davieG Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 http://www.spiked-on.../article/11963/ Brendan O’Neill This isn’t anti-racism – it’s the policing of passion The campaign to excise offensive language from football games is a class war masquerading as an anti-racist initiative. Is racism rife in British football? Reading the papers, you could be forgiven for thinking so. Yes, 30 per cent of British professional footballers may be black, this may be one of the few arenas in which a working-class black Brit can make a fortune for himself, and the sight of fans throwing bananas at black players may be a mercifully distant memory. Yet, according to reports, racism remains a massive problem in football. In recent weeks, following allegedly racial incidents involving Luis Suarez of Liverpool and John Terry of Chelsea, the commentariat, public officials and the suits of the Football Association have joined forces to try finally to ‘eradicate racism from the game’. Don’t be fooled by the high-falutin’ morals of this drive against the alleged scourge of pitch-based racism. This isn’t anti-racism – it’s the policing of passion. It might package itself as an anti-racist initiative, designed to bring about an era of racial equality, but in truth it’s a class war against the beastly blokes and uncouth urchins who are seen to make up English football’s player-base and fanbase. The true driving force behind this aloof campaign to ‘clean up’ football is the elites’ utter incomprehension of the mass passions that get aired at football matches, which they stupidly mistake for ‘racism’ or ‘hatred’. In recent weeks, relatively minor incidents on the pitch and in the terraces have been blown out of proportion by snobbish football-watchers, giving an impression of racial hatred running rampant in English football. In December, Luis Suarez, Liverpool’s Uruguayan forward, was found guilty by the FA of using racist language against Manchester United fullback Patrice Evra at a match in October. Keen to demonstrate its implacable opposition to racism, the FA produced a 100-pagereport on the incident. Any Liverpool player or fan who has dared to demonstrate support for Suarez – by wearing a shirt with his name emblazoned on it or calling for an appeal against his ban – has been written off as a scummy accomplice to racial hatred. Liverpool management has been accused by one anti-racist official of ‘whipping’ up ‘tribal fervour’ amongst its fans on the Saurez issue. Chelsea and England captain John Terry stands accused of committing a ‘racially aggravated public order offence’ at a match in October, where he’s alleged to have called QPR defender Anton Ferdinand a ‘****ing black ****’. Terry strenuously denies the allegations. Meanwhile, Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, caused paroxysms of fury amongst the chattering classes in October when he suggested that racism on the pitch is on the wane and that when it does occur it can usually be resolved with a handshake between the two clashing players. And last Friday, at an FA Cup tie, a section of Liverpool fans allegedly called Oldham defender Tom Aeyemi a ‘black bastard’. One of the fans has been arrested. It is proof, said yesterday’s Sun, that Blatter was wrong, and ‘despite efforts to fight racism it has still not been eradicated from football’. The problem with this hysterical obsession with ‘racist incidents’ at football games is not only that very rare uses of offensive language are used to demonise a mass sport that has millions of participants who would never dream of using racist language. More fundamentally, there’s the fact that these incidents and alleged incidents are not racism at all, in the true meaning of the word. To the cliquish commentators, quango officials and Nu Football types in Ben Sherman shirts (from Debenhams) who peer into football stadia from outside, it might look as if the average game is a hotbed of hatred and abuse and even racial or homophobic slurs. But that’s because they understand little, possibly nothing, about the undiluted passion that can be exhibited by a throng of football fans. Hailing from those arid, passionless planets of professional politicking or PR, where strict linguistic etiquette is the order of the day and fury is looked upon as a potential mental disorder, these outsiders look at hollering footie fans in the same way wives of Victorian colonialists once gawped at scantily clad Africans dancing around naked flames. The fact is that at a big football match, where rivalries are stoked and your team has its neck on the line, people act and speak in a way they wouldn’t around the dinner table, say, or at work. They sing obscene songs, shout abuse at opposing fans, muse loudly upon the sexual preferences of Chelsea players, and yell things about Posh Spice’s anus. This is not normal behaviour. But that’s because a football ground during a game is not a normal, everyday place – it is a zone outside of normality, away from the humdrum of daily existence, where one can unleash one’s id and ignite one’s passions. Put on edge by a tense game, wound up by opposing fans, determined to cheer to victory a team that your family might have supported for generations, it’s perfectly understandable that fans get het up, shouting down players they don’t like and trying to put off players they fear. Does that make them hateful, racist if they say the word ‘black’ or homophobic if they say ‘takes it up the arse’? No. They wouldn’t say that kind of thing in the office or the pub, because the vast majority of fans don’t actually hate black people or gay people. It’s just that at a football match, with passion at play, anything and everything can be used as a battering ram against your implacable opponents. The fantastic inability of the cut-off elites to understand this fact, their laugh-out-loud belief that what a football fan says in the heat of the moment in the Emirates stadium is a perfect snapshot of his entire ideological outlook, is a result of both their aloofness from ordinary people and their lack of familiarity with passion, at least of the working-class crowd variety. Ours is an era in which politics is an increasingly shrink-wrapped, anodyne, etiquette-obsessed arena, where watching your words and curbing your emotions are not only expected, but demanded. Schooled in PC, drained of controversial thought, thoroughly prepped by their parents or their peers for a life of dutiful PR work or broadsheet media stardom, it is not surprising that the kind of people who staff public bodies, equality quangos and the comment desks of newspapers find mass football passion a totally alien thing and that they can refer to fans who shout offensive slogans as ‘knuckle-dragging cretins’. Behind the campaign to ‘eradicate racism’ from football, there lurks a pretty poisonous desire to police the weird emotions of these knuckle-draggers once known as the working classes, an attempt to subordinate passion to PC. If these snobs dolled up as anti-racists get their way, professional football might soon be drained of the very thing that makes it brilliant – people’s investment of passion and fury into their teams. Do we really want a situation where English football is turned into a totally respectable TV extravaganza, like American football, or where fans have been so lobotomised by the PC elite that they only clap or demur politely, as if football were dressage? If not, I suggest we set about the urgent task of kicking these ‘anti-racists’ out of football. Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal websitehere.
davieG Posted 10 January 2012 Author Posted 10 January 2012 My simplistic view is many things have been introduced that could be classed as the policing of passion but abusing fellow fans, referees and players is not one of them. Surely it's possible to show your passion without resort to personal abuse.
