Sam Kerr and the dangerous myth of ‘anti-white racism’
On Friday, an article lawyer, chair of Professional Footballers Australia and former Socceroo, Francis Awaritefe and I wrote about the accusations levelled against footballer Sam Kerr for 'racially aggravated harassment' against a police officer in the UK was published in The Guardian. An important part of our argument regarding British Conservative parliamentary candidate, Ben Obese-Jecty’s attack on a young Black man for a social media post didn’t make the cut, so I am sharing it here.
It is also worth mentioning former Socceroo and refugee advocate Craig Foster’s public apology. Foster originally came out against Kerr, saying ‘racism is racism’. But having had the opportunity to learn, including from Francis and my article, he has retracted his accusation of ‘anti-white racism’. This is good, but I note that in addition to apologising to Sam Kerr, it is the public which deserves an apology for being misled over what race and racism are.
I also note the journalist Tracey Holmes doubling down on her stance that Kerr should be treated as a perpetrator of racism before the law. Now, she has claimed that the matter has turned into a ‘culture war’. As Alex Charnley said during the interview he, Michael Richmond, and I did with Millennials are Killing Capitalism, “This Isn’t a Culture War, This Is a Class and Race Offensive.”
As the anti-fascist analyst Andy Fleming posted on X on March 6, the first time Western Australia's new racial vilification laws were applied in 2006 was in the case of an Indigenous teenager who called a woman a ‘white slut’. As reported in The Australian at the time, the law had come into effect in response to the Australian Nationalists Movement’s racist graffiti attacks on Perth's main synagogue and on businesses owned by Asians.
Since that time, the charge of ‘anti-white’ racism has become ever more prevalent as hard fought battles in the fight against racial discrimination and for greater racial literacy are being lost in the wider ‘war on woke’.
And so, it was of little surprise to antiracists when it was revealed that Matildas star and Chelsea striker, Sam Kerr’s charge of causing ‘racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress’ to a London police officer had been the result of her calling him a ‘stupid white bastard.’ Black, Indigenous and other people of colour all responded with variations on the theme of ‘I told you so.’ They have become used to being racially gaslit by the idea of ‘reverse’ or ‘anti-white racism,’ a phenomenon the comedian Aamer Rahman has pointed out would only make sense ‘if I had a time machine and I could go back in time to before Europe colonised the world and convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America to invade and colonise Europe, just to occupy them, steal their land and resources.’
In other words, in the dominant understanding of racism heavily promoted in the context of the ‘whitelash’ that met the global Black Lives Matter movement, racism has been stripped of what the sociologist Miri Song calls, its ‘history, severity and power.’ Racism is no longer the ideology that accompanies racial capitalist systems of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism; it becomes a matter of individual morality. Race, best understood as a technology which produces and maintains white supremacy as a global system of power is reduced to bad behaviour. This view has particularly dangerous ramifications in any case involving the police, an institution that has form when it comes to institutional racism with, often lethal, effects, as the number of deaths in custody in Australia attest.
The charge of ‘anti-white racism’ is increasingly legitimated in a political context in which a real commitment to antiracism is papered over by ersatz politics of representation. The UK government’s diverse ‘postracial’ leadership is committed to rolling back any commitment to dismantling systemic racism by referring to their own experiences as Black and Brown people who have had personal successes to deny its existence. Promoting a racially neoliberal ideology of ‘personal responsibility’ politicians like Kemi Badenoch play to a gallery of anti-woke warriors, using diversity against itself to vilify and criminalise other people of colour whose lives look nothing like that of the cabinet members, corporate high flyers, or indeed the right-wing think-tank pundits whose ideas pepper their speeches.
Explanations that Sam Kerr cannot be racist because she is of Indian origin do not go far enough in exposing the problem at stake. In the absence of a more structural and historical analysis, this view would also mean agreeing that the recent case of a young black man who sent a tweet with a raccoon emoji to the Black Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Ben Obese-Jecty was maliciously intentional. While the case was thrown out, Obese-Jecty’s abuse of power against the young man in a clear aim of contorting longstanding intercommunal Black critique into a matter of racism is a sign of how the law can be manipulated to completely undermine any antiracist purpose.
In both cases, it all boils down to subjectivity: that of a white police officer, whose actions towards Sam Kerr precipitating her remarks have gone uninterrogated, and a rising right-wing politician playing to the ‘all lives matter’ gallery.
The only reason we are hearing about this case at all is because Sam Kerr is a globally popular footballer, arguably even more so after these revelations. Nevertheless, as antiracist campaigners, in the worlds of education and sport, this case reveals the need for a greater public understanding of the function of racism in a world still divided by the colour line that W.E.B. Du Bois identified at the turn of the twentieth century. While individuals can cross the line and ascend to the dizzy heights earned by the likes of Kerr, on a mass scale, ‘the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’ still determines the extent of your vulnerability, as the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, to ‘premature death.’
Treating all forms of vilification involving people from either side of the colour line as racist does nothing to transcend the colour line. But it does serve a view which minimises racism to the benefit of a new class of postracial Black and Brown elites. In the fight ahead it seems at least we have Sam Kerr on our side!