OUT NOW
Politics through the looking glass
The inversion of Australian democracy.In the Autumn issue of Meanjin.
Race
Monday, 24 August 2015
To paraphrase a great rugby phrase ‘go you Goodes thing’ and to quote Warren Mundine ‘stop the boos’
Tweet from the very clever Scott Morrison
I just find it incomprehensible that the state of Australia is so racist that we have widespread tolerance and support for the most vicious kind of racism that I haven’t seen since the dark days of the end of apartheid
Some perspective from Marcia Langton
Probably for some the jeers are mindless, just revelling in something taboo. But increasingly, that dull drone is sounding like an assertion of power: crowds of non-Indigenous people declaring, “We will keep doing this and you can’t stop us”.
One sports writer expressing the darkest fears
Like most developed countries, Australia has a race problem. It might not take the form it does in the enlightened country this writer comes from, of cops regularly shooting black people in the streets (curiously omitted in the piece), but it exists and mostly is focussed on indigenous people.
Here are a few examples highlighted by this blog.
In June 2007, a report published by the NT Labor government Little Children Are Sacred claimed there was widespread sexual abuse of children being committed by NT indigenous communities. No proof was offered and none was ever found. Yet they were widely believed and led to Coalition/Labor support for the intervention and restrictions to welfare on racial grounds. While there was some criticism of the intervention, there was no questioning of the assumptions in the report behind it. Yet it’s hard to imagine a similar claim without proof against non-indigenous communities would be published, let alone acted on. Clearly different standards applied.
A few months later there was an actual proven case of indigenous child sexual abuse, a rape of a 10 year old girl in Aurukun Queensland. This time authorities took the opposite approach: letting the nine guilty males escape jail by citing cultural standards because they were indigenous. Clearly, to the Brisbane magistrate judging the case, different standards applied.
This year we had the West Australian government threatening the closure of indigenous communities in the state’s north. Here there was more opposition. But even those opposing did so by claiming different cultural standards should apply, when all that was needed was to argue for the same standards for indigenous communities as for heavily subsidised non-indigenous communities nearby. Even in opposing discriminatory closures, different standards still had to apply.
And then finally we have the row over the bit in the constitution that allows such different standards to apply in law: the so-called “race powers” that allow federal laws based on the colour of the person’s skin. Most of the public want them gone. Yet while those making the decision may disagree on how the Constitution should change, they all agree that race-based powers must stay – because to get rid of them would mean dismantling the entire land rights, native title edifice of the last 40 years and no one has the stomach for that. So whatever happens on the Preamble and the Constitution, as far as the law is concerned, different standards will continue to apply.
It would be tempting to add the booing of Goodes to this list. But there’s an important difference. All of those above were initiatives from the authorities, which makes sense because they have the power to close communities, restrict welfare etc. Whereas the problem of the booing of Goodes came from the public.
This distinction is important. First it was why some of those complicit in the decisions above could so smoothly take a position on Goodes. Labor MPs, fresh from comfortably voting to push asylum seekers back out to sea to, er, save lives had no trouble regaining the high ground by condemning on Twitter the crowds booing Goodes. It was has even allowed the one responsible for that very policy, Scott Morrison, to cheekily refer to it in his tweet supporting Goodes – suggesting the contender has a danger of being too clever by half.
The distinction is also what made the reaction out of all proportion to what actually happened. After all, what we were talking about was the booing of one footballer. Hardly comparable to the closure of communities or the welfare restrictions which have affected thousands. Yet the “apartheid” hyperbole from those like Langton (who supported the intervention and welfare restrictions) or the over-the-top comparisons of Goodes to Rosa Parks (!) were less motivated by the victim but the source: the Australian public in the football stands.
Indeed, because this is about the public, it goes smack in the face of the anti-racism campaign against the public, which in Australia today, is pretty well the only anti-racism campaign there is. On the racial standards being applied by the authorities as described above there is nowadays very little criticism in the public sphere. In the debate around the Constitution, for example, there is almost no criticism of keeping the race powers, save from those like Bolt who have trouble understanding they are already there.
