Agree with your last comment. Surely the very selection of an Indigenous team is itself racist? Is there any team in Australia selected from purely white Anglo Saxons?
I can't think of one, if it did happen it'd be front page news across the country, it'd probably make international news too.
However I can think of plenty examples of the reverse, the Redfern All Blacks are probably the most famous example, the Koori and Murri knockouts are aboriginal exclusive, in Canberra you have the Boomanulla Raiders, I'm sure there're more, all of them are exclusive to people with aboriginal heritage.
Well all national teams discriminate based on nationality, obviously.
Nationality and race are two very different things, race is inherent you are born with it and you can't control or change it, nationality can be changed and controlled and is connected to where you live and your ideological beliefs (obviously it's not and can't be that simple in international sports for practicality reasons, but the point still stands).
If I wanted to become a Pommy I could move to England and attempt the process of becoming a citizen of the UK, on the other hand if I wanted to become an Eskimo I can't, cause I can't change my genetic makeup to make myself an Eskimo.
So discriminating based on nationality is inherently more reasonable (under the right circumstances) then discriminating based on race cause it can be controlled by the individual and race can't.
The indigenous side would be discriminating based on membership of the indigenous tribes of Australia, and considering the Aus government acknowledges indigenous status up to 1/16th I have no doubt there will be some white people in the team. Daniel Geale is an infamous example, especially when he fought Anthony Mundine wearing the aboriginal flag.
Except every indigenous team I have any knowledge about isn't discriminating based on membership of mobs, for example Boomanulla isn't only letting Ngunnawal play in their team, it isn't a Ngunnawal national team, they're letting anybody with aboriginal heritage in and nobody else.
Hell I'd be surprised if more then half the Indigenous All stars actually held memberships of a mob (before becoming part of the NRL and/or the Indigenous All stars at least) or actually knew which mob they are from, most of them just claim they are from the mob that is from the area of Australia that they are born and have never attended a meeting or anything in their lives, I'd be willing to bet that if we did genetic testing of the team that many of them, if not most, wouldn't be genetically related to the mob they think they are from.
It's purely race based who is and who isn't picked for the team, another evidence for that is that in theory you can marry into a tribe, yet I doubt that a player with completely Caucasian or Polynesian heritage that's marry into a mob would ever, ever, be allowed to play for the Indigenous All Stars, and if they were the screams of racism would be huge (and the irony of those screams would be lost on the people doing the screaming) so it's not about being members of tribes it's about race.
I don't have any problem with an Indigenous team; most people don't. They have been playing exhibition matches for quite some time now and are quite popular. From what I understand they are great platforms for aboriginal community engagement and are a great way to connect with disenfranchised teen boys, who are at the greatest risk of going off the rails.
I think Indigenous team needs more game time, perhaps in a touring Australia capacity. I doubt they will appear in the world cup ever.
I don't know, maybe it's just because I have a better then usual understanding of human history then your average punter, and I'm old enough to have seen some of the most important people in history that lead to some terrible habits that humans have changing, maybe that's why I don't like it, cause it is completely antithetical to what those changes and the people who pushed for them most stood for.
Maybe because of my better then usual understanding of human history I also realise that it's seemingly little things like this that'll lead us back down a dangerous road of tribalism based on stupid insignificant things like skin colour.
Whatever it is, I can't justify a race exclusive anything as it's inherently discriminatory to other races and that is always wrong no matter which race it is that you are discriminating against.
It also sets an incredibly dangerous precedent, a dangerous precedent that hundreds of thousands of people fought for hundreds if not thousands of years to change, and we're completely undoing all of that work in under a generation. Then again maybe those people never really succeeded in changing those attitudes in some groups and only unwittingly succeeded in creating an opening for people to walk into and attempt to reverse the status quo in western countries.
It seems to me that we are still judging people by the colour of their skin instead of their character, it's just that we are negatively judging different people with different skin colours then we used to, and that has always, and will always never sit well with me.
