According to Senegal-born Arsenal, London-based footballer Patrick Viera, Britain is doing more than other European countries to combat racism.
He was speaking in the wake of disgraceful scenes in Spain in which England’s black players were subjected to hateful racist barracking.
He gave as an example of Britain’s efforts the fact that you often see black presenters on TV, something that is rare in his adopted home, France.
Also mentioned in the article is a 2001 race-centred spat the player was a victim of in a game in Italy.
Is Britain really doing more than its neighbours, who have comparable minority communities, or is it that Britain’s minorities are more determined in breaking through into the mainstream?
If, as recent footballing behaviour suggests, mainland Europe is lagging in its efforts to stem racism that is being displayed in such a public arena, why is that so? Everyone is making the right noises but why, if Britain is making progress, is it so much more unattended to elsewhere?
I’d read about the monkey noises at the Spain -England game in Madrid last week, but hadn’t watched the game so didn’t know how serious it was. Various sources referred to spectators lining up in walkways and doing choreographed monkey impressions, as well as racist chants.
Yesterday I caught the second half of the Barcelona-Madrid game at the Camp Nou, and heard the abuse that the black Brazilian left back, Roberto Carlos, received whenever he touched the ball.
If these two games are symptomatic of what’s happening in Spain, then the Football Association there needs to move quickly to eradicate the problem.
It is my impression that the kind of trouble that we see played out at football matches (both in terms of violence and things like racism and taunting) are quite isolated within a discrete, smallish but rather active and vociferous element. Certainly there are problems of racism and violence outside of football matcvhes, but the aren’t really the same kind of problems and I think they may not actually be quite the same phenomenon.
Britain used to have similar problems (and still does have isolated morons) in past decades - I remember a banana being thrown at John Barnes (to be beautifully backheeled into touch, of course) in 1989.
However, Britain gradually overcame such nonsense (at least in football) due in part to various campaigns, deliberate “affirmative action” style profile-raising in TV, and bans of racist fans (fairly easy these days with CCTV in stadia etc.).
Last week’s Spain-England game was literally worse than any English game since the 1970’s. This Friday 19th front page shows a fan in a monkey pose, one of many who racially abused England’s black players in the Spain-England match on Wednesday. Every time a black England player got the ball, monkey-hooting was clearly audible from the crowd. This was all kicked off when Spain’s geriatric coach Luis Aragones attempted to motivate Arsenal’s Reyes by telling him he was better than his “black shit” of a club-mate, Frenchman Thierry Henry.
Strangely, only Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe appear to be so afflicted. The Roberto Carlos thing in Madrid is even weirder: he is Latino-Indian, probably more “Spanish” than much of the crowd (and certainly less ‘black’ than Barcelona players like Samuel Eto’o.)
I am reminded of Dennis Hopper’s soliloquy in True Romance: Why does these pricks think that Mediterranean people have black hair and dark complexions?
Because 1000 years ago you were black. So look at me and tell me: am I lying?
There was an English black player who was often greeted with peeled bananas thrown on the playing field.
Fans of teams playing against the Dutch club Ajax, which has some Jewish roots, make some noise like “pffftttt” to signal gas flowing, or simply chant “gas. gas. gas”
English fans (and newspapers) often disgrace other teams with insults about who won in WWII or some other war. During the last European Championship in England when England faced Spain, I saw some headlines ridiculing the Spanish armada that sunk in the English Channel.
I don’t think you can use football matches as an indication of the level of racism. Players live in a very special (and ridiculous pampered) world and some fans will use anything to slur the other teams with. Race, Religion, Politics, Past wars. Etc. All part of the game.
In the 1980s, English clubs were banned from European competitions for five years due to fan related violence. Since then, the FA (Football Association) has taken a very tough line against holliganism and racism. If the England - Spain international had been played in England, the rasict chanters would have been identified on CCTV and been issued with life bans against attending football matches. So I’m not sure if Viera’s comments about racism hold true for the entire country. As Rune says, he lives in a bubble.
A bit of historic ribbing of an entire country, however boisterous, cannot be compared to taunts of a racist nature directed at individuals.
Even an attack on a whole team, however painful (ie Manchester City using Man Utd’s Munich air disaster as song material), is to be expected in the charged atmosphere of a football match - its an “us against them” thing that is intrinsically linked to sporting encounters. When its us against HIM, however, that’s when it turns nasty.
What I wanted to get at, though, was the reasons behind the difference of approach/success in different countries to the problem both within football and within society at large.
Maybe. But since football is such a pervasive part of British culture, could the tough attitude towards racism being taken in the stands be filtering into the mainstream?
There’s definitely a huge acknowledgement that ‘racism is bad’. People object far more strongly eg to racist words or phrases being used in TV dramas than they used to (conversely to swearing, which has lost its offensiveness). However, deep-rooted racism is still there, only just under the surface. It doesn’t take much to bring it out again - only it tends to be in more subtle and insidious ways than monkey chants at football grounds (replacing the word ‘foreign’ or ‘asian’ with the phrase ‘asylum seeker’ lets people get away with saying just about anything).
You need to distinguish between Britain and England. Not only are the terms generally not interchangeable, but they are certainly not interchangeable in footballing terms, seeing as all the countries of Britain have their own football associations.
