The Australia cricket team has a very capable player of ultimately African origin named Andrew Symonds. Cricket is a national obsession in India and in games recently played by the Australians in India, the Indian fans tried to put the black player off his game by chants and gestures that referred to him as a monkey. Spectator abuse of African players as "monkeys" is also common in European soccer matches. The Indian authorities have tried to deny the abuse but an Indian writer dismisses their evasions below:
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The photograph sealed it. Published in the Herald on Thursday, it shows an animated section of the crowd, all Indians, at the one-day game between India and Australia in Mumbai the day before.
Your eye is automatically drawn to a stocky-running-to-fat man near the centre of the frame. He is wearing a blue T-shirt with black sleeves. His cheeks are puffed out as he blows hard on - it seems - a whistle. His raised arms are bent at the elbows. His fingers are crooked, turned downward, somewhat like a fist held back from being clenched; his thumbs are splayed on either side. He has, it seems from the picture, put a lot of effort into his posture.
In the foreground is another man - younger, in a T-shirt, glasses and a baseball cap - who seems to have picked up the cue. He too has his arms bent at the elbow. His approximation of a monkey is not quite as mimetic as that of the man behind, but he is smiling and chanting. You cannot tell for sure from a photograph, but it is fair to guess that it is a monkey chant.....
India has traditionally had the worst crowds at cricket stadiums. They tend to turn hostile whenever things are not going too well for the home side. They can get ugly and violent and have been known to stop games, to set stadiums alight.
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It is somewhat to the credit of Indians that the events concerned have caused much heartburn in India but I do think the whole uproar lacks perspective. Trying to help your team by distracting the opposing side is as old as the hills in sport and that a particular episode of such behavior involves racial stereotypes is really incidental.
It does however give the lie to the Leftist contention that only whites can be "racist". I put "racist" in quotes there as I think people should be called racist only if they incite harm or do harm to someone solely because of his race. But if we are going to call mere words from whites "racist", then the same should apply to similar words from non-whites.
