Good reason to be dark

It's been a long week in footy. Rex Hunt gets tongue tied during 3AW's broadcast of the Essendon v Collingwood match and ends up with 'Neon (Davis) Leon's as black as a dog' and all hell breaks loose. Naturally, the Collingwood pres, Eddie McGuire, was so annoyed he convened a meeting with Davis and Hunt. Rex, of course, went on to tell everyone he wasn't racist. Did anyone say he was? And of course Rex gave us the 'if I've hurt anyone' apology. Just to round it off, Mick Malthouse then told Sam Newman on Nine's Footy Show that 'until you sample racism….you don't understands it'.

All this might indicate that we've come alongway. Remember when the Collingwood president Alan McAllister suggested that if 'Blacks behaved like whites' they might have an easier life? Remember when Carlton president John Elliott said Aborigines were a forgotten people who'd never worked the land like white farmers? Remember when Sam Newman painted his face black on the Footy Show in some allusion to Blacks going 'walkabout'? Remember when some AFL players said that sledging, even racist sledging, was just part of the game?

In this context, Rex Hunt's comments might appear to be at the low end of the insult scale. Even so, why is every such apology prefaced by the 'if I hurt anybody' line? Wouldn't the more appropriate response be 'I now fully understand why indigenous footballers take offence at such comments'?
Isn't the reason indigenous Australians are sensitive to the way white fellas talk about them because racism has a history in Australia? Weren't many indigenous Australians taken from their families? Aren't they at the bottom of the health and income pile? And we've all seen the blokes with a beer gut hanging over the belt and a tinnie in the hand delivering torrents of racist abuse. Given the history of race relations in this country, being called a 'black ***' is hardly the same as being called a fat pig.

Rex Hunt doesn't need to be 'cut to the bone' because he 'hurt a fellow human being'. A simple, 'it's a comment that belongs in a time when we were totally insensitive to how Blacks have been treated in this country' would probably have done the trick. Maybe one day the sporting world will realise that a white fella's apology is less important than a genuine understanding of why indigenous Australians like Michael Long and Maurice Rioli take a dim view of some comments. On this score it seems that Mick Malthouse is on the money. This leaves me with one more question. Why didn't someone ask Eddie McGuire how Rex Hunt's comments compared with Sam Newman's face painting episode?