User:Hoppye

This the start of my page regarding the An Indigenous Man.

This story in the start of my logging other stories about racism. In the United States and Australia. http://jotamar.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/not-good-enough-indigenous-man-dies-in-custody/

I can’t comprehend how things like this are still happening.

(That last link is a link round-up – another is here.)

The story I’m talking about is this (and apologies for taking a week or so to blog about it): Mr Ward (his family have asked that his first name not be used), an indigenous man, was arrested after being charged with drink-driving.

He was locked into a metal, un-air-conditioned lock-up van (operated by a private contractor, GSL) on a hot summer’s day for a journey of several hundred kilometres.

He died. With third degree burns from the metal of the lock-up.

I cannot imagine this happening to a white person. Unfortunately, my reaction when I first read this story (hat tip: Christina at Saying Nothing Charmingly and Trin at Salt in the Air) was that it was all too imaginable in a still-racist Australia.

Literally adding insult to injury: apparently, on Facebook, people are saying things like this: Marty Rodgers wrote at 15:59 on 18 December 2008 Maybe if they don’t get arrested, there will be less deaths in custody. Stop blaming the police. Look closer to home….

Marty, sweetheart. Where to start? How about this: how many of your white buddies have been arrested and taken to prison for drink-driving?

The fact that it is incredibly unlikely that a white person charged with drink-driving would then have been arrested and transported several hundred kilometres is only the first part of the racism illustrated by this horrendous incident. And if it did happen, which it wouldn’t, it sure as hell wouldn’t happen in an un-air-conditioned metal lock-up van like this. And if that happened, which it wouldn’t, there would have been comfort stops.

And even with all that, which wouldn’t happen, if the hypothetical white person had died, there would be such an enormous national outcry it wouldn’t be funny. There would be cries for the immediate closure of GSL. There would be fund-raising. There would be celebrities.

None of that is happening, at least, not on the scale it would be if a white person had died. And that’s only one thing that’s wrong with Marty’s statement.

Many of the links display the level of racism shown by the people driving the van. I’m going to leave you with a couple quotes from this one (by no means the whole thing, or the worst of it, just quotes I want to use to illustrate something).

So, compare: Ms Stokoe said she assumed the air-conditioning was working in the rear because there was no problem with the air-conditioning in the front cab and Ward, whose family does not want his last name published for cultural reasons, would have banged on the side of the van if there was a problem.

with:Ms Stokoe and Mr Powell made no stops on the 3 1/2-hour journey until they heard a thud in the back of the van when they were just outside Kalgoorlie.

When they pulled over to check on Ward, Ms Stokoe said, they did not open the van’s back doors completely because it was not procedure and Ward might have been trying to escape.

“If he was mucking around and it was an escape attempt, we would look like idiots,” she said.

(emphasis added in both sets of quotes) In other words: “he would have banged on the side of the van if there was a problem [implying this is how they usually do things], but if he had banged on the side of the van, we would have thought he was trying to escape.”

Logic FAIL. That is only one of the many, many, many things wrong with this entire mess.

Australia is still a racist country. Just Like the US