UNLOCKED PREMIUM: Racism & Sam Kerr
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can a non-white person be racist? Or is racism something only white people do? The beloved captain of Australia's national women's soccer team, Sam Kerr, a woman of colour, was charged by UK police with racial harassment after allegedly calling a white male police officer a "stupid white bastard" in London.
Australia's commentariat has been twisting itself in knots trying to find the correct anti-racist hot take. The official consensus is that people of colour can't be racist, so she did nothing wrong. The other side shrieks that that's hypocrisy, insisting that all race-based insults are equally bad. Josh tries to bring rationality to an irrational debate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gahey, humans. |
| 0:03.3 | Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. |
| 0:06.4 | And what does it mean to be racist? |
| 0:08.6 | Can a person of color ever be racist towards a white person? |
| 0:12.9 | Can a person of color be racist towards another person of color? |
| 0:16.8 | Or is racism just prejudice plus power as the new definition insists? |
| 0:23.0 | This is all coming to a four in Australia at the moment. |
| 0:25.6 | Over the past few weeks, amid a furor over one of our greatest athletes, |
| 0:29.5 | in some respects, everything that can be said has been said about this incident. |
| 0:35.3 | And in other respects, the deepest questions that it raises about |
| 0:40.6 | bigotry and tolerance and identity haven't really been touched in an authentic way as far as I |
| 0:49.0 | can tell. So I feel like I ought to touch them. My feet have just landed in Australia for a big overseas trip. |
| 0:57.2 | So I was stunned by this news and disappointed at the way that it's been treated in the media. |
| 1:03.9 | And the conformism, I suppose, the ease with which people's opinions about it have fallen along neat ideological lines. |
| 1:12.2 | If you don't know what happened, if you're not Australian, basically the allegation, |
| 1:16.6 | which has not yet been proven in court, the allegation is that 14 months ago in January of |
| 1:22.3 | 2023, Australia's greatest sports star, Samantha Kerr, the captain of the Australian women's soccer team |
| 1:29.6 | and the star of its performance in the Women's Soccer World Cup last year, which was hosted in |
| 1:34.9 | Australia, spent a night in jail in southwest London after being charged with the racial |
| 1:41.5 | harassment of a police officer. |
| 1:45.7 | Now, Sam Kerr is Australian, but she has some Indian heritage on her father's side. |
| 1:52.4 | She would probably pass for white. |
... |
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