(Footage of American police clashing with
protestors)
KIMBERLY
LATRICE JONES, AUTHOR: You can’t win. The game is fixed. So when they say why
did you burn down the community, why did you burn down your own neighbourhood,
it’s not ours. We don’t’ own anything. We don’t own anything.
(Footage
of tear gas explosions in the crowd)
KIMBERLY
LATRICE JONES: There’ a social contract that we all have, that if you steal or
if I steal then the person that is the authority comes in and they fix the
situation but the person who fixes the situation is killing us.
(Footage
of protestors on the street)
KIMBERLY
LATRICE JONES: You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and
didn’t give a fuck. You broke the contract when for 400 years we played your
game and built your wealth.
(footage
of police arresting a protestor who asks: What did I do? What did I do?)
KIMBERLY
LATRICE JONES, AUTHOR: As far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch
to the ground and it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what
black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
(footage
of an angry encounter between protestors and police)
STAN
GRANT: What is this rage that we see on the streets, now? People burning
and people looting. This anger that just comes from nowhere, that erupts, goes
away and then comes back again at another time, but never really leaves us. How
do we explain that rage?
(Footage
of Australian protestors chanting: Black lives matter; no justice no peace; I
can’t breathe)
STAN GRANT: To live in a society where you are not heard and to dare to speak
the truths of the past, the truths of our history, means that you are the one
with the problem, that you are the one causing trouble. And all of that
history, all of that history collapses in on itself. That rage that just says,
"I want to be heard. I am here. I am a human being. See me."
(footage
of Minnesota police detaining George Floyd on the ground with an officer’s knee
on George Floyd’s neck)
GEORGE
FLOYD: My stomach hurts, my neck hurts. Everything hurts. I can’t breathe
your knee in my neck. I can’t breathe sir.
STAN
GRANT: On May 25 this year an unarmed black man died under the knee of a white
police officer.
POLICE
OFFICER: Get up and get in the car
GEORGE FLOYD: Mama!
STAN
GRANT: And there in that moment he became every black life.
There captured on video was every person enslaved. Every person in chains.
Every person who lived under the whip. Every person lynched from a tree or
ordered to the back of the bus.
Every
nameless faceless person who was told their lives did not matter.
GEORGE
FLOYD: I can’t breathe officer
STAN
GRANT: In death George Floyd gives his name to those nameless. In his cries we
hear the cries of hundreds of years and the unknown dead.
And a
world away I hear those cries too – and they sound so familiar.
This is
what history sounds like to us.
GEORGE
FLOYD: I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.
STAN
GRANT: I can’t breathe
TITLE:
I CAN’T BREATHE
(Footage
of George Floyd being lifted from the ground and place in an ambulance)
CROWD: check for a pulse. Is he breathing right now? Check his pulse. Oh my
god. I got this all on camera
JAMEL MIMS, HIP HOP ARTIST AND ACTIVIST: You watched that video. And I
dare you not to be angry. You watch that video of a police officer stomping the
life out of a man with his knee on his neck for eight minutes and 46
seconds. And it's excruciating. And when people see that video, they don't just
see George Floyd's life being snuffed out. You know, they see actually the
centuries of brutality and racism in this country.
STAN
GRANT: America has been here before. The race riots of the 1960’s. On the
streets of Los Angeles in the 1990’s. In Ferguson, Missouri. And in Minneapolis
today. And the message is the same: For black America the land of the free has
never felt truly free.
JAMEL
MIMS: This deep wellspring of anger actually goes to a, essentially unresolved
question in the United States which is at the core of the foundation of this
country. Which was been founded on slavery and genocide.
REV JESSE JACKSON JR: America really is a white supremacist country. We believe
in white supremacy. Until 1950 blacks were legally inferior. Rosa Parks on the
bus, she was arrested. The sign above the driver said, "Coloureds in the
rear, whites in the front." Supremacy law. That was the law of the land.
And we've had to overcome whites feeling supreme, blacks feeling inferior to
even the playing field. We want to be even. We want to be fair.
STAN GRANT: This not a story for me. This is not something that I can break
down with facts. This is not something that I can analyse, it isn't about
statistics. It isn't about numbers. This is my life. This is my mother and my
father. This is all of my family who have come before me. This is my children
who will live in a world that we did not make, but a world that they have to
survive and I have to teach them how to survive this world.
