Goodes and booing

[Go Swannies]

Stan Grant at I can tell you how Adam Goodes feels. Every Indigenous person has felt it | Stan Grant | Comment is free | The Guardian is quite moving. But one memorable par:

"To Adam?s ears, the ears of so many Indigenous people, these boos are a howl of humiliation. A howl that echoes across two centuries of invasion, dispossession, and suffering. Others can parse their words and look for other explanations, but we see race and only race. How can we see anything else when race is what we have clung to even as it has been used as a reason to reject us."

[AnnieH]

All Adam has done has put a mirror up to Australia and the haters didn't like what they saw, so they reacted... very badly.

I've spent the last two days defending him on facebook left, right and centre. I've honestly enjoyed putting holes in people's theories.
Most of the trolls have given up and gone away. A few are still clutching at straws.

I'm honestly really surprised that Eddie has said nothing. Melbourne peeps (anyone who listens to him in the mornings at least), has he said anything about it on air?

[mcs]

Stan Grant at I can tell you how Adam Goodes feels. Every Indigenous person has felt it | Stan Grant | Comment is free | The Guardian is quite moving. But one memorable par:

"To Adam?s ears, the ears of so many Indigenous people, these boos are a howl of humiliation. A howl that echoes across two centuries of invasion, dispossession, and suffering. Others can parse their words and look for other explanations, but we see race and only race. How can we see anything else when race is what we have clung to even as it has been used as a reason to reject us."

Such powerful words, and a wonderfully written piece from Stan Grant.

[Ludwig]

Moronic Sports icons have their say:

Adam Goodes: Shane Warne defends fans booing Swans' Indigenous star - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Adam Goodes playing the victim over booing, says former AFL star Jason Akermanis - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[Untamed Snark]

All Adam has done has put a mirror up to Australia and the haters didn't like what they saw, so they reacted... very badly.

I've spent the last two days defending him on facebook left, right and centre. I've honestly enjoyed putting holes in people's theories.
Most of the trolls have given up and gone away. A few are still clutching at straws.

I'm honestly really surprised that Eddie has said nothing. Melbourne peeps (anyone who listens to him in the mornings at least), has he said anything about it on air?

Eddie was on mmm with Mick Moloy.
Said Adam shouldn't be booed and then carefully listed all the reasons people boo him.
"But the dance was inappropriate" etc.
Mick was much more reasonable.

- - - Updated - - -

Moronic Sports icons have their say:

Adam Goodes: Shane Warne defends fans booing Swans' Indigenous star - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Adam Goodes playing the victim over booing, says former AFL star Jason Akermanis - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Ah yes. Jason "stay in the closet" Akermanus. Wish he'd just shut the hell up

[Velour&Ruffles]

[QUOTE=Ludwig;678178]Moronic Sports icons have their say:

[URL="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-30/warne-defends-goodes-booers/6661084"]

It is worth remembering that this opinion comes from the same brain that apparently believes Warnie's rug and cosmetic surgery make him look good. This is not a brain I pay much heed to.

[Nico]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1341[/ATTACH]

The faces of hate - for some reason these Kanga fans epitomise the hatred found at every ground at Melbourne when Goodesy plays. Their father who is smiling proudly next to them should be ashamed

No surprise. They were the first to do it after he was found guilty, but reprimanded when he was reported for striking a WCE player. We played them the next week and he was booed all game. Been going on ever since.

[dejavoodoo44]

All Adam has done has put a mirror up to Australia and the haters didn't like what they saw, so they reacted... very badly.

I've spent the last two days defending him on facebook left, right and centre. I've honestly enjoyed putting holes in people's theories.
Most of the trolls have given up and gone away. A few are still clutching at straws.

I'm honestly really surprised that Eddie has said nothing. Melbourne peeps (anyone who listens to him in the mornings at least), has he said anything about it on air?

Good for you, Annie, I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday night, happily demolishing the idiot arguments on a Telstra Sport thread. (Stevoswan was also playing too). I actually enjoy enraging the sort of people who think they are experts, because they have read Andrew Bolt and listened to Alan Jones. But unfortunately, I really don't have the time to indulge in that pastime too often.

[Scottee]

Immeasurable harm being done to AFL and Aussie Rules by this issue. Not to mention Adam himself. This sucks.

[dejavoodoo44]

[QUOTE=Velour&Ruffles;678185]

Moronic Sports icons have their say:

[URL="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-30/warne-defends-goodes-booers/6661084"]

It is worth remembering that this opinion comes from the same brain that apparently believes Warnie's rug and cosmetic surgery make him look good. This is not a brain I pay much heed to.

