Imprisoned First Australians prove the rest of us are racist

Last weekend 100,000 of us turned up to join in the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, focusing in Australia on Indigenous deaths in custody. 

Since the 1991 Royal Commission into deaths in custody, there have been a further 437 deaths without a single conviction for criminal responsibility. None of the recommendations were adopted. 

The protests in Australia had nothing to do with wanting to be like the Americans, or thinking it looked like fun, or wanting to score social justice points. The protests were lead and organised by Aboriginal people who had lost loved ones in the racist prison system and were calling out for justice, and we went to say enough is enough.

Yet the usual flying monkeys had their simple answers ready. "If Aboriginal people stopped committing so much crime, they wouldn't go to jail and they wouldn't die in jail. Nothing to do with racism."

It has everything to do with racism. 

Aboriginal people are incarcerated at roughly ten times - that's 1000% - of non-Aboriginal Australians.

Indigenous incarceration rates prove Australia is a racist country.

You think that the reason Aboriginal people are imprisoned at ten times the rate of non Aboriginal people because they commit ten times the amount of crime? Then you're a racist. And the fact that a lot of people think this proves Australia is a racist country. 

You realise that there's other factors contributing to high rates of Indigenous incarceration, such as the legacy of dispossession, targeted policing, and disparities in sentencing? These are all the systemic factors in play because Australia is a racist country. 

There's no way around this. We have a massive problem, and we have to get it out of the trenches of the cultural wars and face it and deal with it.