Tag: racism

No Australian should stand for inequality

Posted on by Martin Newman

Trash talk precedes most big fights. Boxers have to sell seats and the more bums on them the better their payday.

Anthony Mundine’s no stranger to that. He’s been stirring the pot his whole career, drumming up business, psyching out his opponents, giving the public the loud mouth anti-hero some genuinely hate, while others look beyond the words to the fighter, the athlete.

Unlike most scrappers, though, Mundine has rarely wasted these opportunities (which are fewer and further between for him) by talking up simple rivalries.

Five years ago he caused controversy by disputing fellow boxer Daniel Geale’s very Aboriginality.

There has never been anything mundane about Mundine.

Instead he’s used that time as a platform to push debate around indigenous life and to hopefully change it for the better.

He has vowed to sit down during the playing of the national anthem at his rematch with Danny Green on Friday night, calling it “disrespectful” to his people.

And as an Australian, let alone an Aboriginal one, he has every right to do that.

If, as is mooted, promoters get around this by having the anthem played before he enters the ring it would be another stain on this country’s already tarnished history of race relations.

It would be a greater disgrace than what some perceive is Mundine’s snub to Advance Australia Fair.

Mundine should absolutely be allowed to get in that ring and sit on his seat while the anthem is sung. As the headlining boxer he deserves to have that moment – to be more than a piece of meat, making a small fortune for the promoters.

He deserves to be able to rankle the masses and let them know where he stands as an individual, and maybe make them think a bit longer about what it really means to be Australian – both white and black.

Our headlining Aboriginal sportsmen are the ones who get the most column inches when they speak on these issues, even though they are shouted down.

Adam Goodes, one of the most eloquent sports people when talking about racism and the toll of white Australia on native Australians, has paid the price. Derided, bullied, beaten down.

The fact of the matter is there has never been a level playing field for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, and we have a long way to go before we get one.

It is not, as Barnaby Joyce insists, about having to say ‘sorry’ for ancestors like his who came to the country as immigrants and had nothing to do with colonial massacres.

It’s simply about recognising things are not fair and working towards making them so.

It’s kinda in the title: Advance Australia Fair.

Only the anthem doesn’t mean ‘fair go’ it means things being nice, good, palatable.

Well it’s not ‘nice’ that indigenous Australians live on average 17 years less than non-indigenous. Nor is it ‘good’ that Aboriginal women are 58 times more likely to be held in police custody than white women. It’s not ‘palatable’ that suicide rates among the indigenous population are three times higher than for everyone else. It’s certainly not ‘fair’.

That’s not the fairness Australia is meant to be about. It’s meant to be about equality.

Equality for blacks and whites, for Asians, for women, for gays and anyone else born with the same irrefutable rights as the next person.

Mundine will continue taking the hits and speaking his mind. And I hope for all Australians, come Friday, that he is allowed to sit on his stool as the anthem rings out and make his point.

That would really advance Australia fair.

Serena’s simply the best – across all tennis

Posted on by Martin Newman

She’s the best tennis player of her generation.

And I’m not just talking about the women’s game. It’s not just Sharapova or Clijsters or Henin or her sister Venus she has trumped. Serena Williams has made the men’s champs Federer, Nadal and Djokovic look like also-rans.

She’s better than the lot. And it’s time she got some love.

Serena now stands on the verge of being the greatest player of all time as she attempts to win a calendar grand slam at the US Open in eight weeks’ time, which will equal the record of Steffi Graf and put her two away from reeling in Margaret Court.

Few doubt she will do it.

Despite this, the women’s world number one has rarely been a favourite with the crowd or the media.

She’s familiar with the fact the fans are more often on her opponent’s side — the underdog. She has taken the jibes about her muscularity, knowing that many tennis fans seem to think she has an almost unfair physical advantage.

And through all that, though it must have rankled, she has remained gracious and good-natured.

When the Williams sisters burst on the scene, they were given plenty of stick. As the two softly-spoken girls from Florida cut a swathe through the mostly white ranks of the professional women’s circuit there was an edge of panic in the media and the establishment.

It was rarely verbalised but the underlying issue was race. Was this the point where the prowess of black athletes transformed the sanctity of a comfortably closed shop for white people? Like the 100m sprint at the Olympics, like the ranks of the heavyweight boxing champions once dominated by preternaturally large Italians, Jews and Irish. The same went for Tiger Woods and golf.

It was given voice at the 2001 Indian Wells Masters when the crowd turned on Serena and her family in the gallery. After Venus withdrew from her match with an injury, father Richard was accused of pulling her out so Serena could win. The sour grapes that bubbled beneath the surface vented spitefully and unfairly. The mask dropped. The sisters boycotted Indian Wells.