(footage
of Australian protestors chanting No justice no peace, no racist police.)
KEENAN MUNDINE, YOUTH JUSTICE WORKER: Black lives matter means a lot to me on a
personal note. For a long time, I felt like my life didn't matter, and then I
got old enough to understand that I do matter, and I got to be able to take
control of my future. I've been in custody. I've been in prison cells. I've
spent time in solitary confinement. Like I said, I thought my life didn't
matter but to be able to see everybody across the world come together and say
you know what this is not, this is not okay and these are human people and
their lives do matter. It, man I can’t even describe it.
LATOYA RULE, ACADEMIC AND ACTIVIST: All lives matter when black lives matter,
and until black lives matter, we cannot suggest that all lives do matter
because clearly they don't. Clearly the fact that we have to distinguish
blackness from others to be able to fight the cause of Aboriginal deaths in
custody, of black deaths in custody globally, clearly all lives don't matter.
It's a white washing standard that's being put across black lives to further
invisibilize and dehumanise us. We shouldn't have to do this work.
STAN GRANT: We have heard George Floyd’s words here in Australian prisons.
(Footage of David Dungay Jr being restrained by police in a prison cell)
DAVID DUNGARY JR: I can’t breathe, please.
STAN GRANT: They were David Dungay’s Junior last words in 2015 before he died
in the hospital ward of Sydney’s Long Bay prison. The coroner found lack of
oxygen while he was restrained was a contributing factor to his death.
DAVID DUNGAY JR: I can’t breathe, please don’t!
STAN GRANT: But it has taken the death of a black man in America to wake us up
to what happens here.
POLICE
OFFICER: Dungay just breathe
DAVID DUNGAY JR: I can’t breathe
STAN GRANT: That black people die here in custody and that the numbers keep rising,
and we fail to stop it.
POLICE OFFICER: Dungay, Dungay
LATOYA RULE, ACADEMIC: I don't believe actually the government have learned
anything more than how to hide Aboriginal deaths in custody from the world. And
that's what we're trying to expose here. We need to expose globally what's
happening here in Australia because we resonate with people like George Floyd.
We resonate with those families. We resonate with various deaths in
custody around the world that are going unseen.
REV
JESSE JACKSON JR: Some racism black people never really stopped, if you think about
it. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery. We were set free. Slave masters
and apartheid masters, they became very angry. Killed over 5,000 blacks in
about 70 years or burn the whole town like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood,
Florida. They, they massacred blacks alive.
STAN
GRANT: When I see black America I see part of myself. When I was growing up
black America spoke to me when white Australia did not.
MALCOLM
X: We are oppressed, we are exploited, we are downtrodden, we are denied
not only civil rights but even human rights. So the only way we are going to
get some of this oppression and exploitation away from us or aside from us is
to come together against a common enemy.
STAN
GRANT: And black America taught me to dream.
REV
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise
up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident; that all men are created equal."
STAN
GRANT: Those who say black lives matter is a movement we are importing
from America know nothing of who we are. I came out of the same black churches
as Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King. Ours was the church of the forsaken
and these men were our patron saints. From black America I learned how to speak
back to whiteness.
(footage of James Baldwin on the Dick
Cavett Show in 1968)
PROFESSOR PAUL WEISS: So why must we always concentrate on colour or
religion or this, there are other ways of connecting men?
JAMES BALDWIN, WRITER: I’ll tell you this when I left this country in 1948 I
left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn’t care where I
went. I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu. I ended up
in Paris, on the streets of Paris with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing
worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here. You talk
about making it as a writer by yourself you had to be able then to turn off all
the antenna with which you live because once you turn your back on this society
you may die! You may die!
(footage
of American police chasing and arresting protestors with text of poem over
vision)
CLAUDIA RANKINE, AUTHOR, “CITIZEN”: ‘then flashes, a siren, a stretched
out roar and you are not the guy and you still fit the description because
there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description’.
CLAUDIA
RANKINE, POET AND AUTHOR: I think the white imagination has framed
the conception of whiteness in a certain direction and therefore in order to
keep itself segregated, superior in its narrative, it had to classify blacks
as, as animals and we see that language being used by presidents like Reagan.
Being used by ordinary citizens, being used to talk about Michelle Obama as
First Lady. And I think white people have passively taken that in and then
believed it as fact. So you know when we have someone like President Trump
saying you can tell these people anything and they’ll believe it, he’s not
wrong.
