Ross Taylor hails from the Samoan community and referred to some of the “jokes” in the locker room that describe the casually racist comments made by some New Zealand team officials.
“Cricket in New Zealand is pretty white sport,” wrote Taylor in his book “Black and White.”
“For most of my career I have been an anomaly, a brown face in a vanilla line-up. This has its own challenges, many of which are not readily apparent to your teammates or the cricketing public.”
Taylor, 38, said many assumed he belonged to the Maori or Indian community. He said the locker room jokes were sometimes racist and hurtful but he worried that raising the issue could make the situation worse.
Dressing room jokes are the barometer in many ways,” Taylor wrote. “A teammate used to say to me ‘You’re a half-good guy Ross but who’s half-good? You don’t know what I’m saying.'”
He added that other players also had to come up with comments based on their ethnicity.
Taylor said, “In all likelihood a (white New Zealander) hearing those types of comments would think ‘Oh, that’s okay, it’s just a joke. “But he’s hearing it as a white man and it’s not directed at people like him. So there’s no pushback; nobody fixes them.
“Then the goal falls on the target. You wonder if you should pull them up, but worry that you’ll cause a bigger problem or be accused of playing the race card by making harmless jokes at racism. For this you have to develop yourself mentally and it is easy to let that slip, but is it the right thing to do?”
Taylor said a former New Zealand team manager and coach made remarks that were unintentionally racist.
A New Zealand Cricket Board manager told Taylor’s wife Victoria that in her experience players of Māori and Pacific Island heritage have problems managing money and offered their assistance.
Taylor said former coach Mike Hesson, who guided the New Zealand men’s team for six years from 2012, once called him my cleaner a Samoan. She is a lovely lady, hardworking, very trustworthy.’
“All I could say was ‘Oh, cool, I have no doubt that (the officer) and those involved in the ‘joke’ will be disappointed to find that his remarks were met with a laugh.
“Let me be clear: I don’t think for a minute that they were coming from a racist point of view. I think they were insensitive and lacked the imagination and empathy to put themselves in the other person’s place.
“What is a harmless joke to them is actually facing for the goals because it tells them they are seen as being different. Instead of the message being ‘You are one of us, friend,’ this effect. in, ‘You are one of them.'”
A spokesperson for New Zealand Cricket told the New Zealand Herald newspaper that the national body “condemns racism, is a staunch supporter of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s Give Nothing to Racism campaign and that such treatment of Ross Taylor has left us deeply disappointed.”