Yet it was the targeting of the public in the controversy around Goodes that also exposed the hollowness of that anti-racism. To see how, it is necessary to start where some like the American writer above didn’t want to, Goodes’s reporting of a 13 year old girl to security for calling him an ‘ape’ two years ago.
Having a grown man report a 13 year old to security was not a good look but in the middle of a game, tensions were running high and no doubt, as he later said, there was a lot of history behind the epithet that made an over-reaction understandable.
So that was Goodes’s excuse. But what was security’s excuse? On what basis did they think it right to take a 13 year old girl and confine her in a police room for two hours after dark without her parents and with her grandmother ordered to stay where she was in the stand? Goodes has been praised by many for not taking up the offer to press charges the next day. Press charges? Some have claimed the security response was an over-reaction, but the law is considered. So on what basis could the law possibly think it reasonable for a grown man to press charges against a 13 year old girl for calling him a horrible name?
In reality the response by security and the offer to press charges is less an over-reaction than a culmination of several years of an on-going campaign by AFL authorities to police the behaviour of the public in the AFL stands and is the pointy end of the anti-racism campaign against the public. But what subsequently happened was to expose how meaningless that campaign was.
After that, Goodes became a target of booing by fans of opposing teams until he responded with the war dance against Carlton fans in May. While shopping a girl to security was not Goodes’s finest hour, his war dance was in the noble tradition of AFL players sticking it to the crowd as good as they get. For players of Goodes’s quality this is usually an adjunct to the more common response to booing fans: ruining their weekend by destroying their precious little team in front of their horrified eyes.
But Goodes’s war dance was seen as provocative (which of course it was) and then condemned as such by those like Bolt who making a living out of being precisely that. The act itself was no big deal, but once the right weighed in, the anti-racism campaign kicked in and we were off.
Cultural warriors on left and right like sweeping generalisations as much as they as they like bogus polarisations, and so in opposing the right we had the position that the booing of Goodes was nothing but racism.
Claiming the Goodes booing was nothing but racism was just silly. If that was the case, why weren’t Sydney Swans fans joining in the same way? Surely the red blooded racist supporting the Sydney team would have been just as outraged by the war dance, furious after reading the transcripts of Goodes’s Australia Day speech, incensed at the “invasion day” references etc. etc. Yet somehow Sydney Swans fans seem to have a racial sensitivity clearly missing from fans for every other side in the AFL, for reasons that will just have to remain a mystery.
In joining the faux polarisation of the right, the anti-racism campaign against the public had not only ended up having to argue something daft but exposed the hollowness of what passes as anti-racism today.
Because here’s the thing: where were the arrests? If it was acceptable for the authorities to offer pressing charges against a 13 year old girl, why weren’t there charges being pressed against the hundreds (thousands?) of men and women doing the same thing for the last few months? Why weren’t there queues of West Coast Eagles fans being lined up by security to be held in the same police room they kept the girl?
In reality after years of a campaign targeting the public, and having sweepingly claimed that the AFL crowds were racist en masse, we now find that they couldn’t do anything about it. If anything, there was a growing fear in the media that the public were openly defying what this anti-racist campaign and threatened to expose as a sham by saying “you can’t stop us”. Hence the hysteria and hyperbole in the days before Goodes dropped out.
The phoniness of this anti-racist campaign is exposed by the laws that back it up. The federal Racial Discrimination Act does not allow for criminal convictions for racial vilification, having been instead passed on to the states. Yet despite all states having brought in such laws over the last 20 to 30 years there has, incredibly, only been one successful prosecution.
In NSW, where section 20-D of the Racial Discrimination Act has been in place for a quarter of a century, there not only haven’t been any convictions, there hasn’t even been a single case referred. Similarly in the home state of AFL, the bar is so high in the Racial Vilification act of 1995 that the Human Rights Authorities argue making a vilification claim is almost impossible. In the only state where there was a prosecution (for anti-Semitism), Western Australia, it followed a tweaking of the law in 2004 that, ironically, resulted in the first prosecution being a 16 year-old Aboriginal girl who called someone a ‘white slut’.