STAN
GRANT: How quickly this world steals our innocence. I didn’t get to discover
the world through my eyes, I was the one discovered. I was the one
captured in the white gaze and I learned at school the hard lesson of life.
I lived in a world where white lives mattered and I was not white.
White was normal. And I wasn't normal. The schoolyard, taunts, the laughing,
the pointing, the mocking, the heads turning. These the little things that stay
with you. Once our eyes are open to the world around us, we can never see the
world in the same way again. I was 15 when I learned another lesson – no matter
how close I got I could never truly belong.
STAN
GRANT: One day I was asked in class to stand up and talk about myself, to talk
about my life. And I told them who I was. I told them where I was from. I told
them about my family, about my parents. I told them about our history. As I
walked out of the class, one of my friends turned to me and said, why do you
have to always talk about that Abo shit? We came back into class after lunch
and scrawled across the board, ‘be kind to Stan. Abos need love too.’ This
might seem like just a little thing. It might seem like something you can shrug
off, sitting here today. Why should that matter? Why should that matter to me?
But you can never let go of those things. People know just where to hurt you.
They know just how to tell you what your place in the world is. And what the
price of belonging really is. Just shut up. Just go along. Don't talk about it.
STAN
GRANT: Race is an invention, a lie that we make real. Like witchcraft it
is our belief that gives it power. And just Like magic it can fool you.
CLAUDIA
RANKINE, POET, AUTHOR OF BOOK “CITIZEN”:
‘Certain
moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue and clog the lungs.
Like thunder they drown you in sound – no, like lightning they strike you
across the larynx’.
CLAUDIA RANKINE: The person who points out the problem becomes the problem. And
in my case, I have decided that I embrace that position. You know, if, if
you need to see me as the problem, then see me as a problem, but I am not going
to let it go. And I think, I think white people have to start stepping up and
speaking out and, you know, because I don't think I have superhuman ability to
see, I think I see what they see and they are allowing it to happen. And, and
I, you know, when I say this, I'm talking about my friends who will be at a
thing with me and something will happen and they will look at me like, did you
see that? But they will say nothing. And we all have to start being accountable
to the moments, the small moments, because it's the same people who are
involved in the small moments that end up in the big moments.
STAN
GRANT: From our politicians to our judges to our business leaders, power in
Australia is still overwhelmingly white. Turn on the television and the faces
you’ll see - still mostly white. Four Corners has been on air more years than I
have been alive and I am the first indigenous person ever to report for it. And
when we do break through that colour line we are expected to be grateful and
humble.
MEYNE
WYATT, ACTOR: I’ve taken it. No matter what, no matter how big, how small I’ll
get some racist shit on a weekly basis and I’ll take it. You know it used to be
that in your face ya boong, ya black dog coon kind of shit. Gonna chase you
down the ditch with my baseball bat skinhead shit when I was 14 years old. But
now we come forward, we progressive, we’re going to give you that small subtle
shit, the shit that’s always been there but it’s not that obvious in your face
shit. It’s that ooh no we can’t be seen to be racist kind of shit. Security
guard following me around the store, asking to search my bag. Then walking up
to the counter first and being served second or third or last kind of shit.
Then hailing down a cab and watching it slow down, look at my face and then
drive off. More than once, more than twice, more than once, twice or any one
occasion. Yeah that shit I’ll get weekly, sometimes I’ll get days in a
row if I’m really lucky. But then on occasion when you caught me on a bad day
where I don’t feel like taking it. I’ll give you that angry black that you been
asking for and I’ll tell you, you arsehole. Not because of that one time, but
because of my whole life. At lease Adam danced and they still pissed and
moaned. But it’s not about that one time. It’s about all those times. And
seeing us as animals and not as people, that shit needs to stop. Black deaths
in custody, that shit needs to stop. I don’t want to be what you want me to be.
I want to be what I want to be. Never trade your authenticity for approval. Be
crazy, take a risk, be different, offend your family, call them out. Silence is
violence, complacency is complicit. I don’t want to be quiet. I don’t want to
be humble. I don’t want to sit down.
KEENAN
MUNDINE, YOUTH JUSTICE WORKER: Aboriginal people here are at war every day.
We're at war with the system. We're at war with the police. We're at war with
statistics. But you want us just to move on from that.