Head Honcho Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Maybe we should just ban chanting! Give everyone who enters the stadium a gag............
ozleicester Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Maybe we should just ban chanting! Give everyone who enters the stadium a gag............ as long as the gags have a fire certificate
Bettsj2 Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Maybe we should just ban chanting! Give everyone who enters the stadium a gag............ Has that already happened at the King Power?
lcfcadam Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Seriously though, the suggestion that there is a racism "problem" in British football nowadays is almost certainly a joke. Thousands of fans dressing up in monkey suits, grunting monkey noises, and throwing bananas on to the pitch constitutes a racism problem, one pissed up Scouse twat in a crowd of 45,000 does not. Neither does a foreign football player using a word that when translated in to English carries racist connotations. Neither would a hideous chav like John Terry calling a fellow player "a ****ing black twat" or whatever. They're all incredibly rare and isolated incidents that can be dealt with on a case by case business, but the reaction that each one of them generates in the current climate is just ludicrous. Any black player stepping on to a football pitch in Britain in this day and age knows that 99.9999999% of the people in the stands is fully supportive of him and anyone who gives racist abuse is in the tiniest, almost non-existent, minority. I think the likes of Mark Walters, Viv Anderson etc would probably be deeply embarrassed by the stuff that's been hitting the headlines in the past few weeks...
Captain... Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 That article is a mostly crap, I agree that in some ways these racist rows are pretty much storms in tea-cups, childish and petty rather than nasty and vindictive. We are not hearing words like nigger, wog or paki on a regular basis. It seems to be unfortunate uses of the word black more than actual racism, idiocy rather than a regression, but the idea this is a class warfare and a war on passion, is just a load of crap. As others have mentioned in other threads, black is an adjective like fat or ugly, on it's own it is not negative, but when used in a negative sentence it dominates it, but whilst it is acceptable to chant you fat bastard, there will be those that miss the difference between fat bastard and black bastard and maybe because that difference is only perceived and not real. I think that a great step will be taken towards removing racism when black bastard is treated as the same kind of insult as fat bastard. If anything the reactions in recent weeks have been overblown and if anything that goes to fuel racism, resentment and hatred. Take the Hansen incident, using the word coloured, a few people got upset over that, which was just ridiculous, but the reaction brought out a lot more resentment towards black and other ethnic groups, than if nothing had been said about it. It clearly wasn't racist but some of the discussion it caused was. There is an argument that we need to stop being so sensitive towards the word black, the other argument is that we need to be less tolerant towards abuse in general, one thing I will state though is that the original article is a pile of shite.
Dan Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 The two posts above me are very good. I've said so many times the main causers or racial hatred in this country are the PC twats who just constantly try to get people into trouble. Whilst you get some idiots who are genuinely racist, you can bet your life these PC ****** haven't helped it.
ajthefox Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 He has a point in that anything involving race is getting blown out of proportion and that there isn't really a problem, it is just a small few, but that article is rubbish. Just because being at a football match is a completely different environment doesn't mean you can say literally anything you feel like and not have to think about the possible connotations it might have.
Guest MattP Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Said pretty much the same thing for the last few weeks and been slandered all over the place. Beware, the thought police is alive and kicking in this country now.
Webbo Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 One or two good points but to pretend that eradicating racism is some sort of plot against the working classes is blatant bullshit.
Finnegan Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Oh **** off. I'm plenty passionate about a lot if things, I work in a high stress (and almost entirely working class, no Bentleys or Beemers here) environment and I'm prone to all sorts I'd language in the heat of the moment. Never felt any involuntary convulsion that made me spew racism nor seen it in the people around me. Mostly cos they aren't tossers.
Guest MattP Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Oh **** off. I'm plenty passionate about a lot if things, I work in a high stress (and almost entirely working class, no Bentleys or Beemers here) environment and I'm prone to all sorts I'd language in the heat of the moment. Never felt any involuntary convulsion that made me spew racism nor seen it in the people around me. Mostly cos they aren't tossers. Come on, you must have slipped out an "English tosser" or something watching a Wales England Rugby Match
Raj Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 As long as its just One scouser calling a blcak player a black cvnt Or Englands Captain calling his fellow England team mates brother a Black Cvnt A cheating Foreigner calling another foreigner a negro A section of forest fans chanting racist chants Its all banter....
Finnegan Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 Come on, you must have slipped out an "English tosser" or something watching a Wales England Rugby Match We're murder than that normally.
accessory Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 As long as its just One scouser calling a blcak player a black cvnt Or Englands Captain calling his fellow England team mates brother a Black Cvnt A cheating Foreigner calling another foreigner a negro A section of forest fans chanting racist chants Its all banter.... Doubt The Singh would agree with you there..
accessory Posted 10 January 2012 Posted 10 January 2012 My simplistic view is many things have been introduced that could be classed as the policing of passion but abusing fellow fans, referees and players is not one of them. Surely it's possible to show your passion without resort to personal abuse. It is. The article's author is a well-known internet troll and this will only confirm opinions of him. Football grounds shouldn't be the exclusive preserve of straight white men.
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