Some things are seen more clearly from the outside. And from the outside, it is easy for Australians to see in this week’s scenes from America the injustice, the fear, the racism, the excesses, the manipulation, the hypocrisy, the rage and the despair.
In order to understand these scenes, one has to know the history and appreciate the complexities. In Senior School Assembly this week, therefore, we retraced the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement to help the girls understand how one episode of police brutality in Minneapolis could ignite protests and riots across the US.
It is not an easy topic but, as described in last week’s newsletter, this approach reflects our respect for the girls’ desire to grapple with difficult issues and their capacity to engage with complexity when there are no neat answers and the actors cannot be divided into good and bad. The human spirit yearns for higher things – for justice and hope and love. Our job is to show the girls how to bring such abstract principles to bear on tangible problems.
Some of the girls told me after Assembly that they were aware of the riots but not of the specific trigger. Others said they were aware of the death of George Floyd but not of the long series of deaths behind the Black Lives Matters movement. We all acknowledged that these were heavy topics but the girls argued fervently that they wanted to know about them.
There is, though, a terrible irony that our gaze in Australia has swung so firmly towards America during Reconciliation Week of all weeks. One of the reasons we are so ready to criticise America is because it comes at no cost to ourselves. There is a real danger in this – a danger of substituting virtue-signalling for justice, of ignoring the beam in our own eye.
It was important, therefore, to extend our consideration to what we might learn from America in this time of trouble. Their problems flow from centuries of enslavement, racism, exploitation and marginalisation – and Australia, like America, has its own issues to grapple with. So we also considered the long history of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the sad failure of previous attempts, such as the 1989 Royal Commission, to secure justice and ensure that all people, especially our Indigenous citizens, are treated equally with dignity and compassion.
There are no simple answers. We can’t boil down the causes to individual motivations and nor can we simply blame it all on ‘the system’. Either approach would be convenient but untrue. Instead, to achieve reconciliation we will need to draw on reserves of grace, forgiveness, courage and fortitude that are beyond the capacity of any individual. We are, in the words of this year’s Reconciliation Week theme, ‘in this together’.
This year, Australia has demonstrated (perhaps to the surprise of our own sceptical citizens) that we are not just a lucky country. In addition to our geographical advantages, we enjoy political stability, a (relatively) strong economy, a culture of good governance balanced with respect for personal freedoms, and enough altruism within the community to see us through a health crisis which has overwhelmed countries larger and richer than us.
The responsibility rests on each of us to ensure that these social benefits are enjoyed equally by all Australians. It rests especially firmly on those of us who enjoy the advantages of a first-class education, supportive families and strong communities. Our girls look forward to meaningful, productive lives in which they can assume positions of leadership and responsibility, and let us hope that by engaging with big ideas at a young age they will be inspired to lead our country for good.
“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Martin Luther King Jr (Amos 5:24)
Ms Elizabeth Stone
Principal