The first time I remember experiencing racism, I was five years old. In Grade 1, we were paired with Grade 7 buddies, the eldest in the school, meant to settle us in and be our protectors. Mine bullied me for being Aboriginal. She called me a "n****r" whenever she saw me. I still remember the day I went home crying. My mum picked me up on her pushbike, my little brother in the baby seat behind her. When I told her what happened, she rode straight to see that girl's parents. They had known our family for years, ran the servo a few doors from my Nan's, and said they did not know where she got it from, probably school they suggested.

By Grade 4, the pattern was already familiar. After years of taunts, a group of girls were finally made to apologise. The principal forced them to give me a gift, a tiny piece of driftwood with seagulls glued to the top. I cherished it, not because I wanted it, but because it was one of the only times someone was made to make amends.

These are just two stories. I have many more. And even with a lifetime of this, I was still shocked by the words Jake Danby used after fatally running over Mr Whitehurst in Darwin in 2024. He did not just kill a man and injure another. He did not stop to help. He drove off and boasted about it in a stream of text messages to his friend.

In those messages, he called the victims "dogs" and "n****rs". He wrote that they "rolled all over the road like bitches" and said, "the world needs c***s like me to teach these c***s a lesson". He even joked that maybe he could claim his victim's Centrelink "for taking out another oxygen thief".

Think about that. While Mr Whitehurst's family were trying to come to terms with the sudden, violent loss of their loved one, they were then forced to read those words in court. Double the trauma: first the death, then the knowledge that their loved one's life was mocked and devalued in the most filthy way.

And what did the court do with this? For killing a man, injuring another, leaving the victims to suffer and one to die, Danby was sentenced to a 12-month community corrections order, with five months to be spent in home detention at his house in Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory.

Justice Brownhill said she accepted that Danby was now remorseful. How did she come to that conclusion? What has he done to show he has changed? Where is the psychiatric assessment? Because no sane or healthy person responds to killing another human being by sending messages like that. And if nothing has changed, then what safety can Aboriginal people expect when he is soon back in the community?

The Director of Public Prosecutions described Danby's sentence as "manifestly inadequate". They were right. Mr Whitehurst's family deserved better. The community deserved better. We all deserved better. But harsher jail time alone does not fix racism. Home detention certainly will not. What it does do though is send a clear message: Aboriginal lives do not matter.

My teenagers read the coverage in the local papers. They see the words Danby used. They see the leniency he was given. And they wonder if their lives are worth less. That is the violence of this sentence, it harms not just one family, but every Aboriginal child who reads it.

This is not an isolated case. In 2022, Kumunjayi Dixon was killed by Joshua Mason in another hit and run. Instead of calling for help, Mason and his mother moved and abandoned her body as though she were rubbish on the road. He served just two years. Imagine that. Imagine treating someone's daughter, someone's loved one, with such callous disdain. Imagine the court saying two years was enough.

These cases prove what we already know: the justice system is stacked against us. And yet in Darwin, I constantly hear the lie that Aboriginal kids "get a slap on the wrist", that our race is untouchable. It is nonsense. Our children fill the prisons. We are incarcerated at the highest rates in the world.

The truth is this: when white people kill us, they get mercy. When police kill us, they have impunity.

Danby's words were not just cruel; they were a continuation of a long history. Aboriginal people have always been dehumanised to justify our treatment. That is how massacres were excused. That is how land, wages, and children were stolen. Strip us of humanity and nobody has to feel remorse. Danby's language is the modern face of that same old logic.

Words matter. They tell my children their lives are worth less. They teach non-Indigenous kids that we are fair game. They reinforce a system that already fails us.

We cannot allow this to be the norm. Australians must stop pretending racism is an aberration. Racism is baked into our institutions, into our courtrooms, into our daily conversations. When we hear racist language at our dinner tables, stop it. When we see racist memes on our social media feed, shut them down. If we witness injustice, we must speak out. Silence is complicity.

We should all be disgusted. Every one of us. The judge who accepted Danby's apology should be disgusted. His family and friends who excused his language should be disgusted. And readers, you should be disgusted too.

Such violent racism cannot be normalised. It cannot be brushed aside as just another court case or another headline. When a man kills and then mocks an Aboriginal person and then walks free to serve his time in comfort, that is a stain on all of us.

Justice will only come when Australians stop tolerating this. When we reject the excuses. When we demand better. When we refuse to look away.

Jade Appo Ritchie is a Gooreng Gooreng woman.