Two retired judges say a section of the constitution which allows federal laws to be made for a particular race of people should be changed, because it is a relic of Australia's past and is potentially dangerous.

The races power, in section 51(xxvi) of the constitution, gives parliament the power to make laws for "the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws".

It was introduced into the 1901 constitution to regulate the migration of particular races to Australia, amid concerns about Chinese and other Asian migrants after the gold rush period of the late 19th century.

Retired NSW Chief Justice James Spigelman, QC, says when it was introduced, "there was no doubt that it was a racist power".

He says the races power no longer has a place in the constitution. 

"A power with respect to people is I regard a very dangerous power to confer on any legislature, even the Commonwealth parliament ... because it can be focused on particular groups by reason of their presumed characteristics, rather than what their behaviour is or what their needs are, but just because of who they are," he says.

Robert French, a retired Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, says the term 'race' is a term of the past.

"I think the term 'race' itself is a cultural construct whose day has passed and has very little factual referent apart from what you find in so-called cultural realities," he says. 

"And I think we'd be better off without it."

The judges discussed the races power in interviews about the 1998 Hindmarsh Island Bridge case for Section 71, an RN series about significant High Court cases.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-04/races-power-in-constitution-should-change-say-retired-judges/12312362

The Black Lives Matter protest movement over George Floyd's death has triggered a lot of questions, starting with whether the murder was really driven by any racist prejudices and why BLM ignores the tremendous progress in American society in improving the treatment of African Americans in the last decades, says US journalist Jason Goodman.

George Floyd, a 46-year old African American man who died at the hands of white policeman Derek Chauvin, has become the symbol of the Black Lives Matter's anti-racism protest, which has spilled over into the other countries of the world. One might ask whether Floyd really deserves to be revered as a new black icon akin to Martin Luther King.

Floyd Was 'a Horrible Guy Who Shouldn't be Praised'

Though the story circulated by the media is arousing feelings of sympathy and compassion among the public, there is more to it than meets the eye, according to Jason Goodman, an independent investigative journalist and the host of the podcast Crowdsource the Truth. In fact, the story behind Floyd's death may have nothing to do with racism-related police brutality, he suggests.

Despite being depicted as a civil martyr, a "gentle giant" and a hero whose funeral was broadcast by major US mainstream media channels, Floyd was no saint to begin with, Goodman highlights.

According to court records, Floyd was arrested on nine separate occasions between 1997 and 2007, mostly on drug and theft charges, with months-long jail sentences. In 2007 he was charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, for which he pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to five years in prison. The probable-cause statement says that Floyd forced his way into the residence of Aracely Henriquez and Angel Negrete where they lived with a 1 year-old toddler, placed a pistol against Henriquez's pregnant abdomen, and robbed the place together with five other black males.

Having been paroled in 2013, Floyd returned to Houston but then moved to Minneapolis to "make a fresh start". It's unclear what he meant by "fresh start", but his autopsy indicated drugs and psychoactive substances in his system on the day of his murder, including 11 ng/mL of fentanyl and 19 ng/mL of methamphetamine. On the top of this, the trigger for his deadly arrest was either the intentional or unintentional use of a counterfeit $20 bill.

Though Floyd did not deserve to be killed like that, "this [was] a horrible guy who should not be praised at all", the journalist opines.

Much in the same vein, Candace Owens, an African-American 31-year old activist, has recently warned against portraying Floyd as a new Martin Luther King: "For whatever reason, it has become fashionable and despicable, for us, the last few years, to turn criminals into heroes overnight", she said on Twitter.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202006141079610632-why-black-lives-matters-story-of-the-racism-driven-killing-of-george-floyd-may-fall-apart/

 

"Let's blame Trump for all this, anyway..."...

 

Why wasn't Germany changed by a shocking racist murder?

Alberto Adriano, a black African man living in Germany, was beaten to death by neo-Nazis. Two decades later, people often ask whether racism actually exists in Germany, even as racial discrimination is on the rise.

Twenty years ago Germany was shocked by a brutal racist murder. Alberto Adriano, a 39-year-old husband and dad-of-three from Mozambique, was set upon at night by neo-Nazi thugs as he walked home from watching football at a friend's apartment.

His three attackers punched and kicked him repeatedly, long after he lost consciousness, in the middle of the Stadtpark in Dessau, in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Alberto Adriano died of severe head injuries in hospital three days later, on June 14, 2000.

It was the first right-wing extremist murder in the former East Germany since the Berlin Wall fell 11 years earlier. In an outpouring of grief and anger, 5,000 people demonstrated on Dessau's streets.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/racial-discrimination-after-death-of-alberto-adriano/a-53759367