Australia and the United States — Racial Violence and Indigenous and Black Resistance

Crystal McKinnon, SPLC

My country is on the midwest coast of Australia, Yamaji country, in Western Australia. It is known for its cream-colored sandhills that lead down to the blue ocean shores, and for the spectacular wildflowers that bloom every year in orange and red dirt, which are especially colorful and vibrant after a good winter with lots of rain. Off the coast, the shipwreck Batavia lies at the bottom of the ocean — a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company. On a journey seeking spices from Indonesia for the European markets, it instead found the coral reefs of the Abrolhos Islands in 1629.

Understanding settler colonialism and its long and ongoing histories of colonial and racial violence requires us to begin with invasion and first contacts. The wreck of the Batavia marks an early moment in a global history of empire that would later take root on the Australian continent through British invasion and structures of settler colonialism. In the United States, along with histories of Native American dispossession and frontier violence, this history is often also told through the slavery of African people and the subsequent targeting of African American communities via racist laws like those of the Jim Crow era. Similarly, in Australia these histories are also told through the invasion of Indigenous lands and the violent establishment of the settler colonial state, along with its own racist laws and policies, including the Australian nation states foundational “White Australia policy” and others designed to exclude, assimilate and eliminate Indigenous communities.¹

These histories are not separate. Rather, the racial hierarchies that underpin Australian settler colonialism were influenced by transnational ideas of race, with the U.S. used at times as a warning, a model and a point of comparison. Tracing these connections reveals how racial hierarchy persists across time and place, even as it takes different forms. Just as colonists circulated ideas of race, Indigenous, Black and Brown people too shared visions for how to best fight, resist and end the violence of settler colonialism.

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