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I found it a little disappointing and surprising to read some Eddie McQuire quotes in The Age this morning that seemed aimed at generating some level of sympathy for the teenage girl that racially abused Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes on Friday night.
Since moving to Victoria, I’ve been impressed with the omnipresent media guru Eddie McGuire.
He’s articulate, interesting, is clearly very widely respected and has consistently taken a publicly visible, admirable, anti racism stance.
This is even more significant given his extremely close ties to the institution that is Collingwood Football Club.
On the whole, I think McGuire has shown good leadership in his handling of this ‘ape’ incident. I particularly like his quote, in the same Age article, about how fans should be able to enjoy supporting their footy team “without bile coming out your mouth” directed at opposition players.
However, it seems that today he has clouded his own message a tad.
“Teen didn’t know ape was racist, says McGuire.” The Age headline doesn’t beat around the bush.
The first paragraph states that Eddie McGuire has spoken to the girl and doesn’t believe she understood that using the “ape” as an adjective when describing an indigenous player could be offensive.
The writer quotes McGuire directly from an ABC radio interview this morning when McGuire reportedly commented that she: “didn’t even know that it was racist.”
This is where I started to get worried.
Reportedly he went on to say: “she didn’t even know it was the Indigenous Round. She was 13-year-old girl from… country Victoria, she had no idea what she was doing, what she was saying, or anything else.”
This is where I got irritated.
Eddie could have the combined oratory skills of Barak Obama, JFK, Christopher Hitchens and Kevin Rudd and I would remain unconvinced.
Ape: (Noun) A large primae (families Pongidae and Hylobatidae) that lacks a tail, including the gorilla, chimpanzees, orangutan, and gibbons.
We all know that apes are basically unevolved humans that have dark skin. They have an IQ level in the 35-49 range which is the official classification of being: ‘moderately retarded.’
My belief is that you would have to be living under a rock, in an extremely isolated place, without any exposure to televisions, internet, school teachers and books to not understand that aggressively describing a man of dark skin, at a footy match, as an ape, is extremely racist.
The girl’s age is irrelevant at this point. She’s young enough to lack refined judgement, to be vulnerable to peer pressures and misguided adults. But she’s definitely old enough to fully understand what she’s saying and what she’s implying.
As for the girl being from the rural Victoria, this changes nothing. In this media saturated age where over two thirds of the Australian population has access to internet, no-one can use rural lifestyles as an excuse anymore.
It is sad that this girl has exposed herself to such a high level of public scrutiny at a young age. But others should be careful not to downplay in any way what she has said because that lessens the severity of the offence caused and waters-down the severity of the real issue.
The real issue is that somewhere along the line she has heard someone refer to a dark skinned person as an ape.
It would seem that she thought that she could easily get away with yelling it at an opposition club’s player in an aggressive effort to reduce her own frustration, while he put in an outstanding performance against her beloved Collingwood.
That’s inexcusable. It’s clear-cut racism.
She should seek out Adam Goodes, ask whether she can appologise to him face-to-face and hope for his forgiveness. So should the adult male Collingwood supporter who was filmed racially slandering both Goodes and teammate Lewis Jetta.
They should both be banned from attending Collingwood games for at least five years. That’s the only kind of consequence some people fully understand. It would send a crystal clear message to the entire sports loving public.
Racism is racism. It’s totally inexcusable. No ifs, no buts. No qualifications.
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