

This movement was born out of love, and love always wins.

2. BLM WAS A THING BEFORE IT WENT VIRAL

In 2013, steadily and strategically, the co-founders started to build the scaffolding of a nationwide on-the-ground political network.

Enter Ferguson. On August 9th, 2014, just a few weeks after Eric Garner died in a NYPD officer’s chokehold in New York City, Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by twelve police bullets in Ferguson, St Louis. Police left his body in the street for four and a half hours, steps away from his mother’s house.

The events that followed Mike Brown’s death have often been described as ‘the catalyst’ for the revolution-like protests that followed. “I can’t breathe” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the last words of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, were chanted loudly – people young and old mobilised to mourn and protest police brutality and racism. They were met with tanks, riot police and tear gas.

For the Black Lives Matter Global Network, it meant that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag went viral on social media. Black Lives Matter became a slogan that leapt into the streets. Technology accelerated the pace of organising people, and allowed the movement to amplify their calls in ways that were impossible before.Over 500 members from across the US joined Patrisse Cullors in a #BlackLivesMatter ‘freedom ride’ to Ferguson to support the movement in St. Louis.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers, and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag.

Alicia Garza

For some ‘Black Lives Matter’ was a wakeup call, for many others the words gave voice to a deep seeded awareness of what it felt like to be black in America.

Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry that captivated the country, galvanising a national movement for dignity, justice and respect.

3. BLM IS ABOUT MORE THAN ‘JUST’ POLICE BRUTALITY

Black Lives Matter is an intervention.

It is an affirmation of the value of Black life, and a condemnation of the racism that devalues it.

On their website, BLM writes: When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.

Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors says: “Black Lives Matter is our call to action, it is about replacing narratives of black criminality with black humanity, a tool to re-imagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live, and a tool for our allies to show up for us”.

Black Lives Matter demands that American society reconsider how it values black lives by identifying where and how black life is cut short, whether in viral videos of police brutality, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the criminal justice system, or in areas where black communities disproportionally face homelessness, poverty and economic disparity.

Black Lives Matter is about structural change. It is about sparking dialogue and changing the conversation: If it is true that black lives matter, then what does that mean for police reform, for our justice systems, for schools, for jobs, for infrastructure, and for economic development? If black lives matter, then what needs to change in politics and in the media?

To steer these conversations, over 50 organisations – including the Black Lives Matter Global Network – united in the Movement for Black Lives to launch “A Vision for Black Lives” in August 2016, ahead of the Presidential election. Following a year-long consultation process, a series of 40 policy goals calls for divestment from law enforcement (including ending the death penalty and mass incarceration) and investment in black communities through reparations, educational reform, jobs and infrastructure, and increased community control of neighbourhoods.

4. BLM IS ABOUT A THING CALLED ORGANISING

Protests are just one tool in a big toolbox of tactics for change.

BLM’s disruptive actions and protest strategies are modern and bold, and regularly make media headlines. But whilst protests may get lots of media attention, organising is what builds sustainable, resourced movements. Organising includes building critical communities connections, convening member-led organisations where everyday people can strategise together, and cultivating local leadership. Organising includes creating space to reimagine what a fair and just society looks like, and to develop political thinking and ideas. Organising includes finding allies and co-conspirators, and building collective power to demand changes. Organising also means fostering peoples’ skills to hold office bearers accountable for their decisions, and creating space for the celebration and humanisation of Black lives.

BLM’s persistence and evolvement has breathed new life into the legacy of the black freedom struggle, reenergising older activists who are eager to connect with a new generation of organisers.

I identify as an organizer versus an activist because I believe an organizer is the smallest unit that you build your team around. The organizer is the person who gets the press together and who builds new leaders, the person who helps to build and launch campaigns, and is the person who decides what the targets will be and how we’re going to change this world.

Our folks have continued to organize locally, not just hit the streets. Many of our people are thinking about how to enact a political strategy. How do we build black power in this moment? How do we actually get people in office?

It’s not a hashtag that built the movement. It was organizers, activists, educators, artists — people who built an actual infrastructure so that a movement can exist and have life. 

