The Australian Football League has been proven to be an organisation rife with hatred for people of brown and black, and its most recent scandal, the shocking report into systemic racism at one of its biggest clubs, Collingwood, where it was conclusively found by the very non-biased racism expert, Eualeyai/Kamilaroi woman Larissa Behrendt, that the player formerly known as Harry O’Brien, who now likes to be called Héritier Lubumba, no La Bamba, no again, Lumumba, really sorry, was tormented by teammates throughout his 199 game career with the nickname “the Chimp“, which is short for the chimpanzee, despite there being physical evidence that he originally had no problem with the nickname, has stung the League’s administrators into bold, foresightful, visionary action, with the announcement that highly gifted person of black Amanda Gorman, a renowned poetess, will be flown into Melbourne (pending Covid restrictions) from the United States of Amerika at this year’s AFL Grand Final, and, after quarantining in a hotel room with no fresh air for the requisite 4 weeks, will perform a dynamic poetry reading for the half time entertainment at this nation’s biggest (pending Covid restrictions) sporting spectacle.
AFL chief Gillian, okay no, Gillon McLachlan, made the big announcement in somewhat hard to follow terms:
We have invited Amanda to be our half time act to show that we all have to listen, learn, and act to stop the systemic racism that permeates our once great game. Only by listening, learning, and acting, can we spark crucial conversations about dismantling racism, specifically anti-Black racism and indigenous erasure, develop viable solutions to persistent resource gaps and accessibility barriers for financial and other needs BIPOC people have as a result of inter-generational racism and bigotry, come to be able to believe BIPOC folx like Henrietta Luboomba when they share about their lived experiences of racism, and then serve as sponsors for BIPOC folx by removing barriers and increasing access within the football industry. Also, she couldn’t be any worse than Meatloaf.
Amanda is no stranger to this kind of thing of course, having recently done a similar performance at the gridiron grand final in Tampa, Florida, but sadly her inspirational reading could not prevent the square jawed maskhole white man Tony Brady from defeating all the other players, some of whom were BIPOC, so in spite of Amanda’s best poetic efforts Tony ruined everything and won the coveted LXIXth Big Bowl trophy.
Amanda, who is the first ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the USA, is not just a fixture at regional sportball games, but has also performed at momentous state events, only last month reading some of her interminably long work at the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, who because of this now believes himself when lucid to be the president of the United States.
Australian football fans are no doubt excited for the time that Gorman steps out onto the hallowed, sacred, pristine turf of the MCG and bedazzles and mesmerises us with her verbal sludge of sentences oozing into each other sometimes incomprehensibly and apparently intended to be poetry. It is necessary though, intimates Gillon, Hercules Laborgia is still hurting from being called a monkey at Collingwood.
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