Own It
5
By Jack Cottrell
For ten minutes during day four of the third test between Australia and India, the visitors halted play after bowler Mohammed Siraj complained of racial abuse.
The media reported it different ways. There are a lot of “alleged racial abuse” or “believed the abuse was racist” on moderate sites. There’s a lot of skirting around the R-word.
The Daily Mail and Fox Sport details what others in the crowd heard and decided wasn’t racist – just heckling, just banter, just making fun of Siraj’s name. As if mocking someone’s name cannot be racist.
The Times of India reports far more serious racist abuse – an unnamed source saying Siraj was called a “brown dog”.
Some of the reactions from other corners has been disappointing. White guys demanding to know exactly what was said before they condemned racist abuse, because they must be the ones who are in a position to judge what’s racist and what’s not.
First off, let me say that a man of my complexion isn’t the world’s foremost authority on racism. Or really, any authority – I’ve never been subjected to it. But I know a bit about microaggressions, and how what seems completely innocuous to anyone on the outside, can in fact be bigoted harassment.
‘Microaggression’ is a shorter term for ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Microaggressions are the tiny ways that discrimination shows up in your everyday life, the ways that make you feel diminished, make you feel like the ‘other’. They make you feel even more like shit because you know if you told people who don’t get it, those people would say you’re making a big deal out of nothing.
Let’s look at things that happened before Siraj took a stand and said that if the abuse didn’t stop, the game would.
Before the start of the series, Siraj’s father died – and he couldn’t go to his funeral because of covid quarantine restrictions.
Before the start of day four, the Indian team told umpires and Cricket Australia officials that Siraj and Jaspreet Bumrah had been racially abused.
Before Siraj went over to field on the boundary, he’d bowled a poor over when India were already struggling in the test.
And then some assholes had a go at him. And then they made fun of his name.
*
The most painful homophobic abuse I’ve received around sport wasn’t being called a homo or a queer. It wasn’t the multiple times during my very lengthy androgynous phase that someone called me an “It”. It wasn’t even being pushed and shoved in a crowd at Westpac Stadium by three guys who called me a faggot.
It was the word “Rainbow”.
While I was being an assistant referee at a club game, a kid noticed I had rainbow laces – like half the All Blacks at the time. He pointed it out to his dad. His dad then looked at me, sneered, and said it – just one word.
“Rainbow.”
The tone conveyed everything. The utter disgust, the contempt, the loathing. With one word I felt small, I felt I was disgusting, I felt like I didn’t belong there.
Much like Siraj, context was everything. Two weeks prior, a dear friend had killed himself at just 19, because he couldn’t live with being queer.
I went home and cried while I took my laces out. I left them in my boot bag for almost a year, because of one word.
*
I don’t know anything about Mohammed Siraj beyond the bare facts I’ve put down here. I don’t know whether his father gave him his name. I don’t know whether the more serious accusations, the more unambiguously racist taunts are true.
But that doesn’t matter – maybe there were statements that any decent person would have to condemn. Maybe Siraj’s tolerance was just put over the top by six dickheads who might have been a light annoyance on another day.
It needs to be the person on the end of it who gets to decide what abuse is tolerable. What mockery they’ll will put up with to just get on with the business of playing cricket. And arguably, it’s a bar that has been set far too high for far too long.
P.S. If you’re white, and you’re *determined* to say that this whole thing is Not Racist, maybe sit down for a while and try to really analyse why you so badly need to feel that way.
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While you make a few good points Jack, if we are going to agree that the person on the end of the abuse is the only one who can decide if it is tolerable, then that standard has to be applied to all players, including the Ockers when they are visiting these shores.
I also feel it needs to be appointed out at his point that the host of this blog displayed a slightly different attitude following the racist abuse directed at the visiting English player Archer, going so far as to spread the conspiracy theory that the offender was an English supporter, or at least a non-Kiwi of some sort!
Indeed, if we are to fully accept this notion that the line between abuse and crowd banter can only be determined from the perspective of the abused, then would it be only sensible to outlaw any banter at all from the crowd so as to avoid any further incidents?
We could also extend this zero tolerance of abuse to social media, starting with the host of this blog deleting the many derogatory tweets he has made about David Warner, given he would have no idea of any inner demons Warner might have that contributes to his behaviour.
