CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Over 70 major US cities continue to rocked by civil unrest as protests sweep from coast to coast for nearly a week now.
Curfews have been imposed right across America, as citizens continue to vent their outrage over the death of an unarmed black man shown on video gasping for breath as a white Minneapolis policeman illegally knelt on his neck for nine minutes on May 25th.
In Australia, the US protests have reignited a conversation about the often overlooked statistics in our country’s own dark history of black deaths in custody.
Since the royal Royal Commission into Indigenous Deaths in Custody released it’s reccomendatons in 1991, there have been over 400 Aboriginal people die at the hands of police or correction officers with not one arrest made.
While the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community continue to figh for answers, it has taken the near collapse of American society for the conversation of Australian black deaths in custody to re-enter the national news cycle with a few reluctant columns in the papers
One prominent water-colour artist, Heidi Kingstreet (42) is not yet across these alarming statistics in her own backyard.
But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t joined the waves of other white inner city lefties who are now starting to learn that some people live in fear of being killed every time they hear a siren.
The protests in America has lit a fire inside Heidi, and a return to her latent passion for civil rights, not seen since she went to a march in Sydney’s Hyde Park after President Trump said something rude about Hillary Clinton.
So aware of America’s engrained culture of systemic racism, Heidi has today decided to spread the word of these injustices to all of her friends that might not be watching the news.
“Must read!!!” she writes on Instagram, while recommending a book written by a black person.
While keeping a close eye on the disappointingly low engagements on her highly controversial instagram story, Heidi is now starting to understand how hard it is for people like Colin Kaepernick.
“People don’t want to have these conversations” she sighs.
“Oh well. I don’t regret what I did.”
