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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

seeing "1931" in there is so depressing. I realise we've made progress since then, but that still isn't very far on a "cultural mentality" scale

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Australia, 1967. Aborigines are finally recognized as persons and granted rights under the Constitution. Up until then, they were to be treated as 'native fauna' - i.e. animals.

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/ab...

It seems clear cut now when we grow up being told "everyone is equal", but that's because we have the luxury of seeing all moderns humans as a single species with no close living relatives. How would we classify Neanderthals if we found them alive today? How far removed from "our own race" do you have to go before something isn't a human? How about someone with a different number of chromosomes such as a Down's syndrome patient?

I think the real problem isn't classifying animals - aborigines really do have a different genetic history from every other race. It's that we somehow equate "not properly human" with "deserves to be abused". Until we can escape from that mentality, we're really no better than these zoo keepers. We've just moved the threshold a bit.

I've heard of the forced removal of children from their families but this timeline paints a really dark picture for me of Australia's history. Makes early 20th century Australia seems comparable if not worse than apartheid South Africa.

Its a dirty little secret, but Australia is still a very racist and intolerant place. Basically, Australia got away with its own "slow and steady" apartheid - a true travesty, to this day, and which still causes untold pain and suffering to a portion of its population. Alas, this is the price paid by generations for the luxury most Australians enjoy today. As an ex-pat, I hope to see things change, but I'm very much afraid that the more things get swept under the rug the more they stay the same.

I'd thought I'd just point to:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/10/us/map-of-73-y...

but along the way I also found:

"Researchers said they determined that 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950." (My emphasis)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/02/10...

Indeed - we live in a sanitized world thinking that civil rights happened with the civil war. I'm ashamed to even look at these pics.

Surely people know the civil rights movement, 50 years ago?

In school it's summarised as "Rosa Parks sat in a white person's bus spot, MLK was shot, and the Civil Rights Act was signed". Really no talk of the lynching beforehand (or anything else in the systematic oppression of blacks).

For the people who think of REM as Old Fogey Music, the Civil Rights Movement is a foreign to them as the roaring 20s liberation was to us.

I was convinced it was a typo before I looked it up. It's so horrendous what we did (and still do) to eachother.

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