In a landmark case a former Australian Rules footballer is suing his club and league over the alleged racism he endured during his playing career. Héritier Lumumba, 33, has lodged a writ against his former club Collingwood and the Australian Football League (AFL), in an important legal case for racial discrimination in the country’s sporting industry.

Lumumba, born to a Brazilian mother and a Congolese-Angolan father in Rio de Janeiro, said teammates gave him a racial slur for a nickname and endured a “culture of racist jokes and ideas” at the club.

The player joins a number of high-profile sportspeople around the world speaking out about against racism in recent years, such as NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, tennis champion Naomi Osaka and Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton.

In a sport-obsessed country, ‘Aussie Rules’ is king. It’s a free-flowing and full-contact sport, like a mix of Gaelic football and rugby, that attracts crowds of 70,000 every week and television rights are measured in the billions of dollars.

Originating in Melbourne in 1858, it is one of the oldest professional sports in the world. Historians posit that when devising the rules its inventor was influenced by watching Indigenous Australians play a sport that valued high kicking and leaping over other players. While the number of professional players with First Nations heritage today has never been higher at 11 per cent — compared to 2.8 per cent of the general population — early players of colour suffered severe racial vilification and discrimination, while those in the sport’s positions of power have remained overwhelmingly white, older men.

Between 2005 and 2015 Héritier Lumumba became a cult figure playing for Collingwood, the biggest sporting club in Australia. In a sport where dour media appearances are the norm, Lumumba did things differently.

He was an early adopter of Twitter, he met the Dalai Lama and became the league’s first multicultural ambassador. All while helping Melbourne-based Collingwood win a Premiership title in 2010 while being named one of the best players in the league the same year.

But in a 2017 documentary called Fair Game, Lumumba revealed that throughout his time at Collingwood he had to deal with racist name calling and jokes. He admits that he initially went along with it in a bid to fit in with the white culture of the club: “You want to feel the sense of inclusion, so you will do anything really to show that you’re not an alien, that you are normal, that you are a human being,” he said in the documentary.

In 2013, Lumumba changed his name, dropping the anglicised Harry O’Brien he had played under, in recognition of his father’s family name. A year later, after becoming more outspoken on racism in sport, he left the football club. “It’s very easy to be labelled an angry Black man, it’s very easy to be labelled crazy,” he added in Fair Game. “You do reach a point, where you’ve had enough and you either want to give up or do something about it.”

A ‘wave of athlete activism’

This year has seen a multitude of global sports stars use their platforms to speak out against racism and in support of Black Lives Matter. The movement has been inspired by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the US national anthem in protest against police brutality and racism in the US in 2016. It also taps into a deep vein of sports protests reaching back to boxer Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War in 1966 and Jackie Robinson integrating professional baseball in 1947, for example.

Brendan Schwab, head of the World Players Association, says Australian footballers are finding common voice with sportspeople taking a stand for justice around the world. “We’re living in very polarised and unequal times and athletes feel compelled to use their platform to bring about broader social change. The ‘Me Too’ and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have both had a profound impact on sport in the last 24 months,” he says.

“When we look at this wave of athlete activism that we’re experiencing in 2020, there are two defining elements: the right of athletes to access, enjoy and work in sport free of discrimination, and sport being true to the rhetoric about being a force for good.”

The executive director of the association representing 85,000 professional sports players said the push for racial justice was part of the wider movement of athletes pushing for social change – a push felt strongest in sports that are unionised. A recent example is how players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) won important social justice measures after a wildcat strike during the playoffs to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin this August. Measures won by players included “increasing access to voting, promoting civic engagement and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform,” including forcing team owners to convert stadiums into polling locations for the 2020 presidential election.

“Strong platforms for social change exist because those players operate in a very successful, unionised environment where their freedom of association is recognised and therefore their freedom of expression can be enjoyed. The NBA was able to settle the boycotts through social justice agreements which were about bringing greater access to the political process in the United States through sport.”

Schwab highlighted sport’s other struggles, such as women soccer players fighting for better pay, athletes standing up against past sexual abuse in gymnastics, swimming and football, as well as fans successfully forcing the billionaire owner of the newly named Washington Football Team to change its name from a previous moniker which was considered deeply offensive by many Native Americans.

Workplace racism is a labour issue

According to court documents filed last month, Lumumba alleges his former club and the AFL breached its duty of care when he was “subjected to racial abuse or racially offensive conduct”. The club “failed to take any or any sufficient steps to provide and maintain a safe working environment, including by protecting the plaintiff from racial abuse or racially offensive conduct,” the court documents read.

