The speech has been hailed as a Martin Luther King moment by many commentators.
A speech on racism delivered by Australian journalist Stan Grant has gone viral after it was uploaded to YouTube in recent days.
Grant gave the moving speech at the IQ2 debate series held by the Ethics Centre in Sydney, Australia in October 2015 and it has been widely praised on both social media and conventional media sites.
Speaking to the large crowd, Grant spoke of incidents of recent racism in Australian sport when AFL star Adam Goodes was booed by some supporters.
“When we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us,” Grant said, “we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of disposition, injustice, suffering and survival.
“We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, ‘you’re not welcome'”.
He followed on from that to discuss the Australian dream, and how he felt that he succeeded in life in spite of the “Australian dream”. His recounting of a tale regarding his white mother is further evidence of the injustices he, his ancestors and countless others experienced.
“If the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person,” he said.
“The Australian dream, we sing of it and we recite it in verse; ‘Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free’.
“We are better than this” he said.
You can watch the video in full below…
Video via The Ethics Centre
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