Normally I don’t get in another country’s business, but I have to say something about what happened in Australia. I had erroneously made a comment in a blog about there being no people of color in Oz, unless you count the sunburned. It was glib and it wasn’t true. I was actually talking about the audience at a particular hip hop show, where the majority of the attendees were white, but I am fully aware that 400,000 Aboriginal people make up a sizeable portion of the country, and that they suffer in much the same way as our native Americans and many black and minority communities.
There is abject poverty, overt racism, police brutality – which is the main cause of the business I am getting up in their antipodean face for. A teenage Aborigine boy named Thomas Hickey was impaled on a fence after allegedly being chased by police. His death sparked riots in the neighborhood known as “The Block,” an area well known for its crime and large Aboriginal community who can not afford to live in the fairly serene and sublimely sunny Sydney that we all see in the travel brochures. It is not Bondi Beach, it is Panic Beach, not so different from the L.A. riots in the early ’90s.
Rodney King has many faces. Race is a problem no matter what country you’re in, and when it comes to the thin blue line, they always come off a little sketchy. I am not saying that anything anyone did was wrong. I wasn’t there. But, people do not set cars on fire and pummel shit for no reason. People do not set cars on fire and pummel shit for no reason. There is a war brewing in the inner cities of the capitols of the world and it isn’t because “Friends” is going off the air. It is because they didn’t have any friends of color. Just acquaintances. I would like to have a series called, “I Only Know Him Enough To Say Hi” to take over the enviable time slot, and have it all be people that you never saw on the show, Australian Aboriginals from around the way, Maori, who were once warriors, but find that they are no longer able to fight – at least not with the mythical Lords of the Rings, from New Zealand, Lakota teenagers who love vintage video games like Ms. Pacman, Filipino kids eating lumpia in Daly City, Mexican Americans kicking back in Highland Park who are really into Morrisey, Korean Americans from the secret Koreatown in La Crescenta (that’s me).
I am terribly saddened by the death of the little boy. Thomas Hickey was only seventeen. I don’t care where you live, that is a baby boy to his mother and to me. I don’t know him, but I know him, because he is me. He is all of us who have had to live under the guise of media generated and manufactured invisibility broadcast back to us via television, which purports to be society’s mirror, when it is worse than a cracked crystal ball. It shows us nothing of our future.
I have high hopes for our world and the state of race relations and inclusion. But how long can you look in the mirror and never see yourself before you go mad? It is the fate of doomed vampires, not human beings. The less we see our own reflection, the more blood that will be spilled.
Thomas Hickey, wherever you are now, bless you little darling. Peace to you. Love to you. Hold fast to the knowledge that your family and your community really love you. They will fight for your unjust and untimely death, possibly to their own deaths and that this will spark change in the place where you lived and all over the globe. It is a shot heard around the world. It is a wake up call to all those who need to be seen, who need to see themselves to know that they exist, so that they can get up and fight if they have to. Once were warriors, will always be warriors.
If only we didn’t have to create change by chaos, but sometimes that is just the way it is. The universe supposedly started with The Big Bang. Let’s hope this explosion and the inevitable fallout after will have the same effect.