Patrisse Cullors

5. BLM IS NOT JUST A #HASHTAG, IT’S A GLOBAL NETWORK 

For Alicia, Patrisse and Opal, #BlackLivesMatter was never meant to be ‘just’ a hashtag or social media meme. Long before the protests that grabbed the world’s attention,  the Co-Founders started to organise people across the country, encouraging a broader and deeper conversation about what justice and dignity for black people might look like in an era of increasing inequality, mass incarceration and relentless police violence—and how people could join forces and build the power needed to achieve it.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has over 40 chapters worldwide, scattered across the US, Canada, the UK and with a growing presence in South African and Australia.

Activists for black, brown, and Indigenous rights around the world have adopted the Black Lives Matter slogan alongside homegrown movements against racism and police brutality.

Last month, BLM marked its four-year anniversary and released a report about its guiding principles, challenges, and plans for the future, along with a snapshot of where its member organisations have been.

“Four years later, we still declare with conviction that Black Lives Matter everywhere.”

Patrisse Cullors

6. BLM IS LEADERFUL

Many people have called Black Lives Matter the civil rights movement of a new generation. There is a great deal of nostalgia in comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but if it’s up to the Network, this movement will look very different.

The Founders are committed to building a movement that relies less on the establishment voices of a single or few very charismatic, cisgender men. Rather, they nurture a decentralised movement from the bottom-up: A movement that encourages different voices to emerge and shape their leadership based on experiences and needs rooted in the community they organise. The Network is truly a grassroots movement with a commitment to a ‘leaderful’ structure.

It is in this spirit that the three Founders have accepted the Sydney Peace Prize for the Black Lives Matter Global Network:

The Sydney Peace Prize is an affirmation and reminds us that we are on a righteous path. Accepting this award is about our people on the ground striving for justice every single day. It’s truly meaningful to be recognized in this way.  We’ll continue to push forward until structural racism is dismantled and every Black life matters. It’s our duty in times like this to keep our eyes steadfast on the freedom we deserve.

Opal Tometi, Co-founder Black Lives Matter and Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)

7. ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER

The Black Lives Matter Global Network was founded on the values of inclusivity and love.

Black Lives Matter means ALL black lives matter and are creators of this space. Queer Black lives, Trans Black lives, formerly incarcerated Black lives, differently-abled Black lives, Black women’s lives, immigrant black lives, Black elderly and children’s lives. We rise together.

The Founders want the faces of this movement to reflect the change they strive towards in their own communities, which is that all black lives matter, regardless of their gender, class, sexual orientation, or age. Everyone’s contribution is valid as long as people commit to uphold a number of Guiding Principles. These include working “collectively, lovingly and courageously”, making space for queer leadership, respecting diversity, practicing empathy, and working towards an intergenerational network.

Black Lives Matter is committed to “(re)building the Black liberation movement”: the Network supports those who were previously on the margins and invisible from the public eye – women, LGBTQIA people, undocumented immigrants, people with disabilities, and people with records – to take centre stage.

8. BLM DOES NOT SAY THAT ONLY BLACK LIVES MATTER

When people counter Black Lives Matter’s call for justice with the phrase “all lives matter,” there is undoubtedly a fallacy is this response.

While all lives should matter, this is a utopia as we do not currently live in a world where all lives are equal. The statement “Black lives matter” is not an anti-white proposition. Contained within the statement is an unspoken but implied “too,” as in “black lives matter, too,” – it is a statement of inclusion rather than exclusion. Only when Black lives matter will all lives matter. Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important – it means that Black lives, which are seen without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation.

Therefore, to say “all lives matter” in response to Black people saying “Black lives matter” is actually saying that Black lives don’t matter.

“But we’re a group that’s looking at the totality of anti-black racism and its effects on communities of color,” Cullors says.