STAN
GRANT: Keenan Mundine’s story can be heard in any black community in
Australia: lives black, poor and in the sight of the police.
(photos
of Keenan Mundine as a child)
As a
young boy Keenan lost his mother and his father. He grew up on the streets of
inner-city Sydney. Like so many others got into trouble went to juvenile
detention and ultimately to jail.
Australia may call him a statistic. We know those numbers, we are three percent
of the population and nearly a third of those behind bars.
But
Keenan is not a statistic. He is real and his friends and his family are real
and his pain is real.
KEENAN
MUNDINE: I come back to my, my community, and all I see is pain. All I see is
haunting memories where I used to play with my friends and my brothers that
I've lost. Where I used to sleep but now my brothers are in prisons serving 15
years. Like these are, we never wanted to grow up to be drug addicts and
criminals. We just wanted to be loved. We wanted our mum and dad to be home. We
wanted to have food on the table and we wanted to be safe, and we spent the
rest of our lives trying to pick the pieces up and understand why we
never had such a beginning like everybody else and where do we fit in and
how do we pick ourselves up and move on from all of that?
(photo
of TJ Hckey and the location of his death)
STAN
GRANT: TJ Hickey was 17 when he came off his bike and was impaled on a
fence post. He died from his injuries. TJ’s family believe he was being pursued
by police at the time – a view the coroner rejected.
KEENAN
MUNDINE: Man, this is like one of the hardest things. I was, man I was only 17
at the time and I was with him the night before the incident happened.
(footage of riots in Redfern)
STAN
GRANT: Thomas Hickey’s death set fire to the streets of Redfern in inner
city Sydney.
It
looked like a scene from Los Angeles.
(footage
of TJ Hickey’s funeral)
To this
day the Hickey family and the black community will not accept the coroner’s
finding that TJ’s death was an accident.
They
still believe police were pursuing him. They still want an inquiry re-opened.
KEENAN
MUNDINE: He died in the same community that we used to play in as kids. The
same streets we used to walk as children, and hope for a better future. Hope
not to be poor when we grow up.
STAN
GRANT: Keenan is haunted by the memory of his friend TJ and he works every day
to try to keep young black kids out of jail.
KEENAN
MUNDINE: I'm more scared. Scared that it's going to happen to my boys.
I'm scared that my children are going to grow up in a country that thinks
there's no racism but they’re more likely to end up in the criminal justice
system than their other fellow friends in day care. I see them being chased
by police. I see them in a cell, crying. I see them in an adult prison cell,
and having no one to visit them, because they're my children and they're my
blood, and that's my experience. I have every right to be angry, but angry kept
me, angry kept me in a place, man, that was doing more damage to my community
than healing it.
LATOYA
RULE: I had police driving alongside of me on my way walking to high school in
year eight. So my understandings of, of surveillance were attached to race. My
understandings of police brutality, of prisons, really negative terminology
attached to the idea of race rather than race being about unity, race being
about collective communities, race being about love. My earliest understandings
of race, yeah, were rather set up as violence due to racism.
(photo
of Wayne “Fella” Morrison and footage of CCTV showing many prison guards
restraining him)
STAN GRANT: Latoya Rule never got to say goodbye to her brother Wayne ‘Fella’
Morrison.
CCTV
footage captured his last day in an Adelaide police cell where he was facing
assault charges. He became unresponsive in a prison van and died in hospital
three days later in September 2016. A coronial inquest is ongoing.
But
like so many other deaths in custody for Latoya and her family there are more
questions than answers.
LATOYA
RULE, ORGANISER #JUSTICEFORFELLA: what happened in those final moments
during Wayne’s last breaths? There are so many unanswered questions. Why in the
first instance did they have to detain Wayne? What happened in the van? Why
wasn't there surveillance in the van? Why is it that the officers actually
refused initially police entrance and investigator entrance to take their
statements that were, I believe not released until months and years later. You
know, there, there are so many unanswered questions about what really happened
to Wayne.
(Footage of Indigenous dancers at Uluru)
PROF
MEGAN DAVIS, ULURU STATEMENT FROM THE HEART: We seek constitutional reforms to
empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have
power over our destiny out children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds
and their culture will be a gift to their country.
JOE
ANDERSON “KING BURRAGA” 1933: All the black man wants is representation in
federal parliament.
