This is part of my Brave Mondays series, where I lean into the conversations we need to have.
I've experienced racism in a lot of different ways across my life. Some of it is direct — and direct racism is easy to understand. When someone calls you a coon, a booga, an abo, you don't need to interpret that. It lands straight away. It's sharp, it's immediate, and you know exactly what's been said and what it means.
Indirect racism is different. It's not always loud, but it sits with you longer. It's the exclusion, the assumptions, the quiet decisions being made about you before you've had a chance to show who you are. It's being at school and having people assume you won't be able to do the work. It's being on a footy field and someone won't share their water bottle with you because you're Aboriginal. It's missing out on opportunities and not being able to quite prove why, but knowing something isn't right.
For a period, it felt like things were shifting. After the Stolen Generations apology, there was a change in tone. People became more curious, more open. But recently, that doesn't feel like the case anymore. Since the referendum, and with what's happening globally, something has shifted again. There's a confidence that has come back into certain conversations — a willingness for people to say things out loud that they might have kept to themselves before.
The day at the lights
On the day of the referendum, I had someone pull up next to me at the lights. I've got an Aboriginal flag sticker on the back of my car, something I've always been proud to display. This guy winds his window down, looks straight at me, and yells, 'F off, coon. You lost.' That hadn't happened to me in years. It wasn't just the words — it was the reminder that this thinking hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been waiting.
The Bunnings moment
This weekend, I'm standing in line at Bunnings with my daughters. We're there to grab a sausage. The men cooking are volunteers from a Lions Club, brown men with accents, doing something good for the community. They are, by any definition, part of this country doing a very Aussie thing — volunteering.
Behind me are three young white men, early twenties. In the middle of their conversation, one of them says, 'Where are all the Aussies? There are no Aussies anymore.' We get to the front, order our food, step aside. Then those same three guys walk up, and the one who made the comment looks directly at the man serving and says it again, 'Where are all the Aussies?'
That's when I knew exactly what I'd heard.
I turned around and asked him what he meant. He looked at me and said, 'It's going over your head, mate. You don't get it.' I asked him if I wasn't getting his racism. He didn't respond. He just stood there.
I grabbed the snags, stayed calm because my daughters were right there watching, and said to him, 'You've just got to be better, bro. That's not good enough.' Then I walked away.
Afterwards, two women came up to me and said thank you. But what sat with me more than anything else was that there was a whole line of people there, and no one else said a word.
It's not all white men. But it's always white men.
After the Bunnings incident, I put something up online. As the comments came in, they followed a familiar pattern. Racist, aggressive, dismissive. I went back through older posts I had saved from when I launched Dhuwa Coffee. Same tone, same type of language, same kind of thinking. And when you look at the profiles behind those comments, there is a pattern. It's white men.
Now every time this gets raised, the response is predictable. People say, 'Not all white men.' And that's true. It isn't all white men. But when you look at the behaviour, when you look at where these comments are coming from, when you look at who is driving a lot of this aggression, it keeps coming back to the same group. It's not all white men, but it's always white men.
That's not about blame. It's about accountability. Because until we can actually name what is happening, we can't expect it to change.
Silence plays a role in this as well. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept, and if we keep walking past this, we are accepting it.
This isn't separate from the workplace either. These attitudes don't stay in car parks or weekend outings. They come back into offices, into hiring decisions, into promotions. If people feel comfortable saying these things publicly, they carry that thinking into professional spaces. So if organisations think they don't need to have these conversations, they're wrong. This is exactly where leadership is required.
I had a conversation with my daughters after that moment at Bunnings. We talked about when it's safe to speak up and when it's not, because safety does matter. But we also talked about what happens when good people don't say anything. Things don't stay the same. They get worse.
That's why these conversations matter. That's why we need to lean into them, even when they're uncomfortable. Because if we don't, we go backwards. And that's not something I'm willing to accept.