Black Lives Matter sprang from a place of love, and inclusivity is at the very heart of their important work. A common misconception is that Black Lives Matter is only a trendy hashtag or that it only fights police brutality or vigilante violence against black people. BLM is not about saying yes to one identity, but about looking at how all marginalised people are impacted by Trump and his regime. BLM looks at the totality of anti-black racism and its effects on communities of color, collaborates with other progressive coalitions (sometimes under the banner of ‘The Majority‘) and supports other minority groups. For example, they have stood in solidarity with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and were amongst the first to gather at airports to protest President Trump’s Muslim ban, declaring:

“We must rise in solidarity whenever and wherever necessary. (…) We know that these attacks do not live in a vacuum and that our issues are connected. This fight is for all who believe in justice.”

 

9. BLACK LIVES MATTER FIGHTS WHITE SUPREMACY EVERY DAY

White supremacy, both the visible and more insidious invisible incantations of it, is alive and well across the globe. The rise of Trump in the US saw the emboldening of hate groups across the US. To garner votes and stoke anti-establishment flames, Trump latched on to the ideology of white supremacy and incentivised violence on the campaign trail, promising his supporters — some of whom carried the banners of Nazism and Klansmanship — he would “pay for the legal fees” of anyone who got violent with anti-Trump protesters.

While Trump can certainly be credited with fanning the flames of white supremacy, it is undeniable that violent racial inequality is woven into the very fabric of the American story (as is the case here in Australia). The sickening violence at the  white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, made visible structural imbalances and privileges that have historical roots and continue to divide a nation and drive inequality. It is clear that white supremacy is not on the fringes of our society – it is in the White House and in Trump’s Cabinet, but also in our work places, living next door to us, and serving us our morning lattes.

“To be shocked really means folks have an ahistorical analysis of this country. What we saw in Charlottesville, and what we’ll continue to see across the country as white nationalist groups rise up and take to the streets, is that this is very much the fabric of American culture.” 

Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors

Black Lives Matter is working across geographical and issue areas to call attention to white supremacy and build sustainable, resourced movements to significantly reduce it. Organisers are taking the fight to their own backyards, organising people in local communities, having courageous conversations with people who would not otherwise have courageous conversations with us, or encouraging our allies to have those conversations in our stead.

10. BLM RESONATES HERE IN AUSTRALIA

We can’t talk about Black Lives Matter without looking at our own backyard.

Racism and systemic discrimination is all to prevalent in Australia. Whilst the struggles are different in many ways, various communities feel a strong resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US.

As BLM Co-Founder Alicia Garza, who in 2016 spoke with Stan Grant at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, says: People in Australia tend to highlight how big BLM is in the States, but Australia has some serious, serious issues around Black lives mattering.”

Australia struggles to come to terms with its past and fails to right ongoing wrongs. Australia’s First Peoples have fought for justice and dignity for decades, very few people know about Australia’s past of slavery or ‘blackbirding‘ of which our South Sea Islander community is still feeling the repercussions, and Australia’s treatment of refugees and migrants, whether on Australian soil or in overseas detention centres, reeks of racism and discrimination.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network declared “we receive this award with tremendous gratitude and in solidarity with organizers throughout Australia who, in the face of egregious oppression, fightback against the state and proclaim that all Black Lives Matter.”

Particularly Australia’s First Peoples continue to endure systemic inter-generational injustice and trauma.

Most of the 339 recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths have been gathering dust for years, yet imprisonment rates for Indigenous Australians are at an all-time high. In the Northern Territory and Western Australia more than 80 percent of the prison population is Indigenous, and the number of deaths in custody is increasing. In Western Australia, Indigenous suicides are eight times the national rate, and children as young as eight years old are suiciding. Since Kevin Rudd’s Apology, children have been removed from their families four times as often than during the Stolen Generations.

When Ms Dhu died after being jailed for unpaid fines, and when Elijah Doughty’s killer was found not guilty of manslaughter, communities around the country used ‘Black Lives Matter’ to demand justice for all Black victims.

Senator Patrick Dodson, 2008 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate, strongly supported the choice of the Jury: “This movement resonates around the globe and here in Australia, where we have become inured to the high incarceration rates and deaths in custody of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It’s as if their lives do not matter. When there is ignorance, hostility, discrimination or racism, and they are allowed to reign unchecked, then we are all diminished.”

