The Role Of Racism In Sports

Good morning to the sporting community and the cricket association and thank you for taking the time to listen to me today. I am Gordon Smith, a reporter for channel 7, this morning I will be illustrating to you why I strongly feel that the sporting community overreacted to Chris Gayle’s treatment of the reporter Mel McLaughlin. I will be addressing the following points throughout my talk: The reaction to Chris Gayle’s flirtatious behaviour being exaggerated, the racist component in the criticism that Chris Gayle had received. And the fact that other woman reporters have not been caught out on their flirtatious behaviour when interviewing a male.
I have been a reporter for 15 years and I have been subject to some flirtatious behaviour the same way Mel McLaughlin had been. I remember when I was interviewing professional tennis player, Kerry Reid, after her game at Melbourne Park and she was clearly acting flirtatious,
Racism? From where does racism come from? It is clear that people are now just using their grudge or hate towards Chris Gayle in a sporting point of view as a way to offend Chris Gayle. No one is talking about the racist comments that Gayle is receiving however he is constantly being dragged through the mud by the sporting society while having to deal with racism. On January 8, 2016, the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner, published an opinion piece by Chelan Smith titled 'White Beauty and the Black Beast'. Seriously? How that was even allowed to be published just makes me question if we are living in the 1930s. This is not the only racist piece that was allowed to be published. The Sydney Morning Herald published a comment by one of its sports writers, Malcolm Knox, in which he criticises Gayle's conduct using a parody of Jamaican patois. And how this was managed to be published on an Australian newspaper, I, again, have no