I would like to second Tom’s excellent piece about the ‘riots’ at the Australian Open on Monday.
I witnessed many such fights during my days attending the local soccer and trust me when I tell you this violence has very little to do with race.
These are 16-25 year old boys, with more testosterone than brain cells who get together and decide to they want to fight. So they call up their mates. Then they call up the guys they want to fight.
That’s right, the whole thing is usually prearranged. They arrange a time and a place and meet up to fight. Or they go to a place where they know each other is going to be (like the tennis). It’s more like a first date than riot.
Its the live action version of the Jets and the Sharks. And the choreography is often just as good (although, perhaps will a little less boxstep).
The whole thing is designed for one purpose only – to show your own mates how tough you are.
Its about aggression, its about masculinity, its about boredom, its not about race.
1 comment:
I think the fact that people are able to quickly and easily label and incident like this a race riot, and that such labels seem to stick, comes down to public perceptions and cliffnotes about ethnic rivalry in the world and Australia, and the fact that such differences (while not necessarily any longer a direct source of tension) provide an excuse for picking a particular group as an "enemy" for the sake of such fighting.
I don't know where you draw the line, but it sounds like this incident was more a case of having a made-to-order opponent thanks to previous history or rivalry, rather than the playing out of an actual grievance in violent conflict. Sometimes a hard line to distinguish, but possibly a clear one here.
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