Why Isn't Panesar a Pommie Bastard?

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Kent Academic Repository Why isn’t Panesar a Pommie bastard? Multiculturalism and the implications of Cricket Australia’s racial abuse policy JULIAN C.H. LEE Julian Lee is a lecturer at Monash University, Sunway. His email is julian.lee@ artsci.monash.edu.my. DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY CHOWDHURY DESHAKALYAN Fig. 1. England cricketer Prior to the start of the 2006 Ashes tour, in which England secondly, cast doubts on multiculturalism as a political and Monty Panesar prepares and Australia played five five-day games of cricket, social policy. I will deal with these in turn by drawing on to deliver a ball during a training session at The Cricket Australia, the country’s governing body for the an episode of the American cartoon series South Park and Sinhalese Sports Club sport, announced that it would be cracking down on on some of Ghassan Hage’s comments in his book White Stadium in Colombo, 8 racism. Fans in Australia, where the games were played, nation (1998). December 2007, on the eve of were warned that if they were caught hurling racial abuse England’s second Test match against Sri Lanka. they would be ejected from the stadium. Except, that is, if Doubting belonging the abusive term was ‘Pom’ or ‘Pommie’, terms reserved In an episode of South Park entitled ‘Conjoined Fetus Lady’, for English men (and to a lesser extent women) and the grade 3 dodge-ball team of South Park Elementary popularly thought to be acronyms of ‘prisoner of mother flies to China to compete in the finals of an international England’. This exception was made because Australia’s dodge-ball tournament. While there, the three main child Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which characters demand that a Chinese-American boy, Kevin, Cricket Australia had consulted on the issue, deemed that tell them how the Chinese play dodge-ball. When Cartman Pom was ‘not hurtful when used in isolation’ so long as calls Kevin a ‘rice-picker’ after the latter insists that he is it was not combined with anything else that was ‘racist, American and does not know, the coach, Chef, intervenes offensive or humiliating’. and tells the boys that its wrong to ‘make fun of somebody Although there was media interest in the decision to because of their ethnicity’. ‘But’, replies Kyle, ‘you just permit the word Pom, no one officially contested it and it ripped on Chinese people’. ‘Nonononono,’ clarifies Chef. was for the most part accepted by English fans. There was ‘That’s different. I made fun of them because they are from a common-sense understanding that calling the English China. You see, it’s not okay to make fun of an American ‘Poms’ was acceptable. As one Australian taxi-driver was because they’re black, brown or whatever, but it is okay reported saying of the English fans, ‘they’re the kind of to make fun of foreigners because they are from another pommie b*****ds who don’t mind being called pommie country.’ b*****ds’ (BBC 2006; asterisks in original). Chef’s explanation illustrates a point made by Hage. What was not accepted, though, was the racial abuse Racist practices may be more accurately regarded as aimed at Monty Panesar. MSN News editor Tom Reed nationalist practices, and the discourse of racism is really reports that a spectator shouted: ‘Give us a wave, Monty. one of the undesirability of certain others in national ter- You can’t speak English, you stupid Indian, I’ll have to ritories, not inferiority as such (Hage 1998). Thus, what say it in Indian. What are you doing playing in the English makes the abuse directed at Panesar abusive is less that it side, you’re not English?’ (Reed 2007). This abuse, writes referred to him as ‘stupid’ or ‘Indian’, but that it cast doubt Reed, is ‘racism in its purist form’. The use of ‘Pom’, how- on his rightful belonging within England’s national cricket ever, was a ‘grey area’ (ibid.). team. In raw terms, ‘you stupid Indian’ may be thought There are three ways in which Cricket Australia’s policy less offensive than ‘you Pommie bastard’ because the on racism can, firstly, enlighten us about ethnic abuse and, latter denotes illegitimacy. But the insult to Panesar lies ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRIL 2008 23 Fig. 2. The Age considers the difference between ‘banter’ and ‘insult’, 29 September 2006. in the questioning of his Englishness: ‘What are you doing and authentic ‘national belonging’ (ibid.). What Panesar playing in the English side, you’re not English?’ has failed to do is accumulate symbols of archetypal Englishness: namely beardlessness and hatlessness (or at A matter of hats least a hat and beard without evident religious significance). The same episode of South Park features a nurse who suf- Furthermore, this occurs in the context of cricket, which fers from a fictional condition, ‘conjoined twin myslexia’. has close historical associations with the British Empire Sufferers from this condition have permanently attached and the British upper middle classes, and was often part Fig. 3. ‘Conjoined fetus to them a conjoined twin who died in the womb. Nurse of imperial Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ (Wagg 2005: 1). lady’, in episode 18 of Comedy Central’s animated Gollum, whose dead twin is attached to the side of her Panesar’s outward expression of otherness is in contrast series South Park. First head, becomes the subject of pity among some parents to the short-haired and clean-shaven Sajid Mahmood, the broadcast on 3 June 1998. when their children make fun of her condition. Concerned most likely person after Panesar to be regarded by narrow- parents and fellow staff of minded sports-fans as ‘inauthentically’ English South Park Elementary first on account of his Muslim religion. ask her if she has considered having the dead twin removed. Celebrating difference When she answers that such When Nurse Gollum declines the offer an operation would mean her of hats, staff and parents decide to set death, someone suggests that aside a week to raise public awareness she wear hats to hide it. of people with her condition. ‘Ooooh, Like Nurse Gollum, Panesar yesss,’ says Principal Victoria, ‘a has attached to his head two Conjoined Twin Myslexia Awareness articles that some interpret as Week. You know, that has a nice a signal that he does not really ring…’ Nurse Gollum is less sure. At belong in the English cricket the peak of the awareness campaign, team. For example Tom Reed, when the people of South Park are cel- before condemning the abuse ebrating her struggle and joining her in directed at Panesar, describes solidarity by wearing hats with an imi- the bowler as a ‘bearded Sikh tation dead conjoined twin, she asks who wears a black patka’. the large audience that has gathered: Although merely a description, ‘Don’t you realize that the last thing I it implies that these qualities ever wanted was to be singled out? […] distinguish him from the rest I don’t want to be treated special or… Fig. 4. On the DVD Monty’s of the team. or treated gingerly, I just want to be cricket madness! Monty What is evident in both the ridiculed, shouted at and made fun of Panesar looks at cricket’s South Park episode and the like all the rest of you do to each other. most unfortunate mishaps. abuse directed at Panesar is And take those stupid things off your heads!’ (And that those characteristics that apparently place one beyond it is worth noting Principal Victoria’s response: ‘Oh, my! a norm can be overcome through (principally cephalic) What an ungrateful bitch!’) amendments: in Nurse Gollum’s case, through addition of What Nurse Gollum’s outburst leads us to ask is, ‘What a hat; in Panesar’s case, through removal of a ‘hat’ (and is implied by the different treatment given to Poms and to a beard too). everyone else?’ While it is possible for someone to cast a Hage suggests that within a given social field, ‘there racial insult at Panesar, one cannot level the same at the are material and symbolic goods constructed as valuable’ then English captain, Andrew Flintoff. The reason for this (1998: 53). These can then be converted to symbolic cap- is that (white) Australia and England regard each other as ital which is, in nationalism, ‘recognition and legitimacy’ 24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 24 NO 2, APRIL 2008 BBC 2006. Australia v equals, but non-whites are regarded not as equals but as cult status and, rather than being unambiguously abused, England – 1st Test. BBC ‘matter out of place’. he became the focus of somewhat more ambivalent cel- News Online. http://news. bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/ A brief review of the use to which the term ‘whingeing ebratory mocking. cricket/england/6143676. Pom’ has been put since the 1960s in Australia can shed Panesar’s elevation to cult status is similar to that of stm (accessed 9 January further light on the inability of Australians to wound Melbourne’s current Lord Mayor John So. So is a Chinese 2006) Hage, G. 1998. White Anglo Englishmen with either racial or national slurs. In migrant to Melbourne who, in one Australian journalist’s nation: Fantasies of the period after World War II, Australians regarded the description, ‘speaks English funny’. As Lord Mayor of white supremacy in a British and British immigrants as close comrades who Australia’s second largest city, So may appear a fish out of multicultural society.

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