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“Building the kind of people power to organize our country into a safe place for Black people — one that leads with inclusivity and a commitment to justice, not intimidation and fear.“

Last year’s presidential campaign trail banter was not unlike that of election year’s past, in that it was full of nasty, backhanded, gender-based undercuts aimed at delegitimizing opponents and drawing out emotional responses at the ballot box. Noticeably different from previous year’s strategies, however, was the Trump campaign’s deliberate courting one of America’s oldest and biggest threats to a civil and just world: white supremacists.

To garner votes and stoke anti-establishment flames, Trump latched on to the ideology of white supremacy and incentivized violence on the campaign trail, encouraging his supporters — some of whom carried the banner of Nazism and Klansmanship — to physically harm people, promising at a February 2016 rally to “pay for the legal fees” of anyone who got violent with anti-Trump protesters. Trump used political dog-whistles to signal a 21st century ideological war, one that has also included hate speech and deadly violence.

This past weekend’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, made visible what many organizers and activists have been warning since the 2016 campaign season: Donald Trump promised more death, disenfranchisement and deportations — and now he’s delivering on that promise. The violence he will inflict in office through through policy, and the permission he gives for others to commit acts of violence, is just beginning to emerge.

White supremacy is a web of violent and abusive behaviors bolstered by white nationalists, racist elected officials, violent police and law enforcement, corporate money, and you.

The good news is that we’re not helpless; there are many things we can all do to fight white supremacy. Some of these things are changes we can make to our everyday lives, while others are issues that need to be addressed on a systemic national scale. But we need to know exactly where to begin — and what brand of white supremacy we’re dealing with at every turn.

It’s important to remember that white supremacy is not just people in hoods, nor can it be reduced to only people who are poor, rural and white. White supremacy is a web of violent and abusive behaviors bolstered by white nationalists, racist elected officials, violent police and law enforcement, corporate money, and you. Yes, you. And me, too. White supremacy is an insidious spectrum ideology, so most of us perpetuate it even if we don’t mean to.

If we want to win this battle, we need to open our eyes to all the symbiotic ways white supremacy touches each and every one of our lives — and then come up with the best course of action to fight it.

1. Organize Courageous Conversations

Black Lives Matter, and the Movement for Black lives more broadly, are working across geographical and issue areas to call attention to white supremacy and build sustainable, resourced movements to significantly reduce it.

For some of the most explicit brands of ideological white supremacy — like that espoused by the white supremacist who plowed into anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville, VA last week, killing local activist Heather Heyer — organizers are taking the fight to their own backyards, organizing people in local communities, having courageous conversations with people who would not otherwise have courageous conversations with us, or encouraging our allies to have those conversations in our stead. For example, take a cue from the Dream Defenders and host a Day of Dinners and ask people to “open their hearts and homes to start a new conversation about the country we want and a future worth fighting for.”

We must reckon with the anti-blackness of America’s history that led to this political moment. And we must get justice for those hurt along the way.

The same organizing we’ve been doing for decades is being replicated all over the country. Organizing that includes building and convening member-led organizations where everyday people can strategize together about how to build power for ourselves. Organizing that holds the officials we elect to office accountable for their decisions. Organizing that demands a just and fair society for us all. Building the kind of people power to organize our country into a safe place for Black people — one that leads with inclusivity and a commitment to justice, not intimidation and fear.

Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

In other ways, we are challenging white supremacy by helping bring democracy within reach. Organizers from Greensboro to St. Louis are creating opportunities for civic engagement — some organizers are running for political office themselves and others pushing candidates to use the Movement for Black Lives Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Anyone in the US can send this platform to their legislators and ask them to use it to drive change through their campaigns.

Additionally, Black organizers are training to make ideological interventions through the media to help transcend barriers to empathizing with and understanding Blackness and the plight of Black communities in America. For example, through Channel Black, organizers are supplementing tried-and-true, on-the-ground organizing tactics with media interventions like correcting misinformation about who movement is and what we stand for, and putting members of the movement front and center.

