By now you would’ve seen the allegations of a racist taunt being made during the second game of the NRL’s pioneer ‘Round Zero’ in Las Vegas, marring an otherwise brilliant weekend of fanfare and festivity in the entertainment capital of the world.
But it happened, so let’s talk about it.
Sports history in this country is littered with examples of racism against our Indigenous athletes, from Adam Goodes to Nova Peris, and rugby league is sadly no different, as much as we’d like to paint ourselves as champions of accepting multiculturalism and tolerance as a sport thanks to initiatives such as the Indigenous vs. Maori All-Stars game, Deadly Choices, Indigenous (and Multicultural) Round and the integration of NRL players being made available to participate in the Koori Knockout.
None of that matters.
According to the 2020 Reconciliation Barometer survey, 60% of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander respondents agree that Australia is a racist country, up from 51% in 2018, while only 43% of the general community feels the same way.
Additionally, 52% of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander respondents reported having experienced some form of racial prejudice in the previous six months, up from 43% in 2018.
This data is backed up by research done by Australian National University in 2020, which claims that 75% of Australians tested using the Implicit Association Test displayed negative implicit or unconscious bias towards Indigenous Australians.
3.8% of the Australian population at the 2021 Census identified as being of First Nations descent. A microscopic proportion bearing an avalanche of social trauma.
That’s what makes the responses to the incident between Spencer Leniu and Ezra Mam so bitterly disappointing.
Firstly, I’m sick of the amount of people using this as an opportunity to light fire to the Roosters (and Penrith for that matter) and make fun of their club culture. There’s been far too much “well this is just typical of the Bondi boys,” or “send him back to Penrith where he learned it.”
Could Trent Robinson have addressed it better in his postgame availability? Sure.
But even if the above sentiments, which have been paraphrased and minimised for brevity, are little more than joking barbs from fans of rival clubs not embroiled in this, it serves no ultimate purpose other than to diminish the actual act and turn it into a lame punchline used for pointscoring by the worst corners of the internet.
Imagine being Ezra Mam and waking up to see that your brave stand against an outdated and frankly uncreative insult had been reduced to club logo avatars hurr-durring about “well this would never happen at my club.”
Did I do that in the immediate aftermath of the report being made? Did I have a little shot at the Roosters? Of course I did. I am after all a dickhead on the internet. But that’s wrong, it misses the point, and it helps no one.
Frankly, it doesn’t even stop at this one instance of racism either. Whether it’s a club signing a player with a domestic violence charge from 5 years prior or a cocaine scandal on a night out in the offseason, every indiscretion brings a wave of people tripping over themselves to be the first to hike up the hill and establish territory on the moral high ground.
It’s an honestly tiring way to operate. Every club in every professional sporting league around the world has at least one example of putting morality to the side in the interests of winning. The pointscoring is just not worth the effort.
And the mental gymnastics around some of the validations I’ve seen are mind bending at best and worryingly illiterate at base level.
“I call my kids cheeky monkeys all the time and they get on with their day.”
If you need your hand held on why calling your 3 year old child a cheeky monkey when they put their shirt on back to front differs from yelling it insultingly to an Indigenous man in a vitriolic setting then I worry where society is heading.
According to the Diversity Council Australia, 56% of Indigenous workers reported hearing non-Indigenous employees make inappropriate comments or assumptions about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples because they are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and 44% of Indigenous workers reported hearing racial or ethnic slurs or jokes about Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people at work, sometimes, often or very often.
The odds are that 95% of people who end up reading this will never have experienced bigotry or discrimination in the workplace, and yet so many of that same privileged group will jump at the chance to tell Ezra why he should just take it and move on.
And that’s not ok.
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