Joel talks about racism (1:34)

I think because I always wore the half-caste badge proudly.  Like I never looked at it as derogatory.  Like I always was proud that I’m half black and I’m half white, I was really proud of that.  And especially at a school where there’s only one other Indigenous boy, like I always was, you know, proud of that.  And to have all these other, you know, kids your age like telling you that, I don’t know, black this and, you know, it’s – oh, I can’t explain.  Just sort of the way they perceived my upbringing and my cultural background.  The way they perceived how my family and those were, like my family were drunks or something because they were black, you know, not realising that I was actually in Sydney Wollongong with my white mother and her new husband.  So I wasn’t actually living with any black family then, but their point of view was, “Oh, he’s half black, he – you know, they must drink and fight and stuff at home”.  And I’d never seen any of that growing up.  It was – that – that didn’t happen in my – in our family circle sort of thing.  And so I didn’t really know what they were talking about.  It wasn’t until sort of the first year there that no-one really came over my house for – like other friends and things like that, and it turned out that they were sort of afraid of coming and seeing a black family.  Like it’s really what it came down to.

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