What does racial (in)justice sound like? On listening, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes

ABSTRACT

At the height of public debate surrounding the sustained booing of Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes between 2013 and 2015, several media commentators routinely misheard the roar of the crowd as nothing other than acceptable social behaviour. To ears invested in the established order, the distinction between a ‘boo’ and a ‘boo’ is non-existent; to racialized others, like Adam Goodes, hearing the difference – and calling it out – is an act of resistance, sovereignty, and survival. Taking the booing of Adam Goodes as its starting point, this paper argues for a notion of political listening that attends to the sonic and sonorous histories of racial violence without displacing, or indeed replicating, its wounding effects. I consider the entangled relationship between sound, power and violence, moving beyond the sporting field to examine other acoustic territories where struggles for sovereignty, power and racial justice are playing out. By attending to the ways sound is unevenly deployed to target, silence, assimilate or oppress others along racial lines, this paper hopes to unsettle the listening logic and privileged position of the white, settler-colonial ear, to expose the norms of attention that condition and solidify their appearance.

KEYWORDS:

• acoustic violence
• political listening
• racism
• racial injustice
• freedom of speech
• Racial Discrimination Act
• Adam Goodes
• voice
• settler-colonialism
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Marnie Badham, Tanja Dreher, Michelle Evans and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. This paper also benefited from roundtable discussions during a workshop on Acoustic Justice at Melbourne Law School in July 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In May 2013, Goodes was called an ‘ape’ by a 13-year-old girl in the crowd at a game between the Sydney Swans and Collingwood.

2. For example, Nicky Winmar and Michael Long in the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively.

3. Bolt was found to have breached the Act for a series of articles he wrote which claimed certain Aboriginal people sought professional advantage from being ‘fair-skinned’ (see Federal Court of Australia 2011). The Court ruled Bolt was in breach of the Act and not exempt under section 18(D), which pertains to fair comment in the matter of public interest, because of his failure to act ‘in good faith’, along with errors of fact in his claims.

4. Abu Hamdan’s video analysis of the shooting, including the audio-ballistics and spectrogram analysis, can be accessed here: http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/blog/2014/11/21/preview-to-my-audio-balistics-investigation-into-the-murder-of-nadeem-nawara .

5. It is worth noting the land on which this tournament is played, Indian Wells in California, US, is a site of First Nations dispossession and colonization brought about by the arrival settler explorers and gold prospectors to the area in the nineteenth century that devastated the Indigenous population.

6. In Australia, the term Country has a specific meaning for Indigenous people and is incommensurable to non-Indigenous or geo-political definitions of country/land/territory (see Moreton-Robinson 2004). Indigenous people’s ontological connection to Country describes their spiritual, physical, social and cultural attachment and sense of belonging to their ancestral lands.

7. Cheetham later pointed to alternative lyrics to the Anthem – penned by Judith Durham in consultation with Muti Muti singer-songwriter Kutcha Edwards – that include and celebrate the history and culture of First Nations Australians, as a starting point for a broader public conversation around settler-Indigenous relations.

8. A similar level of anger was directed at boxer Anthony Mundine when he declared he would not come out when the national anthem was played at the start of his fight, saying ‘we are not young and free … my people are still being oppressed’ (Herald 2017). A similar point has been made by Stan Grant (2016). In 2016, African American football player Colin Kaepernick sat down or knelt, rather than stood, when the US national anthem was played, to draw attention to police brutality and racial injustice in that country.

9. It is interesting that mainstream media receptions of the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ – arising from the First Nations National Constitutional Convention – were negatively framed as a ‘refusal’ of recognition, rather than the need for a First Nations Voice and a desire to ‘be heard’. This invitation to listen insists Indigenous sovereignty be placed at the heart of healing injustice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Poppy de Souza

Poppy de Souza is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University and a Research Fellow with the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship critically engages with the ethics and politics of voice and listening in the context of changing media technologies, everyday cultural production, representational politics and political transformation, focusing on sites and practices of struggle, resistance and innovation. Poppy also contributes to projects on Indigenous leadership and political participation, and listening and media justice.