Liz Cambage and the racism shtick

This is the long version of my essay, published in Spiked

 

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of the woke ideology regarding race is the increasing way that it insists that people need to be separated by skin colour, the most mutable of traits and literally a skin-deep one.

 

The direct opposite in sentiment to Dr Martin Luther King notwithstanding, this position is precisely anti-science, which has shown that the term ‘race’, when used to refer to unchangeable biological characteristics, is debunked. Research has shown time and again that there are more genetic differences between individuals of the same race than between populations of races.

 

So when the Australian basketball star, Liz Cambage, who is half ethnically Nigerian, recently decided to lambast the Australian Olympic Committee, threatening to boycott the upcoming Olympics, for promotional photos that supposedly “does not represent” her, one has to wonder if all these sports stars who have drunk deeply from the well of Wokery should be given lessons in Genetics 101, among other things.

 

The photos that Cambage objected to include a promotional shot from the underwear company, Jockey, which had eight Olympic and Paralympic athletes who are ambassadors for the brand. These included four women and four men; three of whom are Paralympians; and Jessica Fox, a Jewish immigrant from France. But none of these details should matter – it’s up to Jockey as to who they managed to get as ambassadors.

 

The other photo that drew Ms Cambage’s ire was from the Australian Olympic team’s official Instagram page. It featured ten athletes in their uniforms, five women and five men, and included the Indigenous rugby player Maurice Longbottom. But again, this shouldn’t matter. These athletes are wearing the Australian uniform because they are unified in representing their country, Australia, and not ‘black Australians’ or ‘white Australians’.

Given that Cambage is ethnically half Nigerian and half white Australian, why is it only ever the Nigerian half that matter to her? For a woman born in London and raised in Melbourne, Australia, she should have much more affinity to the ‘white’ part of her heritage. The intense focus on darker skin tones speaks if anything of a personal complex.

 

She spoke about this previously, complaining that she never got in touch with her “black side” in Australia, revealing a fundamental confusion between skin pigmentation and culture. The old virtues of the Left, alas gone from what is considered ‘left’ in most of today’s cultural and political arena, of internationalism and fraternity, is so that you may avail yourself to the best of each other’s cultures. What she and many in today’s race baiting crowd espouse is much closer to the extreme right wing puritanism, where cultures are clearly divided and any intermingling is banned.

 

It might shock Ms Cambage to realise that the demographics of Australia is almost 90% ‘white’. Therefore if the majority of any profession are made up of white people, that’s statistically unsurprising. And regarding the ‘whites’, the fact that there are every conceivable difference in language, ethnicity, culture, and the all-important skin tone between a German and a Greek, or between an Icelander and an Italian obviously hasn’t come into the orbit of people who think like Cambage. On the flip side, what does a half Nigerian female sport star who grew up in Australia have in common culturally with an equally, if not darker-skinned, Nigerian member of Boko Haram? Why is she not publically outraged about Boko Haram kidnapping hundreds of her fellow Nigerian school girls?

 

She spoke about having suffered bullying as a youth for her skin tone. So have I, as a non-white Australian, and it wasn’t particularly pleasant, and she has my sympathies; but so has every wave of immigrant to Australia, of all skin hues, from the Greeks, the Italians, the Jews and the Vietnamese. This is the unfortunate universal human trait of prejudice and exists everywhere. But to besmirch an entire nation because of this experience is to use the same non-discriminatory mentality as actual racists. And it ignores that fact that Australia now has thriving Greek, Italian, Jewish and Vietnamese communities.

 

She and those who can’t or won’t think past the skin obviously also haven’t thought about the fact that Australia, like America, has adopted the Anglo idea of a civil, rather than an ethnical, notion of nationhood. This is the reason why the UK, America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are among the most open countries to immigration, with laws explicitly protecting minorities from racism. It is also why they do not appear on any list of most racist countries in the world.

 

In short, an important lesson that people who think like this have failed to grasp is that it is how you think and not what you look like that matters – the one and only diversity that should really count.

 

Miss Cambage now plays basketball in the US – will she be equally outraged and fight for the clear underrepresentation of white people in the WNBA, where less than 20% are white? We shall see.