Australia's E.S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand and "Judicial Restraint"

Taking a Stand
An Aboriginal Australian researcher battles to strip a stadium of a derogatory word

By PETER MONAGHAN

Stephen Hagan, an associate lecturer in the Kumbari/Ngurpai Lag Higher Education Center at the University of Southern Queensland, is a trailblazer in Australia's Aboriginal community.

Inspired by his father, who was a member of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the first elected Aboriginal advisory body to the Australian government, Mr. Hagan was the first Aboriginal Australian to be posted overseas in the country's diplomatic corps, to Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. He has also worked with Aboriginal educational, arts, and business groups.

Yet his activism did not take a crusading turn until he moved in 1997 to the city of Toowoomba, to begin graduate work in social theory of education at the University of Southern Queensland. The critical moment came when Mr. Hagan, an accomplished rugby player in his schoolboy days, took his family to a match at the Toowoomba Sports Ground, the town's rugby-league headquarters.

He was shocked to see that the section of the stadium in which he and his family were sitting was blazoned with large letters reading "E.S. 'Nigger' Brown Stand."

The stand was named in 1960 to honor a local player from the early 1920s, the first from the region to represent Australia, who went on to become a well-respected businessman and alderman on the Toowoomba City Council.

Mr. Hagan decided that the word "nigger" was something that his children, and the community at large, should not see in such a public context.

"I'm 45 years of age now, and all my life I've only heard it used in the derogatory sense," he says. "In primary school, in secondary school, people called Aboriginal people niggers if they wanted to make fun of them or belittle them, or try to put them off their game, be it on the football field or in life. Later, socially, as young teenagers, at discos, if they wanted to pick a fight with you, they'd call you a boong or a coon or an abo or a nigger. Those were just demeaning terms that were used throughout my life. I certainly haven't heard nigger used as a term of endearment."

Mr. Hagan's battle to change the name of the "Nigger" Brown stand has taken him to the Australian High Court, which refused to reverse a lower-court ruling against him, and then to the United Nations, where he won a recommendation that Australian authorities press Queensland's state government, which owns the stadium, to remove the word.

It has also led the scholar to publish a book, The N Word: One Man's Stand (Magabala Books, 2005), about his struggle to effect the name change, and to pursue Australia's vexed relationship with an epithet that has caused strife in many other corners of the world. In claiming that terms of racial vilification cause actual harm and cannot be allowed to enjoy the blithe protection of free speech, Mr. Hagan echoes the arguments of critical race theorists in the United States, such as Derrick A. Bell Jr., a visiting professor of law at New York University, and Kimberle W. Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University. He also engages the arguments Randall L. Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard University, makes in his 2003 book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.

Emigrating Etymology

Long associated primarily with American racism, the epithet "nigger" has its roots in the 17th century and has ranged widely throughout the English-speaking world.

In the pioneering days of European settlement in Australia in the early 19th century, writers of newspaper reports, diaries, and letters leveled the epithet at Aboriginal people encountered along the way.

But how did the word end up as the name of a section of a stadium in Toowoomba? One of the ironies of the tale is that E.S. Brown was a white Australian who was so blond and blue-eyed that when he was just a few years old, his older brothers gave him the nickname as a joke. One version of the tale says that Mr. Brown came by the name because he was a dapper dresser who favored a brand of shoe polish called "Nigger Brown."

Whatever its origin, the vilifying term "remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it," in Australia as elsewhere, says Mr. Hagan.

But after six years of trying, he has not convinced Australian courts, or the Australian population, that the word's connotations present a good reason for removing the word from the stadium.

Mr. Hagan appealed to the United Nations because Australia is a signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. And Susan Booth, Queensland's anti-discrimination commissioner, has also called on officials to act on the U.N. recommendation, arguing that Mr. Brown could be honored in a way that "does not offend those many, many people who find the stand name offensive" -- by, for example, renaming it simply the E.S. Brown Stand.

Stadium officials and state-government leaders have already signaled that they will not abide by the U.N. recommendation. The president of the Toowoomba Sports Ground Trust, John McDonald, told reporters after the U.N. finding: "It is obvious to most that the name does not have any suggestion of racial discrimination. The stand has been named in honor of a legendary member of our community. It's nothing more than that."

In public statements, the premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, has said of the term: "It would be inappropriate today, but it is not inappropriate in terms of history."

Mr. Hagan questions that interpretation, especially after uncovering records of the term's use in Australia. That excavation is the subject of the doctoral dissertation that he is writing, titled "The Origin, Maintenance, and Legitimization of the Word 'Nigger' in the Australian Vernacular."

The word was "firmly entrenched in Australia as a degenerative nickname in the early 1800s," says Mr. Hagan. And in the context of pervasive disparagement of Aboriginal Australians by the country's immigrant majority, it came to be used with little self-consciousness. For example, says Mr. Hagan, historians cite such instances as a high-ranking Queensland state official in the early 20th century saying, in the state parliament, "Those who know the nigger best feel most the impossibility of doing much to ameliorate his condition or protract the existence of his race. This callousness as a rule arises from no lack of sympathy with the blacks, but from a firm conviction that their stage of civilization is too many hundred perhaps thousand years behind our own to allow their race to thrive side by side with ours."