By increasing the diversity of faces and opinions debating issues that impact America’s most oppressed, we are reducing racial bias and prejudicial treatment by law enforcement, vigilantes, and everyday people.

2. Pressure Elected Officials

A less explicit, but equally devastating, brand of white supremacy involves our elected officials turning a blind eye to systems of oppression that directly, and often physically, harm people of color — like when elected officials knowingly harmed thousands of Flint, Michigan, residents by giving them a water supply tainted by lead and other poisons, which killed a dozen and left many others with lead poisoning and lifelong chronic illness; years later, officials still refuse to take responsibility. In response, organizations like Color of Change are using digital organizing and campaigns to mobilize everyday people and put pressure on decision makers.

The importance of these efforts cannot be underscored enough — we must reckon with the anti-blackness of America’s history that led to this political moment. And we must get justice for those hurt along the way.

You can pressure your elected officials by showing up to their committee meetings, flooding their voicemails and emails with your questions and concerns (and kudos when they’re deserved), and by supporting organizations who hold them accountable with your dollars and time.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Democratic frontrunners Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams are giving Black people and other people of color hope for a political experience that is dignified and where we can see ourselves, our families, and our values reflected — even if it is an imperfect process. However you feel about the electoral process, having policy makers who are eager to make important interventions in Congress is critical to ensuring that white supremacists have less — not more — power.

3. Demand Justice

Police brutality and violence and bias within the criminal justice system is the brand of white supremacy that the most people turn a blind eye to, either because solutions feel intimidating and out of reach, or because the assumption of security is too comfortable to question. Every year, people are killed by law enforcement, correctional officers, immigration thugs, security guards, and violent vigilantes. And every time an enforcement officer or vigilante kills someone they’re meant to protect and is acquitted, that is white supremacy in action. All of America must take responsibility for and contend with our deadly policing system. All of us.

This political moment may feel new, but we’ve been here before. There isn’t a difference between the so-called Alt-Right and neo-Nazis, and racist confederates of the days when Black people were chattel slavery — we are talking about the same exact thinking. And as long as it has existed, Black organizers and their allies have been here to combat it.

The question is, are we the same nation that turned a blind eye as statues of Confederate soldiers were erected, and prisons were built to incarcerate African Americans at five times the rate of whites — or are we different? Are you different?

This articles was written by Shanelle Matthews, Director of Communications at the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and first appeared on Bustle on 16 August.

The post What Black Lives Matter Organizers Are Doing To Fight White Supremacy At Every Level appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

In the US, the Black Lives Matter campaign is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with that country’s history, with (in the wake of the Charleston massacre, in particular), activists launching a new conversation about the Civil War iconography that litters much of the South.

Already, the Confederate flag’s gone from the South Carolina state house. In Kentucky, talk’s turned to the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue. In New Orleans, pressure is building on the memorial to Robert E Lee while Memphis ponders the future of its multiple statues of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. In communities across the south, public history is suddenly up for debate.

The fissures revealed by the Adam Goodes controversy suggests the need for a similar project here. As it happens, in his new book Australian Confederates, journalist Terry Smyth draws out some fascinating connections between Australia and the American south.

myth focuses, in particular, on the 42 Australians who, in 1865, secretly enlisted to fight for the slave-owning states when the Confederate ship Shenandoah docked in Port Phillip Bay. In passing, however, he acknowledges the broader significance of the Civil War, which opened sudden opportunities for another nations to export agricultural crops.

As historian Kay Saunders has said, the northern blockade of Confederate cotton and sugar meant that “Queensland was regarded potentially as a second Louisiana”.

Aspiring local planters tried to seize the moment, inducing British mill workers to immigrate and establish a local cotton industry. But they quickly discovered that men from England’s industrial towns would not accept the conditions prevailing on plantations in the Australian rural north.

