(Some wisdom from one of my favourite sports journalists)

Talking in circles as a word loses its meaning

Greg Baum | May 22, 2008

'RACIST" has become the put-down of the day, the retort on every lippy lip, the chic insult. It is flung about as freely, reflexively and indiscriminately as "bastard" and "prick". It has become such a common epithet that it has lost all its meaning. It is no more than six letters, arranged in a particular order.

Just as "bastard" no longer signifies someone with colourful parentage, and "prick" no longer denotes male appendage, "racist" has lost its meaning, too. Only obliquely does it connote someone who subscribes blindly to an idea of racial supremacy. Only incidentally does it define an abhorrent disposition.

Not every utterance that refers to the difference between peoples is racist. Comedians get great mileage from the fact. So, for that matter, do historians. Yet we have become so PC that to describe anyone in terms of his or her race - for better or worse - is not permissible. Gillian Hibbins ties herself in knots toeing this line. The way she tells it, the early settlers were racist for their scorn of the Aborigines, and Adam Goodes is racist for his exaltation of them.

During the aggrieved summer just completed, variously Harbhajan Singh was a racist, Andrew Symonds was a racist, the Australian crowds were racist, the Indian public was racist. Everyone was a racist, and everyone else who said so was a racist, too. Consequently, the word has no intrinsic, pejorative sense any more; it offends only because it is known to cause offence. It is a catch-all jab at someone or thing who somehow is confronting, or at least different, or holds a different view.

Age journalists were assailed for their depiction of Hawthorn's Lance Franklin in a paper produced last year by a Monash University academic Stella Coram. It is a specious work.

It chides The Age for describing Franklin in one article as "uncoachable", in another as "child-like" in the way he claps his hands upon kicking a goal. It infers stereotyping of indigenous people. It infers racism.

Colleague Emma Quayle notes that Brendan Fevola also has been labelled child-like in these pages, and Peter Everitt uncoachable, and many other players regularly described in unflattering terms. Evidently, Coram saw no problem then. She saw what she wanted to see. But the world does not divide as neatly on the ground as it does when gazed upon from an ivory tower.

Anyone who believes in the superiority of one race over another is a dangerous fool, and the world has had to work hard to rid itself of such idealogues. But is it so impossible, so reprehensible, to think that we all are different, and each people has its strengths and weaknesses, and that this is something worth celebrating? The AFL did once. One in a series of ads in a campaign to bring people back to football urged people to come to watch some "black magic". Of course, the league was assailed for being racist.

East Africans are superlative endurance runners, west Africans good at sprinting; this is well-established. To some minds, Goodes might have been fanciful in ascribing his people's aptitude for football to their connection to the land. But the aptitude is fact: Aborigines are more representative on AFL lists than in the population at large by a factor of four or five.

Everyone belongs to a race, so all criticism is in its way racist, and for that matter, all appreciation. Plainly, that cannot be.

But slowly, we are arguing ourselves to such a standstill that to refer to a footballer's aboriginality is wrong, and not to refer to it is wrong, too. The first can only be a stereotype, the second a denial. Goodes is a magnificent footballer, a magnificent Aboriginal footballer. Of course, saying so makes me a racist, but it hardly matters. No one knows what the word means any more.