Thanks to Winmar, Long and Goodes the race fight is being tackled

WE are always calling people animal names. You might be tempted to call the girl who racially vilified Adam Goodes a goose.

WE are always calling people animal names. You might be tempted to call the 13-year-old girl who racially vilified Adam Goodes on Friday night a goose. Stupid, ignorant. You wouldn't call her a snake because there was nothing sneaky about her behaviour. She shouted. You might say she was a sheep. That she was merely mimicking what happens and is said in the environment about her. It certainly was not a comment made in a vacuum. It was a learned experience.

People can be rats, lizards and dogs. Sports folk can be tigers and lion-hearted. You might think someone is a bull. There are slippery eels, chameleons, moles, donkeys, weasels and toads. Someone's lovebird is another's cougar.

Describing people as different types of animals is commonplace. It can be rude but it can be affectionate, too. Kitten, puppy, panda, a silver fox. Nobody worries much about it.

Sydney's champion Goodes was called an ape in the last moments of the Swans' match against Collingwood at the MCG, and not only the football community shuddered both in anger and embarrassment.

Goodes was too upset to finish the match on the field. He slipped into the rooms and waited for celebrating teammates there. Collingwood president Eddie McGuire sought out Goodes after the game to apologise on behalf of the club.

Goodes and AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou held a news conference on Saturday morning and did other interviews.

The girl has apologised to Goodes. She was unaware that calling an indigenous player an ape was racial vilification. Goodes accepts that but has explained to her why it deeply offended him. He also wants the girl protected.

While she did not know it, by calling Goodes an ape she was validating the historical treatment of people because of the colour of their skin. Slavery, servitude, segregation, apartheid.

And in the first match of the Indigenous Round, set aside to acknowledge the contribution of the aboriginal community to the AFL, Goodes must have been awash with a sense of hopelessness as well as anger as he walked down the race and into the rooms.

He would say after the match: "I am pretty gutted, to be honest. To win, the first of its kind in 13 years, to win by 47 points against Collingwood, to play such a pivotal role, it sort of means nothing," he said. "To come to the boundary line, to hear a 13-year-old girl call me an ape - and it's not the first time on a footy field that I have been referred to as a monkey or an ape - it was shattering.

"I turned around, and when I saw it was a young girl, and I thought she was 14, that was my initial thought, I was just like, really? How could that happen?"

It is a damning question. The girl was born seven years after Nicky Winmar made his stand at Victoria Park and four after Michael Long held an opponent to account during a match at the MCG.

Goodes is concerned for the girl. "She's 13 years old, still so innocent; I don't put any blame on her. Unfortunately, it's what she hears and the environment that she's grown up in has made her think that it's OK to call people names," he said. Goodes wants her supported.

The significance of that moment when Goodes was vilified cannot be diluted. It captures how hurtful racism is and how brittle the community's fight against it remains. But it must also be seen as a marker in a chase that has an eternity of a headstart. And that marker is closer to the finish than it is to the start. There is one thing to be educated about racial vilification but it is altogether more graphic and real having seen it play out in the manner it did at the MCG. As hurtful as it was for Goodes, the cause and effect of a 13-year-old girl's unfiltered mind is another significant lesson for all of us. To learn, to educate.

The most telling messages about racism in football have been delivered by indigenous players. First it was Winmar pointing proudly to his black chest, then Long refusing to allow a racist remark on the field by an opponent to go without rebuke, and now Goodes.

The fight is being won. Twenty years ago a 13 year old's abuse would have been just a voice in a chorus and her presence just part of the herd.