This very odd legal position suggests one of three things: either 1) the crime that is being legislated against doesn’t exist, 2) by an extraordinary intra-state coincidence, all of the State Attorney-Generals have stuffed up the drafting of their respective bills, or 3) that this is about political posturing in legislation that was never intended to have any practical effect.
And of course, the phoniness of this anti-racism was shown by what happened next over Goodes. On the weekend of the 1-2 August when Goodes took time out, the anti-racism campaign reached fever pitch with front pages in the press and spontaneously organised events around the country showing support, which was not tested, of course, because Goodes wasn’t there.
And then? Who knows? There were reports that at the next match against Geelong, Goodes was still booed but no more than anyone else. But to find such reports you had to read into the match commentaries because suddenly the media seemed no longer interested and the whole issue passed over quicker than a Twitter storm.
This lack of interest seems curious. Either there was still racist booing and therefore the outrage should continue, or there wasn’t and Australia had found a solution for a problem that plagues the developed world. Or perhaps the Geelong team making a display of solidarity took the team partisanship out of the booing that had been there all along (and so explaining the mystery of the racial sensitivity of Sydney Swans fans), we shall never know.
Or it may be possible that having got itself into a ludicrous position through culture war over-reach, which it could do nothing about even on its own terms, the anti-racist campaign against the public quietly tip-toed away from situation before it could get out of control. Instead of AFL crowds, maybe it should just stick to bullying 13 year old girls and their grandmothers. Much safer.
Posted by The Piping Shrike on Monday, 24 August 2015.
Filed under UncategorizedComments
10 responses to “Race”
Great points, needs proof reading
Along with Fairfax we’ve sacked our sub-editors and photographers. We maintain it has made no difference to the quality of the product.
Lol
Have you read Kim Mahood’s bit in the August monthly? What do you think of her take on anti racism?
I think there were some points in that piece, i.e. that anti-racism focusses too much on behaviour of whites rather than simply removing practical inequalities.
But the suggestion is that these inequalities have been removed and so then what? I don’t think on the basics of services, education and health care they have. So posing what happens next is a bit speculative.
I mean what is interesting is that the focus was supposed to be on “practical outcomes” after the intervention. The trouble was that subsequent reviews show that the state is hopeless at “practical outcomes”. So attention has since focussed back on indigenous (and non-indigenous) behaviour.
Native peoples will always be in an incongruous position in a settlement colony.
Like if they really did have any ‘rights’ or ‘respect’ you wouldn’t be stealing their land.
It doesn’t help that some Australians ‘imagine’ they have the race problems of other settlement colonies rather than their own.
I wish we had the ‘practical problems’ of Maori in bi-cultural NZ rather than the actual ‘practical problems’ we do have.
There are some who imagine we have the racial problems of the USA – where the ‘Aboriginal problem’ appears to be split – the land precedence seems to be the issue for Native Americans while racism/discrimination based on skin colour is the lot of the descendants of those brought forceably, or otherwise, from Africa.
We have both and so struggle with how to run a symbolic discussion – how to recognise land alienation etc without in practice actually giving back to the linear or tribal descendant of those it was taken from – and how to stop idiotic and ridiculous discrimination and unpleasant behaviour directed at people based on a few very minor genetic features.
The Australian state cannot really absent itself from the race question – it was fundamental to the construction of the Australian state even before the constitution, but definitely entrenched in the constitution.
The failure of 505 separate Aboriginal peoples to contact each other, establish a joint resistance and throw what would have only been a few thousand Europeans out, including with weapons procured from the Dutch East Indes, will be their enduring regret.
Or have confined Europeans to a small number of port cities. Australia would have then had a classic ‘independence’ decolonisation, with some transfer of power, rough or smooth, to the locals and away from the Europeans.
