Following his retirement from international cricket earlier this year, Taylor wrote in his new autobiography Ross Taylor Black & White that the sport was \u201ca pretty white sport\u201d in New Zealand and that he had encountered racism inside dressing rooms, which was probably perceived by those involved as \u201cbanter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCricket in New Zealand is a pretty white sport. For much of my career I\u2019ve been an anomaly, a brown face in a vanilla line-up,\u201d Taylor wrote in an extract published by the\u00a0New Zealand Herald<\/i>. \u201cThat has its challenges, many of which aren\u2019t readily apparent to your team-mates or the cricketing public. Given that the Polynesian community is dramatically under-represented in the game, it\u2019s probably no surprise that people sometimes assume I\u2019m M\u0101ori or Indian.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many ways, dressing-room banter is the barometer. A team-mate used to tell me, \u201cYou\u2019re half a good guy, Ross, but which half is good? You don\u2019t know what I\u2019m referring to.\u201d I was pretty sure I did. Other players also had to put up with comments that dwelt on their ethnicity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn all probability, a Pakeha [white New Zealander] listening to those sorts of comments would think, \u201cOh, that\u2019s okay, it\u2019s just a bit of banter.\u201d But he\u2019s hearing it as white person and it\u2019s not directed at people like him. So, there\u2019s no pushback; no one corrects them. Then the onus falls on the targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou wonder if you should pull them up but worry that you\u2019ll create a bigger problem or be accused of playing the race card by inflating harmless banter into racism. It\u2019s easier to develop a thick skin and let it slide, but is that the right thing to do?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following his retirement from international cricket earlier this year, Taylor wrote in his new autobiography Ross Taylor Black & White\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":250,"featured_media":27156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2191,164,3058,855,1110],"class_list":["post-4135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cricket","tag-kiwi","tag-new-zealand","tag-nz","tag-racism","tag-ross-taylor"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}