“In 1863,” Smyth writes, “shipping magnate and entrepreneur Robert Towns established a cotton plantation on the Logan River, in Queensland. Convinced that the venture would never turn a profit if he paid white man’s wages, he sent a schooner to the South Pacific to recruit Islanders. The ship returned with 67 Melanesian men who were put to work picking Towns’ cotton. ‘Kanakas’, they were called – originally Hawaiian for ‘free man’ but used by whites as a derogatory term akin to ‘nigger’.

“Although Towns’ islander labourers were offered wages, food and housing and a promise they could return home if they wished, the practice of so-called indentured labour, as it spread throughout eastern Australia, soon degenerated into a form of slavery called ‘blackbirding’.”

Australian South Sea Islanders at Farnborough, Queensland, circa 1895.

Between 1863 and 1904, 62,000 South Sea Islanders were brought to Australia, landing in Brisbane, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Innisfail and Cairns. The majority of the indentured labourers came from today’s Vanuatu, with a substantial proportion from the Solomons, as well as smaller islands. Some came voluntarily (even accepting multiple trips). Others did not – and varying degrees of deception and outright coercion were used by blackbirders to persuade them.

By the 1890s, the so-called “Kanakas” were providing 85% of the workforce for the sugar industry.

The conditions the Islanders faced in Australia were extraordinarily harsh.

Smyth describes a notorious case in which “a certain John Tancred was charged with stealing an islander boy named Towhey, the property of Arthur Gossett. The complainant swore he could prove his ownership of the boy because he had branded him not once but twice – on the leg and on the side – which he demonstrated to the court. The judge fined Tancred 10 pounds for theft, and Gossett walked way with his young slave in tow.

“The press report of the case heartily approved of the outcome, helpfully suggesting: ‘perhaps it may not yet be too late for the Assembly to insert a ‘branding’ clause in the Polynesian Labourers Bill.’”

Not all sugar growers conducted themselves like southern slave owners. But, by definition, indentured labour in Queensland was, as the academic Tracey Banivanua Mar argues, “a legalised system that bound mainly young men to three years of coercive labour under physical conditions considered to be fatal to Europeans, and in standards of accommodation and care that were largely negligent and often fatal”.

Between 1868 and 1889, Islanders’ mortality rate in Queensland was something like 19%. There’s no mystery as to why. In a July 1880 discussion of high death rates on plantations owned by R Cran and Company, the liberal Queenslander newspaper explained that the “the islanders were being killed mainly by overwork, insufficient or improper food, bad water, absence of medical attention when sick, and general neglect”.

If this history isn’t generally known, we shouldn’t be surprised.

At federation, the fate of the Islanders – many of whom had by that time lived in Australia for decades – was hotly contested. Edmund Barton, the first prime minister, argued for their deportation in order to preserve the racial purity of White Australia. In doing so, he explicitly referenced the experience of the American south.

“The negro cannot be deported now because of his numbers, and because his race has become rooted in American soil,” he said. “We do not propose that either of these conditions should ever arise in Australia.”

Thus a key piece of legislation in the first ever parliament was the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, which mandated the forcible deportation of 7,500 Pacific Islanders and banned the entry of any other Islanders after 1904.

“The country did not feel the need of the imported nigger before he came and his loss will not be felt when his gone,” explained the West Australian Sunday Times.

“We do the nigger no injustice by deporting him to his native land in better condition than when he left it.”

What does this have to do with Adam Goodes? A recent survey by regional newspapers in Victoria showed a great majority of respondents saw nothing racist about the hostility directed by fans at Goodes.

Godfrey Charles Mundy’s depiction of the 1838 Slaughterhouse Creek massacre. Illustration: Godfrey Charles Mundy/Australian War Memorial

In the US, many whites have reacted to the Black Lives Matter campaign with similar incomprehension. They’ve never had any trouble with the police – and they don’t see why the experiences of African Americans should be any different.

The debate about southern history taking place across America matters because it provides that missing context.

As Brent Staples says in the New York Times, the confederate monuments were mostly erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the period in which the former slave states were introducing, usually with great violence, so-called Jim Crow laws to abolish voting and other rights for African Americans.