Yep, maybe the wig needs to be excessively nourished and is depriving his brain of some much needed oxygen.
And thanks for the link to The Conversation.
There is also another article published in today's Crikey that is worth a read. Possibly slightly intellectual, but it does contain a few choice put downs from Guy Rundle. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall, so instead of providing a link I'll have to paste it in its entirety.



Years ago, I seem to remember (or did I merely imagine it?) various quasi-unions and associations were conferring on amalgamating and then affiliating with the ACTU to create one big performers' union. At its headiest, this was going to combine Equity, the actors' mob, the writers guilds, and whatever union that covers party clowns and strippers ... and the AFL players' association. It was a delicious thought for a while. Those lithe ballet performers in their unstructured chaotic events called "Aussie rules" joining together with the actors, etc, etc.

That never came to anything, but it's expressive of a truth about football -- it's an industrial activity, a onetime community activity that has since become an input product for mass media, the live crowds themselves now a mere add-on to the spectacle. Teams that were once grounded in the communities they lived in and could draw their players only from certain geographical areas are now brands, mere labels for whatever collection of players they build in each year.

That has not only changed the relationship between club and community, it has changed that between spectator and players. Players who once played on a Saturday and worked down the high street Monday to Friday are now separate people, superstars who live separate lives. That has given them lives that many could only envy -- even if many stuff up those opportunities -- but it also leaves them isolated, both from the fans and each other. Players have become commodities. That largely unspoken factor lies at the heart of the nasty, sad, depressing attacks on Adam Goodes, the reaction to them -- and gives a clue about what needs to happen.

That the attacks on Goodes are racist is obvious, but it's a complex performance of racism. In Europe, until pretty recently, non-white players for venerable soccer clubs would get systemically booed. But that was old-school white arrogance, the idea that these "subhumans" were besmirching the game that implicitly expressed the best of human achievement. The systemic attempt to do Adam Goodes' head in has a different character. You won't find much overt racialism in the comments about Goodes -- no accusation of Aborigines being "unfit" to play the great game. Goodes isn't being booed by the self-selecting group doing it because they believe themselves to be superior to him. They're doing it because they know they aren't, and the player-fanbase relationship has a strange and not always positive twist these days.

The self-selecting group of people whose chief pleasure in attending the game now comes from sledging Goodes may well be racist in their selection of an "uppity" Aborigine, but their relation to him is defensive and quasi-hysterical. He's been a problem for them from the start, a man with a more confident and urbane bearing than many players -- and particularly different to an earlier generation of earlier, somewhat quieter, indigenous AFL stars, who gave the impression that they were simply grateful to be getting a game, which was a demeanour acceptable to that section of the crowd. Furthermore the relationship between fans and players has taken on the same sadomasochistic quality of all audience-celebrity relationships: we want what they deliver, we hate them for their superiority.

With footballers, that's become very marked, as they've become different in every way. Before it became huge business, players looked like the fans -- somewhat fitter, but the same sort of demeanour, tending towards flab. Now as the fans have got flabbier, the players, trained, trimmed and sculpted by specialists, look better, play better and have wholly different lives. Resentment is never far from the surface. With white players, it's channelled into vicarious thrills at their chaotic rockstar disaster lives, their maudlin battles with depression, etc, etc, but Goodes presents another challenge: a man not content to be nothing more than a ball-kicking machine. His assertion of his full humanity challenges the fan-player/master-servant relationship that makes fandom possible.

That's the key to this essentially neurotic group reaction to a couple of fake war dances ... Let's face it, most of the people booing Goodes, by and large, aren't life's winners. Many of them are from social groups that society has somewhat passed by. Goodes is a winner and has come further than most under his own steam. The challenge to them from him is a reminder of that gap. Hence the self-pitying reaction of such people and their supporters, and the use of anti-racist discourse, twisted around. By that token, Goodes is the one bringing race into it, we're not racist, etc, etc, and so it makes perfect sense to systematically try to mozz the bloke who's saying you are. What could be greater proof of your non-racism that you're prepared to take on this guy, even though he's black! What courage we have!

"Players have to break the isolation the crowd is imposing on Goodes by re-solidarising, and collectively walking off. Both sides, for five minutes, each time mass and targeted booing starts."

