Rediscovering The Australia's Effort to Completely Erase the Massive Oppression and Discrimination Towards Aboriginals
For thousands of years, multiple Aboriginal clans have lived prosperously in the northern Sydney. They barely put much effort to survive as the natural resource is astronomically abundant. Requiring them to work by hunting and fishing for four hours a day is the utopia of the current modern capitalistic world.
Then, there came the dystopia where the hundreds of years the aboriginal live in misery since the occupation of British colonies who occupied the Australia land, considering the land as terra nullius (no one's land) despite the densely populated New South Wales by multiple aboriginal clans. Countless of genocides occur since the occupation of Britain on 26 January 1788 which now becomes the national day.
That explains why more activists come into the road demand the Australia government to consider 26 January as the day of morning rather than celebration (Rasyid, 2019). Coalitions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are also protesting as an act of civil disobedience. Social media, through #SOSBlakAustralia, is raising awareness of oppositional positions to the closure.
Grassroot society also do the same activism as what can be seen when the Indigenous elders call for cultural revitalisation in remote communities as a way to protect country. Seeing this years of oppression in silence, this essay is meant to analyze whether the if progress towards equal Australia exist, is it sufficient to end the oppression once for all?
When the genocides end, structural cases of institutionalized discrimination still continue in daily basis. This phenomenon can be viewed from shorter life expectancy (Indigenous women also experience approximately double the level of maternal mortality in 2016), overall health (In 2016, Indigenous children experienced 1.7 times higher levels of malnutrition), lower education and employment, higher incarceration (The detention rate for Indigenous children aged 10-17 years was 26 times the rate for non-Indigenous youth in 2016).
The discrimination effects on Aboriginals are inseparable from the case of oppression. American feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young lists five faces of oppression: exploitation (the theft of a group of peoples' labour through unfair compensation), marginalization (the relegation of a group of people to lower social standing or the edge of society); powerlessness (the domination of a group of people by ruling groups who prohibits their participation in decision making).
The prolonging minor discrimination in daily basis cannot also be undermined as it will damage the Aboriginal mental health and potentially leads to trauma or suicides. Carmichael (1967) gave a bright picture on how institutional racism is far more damaging than the individual and minor-scale one.
"When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city ---- five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of power, food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.
it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it."
The low education coverage and employment for the indigenous is the first thing that Australia government need to manage, the aboriginals now still have lesser opportunity to work In a formal sector in the developed civilization. This discriminative status quo result into the outcome as portrayed by the ABS report showing the employment gap still occurs between the aboriginal and the non-natives (ABS, 2016). The gap is the results from barriers to Indigenous people in obtaining and maintaining employment.
