SHE might look like she’s time-travelled from a Black Panthers rally in 1960s America, but Haley Pessin is very much born of the modern protest movement currently sweeping America.

The paralegal student, who grew up in New York to mixed race Jewish-African parents, is one of a new generation of voices fighting for equal treatment of black Americans.

Galvanised over police shootings in ­places such as Ferguson and Minneapolis, race clashes in Charlottesville and the protests over Donald Trump’s policies, they have achieved a unity through social media platforms.

Racism is not a relic of the past

Pessin, who is active in a number of social movements including Black Lives Matter, says the idea of America being a post-racial country has been exposed as nonsense.

She adds: “Charlottesville has been the apex of activism since President Trump’s election.

“The big change has been in people’s understanding of the issue.

“We used to discuss the US as if it were a post-racial society. Now I don’t think most people with their eyes open really believe that.

media_camera American political activist Haley Pessin. Picture: Richard Dobson

“Trump or the white nationalists in Charlottesville claim they are just protesting in favour of their heritage or of a statue of the Confederacy, but the issue is that racism continues today.

“It’s not a relic of the past, it’s something they look to as a way of galvanising their current movements for racism.”

The disproportionate police targeting of poor black people in the States was the tip of the iceberg, she says.

“I think what Black Lives Matter has pointed to is police brutality is only the worst manifestation of a ­society where racism is really ­endemic.

“There’s an individualist streak in the American psyche, and the flip side of that is if you haven’t pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps and made it, you are to blame for your own impoverishment or your own failure to succeed.

media_camera Haley Pessin is a guest speaker at the Socialism Conference in Sydney this weekend. Picture: Richard Dobson

“We live in the most over-policed society in the world, and one of the most unequal societies in the world, despite being one of the wealthiest.”

In Sydney to talk at the Socialism Conference at Sydney University this weekend the 26-year-old says that while police shootings were disproportionately of poor people, the recent killing of Australian Justine Damond showed there was a wider problem with police becoming more militarised.

She says: “We have a system that is designed first and foremost to treat people as criminals but also to use the most lethal force as the first line of defence and ask questions later.

“The bigger problem is not just how police are trained but many cities have been treated as occupied territories.

“And it’s a mistake to say it’s just right-wing policies. There’s a tendency to look at, understandably, Trump’s approach. But cities like Chicago and Baltimore are actually Democrat-run cities.”

Despite the greater spotlight on police killings the majority of officers involved in fatal shootings have been exonerated.

“When cops have a gun pointed at you as a civilian you are supposed to act rationally and normally and not do the wrong thing,” Pessin says.

“Yet the cops are the ones who are allowed to get away with acting irrationally and being afraid for their lives of people who are just regular civilians, and I think that is the double standard there.”