I certainly do not think the Scottish Football Association is doing enough to combat racism. Whenever Rangers are playing against a team with black players, the racial abuse those players get is disgusting, but very little gets said or done about it.
(And no, I’m not saying Celtic fans have never been guilty of this, but we are nowhere near as guilty of it today as Rangers fans are, as can easily be confirmed by watching both teams the next time they’re on television.)
Maybe this will sound like a stereotype, maybe not. The image of the British tends to be of a people who, despite their sometimes strange ways (warm beer, heavy foods for breakfast, etc) have a sense of fair play and justice. They want to act civilized, and try to live up to that ideal. There seems to be a sense of “such things just are not done in polite society”. As an outsider who has never been there, that at least is how it looks from a distance.
As far as Mediterranean people being black, not true. There is probably some mixing, but that is a given - sailing the Med, trading, exploring, etc. It is impossible to say there would never be any mixing of the races. Besides, that mix is a good thing. It is probably what made we of Italian/Sicilian descent so damn good looking.
On a related not, I was once told that “YAHOO” or some other still common cry (forget which) was a Latin acronym for something like “It Was We who Burned Jerusalem” which, after the sack of Jerusalem, the Romans used to shout at the Jews when they watched them in the Colleseum being burned, thrown to the lions or raped by bulls or whatever fun they could think of. The Romans were also quite crazy about their chariot racing teams, which had fan clubs which would class violently in the streets. I think this has been going on for many many years.
Britain might be slightly more “polite” in some small ways, perhaps, but we’re certainly not all Victorian aristocrats, nor do we live in a Jane Austen novel.
And it wasn’t just “trading and exploring” - the Moors conquered Sicily and the Iberian peninsula for centuries, and only left in the Middle Ages.
Granted, but all this savagery was a mark of the decline of the Roman empire - which was founded on pretty dodgy foundations. I look at the Coliseum and I think of a culture that had lost its moral bearings. Those it had ever had, anyway. The difference with modern Britain, at any rate - I can’t speak for other countries of which I am not a citizen - is that much of its values are derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We have much more to lose, but can lose it nonetheless unless we are vigilant.
Football in england has taken a VERY strong line on racism. Anti-black racism is now pretty much unheard - even at WHU or Stamford Bridge.
However it would be plain stupid to pat ourselves on the back when the same England fans who are reacting to the monkey chants are happy to sing “I’d rather be a paki than a turk” at the Turks. (In mitigation the turks are IMHO the worst football fans in the whole wide world and have been getting away with it at club and national level by playing the race card, not that this means it’s OK to racially abuse them).
Also there is a problem with some clubs (Stoke, Chelsea, Millwall, West Ham etc) who do still have the worst kind of racists within their support, although to be fair to the lions they are probably the most active anti-racistsw in the country, with very noticable results.
However as a spurs fan (and therefore in football terms a “yid” (lapsed catholic IRL) I am here to tell you that racism in it’s anti-semitic form is alive and kicking in the Fulham Broadway.
Just as bad? I dunno. I think crying “Hamas Hamas. The Jews to the Gas” is pretty bad directed at Jewish players. (Though as far as I know, Ajex hasn’t got any special Jewish connection anymore, besides the legends propagated by the fans – all their Jewish players were indeed gassed in WWII) Talking about the Spanish Amada is just rather ridiculous. Merely included a few examples to show football is working-class sport and often fairly dirty and disgusting – and that’s pretty much the way I want it to stay. Football is about the only sport I bother watching. I don’t want it sanitized, feminised or bambified, to be a fit show for companies to advertise in, American puritan viewers or middle class sentiments. I fear coming down hard on such instances, however good in intention, will destroy the soul of the game.
If you right-ponders aren’t careful, you’re going to start tempting some Yanks to pop in with schadenfreude-laden comments.
If you’ll accept the observations from someone who watched this unfold on the left side of the pond: I suspect that it is just a period you need to pass through. When the U.S. was being routinely pilloried for its overt racism in the early 1960s, I saw various replies to Europeans indicating that it was pretty easy to hurl the charge of “racists” from the comfort of essentially monochrome locations. Forty years later, far more people from former African colonies have moved to Europe, Europe’s standard of living has risen to the point where it now attracts far more people from the MENA region seeking work, and sports has become a huge industry in which players are recruited from all over the globe, regardless of skin color.
My guess would be that Britain, (or perhaps, England–I can’t speakto the distinction on this point), seems to have done more visible things to combat racism simply because it had to face the issue sooner, with more people coming from more (former) colonies to a smaller geographic location. France has long had a reputation of embracing blacks from the Americas (North and South); several islands in the Caribbean are full French departments in the way that Hawaii is a state. However, only recently has France begun to see large numbers of people immigrating, so they have simply not yet made any overt effort to recruit non-whites for “face” roles such as newsreaders.
I do hope that Europe can look at the U.S. and pick up the good efforts we’ve made while avoiding our errors, but I suspect that the problem will take time to resolve (and will, in many instances, require time to recognize). Recent events in Denmark and the Netherlands have challenged the reputations of both of those countries for tolerance. I simply think that new situations have thrown Europe into turmoil and that there will be a period of time in which they continue to happen. Perhaps, having no 200 year period of active slavery followed by 100 years of anti-Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Europe will actually recover more quickly than the U.S. We can hope.