In the media, Richard was portrayed as a stage parent, living out his dreams through his children, driving them obsessively. Even his presence with wife Oracene at their matches was questioned, with the implication he had too much control over his prodigious daughters.

Though it seemed from the outside to be a close, stable, loving family, efforts were made to destabilise that and to bring the Williams sisters down a notch.

The dynamic of their relationship was also brought into question. ‘They were rivals who hated to lose to one another’. Venus, who initially was the dominant player of the two, was said to be ‘hurt’ by her little sister’s success.

And all of this bedded in over time.

Venus ultimately became more accepted the more she lost. Her tally of seven grand slams, while incredible, would never threaten the established hegemony in tennis.

But Serena didn’t stop, she went on winning.

Unlike the other top tennis players, she picked and chose her events with an eye more on the quality of her own life. She avoided much of the WTP tour to pop up at a grand slam and take it home with her. In the past 15 grand slams she has won eight. Only Federer’s run of 11 in 16 between 2004 and 2007 is better in the modern era.

With her Wimbledon win she became the oldest woman to hold all grand slam titles simultaneously.

And yet it is not even the records, but her manner of winning that has set her apart — speed on the court, agility, strength and more than anything, grit.

(Originally published in RendezView)

New Literalism: How internet misfittery is warping the news

Posted on by Martin Newman

Someone apologised on Tuesday, although they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Unusual you might say, but it’s something we’re going to see a lot more of.

The reason for that is we have come to a time when misinformation, supposition and the tidal bores of online outrage are treated in the media with the same reverence as fact – provided they have an audience.

In the massively expanded and ever expanding world of online social networking and commentary there is now a sizeable section of the community who take everything they find on the internet at face value and who do not inquire. This amorphous, shape-shifting group regards what they see online, mistakes and all, literally and farms it out as fact to their connections.

Context has been thrown away for many people online and in its place is a new and dangerously ignorant reality.

By the time art collector Dasha Zhukova issued her grovelling apology on Tuesday afternoon for having been photographed sitting on a Bjarne Melgaard chair in the form of a black woman, millions of people around the world had already got a completely wrong opinion of her.

It was fuelled by the media, who reported the ‘outrage’ of regular people, which it then stoked and re-reported on. Many publishers seemed to leave out crucial information that would have explained the context of the photo, perhaps to not diminish the suggestion of racism.

Some punters even thought the chair was a real woman, made to pose semi-naked in subjugation.

And as if the existence of the picture, published digitally on the pop culture website Buro 24/7 about Garage magazine (of which Zhukova is editor), might not be enough to stir people up, others proffered that it had been doubly offensive coming on Martin Luther King Day (or MLK Day).

Nevermind that this was a Russian website and MLK Day is only celebrated in the US, and oddly Hiroshima and Toronto, and that elsewhere in the world few people are aware of it.

Online those boundaries are forgotten and made indistinguishable.

The digital community in the US, and quick to follow the media, quickly concluded this was some added racist slight by backward Europeans.

And because of this US-centric addition to the controversy the rest of the world suddenly was given the impression that the entire event had occurred in America rather than in cyberspace somewhere over the Urals.

Few people saw it for what it was – an edgy piece of political art designed to underline Zhukova’s serious industry credentials as a collector of modern art.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but not a malicious or even clumsy act of bigotry.

Created by the New York-based Norwegian artist and sculptor Bjarne Melgaard the piece first appeared at a Paris exhibition last year, titled Empire State, New York Art Now.

Because it deliberately and closely referenced the 1960s forniphilia (human furniture) works of British sculptor Allen Jones, who created similar works with white women as subjects, it was not at the time regarded as racist.

At the height of Pop Art Jones, now aged 76, created a series of furniture pieces based on bound white women, that inspired the sexualised female props in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

But in Tuesday’s digital furore few knew this or bothered to find it out. Instead this one unexplained picture fuelled a completely unnecessary racism row.

Zhukova, the partner of billionaire Roman Abramovich, and the publishers of Buro 24/7 fell on their swords, aware once the ball was rolling no sensible explanation would be enough to satisfy the online hornets’ nest that had been stirred up. While drawing a line under it their apologies, though, only gave those way-off claims of racism the appearance of credibility.

On Wednesday, the story is front page news and the truth even more obscured amidst the blustering, ignorant hubbub.

But this is hardly an isolated incident.

Increasingly misinformation peddled online is being repeated enough to make people believe it. And if enough people believe it the media starts to report it as though it were real.

In the past week a picture reportedly of a Syrian child sleeping between the graves of his parents swept the internet. It seemed to perfectly and dramatically underline the futile loss of lives in the Syrian conflict and further condemn the country’s leadership.

The only problem was it wasn’t a Syrian child and they weren’t graves. The picture set up and taken in Saudi Arabia by an artist had been appropriated because it fit the subject matter the original disseminator wanted to convey.