STAN
GRANT: For generations we, the First Nations people have spoken truth to white
power.
JOE
ANDERSON “KING BURRAGA” 1933
One
hundred and fifty years ago the Aboriginal owned Australia and today he demands
more than the white man’s charity. He wants the right to live.
STAN
GRANT: But still there are no treaties, no voice. Our people are often out of
sight and out of mind to most Australians. Places like Western Australia’s
Kimberley region have some of the highest youth suicide rates anywhere in the
world. Here like so many other black communities people are stressed to
breaking point – violence, drug and alcohol addiction, chronic poverty. These
are the sad realities of lives under the weight of our history. But
powerlessness is not hopelessness and it is our people – Indigenous people –
who step up when Australia often looks away.
JUNE
OSCAR, ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMISSIONER:
They're, they're real, they're real issues, and I have personal experiences of
loss of families through suicide. And we learn to continue to believe in
ourselves, in our strength, our resilience, our determination for change. And
we can change. And, we can bring others along to assist us, to work with us
around creating the reforms within the systems and structures that need to be
informed by lived realities of people. But to also empower people to lead the
change at the community level.
(footage
of Archie Rach singing)
ARCHIE ROACH (singing): One dark day on Framingham.
STAN
GRANT: Archie Roach has always been the voice of healing for me. His is a voice
that calls me home, that reminds me of the love and courage of my people.
ARCHIE ROACH (singing): He came running, fighting mad.
ARCHIE
ROACH: My hope comes from my people.
ARCHEI
ROACH (singing): Mother’s tears were falling down.
ARCHIE
ROACH: My country, my land. I love this country, I love the earth, the
land, I love my people. Their humour, their resilience. What's got us
through, through all these years, is our love for one another. And that's what
I see. I still see it today. How we still love one another, and still reach out
to one another, you know?
STAN
GRANT: When he was two years old Archie Roach was taken from his family, like
so many of the stolen generations.
ARCHIE
ROACH (singing): Snatched from our mother’s breast said this was for the best,
took us away.
STAN
GRANT: We all have people taken from us. There’s a photo passed down in my
family – rows of Aboriginal girls taken to a home to be trained to be servants,
to live under a sign that read ‘think white act white be white’. They lost
their names and were given a number. There in the middle is a small girl -
number 658 - my great aunt Eunice Grant.
ARCHIE
ROACH: Imagine if you, when you were a child, a baby even, and the authorities
came and snatched you from your mother or your father, or your mother and your
father and your siblings, and you were removed and, and brought up totally
separate from your family? How would you feel about that? And a lot of them say
not too good it would be pretty bad, horrendous. You've got to try and walk in
our shoes for a little bit.
STAN
GRANT: There is a place that I can hold myself against the world, that no
matter where I’ve been or what I’ve seen I will always have a home.
Out here amongst the trees, along the river banks, and the hills and the rocks,
this is Wiradjuri country, a country of my family, of my ancestors.
There
is a deep story here, a deep time and I see myself everywhere. I see myself
amongst the birds, the magpie that is my father’s totem and I hear myself in
our language.
(footage
of Stan sitting with his parents on their porch)
STAN
GRANT: How do you say this is our land, Wiradjuri land, Wiradjuri ngurrambang.
STAN GRANT SNR: yeah, Wiradjuri ngurrambang.
STAN
GRANT: Wiradjuri ngurrambang
STAN
SNR: Wiradjuri ngurrambang. Wiradjuri land. Ninna Wiradjuri ngurrambang,
ninna Wiradjuri ngurrambang. This Wiradjuri land.
STAN
GRANT: This Wiradjuri land.
STAN
SNR: This Wiradjuri land, yeah.
STAN GRANT: Balladhu Wiradjuri gibir – djirrimadalinya Badhu Wiradjuri. I am a
Wiradjuri man, proudly Wiradjuri. These are my parents my babiin, father,
yamarran budhang or Stan and my gunhi , my mother, Betty.
STAN
GRANT: How important is it for us to speak our language?
STAN
GRANT SNR: How important? It’s who you are. If you don’t have a language,
you’re a nobody. If we keep speaking English, we might as well be poms mate.
They tried to get the language off us, out of us in the first place, that’s why
we lost our language. We didn’t lose it because my grandfather, dear old
budyaan, Wilfred. He spoke seven different Aboriginal languages mate, so how
could we lose it?
