From the stolen generation to the current uprise in racial abuse, it is no secret that minorities endure a disproportionate amount of oppression in today’s society. Racial injustices are something that minorities have fought against since Western colonisation and continue to do so even hundreds of years later. To this day, white supremacists still dominate our society, holding positions in parliament, boards and more, an act that directly affects the progression in closing the diversity gap in leadership.
Diversity and inclusion have two completely different meanings, and yet the two terms intertwine so often in our society. As a nation inevitably becomes more diverse, so does its workforce. According to the Mckinsey report, more diverse businesses have a higher success rate than those who don’t. So this should be something for other companies to look up too and follow, right? Wrong. Every day, we read new reports of a big company or even university being dragged for their facade of a multicultural workspace despite the clear statistics being given by the likes of Ford and more. While you may be reading this thinking that it’s not that big a deal, the reality is that uniform workspaces not only rob the employee of a role model/mentor, but they also have a significantly higher rate of race discrimination. What companies and the general public have to understand is that, by keeping an all white board of leadership, they are not only hurting others but also themselves. In failing to recognize that everyone being different is a good thing, they also fail to understand that ‘different’ is exactly the asset they need in business. A diverse workspace not only adds perspective to the company's goals, ideas and potentially tone-deaf deliveries, but it also paves the way for future employees and closes the gap in a white dominated world.
This is where Democracy in Colour comes in. Democracy in Colour is a racial and economic justice organisation led by POC for POC. The organisation focuses on two types of work; one being political advocacy around economic fairness and anti-racism and the other, leadership development and capacity building web design to strengthen the voice of POC.
Earlier this week, our team was lucky enough to sit down with the founder of Democracy in Colour, Tim Lo Surdo, for an interview and what came of the conversation was certainly something that will be carried with us for a long time coming.
What motivated you to start Democracy in Colour?
I grew up in Brisbane, the sunny coast and I experienced quite a bit of racism growing up in school. It became very apparent to me early on that people would treat me differently because of the colour of my skin and I just thought that something as arbitrary as that, shouldn’t determine how people treat you, your opportunities in life or whether your likelihood of experiencing abuse online or the streets.
Racism is obviously one type of pain and there are a variety of others all over the world out there whether that be sexism or ableism and it just became clear to me early on that for a lot of people in our society, our system treats them in ways that dehumanize them, erode their dignity and doesn’t provide equal opportunities for everyone and I thought that simply not fair.
It wasn’t a society I wanted to live in or one that would capitalise on the full potential of humanity if a significant portion of our society were shut out of opportunities. I thought that wasn’t a good way of fostering and investing in human potential and so from a young age, I got involved in activism. I got involved with organisations such as Amnesty international, climate campaigns and moved around a large number of human rights issues until about two and a half years ago, I realised there were gaps in how civil society was trying to address racism and so decided to start Democracy in Colour to try and evaluate and address those gaps.
What were the struggles and barriers you had to overcome in creating this organisation?
Starting anything, it requires a lot of work and there’s a lot of uncertainty about the path forward and barriers in place. There’s a lot of challenges with getting the right resourcing, whether that be people or financial. With anything in this space, it requires a lot of emotional and physical, but mostly a lot of emotional labour and it can be really tiring and exhausting- especially in a space that’s as divisive as race and anti-racism work and it’s polarised as it too.
The main thing that helped us overcome that was that we had a really great team and nothing that we’ve achieved so far would’ve been possible without them. We have a team of around 50 POC around Australia and they make everything possible. It’s also good to have a community you can lean on when the inevitable hard times come.
What do you think is the biggest issue people face today and what can we do to combat that?
I think the biggest issue this country faces is kind of static and it’s colonisation and it’s how this country treats first nations people- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For 132 years there’s been historic and ongoing colonisation whether that be genocide, mass dispossession of land, stealing of children.
There’s a stolen generation happening right now, Aboriginal kids are 10 times more likely to be taken into out of home care than non-indigenous kids. Their taken away from their land, culture, family and put into an under-resourced out of home care system that doesn’t do much caring at all.
We also face an over-incarceration crisis. We incarcerate the most indigenous people on the planet. They make up about 3% of our population but 29% of the prison population. In this country, there are kids as young as 10 in prison right now because the age for criminal responsibility is 10 while most countries around the world are at least 14. Of all the kids currently in prison in the Northern Territory, 100% of them are Aboriginal while 60% of the kids locked up nationwide are indigenous.
