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Local Newtown based digital campaigner, Desiderata Atkinson (35) can finally move on this week.
It’s been a big 6 months, but she’s finally done it.
She has finally pressured a multinational diary company into making a symbolic gesture towards a community of people that more than likely pays four times as much for their products due to regional and socio-economic supermarket price gouging.
Coon Cheese is no more. It is now Cheer Cheese – and Aboriginal people are better for it.
As someone who wants to close the literacy, life expectancy and incarceration gap as much as black people themselves – Desiderata found herself obsessed with this racist cheese.
She says she couldn’t focus on anything else. Ever since Josh Thomas tweeted about this issue in June last year, she has worked tireless to change the branding of this 100-year-old cheese that unfortunately shared the same branding as a racist slur towards Aboriginal people.
She even went as far as finding the name and home phone number of one elderly boardmember’s ex-wives and doxing her on Twitter, in her efforts to give Aboriginal and Indigenous people a taste of the equality she gets to experience every day.
“People are so outraged about it. It’s so good haha” she says to the Betoota Advocate, slightly confusing our reporter as to what her motive was to begin with.
“But yeah, I swear no one actually cared about this as much as me. It’s like I was the only one talking about this.”
“I don’t know many Aboriginal people but from what it sounds like, it was mostly me and my friends doing all the heavy lifting here. They had obviously given up. They must feel so disheartened by this stuff. I guess I just had to step up and be an ally”
When asked what she has planned next as a White Saviour working to end Indigenous inequality, Desiderata says that this should be enough for now.
“I’m pretty exhausted to be honest. That took up a lot of emotional labour… We got there in the end but I had to cop a lot of flak from racists.”
“But yeah, I really don’t like some of the place names in Australia. Blacktown? Blackman’s Bay”
“That shit HAS to change”
“After that I guess I guess we can focus on glaucoma in the Outback? diabetes. I dunno… I can’t do everything haha”
MORE TO COME.
