Charleston, where this latest shooting atrocity took place, is also a historic crime scene. For Charleston was, of course, the capital of the slave trade, with about forty per cent of the Africans brought to the country landing first on American soil on Sullivan’s Island, just outside Charleston Harbour.

Earlier this year when I had an article published by Daily Life entitled ‘The Day My Daughter Told Me She Didn’t Like Brown Skin’, I was called out by a Facebook commentator for being racist. Against white people. The article explored my four-year-old’s comment about her own dark-coloured skin and the internalising of dislike at being Other.

In his first scene in Aloha, the film’s only featured Hawaiian character Dennis ‘Bumpy’ Kanahele wears a t-shirt that declares himself ‘Hawaiian by birth’ – on the back, though, it reads ‘American by force’. This force has continued to force Bumpy, and so many non-white actors, to the margins.

The corruption in Macedonia, however, is almost dystopian. This is not just a government where ministers seem to be appointed entirely due to their personal/political connections rather than expertise. Take the Prime Minister who, when confronted with evidence he has tapped 20,000 phones of ‘opponents’ says he will ‘face down the attack’ because to do otherwise would be weak.

Australian sport is often talked about as the great equaliser: a sacred space where camaraderie can overcome intolerance and exclusion. Skin colour and surnames are irrelevant and athletic ability is the only measure of success – except when it isn’t.

Some 8000 Rohingya asylum seekers and Bangladeshi migrants are currently stranded, lacking food, water and sanitation – and the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are pushing their boats back into the ocean, knowing they have nowhere to go.

Ray Jackson, a long time Sydney activist who drove campaigns against Aboriginal deaths in custody and racialised policing, died at home last week.

Last year, Maria Sevilla's application for a 489 ('Skilled Regional') visa was rejected as Tyrone’s autism was forecasted to be a financial burden on Australian taxpayers. It's policy pulled straight from the 1920s.

How the left should respond to Reclaim Australia is an intriguing question. There is some evidence to suggest that this may be a growing movement, one nurtured by a prevailing Islamophobia on the one hand and white anxiety on the other.

This is not only an argument for 'representation' – that is, the idea that if we decentre whiteness and increase representation of non-white poets everywhere, racism will be solved. But representation within poetry is a practical reality: who gets books published? Who gets asked to read or speak on panels? Who is offered residencies at major art/writing institutions? Whose books are added to teaching courses?

Recently Australia has rediscovered an old crime, one it intends to charge Indigenous people with: identity fraud. Apparently the 'white blacks' of Andrew Bolt's imagination are back. Somewhere in Australia there is a mob of pretenders who are lining up to claim the privileges of Indigeneity.

Recent comments from Prime Minister Tony Abbott about the 'lifestyle choices' of Indigenous Australians have drawn fire from all quarters. The storm can be seen on social media sites with the hash tag #lifestylechoices. It has created discussion, debate and derision about what constitutes a valid 'lifestyle choice' in Australia, and what doesn't; what Australians choose to fund with taxpayer dollars; and what we don't.

It is not just a matter of 'white over black' as Fulton tends to stress. The judges and winners are solidly Anglo-Celtic with a few minor variations. It is also notable that they are nearly all creatures of the academic world at some level as are poets of the award-eligible class in Australia generally.

Broad City and Fresh Off The Boat are two exceptional examples of comedy that prevail by taking risks, but they can do so because they specifically speak to demographics television has ignored in the past. In a world where we often live in fear of having our words and lives taken out of context, it is liberating to know there are opportunities for us to work out what we think makes us exceptional, what we have in common with others and create intelligent situational comedy from those connections and disconnections.

Reading back over Kevin Rudd’s apology, there is a word that sticks out because it almost never appears in contemporary discussion of Indigenous ‘issues’: injustice. White Australia’s narrative about Indigenous inequality is remarkable for how depoliticised it has become. Rather than talking about remedying injustice or righting a legacy of institutional racism, we talk about closing the gap. We have bureaucratised inequality into ‘disadvantage’.

It felt like everybody tuned in to the internet to hear the verdict of a trial about a boy stalked across gated streets, and shot in the rain outside his father’s house. The murder happened hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from where I live, in a state to which I’ve never been, in a country that attempts to shape the world in its image.