1) It is ironic that the first charge of racism brought under the ICC code has been slapped on a man from a minority community in a brown country. And that the complaint was lodged by the white captain of an overwhelmingly white team from a country with a very troubling record of pervasive racism. That the said team practically invented what has euphemistically come to be known as sledging and that a recent former member of this team was involved in an overtly racial incident with his Sri Lankan opponents makes the irony richer.
2) This is from the "Say What?!!" department. The match referee Mike Procter, a white South African, proclaimed: "I am South African, and I understand the word 'racism'. I have lived with it for much of my life." Yes Mike, you have, but you were privileged under that system. How can that make you "understand" what it is like to be on the receiving end of it? Do those living inmulti-crore mansions understand what it like to be poverty-stricken simply because they employ a poorly paid servant or live next to a slum?
3) We will probably never know whether Harbhajan Singh called Andrew Symonds a monkey (most Indians don't find it implausible that the Aussies could have cooked it up), butIF he did, it is inconceivable that he could have done it innocently. Symonds had been treated to monkey chants while touring India earlier, and the Indian team, including Harbhajan, had been made aware that "monkey" was a slur when used against a person of colour in Australia.
4) The monkey chants directed by Indian spectators at Symonds are surely a learned behavior. It is a distasteful page plucked out from the playbook of boorish European, especially Spanish, fans who greet black football players with this form of chanting while waving neo-Nazi banners and shouting at them to "Go back to Africa." But the association of "monkey" with black Africans goes much further back. I can recollect hearing people refer to them as "langoors" ever since I was a child.
