Why being called an ape hurt Adam Goodes so much
Adam Goodes trains at the SCG. Picture: Mark Evans Source: The Daily Telegraph
IT was the finest day in Gladstone Small's bowling career, as he tore through the Australian top order to set England on its way to a thumping win in a Boxing Day Test. From where I watched it, behind the buffoons in Bay 13, it was
Small, you may remember, had an unusual physique. With hunched shoulders and almost no neck to speak of, he resembled a turtle peeking out of its shell. Born in the Barbados parish of St George, he is also black. That day at the MCG, Australia's batsmen didn't know what to do with Small, other than providing catching practice off his out-swingers. Yet between overs, when he returned to the fine-leg fence, the mob had no doubt. First someone threw a banana. Then other fruit was hurled. As the insults and baboon noises continued, Small remained stoic. It was 1986 and I was 15. I've never forgotten the way he stood there, eyes fixed on the pitch, ears no doubt burning, refusing to acknowledge the racist taunts at this back.
When Adam Goodes reflects on the events of this week, in which he was publicly likened to an ape, once by a 13-year-old girl and for a second time by an AFL club president, he can consider himself in good company. Jackie Robinson, a celebrated figure for his role in helping to integrate professional baseball in the US, was regularly called a monkey. Once the manager of an opposing team entertained the mob with a chimpanzee caricature after Robinson injured himself during a game. The manager, Eddie Stanky, was a former teammate of Robinson. Patrick Ewing, a towering centre for the New York Knicks, was confronted with bananas and ape banners during his college days with Georgetown. Michael Jordan copped it. More recently so has Barack Obama, perhaps the only basketballer to achieve more than MJ. It is a racial brickbat the most influential black men in the US have had to endure. None of this is incidental or accidental. Perversions of Darwin's theories, in which it is argued that black people are lower on the evolutionary ladder than white people, were used to resist the abolition of slavery and, after the US Civil War, to promote segregation. In Australia, scientific racism was used in some instances to suggest Aborigines should be placed on the evolutionary batting order below certain species of ape. It is a targeted, enduring and particularly hurtful form of abuse. As indigenous leader Mick Dodson put it this week: "It is Western DNA, this idea of the other, the savage, the barbarian the wild man akin to the beast of the forest. It is deeply entrenched in Western thoughts."
It is a history Collingwood president and broadcaster Eddie McGuire knows well, a fact that makes his own muddled remark on radio about Goodes being used to promote King Kong all the more perplexing. "I have spent all week explaining that this is something abhorrent to say, something that is terrible," McGuire lamented on the afternoon after his comments. He later explained that many of those conversations were with football figures and businessmen who hadn't grasped why Goodes was so incensed at being called an ape by a young Collingwood supporter at the MCG.
McGuire's private conversations - rather than this comment on radio - reflect the bigger problem here and the difficulty facing any organisation that wants to take a stand against what Waleed Aly calls Australia's high level of low level racism. Brazilian-born Collingwood footballer Harry O'Brien says Australia has a "very casual" attitude towards racism. For every person who understands why calling Goodes an ape was racially offensive, there appear to be plenty who don't. For evidence, look no further than the reader comments that filled the city papers this week and online responses to blogs. As Katie Anderson succinctly put it on the Herald Sun letters page at the start of the week: "It was not racism at all, just name"
At a state secondary college east of Melbourne, the girl who called Goodes an ape has been the hero of the playground this week. Her mother, Joanne Looney, tells Inquirer the other kids have been great. "Everything has basically been turned into a joke at school," she says. "They are calling each other apes and laughing." A VicHealth study published late last year found that of 755 Aboriginal people surveyed,
92 per cent said they had been called racial names or teased in the previous 12 months. Deakin University's Yin Paradies, a leading researcher on racism, says Australians take racism seriously, with about 90 per cent agreeing that racial prejudice is a problem. Yet many of us don't readily recognise racism when we see and hear it. "A lot of people are not seeing jokes as a form of racism at all," Paradies says. "There is work to be done - and it is not surprising - to help people understand what racism is. It is not a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. It is actually much more common and subtle forms, and it is not really a joking matter." Karen Toohey, the acting commissioner of the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, says the image of Goodes pointing his finger at the source of a racist taunt resonates stronger than statistics or research. "What we are seeing this week is people like Harry O'Brien and Adam Goodes being able to articulate what that hurt looks like"
At the same time, an online anti-racist campaign featuring Goodes had to be taken down from the Human Rights Commission site after being bombarded with racist comments. Paradies says there is debate over whether bringing attention to incidents such as those involving Goodes are useful in changing attitudes or counter-productive.
He asks: "What is it that most people will take from this? That they should go around calling Aboriginal people apes if they hadn't thought of it before or that they shouldn't?" This week AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou and federal Sports Minister Kate Lundy were resolute in their support of Goodes, who was racially vilified twice in five days. Yet there was no villain in this piece. The 13-year-old girl doesn't understand why she hurt Goodes. McGuire didn't mean to say what he did.
When Nicky Winmar lifted his jumper and pointed to his skin 20 years ago at Victoria Park, it was one man's gesture against a racist mob - the kind of mob that vilified Small that day at the MCG. There was no racial vilification code at the time and little support from the AFL. Goodes is a well-paid footballer in a fully professional era. On his own, he has a powerful voice. Backed by the AFL and its well-established anti-vilification code, he can more than handle himself. If the AFL wants to reduce racism it must convince the supporters in the outer, the kids in the playground and the Herald Sun readers still wondering what all the fuss was about.