Veteran Wiradjuri journalist and Guardian Australia’s Indigenous affairs editor Stan Grant‘s opening speech from the IQ2 debate series, held by the Ethics Centre last year, has gone viral over the weekend after a video of the speech was released on Friday.
Speaking frankly, Grant decried how racism is “at the heart of the Australian dream,” giving a moving speech on the reality of discrimination in Australian society and drawing a direct line between the attitudes of colonialism and society’s discriminatory treatment of Indigenous Australians today.
Going viral on Facebook with over 920,000 views and 30,000 shares, media commentator and writer Mike Carlton even called it a future “Martin Luther King moment” on Twitter.
Honestly. I think this Stan Grant speech will one day be viewed as a Martin Luther King moment. https://t.co/bshxwKjBiX via @YouTube
— Mike Carlton (@MikeCarlton01) January 22, 2016
Grant called out racism as being at “the foundation of the Australian dream” invoking the cultural atrocity of terra nullius and the colonial denial of indigenous person hood.
“Our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law, and when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman,” he said.
“We were fly-blown, Stone-Age savages, and that was the language that was used. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment … was sending out raiding parties with the instruction; ‘bring back the severed heads of the black trouble-makers’.”
“By 1901 when we became a nation, we were nowhere, we were not in the constitution. Save for race provisions which allowed for laws to be made which would take our children that would invade out privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and where we could live. The Australian dream.”
Even today the mark of this history persists, Grant points out, speaking of today’s Australian Dream and how “We sing of it and we recite it in verse; ‘Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free’.
“My people die young in this country. We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3% of the Australian population and yet we are 25% – one quarter – of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you’re a juvenile it is worse, it is 50%. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.”
“Of course racism is killing the Australian dream; it is self-evident… But we are better than that,” he added.
“One day I want to stand here and be able to say as proudly, and sing as loudly as anyone else in the room, ‘Australians ALL let us rejoice’.”
Such an unflinching and detailed discussion of our nation’s atrocious history being rare in today’s media landscape, Grant’s words area a powerful yet lonely cry against our nation’s silence on our continuing mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Having won a Walkley award for journalism in December for his columns covering Indigenous affairs for Guardian Australia however, it unlikely to be Grant’s last.
IQ2 Racism Debate: Stan Grant