His allegations have been rejected by senior Collingwood officials and coaches but supported by former teammates, including two Indigenous players.

Australia’s top union official, Sally McManus of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), tells Equal Times that Lumumba’s case highlights the legal obligation the AFL has towards its players.

“The AFL has the same responsibilities to players as any other employer has to workers in their workplace. No one should have to deal with racial abuse in any context, but when it happens at work employers have a responsibility to step in and make sure those responsible are held to account.

“The AFL has immense cultural power and should be supporting anyone standing up and trying to improve the lives of players and the safety of their workplace.”

Earlier this year, the International Labour Organization released a report revealing that professional athletes often face widespread discrimination, particularly on the grounds of gender and race. To combat such discrimination and other challenges, in 2007 the WPA and its 100-plus player associations developed a Universal Declaration of Player Rights. This framework cements the fact that sport is work, and as such sport’s workers are entitled to workplaces free from discrimination.

By its own admission last year, the AFL failed to provide this to one of the best players in its history, Adam Goodes. The star player was forced to retire early because of racism, including direct abuse, reactionary media commentary and incessant booing from opposition supporters. Unfortunately, this kind of open discrimination is by no means unique to the AFL: across Europe, Black and other racialised football players have faced an upsurge in racist abuse, such as monkey chants and Nazi salutes from the stands, and harassment online.

Following a high-profile documentary telling Goode’s story, the league apologised unreservedly: “Adam, who represents so much that is good and unique about our game, was subject to treatment that drove him from football. The game did not do enough to stand with him, and call it out,” the league said in a 2019 statement

Schwab says the league failed Goodes because it lacked the framework to deal with that abuse. The league focused on defending the sport’s reputation, and whether crowd booing was racist, instead of asking whether a player was being racially vilified or discriminated against in their workplace.

“The AFL commission at the time simply asked itself the wrong question and therefore arrived at the wrong answer, to great reputational cost to the league and great personal harm to a champion of the game,” Schwab says.

“There’s often an onus on athletes to prove that they have been discriminated against. But if the discrimination is unsaid, or cultural, or indirect, or it’s felt but not visible, then clearly, it’s very difficult for athletes to have comfort that that framework is appropriate.

“Sport must acknowledge that it is a big business and therefore it has a proactive duty to respect internationally recognised human rights and ensure its culture is one where those rights can be enjoyed, and discrimination prevented or mitigated.”

No tolerance for racism

The racism Goodes encountered was also a catalyst for Lumumba to leave Collingwood. After the president of Collingwood Eddie McGuire made a racist joke about Goodes on his radio show, Lumumba took aim at his boss on Twitter.

“It doesn’t matter if you are a schoolteacher, a doctor or even the president of my football club, I will not tolerate racism, nor should we as a society. I’m extremely disappointed with [McGuire’s] comments and do not care what position he holds, I disagree with what came out his mouth this morning on radio.”

McGuire was no stranger to controversy, having been the host of a popular football panel show that regularly made headlines for racist and sexist jokes. In 2019, McGuire defended his fellow panel show host Sam Newman for appearing in blackface to mock one of the game’s greatest Indigenous players, Nicky Winmar.

Having taken aim at his boss, who was also one of the most powerful figures in Australian sport and media, Lumumba went from being a leader at the club to been seen as “someone that had to be protected from himself… rather than trying to identify what role the environment had played in creating the conflict,” he said in Fair Game.

When the documentary aired, Chelsea Bond, a senior lecturer in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies at the University of Queensland, wrote that it was not about “the capabilities of Lumumba or even Black men in Australian sport or society. Instead it tells us about the toxicity of White masculinity, and the pervasiveness and acceptability of racism in Australian life, including within the workplace.”

A season later, after a series of concussions, Lumumba retired from the sport as part of a personal “journey of decolonisation”.

In August this year a former Indigenous player, Robbie Muir received unreserved apologies from the league and his club after suffering years of hardship, following being “spat at, urinated on, pelted with bottles and set upon by mobs of racist fans” during his career in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of the greatest challenges for sport, Schwab says, will be how it deals with the past and achieves both reconciliation and compensation for historic victims of discrimination. “When we talk of progress being made we say that from a position of privilege. The timing of progress has not been something which has been fast and it has been something that has resulted from struggle.

“Sports will only be able to move forward when they deal with the past, if they can’t do that then their social licence will be fundamentally questioned. And so access to justice, remediation, reconciliation and compensation are going to be critically challenging issues for not just the AFL but sport throughout the world.”