Joe Williams looked into the camera on ABC's Q+A program this week, and with a pained expression said: "We see racism everywhere, even when you don't see it."
It comes from a Wiradjuri man who has played professional rugby league and forged an internationally successful boxing career while confronting the ugliness of racism.
He told of how he wants to hit out when he endures racist attacks but stops short when he remembers the words of his father, who told him that if you react with violence you are the one who loses.
Joe wasn't speaking with anger, he was appealing for understanding, inviting us to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes.
Defending your right to exist
Joe's has been a hard road. He has struggled with mental illness and attempted to take his own life. He now works in mental health, especially for First Nations people, battling what he calls the "enemy within".
The Q+A panel was dealing with questions about the ethics of sport. But it was more than that. It was about defending your right to exist.
For Joe, it is as an Aboriginal man. For Hannah Mouncey, it was about her right to be seen, valued and respected as a trans woman.
Trans participation in sport has become a hot button issue. It dominated discussion during the last federal election off the back of Liberal candidate, Katherine Deves, who has campaigned against trans women inclusion.
Deves was rarely out of the headlines during her unsuccessful election campaign. The attention given to the issues simply does not match the actual "threat". Sport is not being overrun by trans women.
But it is a deeply emotional issue on all sides. Some fear that the hard won place of women in sport is at risk.
There are big name campaigners such as Australian running legend, Raelene Boyle, and tennis great Martina Navratilova.
Olympic gold medallist swimmer Cate Campbell has become the face of international swimming's all but total "ban" on trans women competing at elite levels.
Hannah was excluded from playing in the AFLW — women's Aussie rules — competition. She does, however, play handball for Australia. It indicates how fraught and inconsistent the response to this issue is: one rule for one sport and one for another.
Someone yelled 'liar!'
Sport is floundering with this. Hannah, like Joe, has been thrust into a position as a public spokesperson. She never sought the role but now it's one she can't avoid.
It is painful and it is personally intrusive, even humiliating. The burden of defending yourself and others like you can be overwhelming. It is relentless. Poisonous social media means they are frequently under assault, even threat of death.
Thankfully Q+A did not sink to those depths.
Oh, the ironyDeborah Lovely-Acason, a Commonwealth Games gold medallist weightlifter, was also on the program. She has competed against a trans woman and she felt it was deeply unfair. She wants a ban.
Deborah and Hannah engaged vigorously yet respectfully. But it isn't always like that.
When endocrinologist Ada Cheung spoke from the audience about her scientific study into trans athletes, someone yelled "liar!"
Passions are high. Numbers and science can be lost in emotion. While Ada's research shows trans women lose their physical advantages during transitional hormone replacement therapy, other research differs or is more complicated.
How do we begin to listen?
Ada concedes the science is not settled. Yet in an age when we rush to judgement, our minds are so quickly made up and debate shut down.
Social media has predictably lit up in the days since the program with the usual toxicity. How do we begin to listen or think? Philosopher John Stuart Mill said those who know only their side of an argument know little of that.
We can't be sure in our own beliefs until we have opened our minds to others who disagree with us.
We should disagree. We should have strong opinions. If two people agree on everything then likely only one person is thinking.
But democracies around the world are withering because we can no longer disagree well. We live in what the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra calls the "age of anger".
It is more than anger though. As Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly argue in their just released Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: “Contempt — more than just anger — is what’s amiss."
They describe not just disagreement but derision. We don't reject someone's ideas, we reject them.
As they write: "There is only winning and losing now."
We so easily form our tribes and go to war. The lawyer and writer Amy Chua says the "tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude."
In the US it is now an existential crisis. America, Chua says, is "in a perilous new situation".
Religion is not exempt
To race and gender, we can also add religion.
Pasifika academic David Lakisa was also on the Q+A panel to help explain how deeply religious Pacific Island rugby league players recently refused to wear a rainbow coloured jersey, designed to support the LGBTIQA+ community.
The players from the Manly rugby league club sat out the game rather than comply. They stood up for their beliefs.
Should they have been forced off the field? Do the rights and respect for one community over ride another?
These are hard questions. Lakisa, himself Christian, could not answer when asked if he also would have refused to wear the "pride jersey".
He said he works with the National Rugby League to try to create more dialogue, more understanding.
Australia is becoming less religious but the NRL is not. At least half of all players in the competition now are Pasifika and most of them are people of faith.
Do they now feel excluded? LGBITQA+ people could tell them something about how that feels.
Our world is more complex. Pluralism and multiculturalism often rub uncomfortably against questions of shared beliefs or rights.
We live alongside people who see the world very differently to us. That should be to our credit. We are more diverse and hopefully inclusive. But as the world has shrunk it has also become a tighter fit.
Internationally we have reached a dangerous tipping point. Ideological, political, religious extremism is wreaking havoc in so many places.
Everywhere there are seemingly intractable disputes between what Indian philosopher Amartya Sen calls "solitarist identities": tribes that define themselves by one thing only — race, religion, borders, class — and go to war.
Decades of reporting the world's worst conflicts has taught me to distrust simplicity or certainty. Yes, truth exists. Flagrant aggression, war crimes, abuse of human rights: it is a reporter's duty to stand with those aggrieved and oppressed, to give them voice.
But it is also to explore the twisted, dark passages of the human condition. Truth may be more elusive. It is messy. We live with the weight of our histories and the bitter taste of the blood of our ancestors.
Those who have had the worst done to them can do the worst to others.
Some, who enjoy the privilege of distance or whose wealth and comfort put them out of harm's reach, can afford to reduce our world to slogans, pick sides, pronounce who is right and who is wrong.
In my experience, they are those who have not had to fight for their existence. Their place in the world is secure.
Others have to fight for theirs. In a world where so many seek to be heard, we have to be prepared to listen.
Ask Joe Williams, Hannah Mouncey, David Lakisa or Deborah Lovely-Acason.
Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm. He also presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel.
