The ongoing debate over the booing of Adam Goodes not only casts a poor light on the mentality of crowds but it reveals a deeper problem with the nation’s ability to maturely approach its own weaknesses. The usual squawking media commentators have come out to criticize Goodes for playing the victim card. Ironic when he is in fact the victim of racial targeting. Only those who have known that position can claim it. Moreover he comes from a race that is very much history’s victims. It is easy as part of the safe majority, blissfully wrapped in ignorance, to use a label like “victim culture” to dismiss otherwise incomprehensible suffering and unimaginable outrage.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The heart of the matter is why a crowd boos a player. The simple answer to that is they don’t like them. In the past this has been generated by poor performance or poor sportsmanship or even a little of that vaudevillian dislike of the arch villain. While there is something of the theatre of the grotesque about modern sport, there is also something more complicated here. Goodes is an over performer and the protests against his sportsmanship are quibbles that smack too much of overjustification; a subsequent feint to distract from the initiating nastiness of all this. On that point there can be little doubt that an originating element of the reaction to Goodes is racial because of precisely who Goodes is; the AFL’s most outspoken and distinguished aboriginal player. The more he takes pride in who he is - the more it riles the idiot crowd. The mob mentality takes over from then on. No doubt half of the dolts who join in the chorus have no idea why they are booing. Like the cries form the pit, the euphoria of the make-believe world of sport sweeps them along with its emotion, carried by the comforting and craven energy of the mob until they are crying for blood without exactly knowing why. But what fun! What sport!
Alas, if it all were only make believe! The arch villain is again the man of dark colors, the unsettling Caliban to be singled out and exiled. This isn’t all theatrical antics when a root cause is the more sinister antagonism towards difference, the man from the minority who is discomfitingly defiant. Most people would find this unacceptable behaviour, but somehow on the arena of sport or perhaps because of it it is not a glimpsed reality we want to face.