Thousands of protesters took to the streets chanting "Black Lives Matter” last June, exasperated at high incarceration rates and deaths in custody. But this was thousands of kilometers from New York, Washington and Los Angeles, on the other side of the globe — in Australia.
While conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed the protests Down Under showed there was a risk of "importing the things that are happening overseas,” for Linda Burney, the first Indigenous woman elected to the nation’s lower house, the anger was justifiable.
Mirroring the U.S., where the Black imprisonment rate is more than five times than that of whites, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up just 2% of the population but 29% of all prison inmates in Australia.