Dr. King's dream: how far away is it?

DISCLAIMER: Indigenous Australian readers are warned this article contains the name of a deceased person.

I understand the risks of getting on one's soapbox publicly. You can offend, or seem pretentious or preachy. And as a white male I really don't even presume to know what it's like to be on the receiving end of racism. And you can call this an expression of white guilt or whatever, but it's much deeper. These issues are genuinely important to me, and since every race represents a different colour but the same species, aren't we all, at least to some extent, people of colour?

We all know the footage: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Then in 2008, Barack Obama was elected America's first (half-)black President. I remember seeing a news interview from shortly after with an African American woman who said something like "Martin Luther King had a dream, and Obama's livin' the dream!" But as is abundantly clear and sad, his fellow African Americans collectively are not. From the numerous killings of Black Americans by police to the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina and even the alleged "whitewashing" of the last two Academy Awards shows, to my mind it just seems endless. But just because something like this SEEMS endless doesn't mean we all can't be able to say we tried to end it. Because Black lives DO matter.

This is comparable with the race relations situation in my own country, Australia. Here, for decades now the life expectancy average for Indigenous Australians is something like 20 years lower than that of non-Indigenous Australians. That's mainly due to the foreign diseases, alcohol and other harmful substances they were exposed to following European settlement from 1788 onwards. Then came Indigenous (and Pacific Islander) slavery, dispossession and the Stolen Generations, and our Indigenous peoples in fact were not even classed as Australian citizens until the successful 1967 referendum. Two years prior, Indigenous activist Charles Perkins, taking inspiration from the African American Civil Rights Movement, staged a Freedom Rides through New South Wales, in protest against white discrimination of Aborigines. And thankfully, that worked. But now, in 2016, and even after two landmarks in the 1993 Native Title Act and the 2008 parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations, the road to full reconciliation, based on not guilt and recrimination but mutual understanding and respect, stretches on. None of must stop until we reach the end.

In Year 4, I made very close friends with an Aboriginal boy named Alex. We're great mates to this day, and now I realise, since he was Indigenous and I autistic, we were bound to click immediately, as we were both outsiders (and I've since formed numerous other such friendships). Maybe that friendship is the nexus point of my feelings on this issue. And I'm sincerely angry when I see racism in the street, or hear of it in the news, and even writing this has made that resurface. But I think we must all try to remain hopeful (I guess against hope), because if we give up, hate has won. As the incomparable Stevie Wonder said (not sang but said) in Happy Birthday, his tribute to Dr. King: "We know the key to unity of all people/Is in the dream that you had so long ago/That lives in the hearts of all people/That believe in unity/We'll make the dream become a reality/I know we will/ Because our hearts tell us so."