To: Hon. Peter Beattie, Premier of Queensland
April 23, 2003

Mr. Beattie,

Here in the US, I've just heard you, online, interviewed on the ABC, saying that the continued use of the word "n-----" on a cricket-ground stand in your state is not racist because it is the nickname of a Queensland sportsman of the past, a nickname that stemmed from the sportsman's preference for a brand of shoe polish whose brand name also was N-----. You argued -- and here are your crucial words -- that the term was not racist at the time it was coined, so was not racist, now.

This, surely, is a very pinched construction of what constitutes racism. The brand name, when adopted, made use of a term that was NEVER acceptable other than to the racists who used it. It was racist then, in exactly the same way that it is, now. I am confused as to how you could be confused on this point. Do you think it was a word used charitably and charmingly by beneficent, socially dominant people such as those who attached it to a boot polish, rather than as part of, and an expression of, a whole system of savage racial oppression? Are you familiar, by any chance, with the history of blackface in the United States, and its connection with shoe polish?

(The reappropriation of the epithet by some African-Americans, today, underscores the indisputable argument that no person of a white, majority population has the right to use the term today, particularly members of populations with histories of bigotry, such as were perpetrated in the US and Australia (and particularly, might I respectfully submit, your own sunny state).

I encourage you to reexamine your lamentable position.