One thing I try to do when looking at current events is to imagine myself in the future, as a historian, looking back, not just with a mind to the present but also to continuities. I try to imagine history as continuum, as something not ended just because I choose to write about it now. What would a historian write about, writing the history of American race relations in the 20th and 21st Century? How many chapter breaks would they put between Jim Crow, Watts and Ferguson? Indeed, when there are more black men in the American criminal justice system (a sort of state mandated slavery) than were slaves, how many chapter breaks would be between then and now? The same goes for Australian race relations, how much change would one identify between the stolen generation and the NT intervention? Between the Aboriginal Protection Board and Operation Outreach. The euphemisms have certainly changed, but the outcomes? It can be all too easy to assume that because time has passed, things have changed, but it can be a worthy exercise to look at things from the perspective of what has not...
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 02:48:02 +0000