The story of a young boy helping a man with African and Indian heritage overcome a racial slur is a touching and meaningful one.
As Alanna Tomazin reports in today's Newcastle Herald, bus driver Sanjay Patel was driving between Swansea and Belmont when a rude passenger told him to "go back to Africa or wherever you came from".
Mr Patel, who came to Australia as a refugee at age 10, said the kind and caring words of 11-year-old Swansea Public School student Brock Keena helped him overcome the effects of the disgraceful abuse.
It's a human right for Australians to live free of racism. While progress is being made, incidents should be exposed.
The Australian Human Rights Commission states, "racism can take many forms, such as jokes or comments that cause offence or hurt, name-calling or verbal abuse, harassment or intimidation".
Racism that is considered "racial hatred" is against the law.
"Racial hatred is doing or saying something in public, including in the workplace, based on the race, colour, national or ethnic origin of a person or group of people, which is likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate," the commission states.
The commission launched a national anti-racism campaign last July, titled "Racism. It Stops With Me".
It is one of many initiatives aimed at increasing awareness of racism and equipping more Australians with ways to address it.
However, it should also be understood that racism is a complex problem.
As British author John Barnes has said, prejudice is more prevalent than many people would like to think.
"We have to recondition the way we think," Barnes said, while promoting his book, The Uncomfortable Truth About Racism.
Barnes doesn't believe a utopian era of racial equality for the average person is about to emerge any time soon.
But he does find hope in the idea that we can all be educated about society's deep-seated prejudice, whether that relates to racism, sexism, class, gender or religion.
"When we talk about indoctrination over a long period of time you cannot then say, all of a sudden, 'Oh, I'm cured of my bias'," Barnes told The Guardian in 2021.
When questioning the effectiveness of football teams walking off the pitch in protest against racism from sections of a crowd, Barnes said. "A bus driver does not have the option of walking off the bus and saying: 'I'm not putting up with this'. They would be out of work and find that nobody cares about them."
On that point, perhaps he's not quite right - as young Brock showed at Belmont.
And the fact that Brock didn't think his actions were anything special perhaps signals that the times are changing when it comes to racism.
Let's hope so.
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