When photographer Abdul Aziz al Otaibi contacted the person who had first deliberately misrepresented it on Twitter as an example of Syrian atrocities, the response he got was: “Why don’t you just let go and claim it is a picture from Syria and gain a reward from God.”

The damage, in any case, had already been done with more people viewing the viral image than will ever read the truth about it.

On a less important level this week there was also the ‘bikini bridge’ hoax, picked up by the mainstream media as fact.

Writing in the Telegraph, Radhika Sangani noted: “Apparently all it takes for the internet to believe something is a trend is a few celebs tweets, blog posts and a hashtag.. behind all of this is something much darker: we all believed it because it sounds plausible.”

And commenting on the number of hoax YouTube videos reported as fact in the press last year Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post described 2013 as “the year the media decisively elevated social media phenomenon, real or imagined, to the level of actual news”.

She cited the cheapness of sourcing it, the growth of social media and the lust for page views – tactics pioneered by high turnover news sites like Mail Online.

The often valueless sourcing of opinion from Twitter has meant you can find anyone online for comment on a particular angle to a story.

Gone are the days where a journalist would always seek out an expert in a field for their view. Now they take their pick from any number of anonymous postings, no matter how ill-informed, biased or stark-raving mad they are.

Reaction, any reaction, is reportable, no matter how right or wrong it is.

And now that everyone has a voice to express themselves the new literalists even make objections to the use of metaphors. No article can run online today describing a rivalry as a ‘war’ without several po-faced readers commenting self-righteously that war is nothing like that and the author’s an idiot for suggesting it.

The value of harnessing an online audience for news outlets has never been greater. We now measure the success and therefore the value of companies by the membership or readership they command. And it is so large now papers and broadcasters are unable to preclude it from mainstream news.

Unfortunately the upshot is facts, context and the full story have increasingly become a casualty.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post. Illustration: Internet Painting by Miltos Manetas)

Is Australia racist? Anthony Mundine says ‘Yes’

Posted on by Martin Newman

He boastfully calls himself ‘The Man’ – it oughta be ‘The Mouth’.

Australia’s most controversial sportsman, boxer Anthony Mundine, has a track record of putting his foot in it or, in the Aussie vernacular, shit-stirring.

Accused of racism himself in the past week for effectively telling a fellow Aboriginal boxer that he wasn’t black enough, Mundine came out and laid all his cards on the table over the issue.

The country itself was racist, its institutions were racist and its flag and its anthem excluded Aboriginals, the 37-year-old claimed.

It was the kind of red rag to a bull remark that Mundine is good at making.

In Australia, where he polarises opinion between those that can’t stand that ‘big mouth’ and those who admire a talent that’s seen him win three world titles at two weights, reaction to his comments was quick and mostly negative.

‘Below the belt’ opined one article, focusing on his ill-chosen words to rival boxer Daniel Geale, while an Aboriginal campaigner rather hysterically branded him a ‘neo-Nazi’.

The much-liked Geale, the current WBA and IBF middleweight champion, is a descendent of Tasmanian aborigines, most of whom were wiped out in the 1830s in perhaps the most near to comprehensive genocide ever pursued against a people that we know of.

Mundine at first disputed if there was such a thing as a Tasmanian Aborigine because of that genocide, but later retracted his remarks.

He was accused of shock tactics and several of his sporting peers, Aboriginals included, denounced him and trumpeted the usual line that he should just play his sport and keep his mouth shut.

But Mundine didn’t back off too far and used the opportunity of apologising to turn the accusations around and launch an embarrassing attack on his country’s race record.

In a counter move similar to Australian PM Julia Gillard’s own recent robust attack on the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s alleged ‘misogyny’, Mundine told reporters: “Everyone that comes here, and a lot of my close friends and family members, we feel that Australia is one of the most racist countries.

“I want to move forward, I want to unite the people.

”We’ve never had any representation on the flag, yet I see representation of the Union Jack, something that symbolises the invasion, the murder, the pillaging, and on and on. I think we need to address that – it’s dividing Australia, rather than uniting Australia.

“At the moment, I can’t fly it. And I want to fly the Australian flag. I want to fly it for the Australian people. But let’s do it together.”

He went on to describe the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, as a legacy of the White Australia policy.

He added: ”I think that we need to move forward together, unite together, move forward as people, move forward as Australians, no matter what you are – brown, black, brindle, white – and move forward together.”

What of those comments though? And how valid are they?

Australia’s Aboriginal population is relatively small, 517,000 at the last census, about 2.5% of the population**, with three-quarters residing in cities and country towns, while 25% live in remote communities.

Despite a decent welfare system nowadays the life-expectancy of Aboriginals is about 17 years less than the national average*, a statistic that is twice as bad as comparable nations with an indigenous population.

