To tackle racism, we must tackle ignorancePosted in Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2012-02-21 18:26Z by Steven |
To tackle racism, we must tackle ignorance
The Times of London
2012-02-14
It’s not about football, it’s about destroying modern myths of colour, race and superiority
In 1987 a black friend of mine went into a shop to buy a coat. He asked the assistant if they had it in black and she said no, they only had it in nigger brown. She was a lovely woman, but what would we say if that happened today?
If I were to ask players of my generation if they had made a racist comment in a football match, anyone honest would almost certainly say yes. No one batted an eyelid 20 years ago. Now when Alan Hansen says “coloured” rather than “black” (because black used to be an insult) or Luis Suárez says “negrito”, everyone jumps up and down to distance themselves from such remarks. They believe racism has been consigned to the past…
…The Football Association ticks all the right boxes with its policies and campaigns, the Government passes legislation, the Prime Minister gets involved because someone didn’t shake someone’s hand, people queue up to say ignorance is no excuse. But they are wrong. Ignorance is the excuse. To stop it, we have to start talking seriously about race.
The idea that race is about colour is relatively modern. When Aristotle spoke about races he was differentiating between uncivilised barbarians and civilised Greeks. But it was introduced by governments, backed by the Church, to validate slavery and colonialism, to justify treating some people as less equal than others. Just as Linnaeus classified plants, so people were classified by the colour of their skin. Academics tried to prove differences in skull formation to give scientific support to the idea that black people were morally and intellectually inferior.
But race is not a scientific reality. You could find a tribe in Africa who are genetically closer to Europeans than to an African tribe a hundred miles away. Some Saudis have whiter skin than Italians.
The notion of “whiteness” is an ideology of superiority. Nothing similar has ever existed in black culture. Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda do not see themselves as the same. When the Labour MP Diane Abbott talked on Twitter about “divide and rule” her claims depended on a sense of black identity that wasn’t correct…
Read the entire article here.