Shocking moment racist screamed the N-word in the face of Indigenous ABC host Stan Grant: ‘No matter how successful you are, someone can always cut you down’
- Stan Grant opened up on racism
- He said he was called N-word by stranger
Indigenous TV journalist Stan Grant has opened on the terrifying moment he was called the N-word by a stranger.
The Q&A host made the shocking admission while speaking at the national summit on Aboriginal child safety in Adelaide this week.
Grant, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, revealed he had been abused by the strange man while he was outside the ABC studio last year.
‘I was standing outside the ABC filming … and a young man and his girlfriend walked past me and, as they got close to me, he yelled the N-word loudly at me, right at me,’ he said.
Q+A host Stan Grant told an audience that a man had called him a racist slur once while filming outside ABC’s studio
‘So what if I’m on television, so what if I stayed in the White House with Barack Obama – so what if I can phone the Prime Minister [Anthony Albanese] and he’ll pick up the phone. In that moment, that’s what I was to that person.’
Grant said the despicable comment from the stranger had been completely random.
‘We don’t know when someone’s going to say that,’ he said.
‘No matter how successful you are, someone can always cut you down… racism can touch us anywhere.’
The national summit was held between March 29-31 and focused on Aboriginal child safety.
The event was organised by South Australian group KWY.
The group works with more than 1,000 children and parents every year who experience either violence or the threat of losing their children to child protection services across Adelaide and regional centres.
The South Australia government has an annual budget of more than $500m but only allocates around $69m of that to support services for new families.
SA’s Child Protection Minister Katrine Hildyard has previously said the Malinauskas government plans to commit $3.2m to create a new committee which aims to improve outcomes for Aboriginal people.
She says the government has also committed to increasing the overall budget for services to new families by $13.4m.
‘We know that the current system is not working for Aboriginal families and children,’ she said.
‘Listening to the wisdom and experience of Aboriginal people is utterly fundamental to building a better approach.
The Q&A host made the shocking admission while speaking at the national summit on Aboriginal child safety in Adelaide this week (pictured, Stan Grant with partner Tracey Holmes)
‘This includes our government acknowledging how that legacy of colonisation and experiences of intergenerational trauma and racism influence the issues Aboriginal people face.’
Aboriginal Children’s Commissioner April Lawrie also made an appearance at the summit.
She used her time onstage to say the government’s child removal policy was flawed and failed to address the issue of why families were in need in the first place.
‘We’re removing [children] but we’re not supporting [families],’ Ms Lawrie said.
‘That speaks more than what you see in data.
‘That is the compelling story about what is going on in our Aboriginal communities, what is the relationship of the state with our Aboriginal families.’
This issue is not only present in South Australia, with 952 Aboriginal children across NSW removed from their families in 2019-20, according to The Guardian.
This was a 2.6 per cent increase on the year prior and brought the total up to 6,688 Aboriginal children in foster care at the time – about 41 per cent of the total number of children in the system.
This was despite only 6 per cent of children under-18 being Indigenous in Australia.
