Louise Roberts: Want to ruin a woman’s career? Just call her a racist
There’s an increasingly popular way to try to silence our female TV hosts. Simply incite the ‘r’ word and wait for the masses to grab their digital pitch forks, writes Louise Roberts.
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There’s an insidious and increasingly popular way to try to silence and humiliate our professional female TV hosts – tell the world they are racist.
In the last week alone we’ve seen NRL commentator Erin Molan threatened with violence, bullied, called a bitch and accused of prejudice against rugby league players of Pacific Islander heritage.
Meanwhile, a US journalist regurgitated a TV interview from five years ago and said Sunrise host Samantha Armytage was being racist when she interviewed non-identical twin sisters, Lucy and Maria Aylmer, who have different skin colours.
And again the mob piled in with weary inevitability. Twitter was a blur of insults and misinformation.
Erin Molan is not a racist.
Samantha Armytage is not a racist.
This is about trying to shut women up and unfortunately for women like Erin and Samantha, as impressive and stoic as they are in the face of this rubbish, calling them a racist will always be the go-to insult lurking in their careers.
That’s because it’s a cheap shot crowd pleaser – bereft of fact but imbued with suspicion and ignorance. Guilty first, up to you to prove your innocence later.
When the abuse begins there’s no science behind it, no filter of truth, ergo they must be privileged, they must be racists and they must be ignorant.
See how that doesn’t add up?
Samantha was once humiliated by paps when a gust of wind blew up her dress and revealed her underwear. She was out shopping, not strangling kittens FYI.
When Erin was pregnant with her daughter, an internet troll said he hoped she would die giving birth.
No one signs up for this sort of grief when they land a TV job and make a success of it.
Critically, neither of these women ever plays the victim card although they could, of course, like many others routinely do.
Let’s just examine what happened this week through the prism of many, many weeks of nasty and vicious comments these women endure. And they are not the only ones.
Erin was accused of mocking names on an audio clip that went to air during the Continuous Call on 2GB.
Not wishing to cause offence, she quickly apologised on air and yesterday reiterated with this: “There was no discussion or segment last Saturday regarding how to pronounce Polynesian names – nor was I attempting to pronounce or ‘mock’ a Polynesian player’s name.
“My remarks were an attempt to reference a story that’s been told multiple times on-air. They were clumsy and inappropriate. I apologised on-air last Friday and that apology stands.”
John Hopoate – a former rugby league player with a long list of offensive and abusive behaviour on and off the field – was one of the first out of the gates with this response:
“When I accidentally trip this RACIST B***H over and she falls and scrapes her RACIST mouth on the ground. But I won’t apologise cause it’s an inside joke”.
The post was later deleted but as we all know once it’s out there, it’s out there forever.
Martin Tapau was also lining up on Twitter: “Understandable for our non-Pasifika community attempting to properly announce our names, but to disrespect and make a mockery of former/current Pasifika players in the NRL like how you carried on is DISGRACEFUL! My grandfather would be tossing in his grave in anger.”
Another Twitter user described Molan’s mispronunciation as ‘peak white privilege’.
“Women like Erin Molan like to use their proximity to Brown bodies specifically Brown NRL bodies as an excuse to joke ‘with’ us … no,’ they wrote.
‘You don’t get to make fun of our names and pretend it’s all in good fun. Not now not ever.
‘It’s f***ing 2020 and if you’re not doing better now you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Peak white privilege.”
In Samantha’s case, a former CNN anchor posted the clip which shows the host seated next to Kochie and saying to the girls beamed into the studio from London: “Maria has taken after her half-Jamaican mum with dark skin, brown eyes and curly, dark hair but Lucy got her dad’s fair skin — good on her — along with straight red hair and blue eyes.
The former CNN anchor who posted the interview did so to stoke up the racial fire and global protest triggered by the death of George Floyd. She also criticised Armytage’s co-host David Koch for not saying anything.
After the interview in 2015, a petition on Change.org called for Samantha to apologise for her remark which she did: “I would be mortified if anyone thought I would say or think anything racist. It’s not in my nature. To anyone who I might have offended, I’m sorry.”
No matter that Maria slammed the petition as “disgusting”. “We want this taken down. Sam is not a racist,” she wrote.
Lucy too added: “Myself, my twin sister and our mother took no offence to Samantha Armytage’s ‘good on her’ comment. We believe she did not mean this as a racial comment and we have taken no personal offence to it.”
Where do we draw the line in savaging these women?
Of course by constantly accusing people of racism, the currency of the word is devalued.
So what do you do when you are actually confronted by real racism – like the cop who allegedly murdered George Floyd?
Well, you don’t have a word for it any more.
Either way, these women are strong female role models not racists.