Cricket: Australian batsman Usman Khawaja opens up on impact of racism on his career

Usman Khawaja has played 56 tests for Australia. Photo / Getty Images

Australian opening batsman Usman Khawaja has opened up on how racism has impacted his career, revealing he did not support the Australian cricket team in his youth.

Khawaja has been a revelation at the top of the order for the Australians in recent times, posting 195 not out in his most recent stint at the crease for the test side.

But despite having played more than 100 international matches for Australia, including 56 tests, the Pakistan-born cricketer told the Sydney Morning Herald it was hard to get behind the national team growing up.

“When I looked at the TV, I saw these really brash, really stubborn, beer-drinking white Australians that were the same kind of guys racially vilifying me while I was playing cricket,” Khawaja explains. “I was like, ‘Well, why would I support this team that doesn’t support me?’

“I found that really hard growing up, and I think that bit of resentment still sticks with a lot of young kids, particularly from ethnic backgrounds, that always get called names and racially vilified. ‘Curry muncher’ is the one that sticks out to me the most. I used to get called that all the time.”

Cricket in Australia has historically been dominated by white players. Only two Indigenous men have played test cricket for Australia - Jason Gillespie and Scott Boland – and of the 464 men to have played test cricket for Australia, just a touch under 99 per cent of them have been white.

Khawaja often shares stories of being racially profiled in his job, with security often doubting he’s a member of the Australian cricket team, even when he’s with the team and wearing his kit.

He said he doesn’t blame individuals for these kinds of encounters, noting the fact Australian cricket has been synonymous with whiteness for so long, many people find it hard to believe a South Asian would actually be part of it.

It’s an area Khawaja is trying to work with Cricket Australia in, with the hopes of keeping players of South Asian backgrounds in the game.

“You see cricketers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, everywhere at a young level. But as you get up at a high-performance level, it just drops exponentially. It just drops, drops, drops.

“That’s where I’m trying to work with Cricket Australia saying, ‘Look, guys ... you invest a lot of money into this, but something’s not going right. You’ve been doing it for 10 years and nothing’s changed’.”

He added the lack of diversity among coaches and selectors was an area with looking at.

“At that high-performance level, you don’t realise it but a lot of the coaches [and] selectors are white,” he said. “There’s subconscious bias. If you have two cricketers, one brown, one white, both the same, the white coach is going to pick the white cricketer just because he has a son that might look similar to him. It’s what’s familiar to him.

“There’s been plenty of times I should’ve been picked for teams and I wasn’t, but it just made me have a bigger chip on my shoulder.”