The racism case that has polarised the NRL has raised difficult questions about what’s offensive and who gets to judge it.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.The adolescent Bernard Tuaimau was amused by Jonah Takalua. As an Australian teenager of Samoan heritage, Tuaimau could relate to the fictional 14-year-old Tongan-Australian on his television screen being rebellious around the grounds of the made-up Summer Heights High.
“So for another Pacific Islander to call me a ‘coconut’, I wouldn’t take offence to that. Whereas if a non-Pacific Islander was to say that to me, I would definitely take offence. And it’s no different to the character of Jonah because we’ve got a Caucasian who didn’t grow up with our lived experience trying to tell our story.”Bernard Tuaimau
The reclamation of derogatory terms can be seen all over the world. “Just listen to rap music,” says Karen Farquharson, professor of sociology and chair of the Anti-Racism Hallmark Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne. Black and brown artists have retaken the “n-----” slur in countless music and other popular culture examples.In Australia, “wog” has been increasingly used by groups of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern descent as a term of affection among equals.
“I was quite emotional talking about it,” Thurston said the day after the hearing. “It opened up a lot of scars for our people, and I know that Spencer’s come out, he’s owned it like he has, he’s apologised to Ezra, I understand he wants to have a face-to-face meeting with Ezra as well. “Because I know in the past when we’ve seen other cases – we constantly see reports in the AFL – it’s almost like we the spectator or person at the game because ‘they were just young’ or ‘they don’t know what they’re talking about’. We try and justify that use of the word towards that person in a way that discounts the responsibility of the word.
The answer, according to Farquharson, is a simple “no”. “There’s a whole theory in sociology called colourblind racism,” Farquharson says, “which by sort of invoking colourblindness – if it’s racist to say something about a non-white person, it’s also racist to say it about a white person. That completely ignores the power dynamics of racism, which serve to keep people of colour subordinates to white people out of positions of power lower in the racial hierarchy.
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