OK
Almost done with the Australia thing.
But let's get personal for a second. Just want to share from my own life why this sort of thing matters.
I remember when I was in High School, back in the early '80s, when we had two exchange students from Australia join our class.
I didn't know much about Australia other than that they had weird animals and that the English had colonized the place.
You may remember that this was around the same time that South Africa was often in the news because pressure was mounting for the white minority to ditch its racist apartheid dictatorship of the black majority.
Some of us were discussing South Africa and I remember (and always have remembered) one of the Australian girls comparing South African and American racism to that of Australia.
Someone pointed out that what was going on in Australia with the Aborigine community was no different than South Africa, or what had been done to the Native Americans.
"The aborigines are not like black people here," she said in all sincerity. "They're hideous. They have such ugly noses and faces. Have you seen them? Plus, they don't work. They just drink and wait for assistance from the government. ..."
I don't believe I ever spoke to her again.
Her words cut right through me, because I had heard them before about my people. I wrote her off as ignorant. As a racist. As not worth my time or effort in relationship.
But not only did I write off this girl, I wrote off Australia.
You see, almost instictively, I assumed that this girl did not exist in a bubble. She couldn't be the only Australian to think like this. She had to come from and environment that had taught her to think and believe this way.
So, in my mind, this was typical of Australia.
I already had this kind of thinking about people coming from the British seed to begin with (will share more about that bias in my head later), so this was just another confirmation.
So, one girl's goofy comments had colored my thinking of an entire people.
No big deal? Childish simplicity on my part?
Surely, but guess what.
Those thoughts never left me. Though I've met and liked other Australians since ... though I've aged and matured and dealt with all sorts of cross cultural issues ... though I've been working on inner healing and reconciliation, etc. (and even though I love the way they talk!) ... I had never really dealt with the attitudes I have kept deep inside me toward this country.
I figured that even the Aussies I'd met and liked were somehow, at least remotely, programmed with this sense of superiority over people of color.
Never had I brought this attitude to the surface so I could deal with it.
Until Tuesday.
Listening to Kevin Rudd acknowledge wrong, apologize and ask forgiveness did something in me. I can't explain it.
He wasn't even talking to me. He was saying it to the Aborigine people.
And even though he had limited the apology to the "Stolen Generation" of mixed race native Australians who had been taken as a policy from their families up until the 1970s, rather than also apologizing for the genocidal way the people as a whole had been treated from the time the British arrived on the continent, I still was moved.
His heart connected with me, and I was able to give him the benefit of the doubt. This was as much a political concession as anything else, I sensed. I believe Rudd knew that the Australian people were not ready to repent that deeply.
So he repented specifically for something the government was responsible for on behalf of the government (as if that democratically elected government had not acted out the will and attitudes of the people it represented).
It didn't matter. I believed in this man's heart. And even if he was the sole Austalian who understood and repented, it mattered to me.
Just like it mattered when one Australian exchange student had such ignorant thoughts and words when I was in high school.
If Rudd's words and heart changed the attitudes of a black American living in Paris, how much more life changing they must have been for countless native Australians.
This is the sort of thing that Rudd's critics, and those who think apologies for the past are silly, fail to understand.
(Don't you love this photo by Mark Baker of the Associated Press?It says it all.)
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