Thanks to Pip Gordon for flagging this excellent piece. Pip says on her Facebook page, "A blog worth a read and a deep reflection. My eyes being opened some years ago have never allowed me to ignore this since. Ignorance is never an excuse."
'It feels like this is a conversation I'm only beginning to have; a conversation I’ve somehow been in the middle of ever since I was eleven years old. I was in a social studies class sitting on the floor of an air-conditioned classroom watching a documentary. An Aboriginal woman was weeping about the children that were taken. There was a strange salty ball knotted in my belly. When the program finished and the lights were turned back up a kid next to me said that ‘All Abos are drunks anyway, they can’t look after their children.’ A chorus of agreement rose in the room.
Mostly I remember the shock; still soaked in the woman’s tears I stared around my class of upper middle class white kids. It was the first time I noticed racism...'
Read more... (and please feel free to comment on Caitlin's blog)