STAN
GRANT: But what did he say, remember he was arrested for speaking the language?
STAN GRANT SNR: We were in a park in Griffith playing and I was only about 9
and the old man come along and he said barra-y yanha barra-y yanha, come
quick, come quick. Here, ninna, ninna, barra-y yanha ninna. Come quick
here. We ninna, ngiyanhi , we, yanha gil li, to go, mogo. We need to go home
you know. All he said was come quick we’re going home and this young
coppa heard the old fella talking and waved his arms and he thought he was
abusing, his excuse was he thought he was abusing us kids in the park and
threatening us.
STAN
GRANT: So the police arrested him?
STAN
SNR: Arrested the old bloke and locked him up.
BETTY
GRANT: Every weekend they’d put dad in jail and some of the others too.
STAN GRANT: And what happened the time he was with his cousin and they
got him for drinking?
BETTY
GRANT: Oh yeah this policeman on a motorbike with a side car he came across
them up in the bush drinking and he couldn’t fit both of them on the motor bike
so he took Johnny his cousin and he had to come back for dad so he handcuffed
dad around a tree until he came back for him.
STAN
GRANT: Handcuffed him to the tree?
BETTY
GRANT: Yeah and then he didn’t come back all day and dad was there in the heat
and he piddled himself and it was all down his trousers.
STAN
GRANT: He had no food, no water
BETTY
GRANT: No nothing - came back hours and hours later and said oh I’m sorry I
forgot you.
STAN
GRANT: My mother writes poems to remember those years and the people she loved
who are now gone.
BETTY
GRANT:
We
lived outside of town in funny little shacks
We know
we were talked about and called those dirty blacks
We
didn’t mind too much because we knew it wasn’t true
We
might have been black but dirt we never knew.
STAN
GRANT: She is fair skinned enough to pass for white – her mother was white and
her father a Gamilaraay man. Mum could have hidden her blackness but she would
have never lived a lie.
BETTY
GRANT:
Yes
those days were hard in those funny little shacks
When we
used to be called those dirty blacks
STAN
GRANT: Mum and dad live quietly now with their memories.
STAN
GRANT SNR: Anyway we survived. And we’re still surviving today so it’s just a
matter of time. Things will get better in this country, I know they will.
STAN
GRANT: Their survival comes from a place of love… a deep love of each other and
our country. And how we love our country – even if we love it with a broken
heart.
There
is a phrase in our language Yindyamarra Winanghanha - it means to live with
respect in a world worth living in. This is where our hope comes from.
And
maybe in the cries of George Floyd – those cries that are so real to us - none
of us can any longer look away. Maybe anger has shaken our complacency. Black
and white are marching together and in that space that anger has made, maybe
there’s enough room to dream.
REV
JESSE JACKSON JR: You know sometimes we go through these dark periods. But
surely as the night cometh, the day cometh as well. When the day cometh, the
nightmare disappears. We will win this war. It is a war. It’s a cultural revolution.
We’ll survive and through it all we will keep our hopes alive. We will not
surrender our hope. We will not surrender our hope. We will keep hope alive.
ARCHIE
ROACH (singing): You’ve been locked up before, but you always came back, with
your head held high and so proud to be black.
ARCHIE
ROACH: I think I'm more sad, Stan, than angry. I mean, you get angry, initially
you're angry. But then that anger subsides and becomes sadness. That people
should continue to think for some reason that they're better or superior than
somebody else because of their race and therefore they're allowed to do
basically anything, even kill somebody, because their life really doesn't
matter. And that’s disheartening. That brings you down and makes you sad. And
it hurts mate, it hurts. It hurts, my brother, it hurts. Yeah.
STAN
GRANT: I'm often asked, "Why don't we just forget about it all? Why
don't we just get over this history? Why don't we just forget the past? Why do
we still cling to this thing of race? Why do we still talk about racism? Look
at your life. Look at me," they say. "You've had a good career.
You’re successful. Why do you have to continually talk about race and racism?"
Because
it still exists. Because it is there. Because it can touch my life at any time.
Because I know there are people in my life whose lives are framed by the colour
of their skin, for whom history is a dead weight. There is nothing I would want
more than to be free of the chains of history. There is nothing I would want
more than for my children to live in a world where they can be all that they
want to be. But we're not there yet.
But it
is us, it is black people in