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Hear no evil: Adam Goodes and our disturbing desire for silence

30th July, 2015
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30th July, 2015
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The booing of Adam Goodes is not unquestionable proof of racism, but it is evidence of a societal indifference to racism – which might be even worse.

The most disturbing thing about the people who boo Goodes isn’t that they started in the first place. It’s that after the booing was associated with racism, they became louder.

I don’t think for a second that everyone booing Goodes hates black people. But the fact that they don’t care that they might be perceived as racist, and the idea that this perception is emboldening and not deterring them, is as depressing as it is frightening.

It would be so much simpler if Goodes was being derided because he was black. We could write off his antagonists as anywhere along the spectrum from uneducated to evil. But Goodes is not being booed because he’s black – he’s being booed because he wants to talk about black people.

The fact that he’s being booed for that reason, and not the simpler one, is much worse. It speaks to something more deep-rooted and insidious in the culture – the idea that if you have pain, not only do we not want to know about it, but we will take pleasure in laughing at you for it.

There seems to be an odd distaste in casual Australian culture for real issues. There is an obsession with not taking oneself seriously. In contrast to America, we pride ourselves on self-deprecation. To burst the airy, inflated bubble of non-seriousness with words about real things is somehow to be un-Australian.

Sometimes there is nothing as loud as the misguided, spiteful desire for silence. It speaks volumes that Australia’s token racist slogan is ‘If you don’t like it, leave’ – a zombie Hallmark card promoting intentional, dismissive deafness.

An unearned, demented entitlement seems to be at work. People generally watch the football to, well, watch the football. When Adam Goodes distracts us from the game with an Indigenous dance or by pointing at someone in the crowd, this makes us feel aggrieved, as though he’s taken something away from us – as though he is selfishly making abnormal what we held to be normal.

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Of course, this is ludicrous. When someone speaks an important truth, regardless of the context, you listen to them. Discomfort is a far lesser evil than neglect.

There is a misguided feeling floating around Australia that Goodes has brought this upon himself. He allegedly manufactures drama for the sake of it, as evidenced by his impromptu war dance against Carlton. But discussion of race, rights and their history need no motivating act because racism is not a stop-start phenomenon – its heartbeat is constant, sometimes we just choose not to hear it.

My dad is white and my mum is not. I didn’t cop much racist abuse playing junior footy, probably because I was six feet tall when I was 15 and generally bigger than everyone else on the field. Being mixed race, my ethnicity is not easily discernible (although that didn’t stop one bloke I tackled high from wrongfully labelling me a ‘Filipino c*nt’. I started to tell him that my mum was actually from Malaysia but eventually decided that the Southeast Asian geography lesson would probably be in vain) and I never dealt with anything more than a handful of passing insults that I immediately dismissed because of the character of those issuing them.

Although the taunts were passing, they still stayed with me, and even as the captain of my footy club at 18 and someone who had spent his entire life in Australia, I always had the gnawing feeling that I was a tourist to a white man’s game.

Compared to Adam Goodes, the adversity I dealt with was nothing. Imagine having a source of pain that you have the courage to bring to the surface, and then have it met not with understanding or sympathy, or even indifference, but rather by gleeful, sadistic mocking on a national stage.

Through his bloodlines Goodes represents over 200 years of a history of exploitation and dehumanisation, and I can’t begin to imagine or comprehend exactly what goes through his head, his heart or his soul.

Evidently neither can the people who choose to boo him.

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