TPS, I’m not sure why you are so worried about what the ‘public’ think. I know you believe the established Left have started distrusting the ‘public’ but I think they have grounds to:
-as I am not a fan of what passes for ‘democracy’ in this country I would hardly expect to find wisdom and enlightenment in the average Australian crowd.
-the Left has always had to propagate the idea that revolutions or transformations have to be ‘led’ – you will see the same with Marriage Equality
-Mark Latham was quite wrong, and you can see it in him. His boorishness is coming from his idea that there were working class males who wanted help from a social-democratic ALP to advance themselves without the constraints of PC and feminism and so on. There never were.
They were either always bigots, opinionated and at best opportunistic in supporting Labor is a share of the total wage pie was coming their way – or – never in the Labor camp in the first place.
The Left need to ignore the baiting from a feral Right wing who believe stirring up base passions in the population equates to ‘connecting’ or ‘democracy’ and get on with doing what they know they need to do, supported by the ignorant many, or not.
There were no “base passions” stirred up. It’s football.
The left is incapable of leading anything, and is in fact terrified of the public as seen by the reaction to the Goodes booing and the referendum on marriage.
As for Latham, his ability to know what Western Sydney thinks, or indeed anywhere else for that matter, was revealed in October 2004.
After all, what we were talking about was the booing of one footballer.
But one who is highly visible and at least a bit politically controversial, given various tears shed over his AotY award. If the exaggerated booing of Goodes wasn’t related to any of that, what exactly was it that made people target him?
Claiming the Goodes booing was nothing but racism was just silly. If that was the case, why weren’t Sydney Swans fans joining in the same way?
Uh, because people don’t like booing their own players (unless they’re playing really badly). This is a pretty thin argument.
But what was security’s excuse?
This is the main point, it was completely ridiculous.
And then? Who knows? There were reports that at the next match against Geelong, Goodes was still booed but no more than anyone else.
…
This lack of interest seems curious. Either there was still racist booing and therefore the outrage should continue, or there wasn’t and Australia had found a solution for a problem that plagues the developed world. Or perhaps the Geelong team making a display of solidarity took the team partisanship out of the booing that had been there all along (and so explaining the mystery of the racial sensitivity of Sydney Swans fans), we shall never know.
A couple of things here: FWIW I suspect that a fair bit of the booing was opposition team fans just piling on after the Bolt/Jones etc followers started it, in the hopes of getting under a great opposition player’s skin, without really thinking about the racist issues going on. The clubs making a big deal about stopping it may have made some of the those fans decide not to engage. Hence, less booing.
Not reporting it is standard don’t-report-speed-chases stuff. The AFL no doubt would have been very anxious to put the matter behind them after the round where they made it a big deal, and the broadcasters were happy to oblige, as the booing was a bad look all around.
If the above is correct, then the campaign by the AFL and clubs in the last few weeks against the booing actually worked pretty well.
Oh and on:
Because here’s the thing: where were the arrests? If it was acceptable for the authorities to offer pressing charges against a 13 year old girl, why weren’t there charges being pressed against the hundreds (thousands?) of men and women doing the same thing for the last few months? Why weren’t there queues of West Coast Eagles fans being lined up by security to be held in the same police room they kept the girl?
Well obviously the AFL has learned a thing or two from their own mistakes here, I can’t see them allowing another incident of a child being separated from their guardian. Also at that point (the WC game) they were hoping it would just go away rather than taking it on publicly.
If people don’t like booing their own team, could the fact that Goodes was on the opposing team for the rest of the fans have something to do with it? I think so.
The booing started before Bolt etc. got involved.
If the AFL’s anti racism campaign was responsible for stopping the booing you’d think they’d want to take credit for it. As it is they barely want to talk of it at all.
I haven’t seen any sign of the AFL backing down on rules against racist booing because of this, quite the opposite. But you’re right they will probably think twice before acting on them, emphasising the phoniness of it which is the point of the post.