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I hate when media puts terms like racist in quotes like this. By definition, it is racist. But quoting it implies it's an invalid claim.
The treatment of Indigenous Australians in this country is disgusting, and deeply, deeply racist, even if "just" systemically.
EDIT to note the use of "just" was sarcasm, because systemic racism is a real and fucked problem, and it exists at the very core of Australian society, and if you're white and haven't actively studied it, you won't know it exists
But quoting it implies it’s an invalid claim.
Interesting. I read the quotes as meaning: someone else said it, it's not just some opinion we made up. In this case, it was reporting the coroner's official finding.
In other words, I understood it to be reinforcing the claim rather than invalidating it.
Yes, that is how they use quotes. Without them it would appear as though the The Guardian was making its own assessment of the system, which it is not.
People need to read beyond the headline and understand how it relates to the content of the article itself. I've seen a few threads on reddit recently where people were outraged about headlines and assumed the article was contradicting their beliefs when it was actually validating them. An example is this article by The Guardian, which is about the correlation between generational wealth inequality and gaps in life satisfaction between generations. /r/Australia was absolutely incensed by the headline and most of the comments in the thread were along the lines of "FEELS LIKE?! HOW DARE THE MEDIA GASLIGHT ME!!!!!" despite the fact that the article was about how young people were feeling and was arguing the exact thing everyone assumed it wasn't.
@Dalek_Thal @Baku systematically is worse. That means it is accepted as official.
I agree, force of habit for me to dumb it down a bit because a fucktonne of people get really angry when I suggest that this is a deeply racist country, institutionally speaking. Our very laws were written to keep the Indigenous Australians down, the racism is by design.
Not only official, but also normalised within Australian society which makes it very difficult for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise its influence.
This article was genuinely hard to read. That poor girl :/
This is difficult to read. I have zero cultural context, but the pain of people being cut off is real. Do better people.
I feel really sorry for the girl. But the article does say that she had suicidal ideation even before this occurred, its overly simplistic to simply attribute her death to racism.
