This brilliant piece, from Gideon Haigh, sums up my view on the matter - the Australian's are precious when they want to be:
Racism is serious. Racism is about the denial of another person's essential humanity on the basis of their skin and their culture. Racism is about embedded prejudices, institutionalised discrimination, real economic and social deprivation.
Racism is South Africa under apartheid - on which, say it softly, Australia was the last cricket country to lower the boom. Racism is Robert Mugabe - against whose country the Australian cricket team would seemingly have been happy to play had it not been for the Federal Government.
To say, then, that one cricketer calling another a monkey on a cricket field is racism is to define the idea frivolously. Was Symonds belittled? Was he hurt? Was he disadvantaged?
Monkey, monkey
Curiously, when a few score Indians made monkey noises directed at Symonds at Vadodara last October, he went out of his way to state that he had not made any complaint, and affected not to care.
"I'm not the most deadly serious bloke," he said. "Life goes on."
Yet somehow Harbhajan's emission is now the gravest of offences and befitting of the severest sanction. Regrettably, the Australian complaint smacks of cricketers who in the process of scaling great heights of excellence have sealed themselves off from reality.
[snip]
Well, I agree that the Aussies can certainly be precious when they want to be, but I have a few issues with Haigh's piece.
Firstly, I dislike the cheap shot he takes in announcing Australia was the last country to "lower the boom" on South Africa during the apartheid period. It's only a year or so earlier that the ECB invited South Africa to tour their shores
after the D'Oliviera fiasco (during which their conduct would hardly be described as adamantly principled - they certainly flirted with appeasing the Saffies by dropping him from the squad), and it took threats of boycotting the Edinnburgh Games by the majority of countries in the Commonwealth to bring about the tour's cancellation. Beyond that, what the ****'s it got to do with anything? New Zealand were sending official rugby teams to South Africa as late as 1976. Does that carry some poignant weight when it comes to how valid it would be for a black Kiwi player (or his captain) to object to racial vilification today?
Secondly, he trivialises racial abuse by reducing (and this has happened a lot in these threads) it to an issue of how much Symonds was genuinely aggrieved. That's irrelevant. The sport has a code, and while there is contention around whether Harbhajan said what he's accused of, if he violated that code, he must be punished. It really is simple as that. I don't think we really want to go down the path of measuring our response to racial abuse by just how upset the victim appears to be.
I believe that Symonds made an error in downplaying the monkey abuse at Vadodara, ironically I think due to an Australian "don't be a tell-tale" and "don't whine, just get along with things" mentality that permeates our sportsmen. I think he was extremely conscious of being labelled a dobber or a princess - this was pointless, because he was labelled one anyway, including by guys like Mark Waugh at home. From what I've read, in the wake of the incidents during the ODI tour of India, both teams were pointedly advised at the beginning of this current series not to cross the line into racial abuse, and to report it officially if it took place, which might go some way to explain the attention paid this incident.
I agree that Ponting's team has room for a lot of improvement in the spirit in which they play the game, and my opinions of Ponting as a leader are probably well known enough, they're not very positive. I do think their celebrations at the match's conclusion were unedifying (including the yelling at Tony Greig), though they don't break any rules of the game. So I don't feel very compelled to be defensive about their behaviour. But I don't really appreciate Haigh's attempts to make this about my country's history re: South African apartheid OR the Australian team's "happiness" to tour Zimbabwe - we know that a lot of players weren't particularly happy about it at all, and the issue is far more complicated than Haigh pretends it is (and this is coming from someone dead against us touring there). I think that's sloppy and prejudicial, and given the respect he commands, I think he should do better. Way better.
Lastly, I don't know why he has a crack about Harbhajan suffering the "severest sanction" either. Let's be realistic here, he got suspended for three tests. Granted again, there is a dispute over his guilt, but if he was guilty, it's hardly a life ban or a year out of the game. Of course there's a social stigma to being charged, but surely that's going to be the case if you're going to do
anything to hold someone to account for racism in the game, no?
