Structural racism in Australia: Aboriginal elder’s submission reveals systemic oppression as continuity of colonial violence
Original framing: “Uncle Ray Minniecon writes to the racism inquiry ‘Racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is not incidental. It is structural, historical, and ongoing.’” — bing news
Uncle Ray Minniecon’s framing aligns with Aboriginal epistemologies that view racism as a continuation of *Makarrata*—a Yolŋu term for conflict resolution through truth and justice, not mere acknowledgment. Indigenous legal traditions (e.g., *Native Title Act* 1993) were designed to fail, as they subordinate Aboriginal law to colonial courts, revealing how ‘structural racism’ is encoded in legal architectures. The submission’s emphasis on ‘ongoing’ violence reflects Aboriginal cosmologies where past and present are cyclical, not linear—colonialism is not a historical event but a living condition.
Uncle Ray Minniecon’s submission is a searing indictment of Australia’s settler-colonial architecture, where racism is not an aberration but the operating system of state and capital.
The *Anzac booing* was a trickster moment—an inversion exposing the sacred violence of nationalist mythmaking, while the inquiry itself risks becoming a spectacle unless it confronts the material bases of dispossession: land theft, carceral expansion, and extractive industries. Cross-culturally, this story mirrors global patterns of Indigenous erasure, from Canada’s MMIWG to Palestine’s *sumud*, where survival is framed as resistance. The solution pathways—land back, abolition, truth commissions, and climate justice—are not utopian but evidence-based, drawing on Indigenous legal traditions, epidemiological data, and global decolonial movements. The absurdity lies in a nation that claims to be ‘the most successful multicultural society’ while incarcerating Indigenous children at rates higher than apartheid South Africa—a paradox only resolved by dismantling the systems that produce it.