Unemployment among Aboriginals is three times higher than the non-indigenous population** and Aboriginal women are 58 times more likely to be held in police custody than non-Aboriginals – for Aboriginal men it is 28 times higher***.

Alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and, in some communities, child abuse are endemic problems. The rate that Aboriginals are admitted to hospital, commit suicide or are diagnosed with mental health problems or disease is between two and three times higher than the non-indigenous population****.

All of these facts point to problems that are either not being addressed properly or not being addressed at all.

And the level of indifference to Aboriginals by the non-indigenous population has only begun to turn around in the past decade or two.

In Australia a national Sorry Day has been held every year since 1998 and four years ago the then prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament for laws and policies that “had inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss” for Aborigines. The previous incumbent John Howard had refused to make an official apology and was backed by about one in three Australians.

Foremost in Rudd’s mind was the controversy over the ‘stolen generation’ of children.

In reality the term used to describe them represented many generations of Aboriginal children, forcibly taken from their families from the 1900s to the 1960s and given to white families to raise in a heartless and bureaucratic attempt at integration.

But the apology was also for the numerous bloody, one-sided massacres committed by settlers, whalers, sealers, police detachments and the British armed forces, carried out since the early days of colonisation right up until the late 1920s.

While the benefits system is now supportive of Aboriginals, they were not entitled to a pension and other welfare until 1959.

It was not until 1962 that Aboriginals nationally were given the right to vote and it was only made compulsory, in line with the non-indigenous population, in 1983. There were bans on Aboriginals entering some town centres, right up until 1948 when the Western Australia capital Perth finally relented.

Among Mundine’s incendiary comments was the claim that Geale didn’t represent the Aboriginal community, citing his ‘white’ wife and kids.

He told a press conference for the fight: “I don’t see him representing black people, or coloured people. I don’t see him in the communities, I don’t see him doing the things I do to people, and fighting for the people. But he’s his own man. He’s got a white woman, he’s got white kids. I keep it real, all day every day.”

To outside observers it was a bit like Muhammad Ali’s portrayal of Joe Frasier and George Foreman as white stooges, part trash talk, but with the kernel of a real issue buried far beneath.

Explaining it later he added: “I wasn’t attacking her (Geale’s wife), or attacking her race. My outlook is, as an Aboriginal man, our people, we’re probably the most endangered species. We’re a dying race, and we’ve just got to embrace our sisters. There’s too many footy stars and too many other stars in powerful positions that don’t. And I don’t know why. That’s how we’re going to keep our people going.’

“Our women are the backbone of our community, and the Aboriginal community is weak if our women are weak, we need to bring our women up with us and embrace that.

“Our mortality rate is far worse than our birth rate. We are probably one of the only races on Earth like that right now.”

As crass as it seemed to direct those comments at the amiable Geale it was the type of view once espoused in 1960s America by Black Power activists – respect the sisters, nurture your own race, don’t fall victim to trying to meet the expectations of the majority.

Mundine has been attracting attention since the early 90s when he had his first amateur fights aged 17.

A top junior rugby league player at the time he was also the son of Tony Mundine, a fearsome hard-hitting Aboriginal middleweight boxer who had fought the legendary Carlos Monzon and ‘Bad’ Bennie Briscoe among others.

From an early stage in his life there was some air of anticipation about what Anthony Mundine would achieve, having already been earmarked as a gifted athlete in at least three sports (there was talk of him playing in Australia’s National Basketball League).

Since those early mutterings of potential Mundine’s won 44 fights and given up a successful career in rugby league, where he represented NSW in the game’s teak-tough State of Origin series.

He’s now 37 and, perhaps too late, is trying to attract some big money fights in the U.S. where it’s taken more than a decade for the heat to go out of acrimony at remarks he made blaming the country’s foreign policy for the 9/11 attacks.

And the Mundine mouth has continued to see the boxer run foul of the press and public.

But Aboriginal Australians need champions and not just successful sports people that tick all the right boxes for the white community. They need individuals with a profile that are prepared to speak up.

Mundine may not be the most eloquent orator, and he may not be the obvious choice as a mouthpiece for political change in Australia, but maybe he has a decent point or two to make.

Does that dour Federation-era anthem reflect anything about Australia today?

Should the country keep flying one of the many identikit flags that dot the South Pacific featuring the Union Jack in the top corner?

And do its people care enough about the Aboriginals to improve their life expectancy and their general well-being to a point equal to their own?

National Sorry Day (now called the the Day of Healing) is worth nothing if it’s just an apology for a distant past.

If Aboriginal kids continue to grow up with few opportunities and little self-esteem what good is saying ‘sorry’ to make ourselves feel better?

More people like Mundine are needed to start talking about solutions.

And not just Aboriginals – white folk too.

* Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

** Australian Bureau of Statistics

*** Australian Institute of Criminology

**** The Medical Journal of Australia

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)