Aboriginal Discrimination Quotes

I have been reading Amy Thunigs book. And this quote stood out to me. I really think this explains a lot about how AOD stigma and harmful prohibition drug policies that disproportionately criminalize the most marginalized has life long negative impacts not only on the people that use it themselves but their families. Especially when there are other intersects of discrimination involved. Chp 20-part 2 "The hardest part of childhood with parents with these struggles (trauma, mental health conditions, drug addiction + Aboriginal etc) and are criminalized, isn’t necessarily life inside your home, it's how you are treated and mistreated by those outside your home. It’s the ways in which people with authority disrespect, demean, and dehumanize your whole family. In childhood I am of my family, they are of me. We are treated collectively and collectively we are assessed to be worthless.

Van Diemen's land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population --Observation made by Charles Darwin, Feb 1836

For just as it is impossible for anyone to be any more or less human at any stage of his own existence, so it is impossible for him to be either more or less human than any other human being. Thus, in essentials the unborn child is the same as you and I, differing from us only in such non-essentials as size and ability, even as you and I differ from each other without lessening the humanity of either. So it is in recognition of their common and invisible humanity that we say all men are equal, subordinating to that equality all the differences in degree between one person and another. And it is because of their common humanity, with its attendant dignity and uniqueness, that we say men may not be used as a means to an end, may not be enslaved or otherwise exploited, may not be killed for the sake of expediency. In the light of this understanding of equality, it is impossible to justify the abortion movement, which would make the differences of the unborn child the basis for denying him the equal protection of the law. If lack of maturity makes him expendable, in principle there is nothing to prevent our declaring that other deficiencies make other persons expendable. Our enslavement of the blacks resulted from just such a denial of their full humanity. The Nazi atrocities resulted from calling an entire people defective by birth. The early settlers of Australia systematically shot the Aborigines for the land and resources they coveted. Defining preborn children out of the human race is no less illogical and callous.