“I learned more about the Indigenous community here, so it ended up being a good thing.” “Australians are very attached to this narrative that Australia is a land free of racism” “I was thinking about how I was going to need to get my hair done while I was in Sydney and I was wondering if there were any black people of African descent in Australia, and I did not know at the time that Indigenous people consider themselves black,” she says. Speaking to NITV during her recent visit Gay explained that she simply wanted a hair relaxer.
The interpretation of the tweet by many was that Gay was erasing the experiences of Indigenous peoples in a colonised country.
The reaction was swift: ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Just wow.’ Some simply commented, ‘Odd’.
‘Are there any black people in Australia?’ she tweeted. Roxane Gay has been to Australia three times, but her first encounter with the country’s Indigenous people in 2015 came before she’d even stepped off the plane.
