This forum thread makes my brain hurt.
Goodes wasn’t booed on a mass scale after he did something dirty or got suspended. Goodes wasn’t booed after a run of dubious free kicks. Goodes wasn’t booed after his brownlow win. Can we dispense with the ducking and weaving and at least agree that there are a few clear incidents that kicked the whole thing off?
Goodes was booed after being racially abused by a young girl, and subsequently, after years of work with the indigenous communities around Australia, winning the Australian of the Year award and opening up some very serious, yet uncomfortable conversations about race.
People have this moronic idea that racism is about wearing the Australian flag as a cape and screaming “**** the abos!” It’s a lot more subtle than that, it’s systemic, it’s ingrained in our culture. No one, including Goodes, is saying that any individual or collective needs to feel ‘guilt’ or ‘shame’ for past atrocities perpetuated against aboriginal Australians. What Goodes and others are doing is trying to get people to recognise that most people living in this country indirectly benefit from the theft, rape and massacre of an entire group of people. This has lasting impacts and the wounds are still fresh. Aboriginals still weren’t counted as people in the census less than 50 years ago. I still find it hard to wrap my head around that. Indigenous heads were sent back on ships to England. Tasmanian aboriginal people were wiped off the face of the planet.
None of this implies any sort of culpability for any one white Australian, including myself. It’s not my fault that I benefit from the past slaughtering of indigenous people and I’m not going to apologise to anyone for it. But I DO. And that’s the important thing. That’s the conversation Goodes was trying to have. Realising that maybe young Travis being in jail or having too much drink isn’t just a result of loose morals or poor character, but at least partly because of systemic injustices past and present that put him in a position that you couldn’t possibly pretend to fully empathise with.
Unfortunately a large proportion of the Australian population wasn’t mature or intelligent enough to have this conversation. They heard terms like ‘genocide’, ‘theft’, ‘invasion’ and ‘race problems’ and quickly jumped on the defensive. They couldn’t spurt out ‘but I don’t hate aboriginals’ quick enough. And unfortunately, this is how real racism is perpetuated. Not because your old fashioned uncle (believe me, I have several) openly said ‘you can’t trust them’ but through the failure of everyday Australians to recognise and own the role they inadvertently play in systemic injustice. So then Goodes is a ‘flog’, a ‘grandstander’, ‘divisive’ and other such nonsense.
This is the reason Goodes was initially booed. Maybe a tiny percentage of Hawthorn supporters (and now seemingly every other club’s supporters) that booed him are openly distrusting and resentful towards aboriginal Australians. But mainly because they couldn’t handle or understand a conversation that while uncomfortable for them, is a tragic and real necessity for someone like Goodes. Then sporting tribalism kicked in and people started booing him because everyone else was and retrospectively performed mental gymnastics to come up with reasons why they did join in.
Like other people have said, the booing stemmed from racial elements, still has a dark racial undertone and is deeply upsetting for the indigenous AFL community as well as Goodes and his family. Initially I’m willing to give many a free pass for getting caught up in the tribalism. That’s a lot of what footy is about.
But at this point, if you join in, you’re overtly racist, subtly racist, or just not very bright. The latter contingent probably constitutes the majority, but why would you even want to be associated with it at this point
From a BigFooty.com forum post by daannn277. Find the full Adam Goodes discussion forum thread here.