The statues, in other words, were an adjunct to a racialised terror enforced by the police as much as by the KKK. That’s what Angela Davis means when she says “there is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan”.

In the same way, white Australians might think nothing of being called an “ape”. But Goodes’s response to the taunt arises from a history that shares far more with the US south than we’d like to think.

In 1960, Faith Bandler, who would become a crucial campaigner for Aboriginal rights, met the legendary African American singer and polymath Paul Robeson during his only Australian tour. Robeson was the child of a slave.

So, too, was Bandler. Her father had been blackbirded from his island in the New Hebrides and then had escaped deportation by fleeing to northern NSW. Faith grew up in a country town shaped by de facto segregation – and, because of that, always identified with Robeson and other American civil rights activists.

She later recalled her meeting with him:

I had an occasion to … show him a film that was made on the Warburton Ranges. And I shall never forget his reaction to that film, never. It was a film taken on a mission station where the people were ragged and unhealthy and sick, very sick. And we took this film and we showed it to him. [A]s he watched the film the tears came to his eyes and when the film finished he stood up and he pulled his cap off and he threw it in his rage on the floor and trod on it and he asked for a cigarette from someone. Well a lot of people smoked in those days so there was no shortage of cigarettes and [his wife Eslanda] said to me, ‘Well it’s many years since I’ve seen him do that’. He was so angry and he said to me, ‘I’ll go away now, but when I come back I’ll give you a hand’. He was beautiful, but he died and he didn’t come back.

Robeson was a long-time campaigner for African American rights. He knew the appalling conditions in the deep south – but the situation facing Indigenous Australia still moved him to tears.

Indeed, historically, the local press openly acknowledged that Aboriginal people were treated far worse than even the Islanders imported to make Queensland a “second Louisiana”.

For instance, in 1880, the Queenslander launched a campaign against what it called “the sickening and brutal war of races that is carried on in our outside settlements”. This, it said, “is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there.”

‘It’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.’ Photograph: Nla

A prolonged debate ensued in its pages, with some correspondents minimising or justifying the violence, and others providing astonishingly frank accounts of frontier atrocities.

On 2 October 1880, for instance, one contributor wrote:

I am no sentimental black protector, and have lived in this Cook district since 1873, when it was first settled. … We are in this district in a state of open warfare with the natives, and if I met a mob anywhere in the bush I should feel justified in firing on them. But there are things done to blacks and black women by some of the police which equal the Bulgarian atrocities that thrilled Europe with horror. In this district a cattleowner who often has to do his own ‘dispersing’ made a raid about a year ago on the blacks, and captured a young gin. She was brought home to the station, and was employed carrying water from the river to the house during the day, and at night was chained by the leg to a verandah post, to prevent her escaping and to ‘civilize’ her. One of the boys employed on the station took a fancy to her, and she was looked on as his wife.

He goes on to outline, in the polite euphemisms of the 19th century, a horrific account of sex slavery and gang rape.

The series of articles concluded on 20 November 1880 with the editorialist writing:

[P]roperty acquired by conquest, no less than that which is transmitted by inheritance, has its duties as well as its rights, and … we, in common with the other States on this continent, have shamefully fallen short of our duty towards the inferior race whom we have dispossessed. That it should be necessary for any section of the Press, in order to ensure a hearing at all, to argue on purely utilitarian grounds against the policy of deliberate extermination that has been unremittingly pursued hitherto; that it should have been incumbent on us to lay stress, not so much on the wickedness and cowardice as on the unprofitableness of shooting down like vermin the helpless savages whose homes we have invaded – all this is evidence of a blunting of the moral perceptions of our own community such as would appear morbid and unnatural if manifested in any other sphere of human relations.

The peculiar reference to “unprofitableness” probably harks back to a debate in the Queensland parliament in the previous month.