(Bosley will not do this of course because like the vast majority of leftish prats he is arrogant and has zero self awareness. I think it was Churchill who said something along the lines that if you are still a socialist by the age of 40 then you have no brain!)
This is a very, very, very late reply to your comment, but the internet archive suggests it wasn’t approved until 2022. Nevertheless, I’m going to make a super long reply to it, because it shows a pretty classic defensive response to being challenged on this kind of issue.
The first thing you do is deflect – immediately moving from the subject of racial abuse directed at Siraj to heckling Australian players in general.
Now, as it happens, I agree that there are a lot of fans who step over the line when they heckle opposition players. And I’d back any player who said “I won’t take any more, we stop the game until those people are gone.”
Not to mention, there are Australian players who have been subject to racist abuse. That was wrong then and is wrong now. But, your statement isn’t really about that.
Having thus deflected away from the topic at hand, you then move to say that the person who runs this site condoned racist abuse against Jofra Archer – because he said the that the abuse came from an English fan, not an NZ one.
I note that you don’t seem too worried about the actual abuse, only that Graeme sought to deflect blame away from locals. Which, yes, is contrary to confronting what we will accept as both sports fans and as people.
But so is using it to discount this piece. What that says to me is you’re happy to allow racist abuse to continue, because in the past, others have not condemned it the way they do now.
That is not a great attitude to have, but is pretty common among those of us who have done shit things in the past, and don’t want to feel uncomfortable when it gets pointed out that those kinds of behaviours are shit. And yeah, it’s an uncomfortable feeling. But that discomfort should drive us to change the way we think and behave, rather than to excuse shit behaviour so we don’t have to feel bad. I’d hope that between 2019 and 2021, Graeme has been open to learning and would respond in a different way.
Next, we have a strange slippery slope fallacy where if we decide to allow what is abuse to be defined by those on the receiving end, we’d be better off not allowing any interaction at all, in case “further incidents” arise.
That is an amazing way to put it given the “incident” we are talking about was one of racist abuse. How much racism should we accept from crowds at games? I’d say none, and if the only way to achieve that is to ban heckling, then 1) we should do it and 2) we have an urgent problem to deal with.
But I’m going to bet the “incident” in your mind wasn’t one of racist abuse. Rather, the “incident” was one where a player stopped the game because he couldn’t take a bit of banter.
(Note: I hate the word banter, especially in this context. Banter is between friends. Not between a crowd and a stranger – unless maybe the stranger is a stand-up comedian.)
It’s important to recognise how this framing distances the discussion from the event. We’re now dealing with hypothetical cricketers stopping hypothetical games, rather than actual racism that has been levied at non-white players.
It’s more comfortable for white people to deal in hypotheticals – because then we don’t have to think of our own racism. Can forget the times we told a racist joke, or used a slur, or made fun of someone for having a foreign name.
We can avoid thinking of ourselves as the baddies, and thus avoid any reason to change.
The discussion is no longer about racism. So we will conclude with mean tweets about a white person.
There is a difference between tweeting mean things to the internet, and shouting abuse at a person who is doing their job 30 metres from you. In one case, the person will not see it. In the other, they can’t get away. There is a difference between slamming someone for their behaviour – justified or not – and abusing someone for their race.
It’s a bit weird that you claim Graeme lacks self-awareness for not deleting past tweets when you seem to be arguing for a continued environment where abuse is acceptable. If you have a problem with those tweets, but not with racist abuse, I don’t know what to think.
(No, it was not Churchill who coined that phrase, it was likely Edmund Burke, as quoted by Anselme Batbie in 1872. Also Winston Churchill’s wartime policies caused a famine which killed 3.5 million Indians, so you bringing him up here is… awkward.)
I do recall I pointed out that the person racially Archer was not a New Zealander, but I fail to see how that was a justification for the abuse? Just clearing up a fact.
[…] hadn’t forgotten about that had you? Didn’t think […]
The English Premier League does a great job fighting racism… the message is loud and clear at every game. And yet black players still get regular abuse.
Cricket, especially Australian Cricket could learn a thing or two there.
It also promotes a positive rainbow message, there are many games a season with rainbow badges and so on.