Neil deGrasse Tyson provides “cosmic perspective” on Adam Goodes controversy

The debate over whether the booing of indigenous Australian football star Adam Goodes is racially motivated already led to some unprecedented media action, and now it’s led to a famous American astrophysicist weighing in. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the host of Fox’s Cosmos, is in Australia for a speaking tour and joined the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Q+A show Monday. The show has panelists taking questions from the audience, and while most of them were about science, one audience member asked how the panelists felt about the Goodes story. Tyson said he was amazed to see the stories about Goodes (who will return to the Sydney Swans lineup this weekend after an outpouring of support) and while he couldn’t speak for Australia, he could offer a “cosmic response”. Here’s video of what he said:

#ICYMI @neiltyson offers a 9pt cosmic mathematical response to the Adam Goodes arguments #QandA http://t.co/borP76b2rH

— QandA (@QandA) August 4, 2015

The most interesting part of that is Tyson’s comments on racism, which have since received substantial play. Here’s the key bit, about the 13-year-old girl who called Goodes an ape and started all of this:

“You know what she’s done, she’s selectively chosen things about apes that she thinks apply to him and not other things that would apply to people who are white,” Tyson said. “For example, apes have hair all over their bodies. You have never seen a black person with hair all over their bodies. Black people are some of the least hairiest people in this world! Who are the hairiest? It’s white people! With hair on the back, out of the neck. And so if you focused on hair then you could call white people monkeys, right. It’s all racist conduct.

The way Tyson wraps up his commentary is perhaps the most impressive, though, and perhaps it provides a blueprint for how society can handle issues like this going forward:

“When I think about race, I think about it as something that unifies us. I think about it as the human race.”

Wise words. Perhaps we should be consulting astrophysicists about sports more often.