gary numan wrote:
We are trying to create a fully integrated society, we all agree (well most of us do) that discrimination due to race is completely wrong then we accept a massive contradiction where we allow teams that completely discriminate on race whereas if you are not the 'correct ' race you cannot play. What does history have to do with a modern day inclusive sport that gives it licence to discriminate?
The answer to your last is a matter of judgement and we might come to different conclusions. It would be nice, in some ways, to wipe the historical slate clean and start over - but it’d also be dishonest.
In the future, I think it is plausible that these teams may be looked at a little differently. Attitudes aren’t static.
When I look at historical racist practices in sport, and reasons why these teams don’t seem anywhere near as problematic as some others it comes down to a couple of things.
Is a more dominant group excluding a less dominant group on the basis of ‘racial superiority’ and/or to protect their dominance? Stuff like open segregation in US baseball and basketball up to 1947 come to mind. Or the Springboks refusing both to select or play against non-whites, up until they didn’t.
Or is it exploitative? Is it reinforcing the views of a dominant group by controlling and projecting the image of a less dominant group? Moving away from racism, women’s rugby league looks and feels very different to the Lingerie Bowl (later rebranded as the Legends Cup). I’d have to look more at the history of the Maori and Australian indigenous teams, but they look like positive self-identification to me.
Why would it be more difficult for a team representing English or British whiteness, for example, to be about positive self-identification? Well there’s a lot of historical baggage there.
Might more of us, one day, look at the Maori and Indigenous teams as curiosities from a different time - as I said above, it is plausible. They’re very unlikely to go down in infamy though, based on a common sense interpretation of what they represent and why, rather a search for rigid consistency stripped of cultural and societal context.