There, on 21 October, the MP John Douglas (who would later go on to become premier), had explained, as Hansard put it:

The colony was now introducing Polynesians, and he did not believe that there was any such great distinction between them and the aborigines of Northern Australia as to prevent the hope that some use might be made of the latter. In Western Australia the natives had been, he believed, in some cases captured, and as prisoners of war had been compelled to submit to a period of pupilage, afterwards becoming useful settlers. … It would be quite possible to take the natives prisoners, instead of shooting down and killing them, though he doubted whether the House would sanction a law by which these people, taken in open warfare, might be kept in a state of captivity. At all events, that would be a more benevolent process than shooting them down and taking their lives. No doubt to shoot them down was the easiest way of getting rid of them.

Here, then, was the liberal position: Queenslanders should cease murdering Indigenous people. Instead, they should enslave them, thus sparing themselves the necessity of blackbirding indentured labour.

That’s the context in which a racialised insult flung at Goodes possesses rather more power than, say, the mean remarks that Andrew Bolt sometimes finds in his comments threads.

In his recent book Forgotten War, Henry Reynolds notes the obvious disparity between Australia’s commemoration of the first world war (something that has now cost nearly half a billion dollars) and the almost complete indifference shown to the frontier wars fought by settlers against Indigenous people, even though the latter possesses far more significance in the development of the nation.

Just as most towns in the American south boast a cairn to the Confederate dead, every tiny community in regional Australia has its a shrine to the dead of the Great War. But it’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.

As Reynolds says, the Australian War Museum honours farcical engagements like the Sudanese war but makes no reference to the “sickening and brutal war of races” the Queenslander so openly discussed, even though the frontier war was clearly the most important conflict in Australian history.

Tony Abbott famously thinks that, before the arrival of Europeans, Australia was “nothing but bush”. It would be foolish indeed to expect the prime minister to commemorate people he seems to believe never existed.

But what’s fascinating about the debates taking place in the US is that they’re driven by ordinary people rather than politicians. The Confederate flag at South Carolina’s State House was first lowered not by a legislator but by African American activist Bree Newsome, who went to jail as a result. All across the country, it’s Black Lives Matter campaigners who are insisting on a discussion of the nation’s history, precisely because that discussion necessarily intersects with politics today.

The Frontier Wars in Australia were fought out with different tactics in different places at different times. Remembering the conflict thus necessitates localised histories, specific accounts of what was done in specific places. An official statement about the past is all too likely to dissolve into platitudes and empty symbolism.

But a grassroots campaign to identify and commemorate particular histories would take on a different dynamic. It would necessitate an engagement with the community, for a start: a serious public debate about historical injustice. It would also link the past with the present, inevitably posing questions that go beyond the treatment of Adam Goodes into the shocking statistics about, for instance, Indigenous unemployment and incarceration.

Australian history and American history are not the same. But it’s very hard to read, say, Amy McQuire’s account of the death last year of Julieka Dhu in police custody without asking the questions currently being posed in the US: do black lives matter or not?

This articles is written by Jeff Sparrow and first appeared in the Guardian on 7 August 2015.

The post If black lives really matter in Australia, it’s time we owned up to our history appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

“Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a tool where we can re-imagine a world where Black people are free to exist and live, and also as a tool for our allies to be able to show up for us. ”

“[Winning the Sydney Peace Prize] is a tremendous honour, it’s amazing that it’s the first time a movement and not a person has been awarded the Prize. It’s an honour and it shows other people what Black Lives Matter is doing and what we’re trying to do…For some folks who haven’t been paying attention, I hope this will draw their attention to get to know what we’re really about and maybe join and help us to make sure all Black live do matter.”

The Black Lives Matter phrase and hashtag was first coined in a social media post against the acquittal of George Zimmerman, for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin 4 years ago.

The movement against racial inequality and police violence in the US which began as a powerful hashtag has gone international, and Cazembe Jackson is a leader of the movement in Atlanta, Georgia.

He believes the objectives of the movement have universal appeal to People of Colour, the world over.

Listen to the full interview between Cazembe Jackson and Larissa Behrendt below.

This interview first appeared on ABC’s Speaking Out on 9 July 2017

The post Black Lives Matter Chapter Leader Cazembe Jackson in Conversation with Larissa Behrendt appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.