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Article snippet: WHEN Bobby Salee looked for work in the Australian town of Cairns, his job prospects would end as quickly as potential employers would ask: Have you ever been to prison? When an Aboriginal teenager from the remote Kimberley region would climb aboard the school bus, she said, her white classmates would tease her: “Go back to where you came from.” “I couldn’t even stand being in school for eight hours a day,” said the teenager, Zeritta Jessell. “I’d get followed around the school from a big group of people.” It has been 50 years since Australia’s indigenous people won the right to be counted in the national census and to be covered by federal laws, 25 years since the High Court provided a way for them to reclaim land that colonizers took. But many of Australia’s First Peoples continue to encounter both discrimination and despair. Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at roughly 13 times the rate of nonindigenous Australians. They are just 3 percent of the country’s population, with dozens of peoples or nations on the mainland and in the islands of the Torres Strait, but indigenous suicides increased to 50 percent of all suicides in Australia in 2010, up from 5 percent in 1991. Indigenous Australians also suffer disproportionate levels of poverty, addiction and unemployment in what they say is a racist society that dismisses them as second-class citizens. I’ve spent the past several years covering race in the United States. But as part of The New York Times’s expans... Link to the full article to read more