Like many around the world, Dark Horizons has been participating in Blackout Tuesday since we first heard about the campaign in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday morning local time here in Sydney. As a result, we quickly put a pause on any new content for the site (aside from this article) and our social media news feeds.
Though it’s now technically the very early hours of Wednesday morning here, the pause on new content will remain in effect until a full 24 hour blackout period has elapsed in acknowledgment and respect of those whose voices need to be heard today.
Articles will resume from around 5am Australian EST on Wednesday (Noon US-PT on Tuesday), while the pause on our social media channels will continue until well into Wednesday evening local time so voices from around the world who need that forum won’t have to put up with our waffle plaguing their feeds.
Comment boards on articles across the site, including this one, will remain open for those who wish to share their stories, offer hopefully productive conversation, and educate themselves. The recent death of George Floyd at the hands of white police officers has led to understandable anger and protests around the globe over black deaths in custody, police brutality and the many generations of systemic racism that have led us to the events of the past week.
Australia has its own horrific history on this front with its treatment of the Aboriginal population. By 2018, around 2.5% of the entire First Nations population of this country was incarcerated – making them the most incarcerated group in the world – just ahead of African-American people in the United States. Though Aboriginal Australians make up only 3% of the total population, they account for around 29% of the country’s prison population and around 48% of juveniles in custody (Source: Creativespirits.info).
In the past 29 years, approximately 432 Indigenous Australians have died in custody and yet there has never been a successful homicide prosecution for any of those deaths in the criminal courts. One story coming up a lot here this week (via The Conversation) has been that of a 26-year-old young Aboriginal man named David Dungay Jr. who was reportedly restrained face down by up to five prison officers (one pushing a knee into his back) screaming “I can’t breathe” several times before he died around Christmas 2015.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more stories just as horrific as what happened to Dungay in 2015 and Floyd this year. No matter your country or background, today is a good day to educate yourselves and others about the issues at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement and hopefully find ways we can all go about affecting real societal change for the better. We’re a movie news site, but we stand with our black readers.