I could go on and on about this but the point is, looking at all these statistics it’s clear that not only does the concept of Australia have 232 years of colonisation to reckon with, that it has still not properly acknowledged- there are no treaties, reparations, nothing like that. To this day right now, it is not history, colonisation is still happening right now.
Do you think the government has failed these people?
Yes, I think they definitely have. We talked about the age of criminal responsibility I think last Monday during a national cabinet meeting, so all the state and the federal government came together to review recommendations on whether they should raise the age for criminal responsibility from 10 to at least 14 and they decided to do nothing about it and wait. We don’t need to wait for more studies, there’s plenty of studies on what to do about all these issues. We have the solutions right now, what we’re lacking is the political will to do anything about them from our politicians! We’re lacking the courage to do anything about them and the honesty to recognise what’s actually going on and remove the rose-coloured glasses that our political leaders put on when looking at these issues.
Whether it be the age of criminal responsibility, we know we need to raise it to at least 14, whether it be deaths in custody. There was a Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991 that produced dozens of recommendations, the majority of those recommendations have not been implemented and that’s why there have been over 434 deaths since 1991. We know what we need to do to address the rampant over-incarceration, we need to explore questions around prison abolition, we need to explore questions around defunding the police and we need to explore questions around what does a criminal justice system look like that doesn’t revolve around punitive punishment but revolves around restorative justice that revolves around effective mediation and ways of actually doing what the criminal justice system is supposed to do which is reduce crime.
How can we empower young POC to stand up against the ingrained racism in society and motivate them to enter leadership positions?
I think that the states, the governments, have a lot of ways they can materially damage people through implementing policies, etc but I think one of the ways it most damages communities is by constructing this idea that everyday people are politically powerless and they don’t have a role to play in politics.
It does that through a number of different ways; by explicitly putting that narrative forward, by just being so incompetent and uninspiring that people, especially young people want nothing to do with parliamentary politics- which fair enough, you look at both the major parties right now and you don’t see much to be inspired by. You just see a bunch of self-interested, vested interest people who spend most of their time shouting at each other. So, this leaves people uninspired which can be seen in the polling numbers. There’re record low numbers of trust in democracy and the idea of democracy which is very problematic. There are record low numbers of trust in public institutions, in government, in NGOs, in the media and that’s due to a variety of things but one of it is simply the state of politics at the moment. The very divisive, weaponized type of politics. So, I think the first thing is you have to see your own power, the most important thing we can do in empowering ourselves is believing that we're powerful because you’re the first person that sees your power. If you believe in your own power, then you are powerful. If you believe you’re powerless then you are powerless. If you don’t believe in your power then you won’t bother writing a letter to your MP, calling talk radio, attending a rally or signing a petition because you don’t think any of those will make a difference. Maybe you doing that as an individual won’t make a difference but if a 1000 other people believe the same thing as you then that definitely makes a difference.
We need to believe that we are powerful not as individuals but collectively and we need to believe in taking collective action together. We need to believe in the importance of being collectively active, that our duty and responsibility as democratic citizens goes beyond voting every three years but it means signing petitions, organising meetings with the MP, etc. It doesn’t matter what it is but do something that interests you and is aligned with the issue you think is important and be active. The idea of democracy is a promise that inequality of resource can be breached by equality of voice but that promise is being perverted by big money and politics, by corporate lobbyists, etc and by the diminishing power of civil society. The only way we can rebalance that power equation is by getting involved and getting active.
As a 16 year old high school student, meeting with Tim to speak about his journey in creating Democracy in Colour and the current issues present in Australia has been surreal. Living in a country that people seem to constantly glorify as being multicultural, it is easy to forget the ongoing oppression and mistreatment minorities, especially first nations people experience daily. What I’ve realised over the course of the year is that our politicians are cowards. They have time and time again failed the people of their country by hiding behind a big red sign that says, “It’s complicated,” or “It’s politics.” No, this is not a political issue, it’s a human rights issue, and if the people leading our country are too blind to recognize that then it is our job to make them.
We are the leaders of tomorrow and so it is our duty to speak up against the issues of today.
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