Mr. Hagan points out that the word is being revived today by the growing popularity of American hip-hop in Australia, such that a white teenager might say to his Aboriginal friend, "What's up, my nigga," with no intention to disparage -- although only a very few "street kids" among Aborigines would ever use it themselves. But he argues that the claim that such usage is in fact positive is hardly convincing at a time when surveys continue to show high levels of racism in the Australian population, and government studies reveal an increasing incidence of racist violence against black Australians.

Against that historical and contemporary background, Mr. Hagan argues, keeping the word "nigger" on the stadium section perpetuates racial discrimination and defamation. What the term signified in 1960, when the stand was named, is outweighed by the fact that the contemporary display of the term is "extremely offensive, especially to the Aboriginal people," he says.

Legal Definitions

When Mr. Hagan brought a complaint about the Toowoomba stadium in a federal court in Queensland, under the federal Racial Discrimination Act, his arguments were dismissed. The court found that the term had "long ceased to have any racial or racist connotation (if it ever did have that)." Mr. Hagan had not demonstrated, the court said, that the decision to name the stand as it was named was an act that "was reasonably likely in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate an indigenous Australian or indigenous Australians generally." (In 2002, the High Court of Australia refused Mr. Hagan's application to appeal the lower federal-court ruling.)

If Aboriginal people were offended, the federal court further opined, then why did none complain during the 40 years that the name was blazoned on the stand before Mr. Hagan pressed the issue?

Because, Mr. Hagan responds in his book, the nickname was given, and later included on the sign, at a time when Aboriginal Australians were thoroughly disenfranchised -- not even allowed to vote or be counted in censuses.

He says that he was astonished by some of the reasoning applied by the court. One justice cited the term "niggerhead reef" as an example of a term at which the public did not take offense.

"Niggerhead reef -- I didn't know what that meant," says Mr. Hagan. "I looked it up, and discovered it referred to a blackened, dead outcrop of coral jutting up out of the water. Well, that itself is a very disparaging, demeaning term for black, dead reef."

Popular opinion also seemed to play a role in the court's decision. In rejecting Mr. Hagan's arguments, the court also took note that a group of 35 local Aboriginal community members had supported the stadium management's stance. It was not until later in the legal proceedings that Mr. Hagan gathered strong shows of support from other Aboriginal people and groups.

"A lot of people assumed that this would be a straightforward case of in and out of the courtroom, and the judicial figures being eminently qualified and educated, that they would see the word for what it is and ask for its removal," he says. "But what happened at the courts surprised everybody. It was only then after the decision that I gained a lot of support."

Nonetheless, he admits, one poll by a television news program showed that as many as 85 percent of Australians believe the name should not be removed. That position has been championed by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists.

Deeper Currents

Sen. Aden Ridgway, a member of the Australian Democrats party from New South Wales who is the only Aboriginal senator in the Australian Parliament, wrote in a review of Mr. Hagan's book last month in On Line Opinion, an Australian journal of social and political comment: "In The N Word, you can read more than you want to know about state politics, national politics, Indigenous community politics, local government, dealing with our glorious mainstream media, the police, prisons, bureaucracies, and just generally being Indigenous."

The book demonstrates, says Senator Ridgway, "how deeply ingrained [racism] is in our national psyche." He calls on the federal and Queensland state governments to heed the U.N. recommendation: "In Indigenous affairs, we regularly need to look to international human-rights standards. If not, all we have left is the 'Australian tradition' and we know that tradition is an unfair one; a racist one; and a politically expedient one."

Contrary to Mr. Kennedy's argument that some uses of the N word amount to an act of solidarity among African-American users, Mr. Hagan says he cannot find a value-neutral way of construing the term that he has fought so hard to remove. Like many of Randall L. Kennedy's critics, he says the word is simply too emotionally and historically charged.

Americans must bear in mind that, when it comes to questions of race and color, Aboriginal Australians can be better compared to African-Americans than to American Indians, says Rebecca Kavanaugh, an Australian lawyer who has recently completed "Reconstructing Reconciliation: The Lynching of Black Australia," a doctoral dissertation, under the direction of NYU's critical-race theorist, Mr. Bell. Like black Americans during Reconstruction, Aborigines have been victimized by the "N word" and lynching, she notes. From the beginning of European settlement, Aborigines "were labeled, and identified, as black and I think that probably explains how the words and practices which developed here were similarly used in Australia," she says.

So, says Mr. Hagan, "here we are, the only sports stadium in the world with the word 'nigger' on it and they don't want to discuss it, air it, or debate it. The way they handled it -- the politicians, the media, and the ground trust who had control of the athletic oval -- was to marginalize me, and characterize me as a bad, troublesome black who had only just moved into Toowoomba."

For his part, Mr. Brown has not been available to weigh in on the dispute. He died in 1974, and now lies under a headstone that, like the stand named after him, is engraved with the word "nigger."