In the news this week is the signalled stepping back of a key Wiradjuri man - Stan Grant - from a public presenter role in television. He is also a follower of Christ, a journalist, a high profile speaker and wisdom holder, truth teller and prophetic voice. This year across these lands now called Australia we will be voting in a referendum on a Voice to Parliament. This Voice is set to be an ongoing rightful place at the table in our political landscape. A step in the long journey of restorative justice in these lands. In a time when I thought we were maturing a little as community of Australians - First and Second peoples, it seems we are not. Stan is stepping back because enough is enough of the continuous racial vileness that seems to pervade the noisy, heartless, threatened, ill informed in our community. |
It saddens me that this is so pervasive in our community. I have been deeply enriched and challenged by the heartbreaking trauma stories that many First Peoples have shared around yarning circles across these lands. Mothers who have had children ripped from their arms, land and culture lost to the violence of white men declaring an activity under the name of crown and God.
What I have heard is a terror I could not imagine, and a grief that I can understand is deeply held across generations. You can't shake that. You don't get over it. . . . .
Stan's stepping back comes off the back of a coronation. I watched it out of curiosity. But I felt a shame that this was church, that this was supposedly our head of state. And I recoiled. Not my king, not my church or sense of God. It cut across what I hold deeply to heart. Every time I acknowledge Country and the First Peoples, I lean into it as an act of restorative justice, as a subversion of the British crown, and as a willingness to make the peoples who inhabit this land in all their diversity a positive, safe, just place to live. I reclaim a history denied, and a peoples with is diverse culture as sovereign in these lands.
So what happens when I hear or see racial abuse, bias, denial of the humanity of the other taking place? Do I be complicit with silence, do I challenge, and call out? Do I counter and seek a healthy way to publicly work towards a better way - like this is attempting to be? Do I seek to keep working away at my own biases and understandings, frames and experiences? Do I engage in spaces that are uncomfortable, challenging, hard because it will shape me? Do I call enough when I need to?
What will you do . . . . . .