I tend not to pay much attention to what’s happening in the news, let alone footy news, but you’d have to be living under a rock in Australia to not be aware of the Adam Goodes’ thing.
To the unaware, Goodes is a high-profile indigenous Australian football player and Australian of the Year. He is unafraid to call out racist behaviour against himself and others but since pointing out a young girl in an MCG crowd last year, he has been frequently booed when he takes to the ground. Recently he spoke out against the behaviour, and debate has been raging in the media for days.
I’ve never liked booing at the footy. It feels unnecessary, unfair, and a bit gross. That said, I’ve been drawn into booing a particular NRL player, who is violent on and off the field and plays dirty, so I guess I can come at people wanting to boo players they simply don’t like. But when it’s happening week after week, more than a year after the original incident, it is bullying, plain and simple.
I don’t claim to be across this issue but, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts. Borne from survival instinct, we are inherently distrustful of that which is different. At it’s best, it probably stopped us being eaten by bears, but at it’s worst this instinct is expressed in ugly, racist behaviour. Goodes is being cut down because he stuck his neck out and stood up for what he believes in. He probably shouldn’t have publicly humiliated that young girl, but he was attempting to stamp out racism whenever he encountered it.
It’s not racist.
Several years ago, the attendant at the servo near my house said to me one day, ‘Oh, you’ve put on weight.’ As I quietly put back the Twisties I’d picked up with my milk she went on, ‘I mean that as a good thing.’ Well, lady, I don’t care how you meant it, now I feel like a fat cow.
It’s not up to the public to decide if somebody should feel attacked because of their race. Especially Anglo Australians. We cannot possibly understand what it’s like to have lived a lifetime of feeling different, and being treated differently. We have not spent our lives being the subject of casual racism (remember this fantastic and moving ad campaign?) let alone specific, targeted, rage-filled attacks.
As with anything, if somebody has taken offence then we need to make amends, not tell them to stop feeling the way they do. Every (white) man and his dog is across all the major media outlets and posting rants on Facebook about how this isn’t an issue of race so Goodes shouldn’t make it one. But we don’t know what the receiving end of racism looks and feels like, so it’s not our place to decide that this isn’t it. The man feels attacked based on his race, so let’s acknowledge it and fix the situation.
Just get over it.
Oh ok. So I’ll chainsaw your arm off and tell you to just get over it? Re-read the above paragraphs. And perhaps take a moment to put yourself in Goodes’ shoes. Putting the race issue aside even, imagine what it must be like to stand on a field in front of tens of thousands of people while they boo, and shout abuse, and just generally pour negativity over you. For weeks and weeks, as you tried to go about doing something that you loved. Then every media outlet would talk about you for days, telling you what you should be thinking and how you should be feeling (and that how you currently feel is wrong).
Sounds pretty awful, right? You probably wouldn’t be getting over it in a day or two either.
But he’s aggravating the issue by doing war dances.
If I was standing in front of an indigenous person and he performed a war dance I would feel threatened. I’ve seen a haka up close and it is intimidating! So I can understand why some commentators are pointing out that this is aggressive and unhelpful. Except that it’s not you against one other person. It’s you and 40,000 of your friends, against one person who is feeling frustrated, angry, and threatened, and is calling on his heritage to demonstrate his courage.
And who are we to tell people to suppress the expression of their heritage anyway? I was discussing this with a friend today and speculated that perhaps it’s because Anglo Australians don’t really have that kind of tradition to call upon. We don’t know what it’s like to have centuries of stories, rituals and customs to call upon and that influence so heavily our identity as people. Perhaps it comes back to the distrust of what we don’t understand. Maybe we’re envious and therefore try to squash the expression of a culture.
As a society, Aussies have always strongly resisted anyone who tries to tell us what to do (demonstrated perfectly, actually, by the suggestion that we should stop booing at sports – look at the outcry!). So how is it possibly acceptable to tell a particular group to stop expressing their identity? Especially when it isn’t actually doing you any harm — sure, a war dance looks aggressive and intimidatory, but in reality there is no malice behind it.
To move forward from this, I think we need to separate the issues from the person who raised them. It has long been acknowledged that racism is sadly alive and well in Australia. Bullying is an incredibly serious issue that should not be tolerated in any form. Instead of talking about Adam Goodes, let’s leave him to privately find the support he needs at this time, and turn our attention to positive action to eliminate any kind of hateful behaviour we encounter.
(And to get specific, yep – let’s stop the incessant booing of our least favourite sports men and women. If you want to compromise, maybe you can express your displeasure when someone gets away with an illegal tackle, but it’s entirely unnecessary to boo someone every time they get near you. We can be better humans than that).