That was the dynamic of Goodes' calling out of the 13-year-old fan who called him an "ape". She apologised, and Goodes accepted it. It should have ended there, but for the visuals. She looked like someone who came to the footy to get what a lot of such people want -- the chance to be part of a roaring crowd, a big beast, and to forget for a few hours the sense of crushing inferiority that the world is happy to hand out to many. Their collective rounding on Goodes is their revenge for that stark moment, when a whole series of social relations were laid bare. Put simply, they have never forgiven him for forgiving her, for rising above, in a way that they find impossible to do.

So this whiny, neurotic, honking goes on. It's about race in this instance, but not merely about race. The same thing will happen when gay AFL players start to come out; it will happen if and when women start to play in AFL teams. Goodes is Gillard, Gillard is Nicky Winmar, and so the chain goes back and back. The sound is the great howl of the left-behind, watching as a new world is made around them by the people they could hitherto feel superior to without any effort on their own part.

Much of the animus towards Goodes has been promoted by Andrew Bolt, who has made that whiny white put-down-ness his stock in trade, channelled from a heritage -- Dutch neo-Calvinism -- refined and perfected over a century. It's a post-settler form of white-skin privilege, not asserting its superiority, but perpetually expressing a purported fear of its own annihilation. It's inevitable, too, that Alan Jones would want in, the perpetual hanger-around, a jowly Miss Jean Brodie of a thousand rugby league changing rooms, a man whose identity is so close to the edge that he seems to believe the moment he stops talking he will cease to exist. The booing crowd are their cheer squad. How much more fun this is than actually watching the game!

Yet such behaviour is a genuine dilemma for organisations like the AFL, even if its reaction was the perfect picture of amiable, over-promoted white guys well out of their depth ("Er, I'm not sure the lynching was racist, but I'd urge people to stop it ..."). For until about 25 years ago, most institutions remained immune from the social changes of the 1960s. One by one they've all fallen. Every setting is now a site of social and cultural war. That is a path to liberation, but it's an exhausting one. It's also had institutions like the AFL take on the role of behaviour management that governments have been willing to take on in every area of our lives. Trouble is, faced with a concerted social act like the verbal tarring-and-feathering of Goodes, they can't not do anything. Forty years ago, all they needed to do was provide a pie warmer and a bucket of orange quarters. Now they have to be a mass social-psychological management outfit.

That has two effects, here and elsewhere. The first is to drain all spontaneity and joy out of any social activity, which is what we're well in the middle of now . The second, related to that, is to give condemned social acts such as the booing a cachet and meaning. They now become an assertion against the AFL, the pointyheads, the commentators, on behalf of the unruly and anarchic mob who will make their own laws. While the AFL scrambles around with ideas for more anti-racism training, counsellors, spraying the crowd with Lexapro, etc, etc, they revel in the problem they're creating for them -- especially since the selling point of football is its (illusory) anarchic, unruly nature. There is no doubt -- and this is diagnosis and not excuse -- that the AFL's parallel willingness to become a sort of agent of social/cultural/behavioural change, rather than an outfit that just plays football, has contributed to this miserable, frustrating, joyless social war that actually crowds out the kicking around of a pigskin.

So what is to be done? The short answer, and the general rule for such social wars, is that nothing can be done by using more abstract powers, more behavioural manipulation to create a compliant subject. Such things can only be tackled on the same level that they occur, on the ground. This is an attack on a player by the crowd, and it can only be resisted by the players acting collectively and defining this apparent cultural problem for what it really is, an industrial issue. Adam Goodes is being cut off and mozzed by a crowd who know what its doing: drawing away the psychic energy necessary to play first-grade football to the necessary psychic defence that anyone must put up against such open assault.

Players have to break the isolation the crowd is imposing on Goodes by re-solidarising, and collectively walking off. Both sides, for five minutes, each time mass and targeted booing starts. Doubtless it would be tough to get all 40 players on both sides to come off -- but it would really only take 10 in total, five and five, to throw the game into turmoil. It wouldn't have to happen too much before one side of the crowd sorted the other one out. (I note Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane has suggested the same thing, although more as a warning to the AFL than as an eager advocacy of turmoil, which is my take. Apparently, no amount of bizarre social phenomena will convince Tim that you can't manage patriotism by having a social-technocratic elite set a list of approved patriotic characteristics and presume people will stick to them.)

Well, Goodes won't be playing this weekend. He may even quit early. When the kid called him an "ape" what he talked about was the degree of hurt. Not anger, hurt. That there is no respect for the simple universality of the game, that anyone can play it, that it is an inherently humanist activity. The crowd booing was an attempt not merely to break his spirit, but to break his heart, a mob's revenge on those who rise above bitterness when they themselves cannot. No one now can turn that around but the players, becoming again workers, comrades and team members rather than commodities and servants to the spectacle.

