Over the last week and a bit racism has been a key theme in the Australian media after Andrew Johns called a league player a “black c***” followed a few days later by an AFL coach calling aboriginal players “cannibals”.

On Friday morning’s Sunrise TV show there was a discussion about racism and they gave the dictionary definition of racism as:

“The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes; The belief that one race is superior to all others”

Now I am not of the politically correct belief that any comments about any race is instantly racism. In fact I believe there are differences between races, these have developed as cultural differences in some cases genetic differences based on the local world in which people have lived over a long period of time (a good study of this is Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel). However, these differences do not make one race superior to another instead it makes us different, in exactly the same way that as humans we are all unique and special just like everyone else.

What is more interesting is looking at the excuses people make for making racist remarks. In the case of Andrew Johns his excuse was that he was merely rallying the troops with a pep talk. In the ARL case it was brushed aside as merely being an in-joke.

Closer to home someone I know wrote a blog post the other day in which they referred to “gweilous”. I have been around enough south east asian friends to recognise that as an extremely offensive racist comment towards “white people”, in fact Urban Dictionary* defines it as this:

Gweilo is Cantonese. It translates as ‘Ghost Man’ and is used to describe a Caucasian foreigner.
Although most of China is familiar with this word only Cantonese speakers use it as a derogative way of describing a white person.
It is considered highly offensive in Mandarin China and with some white people.

When I asked the author of the blog if they knew the meaning of that word they replied that they did and the reason why they had chosen to use it was because they were in a bad mood. That begs a question, is a bad mood a good enough excuse to use foul language? I think not.

There are always times when we lose our cool and say things that we regret at a later date but there are certain words that no matter how bad a mood you are in you are fully aware of the meaning of and there is simply no excuse for the use of.

In the case of Andrew Johns he lost two coaching jobs as a fall out from his comments, so far the ARL coach has kept their job, and the blog post was taken down – with me being accused of over analysing things.

Is taking offensive at racist comments an overreaction? Or should we take offence more often to stamp out racism?

*I know Urban Dictionary is not a real dictionary but it was the clearest, simplest and best definition I could find.