Sam Kerr had a shocker of a night, but racist she ain’t

When Australia went nuts for the Matildas last year, an old video of Captain Kerr did the rounds. In the clip, from 2021, Sam Kerr stands on the football field during a Champions League game for her English club, Chelsea. Play is stopped by a pitch invader who saunters into the game with his mobile phone held aloft, ignoring the discomfort of the women, apparently taking a selfie with the team.

He struts around, cocky, until Kerr sizes him up, lowers her shoulder, takes a run at him and knocks him to the ground. A cheer erupts. Kerr gets a yellow card.

Sam Kerr drops a pitch invader during Chelsea’s Champions League draw with Juventus.

For many Kerr fans, watching this only cemented their admiration. How many times have you wished you could have relegated life’s pitch invaders with a clean shoulder-barge? It was a small piece of vigilante justice for every woman who has ever had her fun interrupted by an idiot bloke with a compulsion to make himself the centre of attention.

Would we cheer a male player who had shoulder-barged a female pitch invader to the ground? No, for much the same reasons that we would have been horrified if Kerr had racially abused a cop who was black or brown. Although we had our doubts for a good 24 hours there.

On Wednesday, it was reported our girl had been charged with racially harassing a police officer following a night out which ended with an argument with a cabbie. We endured a day of worry – could Kerr, a role model for Australian girls, a woman with Indian heritage, really be racist?

One young lady I know executed an immediate cancellation of Kerr – deliberately excluding the Matilda from her International Women’s Day poster of female icons.

On Thursday, we breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported by a British tabloid that the alleged racial harassment was against a white cop, who she had called “a stupid white bastard”.

On Friday, The Australian reported that Kerr will deny calling him a “bastard”, but not calling him “white”. She is pleading not guilty and also fighting to have the charge thrown out of court as an abuse of process.

The incident apparently happened after Kerr went out, post-match, presumably got drunk, threw up in a cab and then verbally abused a policeman who was called to sort out the fracas. Such benders are unbecoming, especially when they involve innocent taxi drivers who rightly wish to maintain the vomit-free integrity of their asset.

What is bizarre is that the case is being pursued at all – that the full force of London’s Metropolitan Police Force, and now, too, the funds and might of the British state, are being poured into a charge of anti-white racism, something which doesn’t actually exist.

Why? Because power imbalances do not just impact discrimination, they are fundamental to it. Throughout their lives, women are statistically likely to be hurt and harassed by men, but the reverse is not so. That’s a large part of the reason we don’t think Kerr should be charged with assault after shoulder-barging a male pitch invader.

The spurious concept of “reverse racism”, like so many culture war shibboleths, was imported from the United States. US research shows that while both black people and white Americans believe there is less racial bias than there used to be, white people believe this has come at a cost – and there is now more bias, or “racism” against them. These people view increased diversity and equality of opportunity as a direct threat, a zero-sum game in which one person’s gain equals another person’s loss.

In 2018, American conservatives were upset when The New York Times hired a technology reporter named Sarah Jeong, whose Twitter history contained statements like “white men are bullshit” and “it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”.

One (white, male) pundit wrote that it was: “simply false to excuse anti-white racism on the grounds that people of color lack power. A powerless person’s hate may not harm the powerful, but it is still hate.”

Police divers.Credit: Matt Golding

This seems like a wilful misunderstanding of the way “white” is thrown around as a descriptor by so-called SJWs (social justice warriors) and others. It is not an article of hate-speech of the kind that might presage violence. It is more like an eye-rolling expression of all the ways in which white people are clueless, like a race-based version of “OK, Boomer”.

That’s why white male politicians, including NSW Premier Chris Minns and federal Education Minister Jason Clare, said they don’t believe Kerr was being racist. Clare even self-identified as a stupid white bastard.

An early example of the genre was the late-2000s blog “Stuff White People Like”, created by a young white Canadian copywriter to lampoon the cultural interests of “left-leaning, city-dwelling, white people”. Built into the concept was that non-metropolitan-elite white people were considered “the wrong kind of white people”. It was a satire of snobbery.

That’s somewhat different from calling an Indigenous footballer a “monkey” or an entire AFL crowd booing Australian of the Year and former Swans champion Adam Goodes, game after game after game...

Last year, a report commissioned by the London Metropolitan Police itself, found the institution was guilty of “institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia”. The report revealed that one Muslim officer had bacon stuffed in his boots, a Sikh officer had his beard cut, and minority ethnic officers were much more likely to be disciplined or leave. The force was found to be disproportionately white.

Kerr appears to have had a shocker of a night and behaved badly. But racist she ain’t.

Let the wheels of British justice turn and all that, but here’s hoping sense prevails and Kerr is soon free to shoulder-barge her way back into our hearts.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.