[dejavoodoo44]

--- But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people?s eyes, reproach them of their blindness -- (John Milton, 1642)

This quote which appeared in the book 'Manufacturing Consent' has had a considerable influence on my thinking about disadvantaged people in society.

Most Australians will deny they are racist or are booing Adam Goodes because he is aboriginal, which is probably true at a certain level. What Adam has done that has set people off is to put into historical context how Aboriginal People came find themselves in the position they do. White Australia wants to believe that the problems of poor health, alcoholism and crime facing the Aboriginal community are a result of their character and has nothing to do with White Australians, who certainly shouldn't be blamed for what happened over a hundred years ago. Very few White Australians had anything to do with the tragedy of the stolen generation, so why should they be held to account for the consequences?

Most White Australians, like myself, can't find anything they did to personally to contribute to Aboriginal disadvantage. So it's easy to take the position that since we are not to blame, why should pay any price. I've lived 15 years in the U.S. and 5 in France, and in both countries white people have the same 'it's not my fault' attitude toward people of colour, although the historical circumstances differ in all 3 countries.

It is primarily White Australians who are themselves struggling to make ends meet that are most reluctant to cut Indigenous People any slack for their own circumstances. This is consistent with like demographics in the U.S. and France.

The likes of Alan Jones and Miranda Devine feed upon this demographic for their audience. They have success in their jobs because they know how to play this situation to advance their own popularity. They focus on the points that Adam Goodes is a well paid Aboriginal Australian who takes advantage of a disadvantaged girl, thus reversing the broader demographic of the respective communities as a whole.

The most confronting part of what Adam Goodes does is to suggest, by reminding us of the historical context, that White Australia, particularly those who are themselves struggling to survive in difficult times, might have to give up something to lessen the institutional disadvantage of Aboriginal People. It is much easier to boo Adam Goodes to vent one's frustrations than to go to work on Monday and tell the boss to @@@@ off.

Those who benefit from the status quo would prefer these matters never get discussed. That's why it's swept under the carpet. It takes a very special person to put his hand in the fire over and over again to bring to the fore these important issues. Adam Goodes is such a person. It would be so easy for him to take the money and run. He didn't have to go through the suffering he has endured.

I sat a long time trying to come up with another Australian that I respect more than Adam Goodes. In my mind, he is the greatest of them all.

Excellent post, Ludwig, well done.

[Wardy]

I'm loving how Robbo went public last night and said "I despise Alan Jones" - bravo Robbo!!!! And I'm debating the trolls but not resorting to using their foul language (even though I have the vocab of a sailor on occasions!!????????) they cant respond with reasoned argument.

[barry]

Immeasurable harm being done to AFL and Aussie Rules by this issue. Not to mention Adam himself. This sucks.

Yep AFL is now the bogan sport. Below rugby league.

I was trying to think of a similar level of bullying and its just come to me. Anyone remember the "hadlee's a wanker" chants? Another disgraceful blight on us.

[Swanstubbs]

They keep bring up "the 13 yr old girl". Goodes didn't know her age when he pointed her out and when he subsequently found out her age said "I just hope that people give the 13 year old girl the same sort of support because she needs it, her family needs it, and the people around them need it. "It's not a witch-hunt, I don't want people to go after this young girl. "We've just got to help educate society better so it doesn't happen again."

Both this incident and the spear throwing incident occurred during the once a year AFL indigenous rounds. When can an indigenous AFL player speak out if not then???

As a Swans fan I've watched Goodes on TV his whole career and the boos started at away games only since the 13 year old incident every time he touch the ball. Not when he was in his prime as a player, or only when he could have milked a free, every time he touch the ball - so the people booing are either racists or sheep.

Waleed Ally sums it up for me "It's about the fact that Australia is generally a very tolerant society until its minorities demonstrate that they don't know their place. And at that moment, the minute someone in a minority position acts as though they're not a mere supplicant, then we lose our minds. And we say, 'No, no, you've got to get back in your box here'."

[goswannies]

Ok, my faith in human nature has been a little restored today.

I had a number of people ask me why Adam is bring booed. I explained why I perceived it was the case. Afterward the majority replied along the lines of "oh, well that's really not ok" & they could see why this is a big issue.
In fact, I discussed it with a someone about 9am. He phoned me back about 230pm to tell me he had been thinking about it for much of the day and he was now quite disturbed by the situation. I told him I was glad he was thinking about it & why the situation was unacceptable & that if it really bothered him, he should discuss it with others. He assured me he intended to. If he does, I think that there is a flicker of hope.