OPINION
If something is true, then it is true in all circumstances. If rape is a crime, then it is a crime, without exception. If racism is wrong in itself, then it is wrong in all circumstances.
Things may be ‘morally grey’, but that doesn’t change the truth or otherwise of the essential principle. We may find mitigating circumstances that might lead us to conclude that more or less odium should be heaped on the perpetrator, but the wrongness of the act itself does not and cannot change.
Too often, though, people are tempted to try and get around this truth because they want to excuse someone they approve of, while they would vociferously condemn someone whom they don’t for doing the same thing.
In such cases, I always advise: Flip the script.
If it is racist for, say, a white sports star to call a ‘person of colour’ a ‘stupid black bastard’, then it’s racist for a ‘person of colour’ sports star to call a white person a ‘stupid white bastard’. Mitigating circumstances, if any, don’t change the inherent moral wrongness of the act. If racism is wrong, then it is wrong in all circumstances.
Enter the left media…
Former Socceroo Craig Foster has called on Football Australia to strip Matildas superstar Sam Kerr of her captaincy if it is confirmed that she called a UK police officer a “stupid white bastard”, to show how seriously the sport takes racism.
He is absolutely right. Rugby star Spencer Leniu is facing suspension for using a racial slur against another player. For the last few years, sports players have regularly ‘taken the knee’ to signal their abhorrence of racism.
But some experts argue that labelling the alleged remark as racist simplifies and trivialises the true definition of racism.
Kerr was reported to have been sick in a cab after a night out in London on January 30 last year before she was alleged to have racially harassed a police officer who had been called to the scene to intervene. The 30-year-old, who is of Indian descent, fronted a London court on Monday to plead not guilty and is fighting to have the charge of racially aggravated harassment of the officer thrown out.
She is accused of using insulting, threatening or abusive words that caused alarm or distress to an officer in Twickenham, south-west London.
In fact, trying to excuse racism, just because you approve of the racist, trivialises the true definition of racism. But the left, like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, know that too often the true meanings of words prove the laughable illogicality of their arguments. So they try and make words mean what they want them to mean. Nowhere is this mendacity more obvious than when it comes to racism.
Racism, according to the standard English reference work, is: The belief that there are different races of people with different characteristics and abilities, and that some races are better than others; a general belief about a whole group of people based only on their race.
According to mendacious leftist academics, the standard English reference work is wrong.
Victoria University professor Mario Peucker, an expert in multiculturalism and far-right extremism, said that while there was no doubt that Kerr’s alleged remark contained a racial element, it could not be classified as racist.
“Racism, in its briefest form, is prejudice plus institutional power,” Peucker said.
The Age
The puckered arsehole here is parroting the made-up definition of racism the left cooked up in order to get around the inconvenient fact that their chosen victim groups are often very, very racist. Far more racist, in fact, than their hated white men (a hate which is racist in itself).
But even if we were to accept their fake definition, their argument falls apart under its own logic.
Sam Kerr is a wealthy, high-profile, international sports star. She captained World Cup teams and currently plays for one of the best-known teams in the world. She features regularly in the media, is endorsed by some of the world’s biggest corporations and even become the first female player to adorn the cover of a best-selling video game. She is immensely institutionally powerful.
(Arguing that she cannot have power solely by virtue of being a ‘woman of colour’ is in itself not just racist, but appallingly sexist, as well.)
She was abusing a cab driver and a beat cop. The power imbalance was overwhelmingly one-sided. She was clearly prejudiced against the driver’s and the policeman’s race.
Ergo, Sam Kerr is a racist.
If professional sport takes racism as seriously as it claims, she must be dealt with every bit as severely as a white male player guilty of the same offence.