Racism, Football and Twitter

Last night’s incident at Anfield involving Tom Adeyemi leaves another bad taste in a mouth already filled with unpleasant sensation. The alleged racist abuse the young Oldham defender suffered from the ugly mouth of a fan has capped a string of incidents in the last few weeks that have the unshakable theme of racial abuse. It would seem that, despite Sepp Blatter’s ill-judged assertion, racism continues to rear its putrid head in English football.

It’s important to stress that there’s no confirmation the incident at Anfield last night was racially motivated, but it would seem very likely given both the accounts of those in the area around the incident and the distraught reaction of Adeyemi himself. This follows the long-winded dispute between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra following the reported racist slur the Uruguayan used.

Both incidents involve Liverpool, but it’s not fair at all to tar the whole club and fanbase with the same brush. I think any club has a handful of despicable, racist idiots in the stands and it wouldn’t be right to pretend that Liverpool are the only club in the world in which that is the case. While racist chanting and the like is a thing of the past, you just have to look around you in this country to see plenty of racist idiots around.

Certainly, Liverpool Football Club reacted badly to the Suarez case with the overblown support, prior to a muted retraction when the FA’s report came out and showed the nature of Suarez’s statements, along with the lack of veracity the Uruguayan showed throughout the saga. Despite the lack of appreciation for the serious nature of the incident, we can forgive Liverpool Football Club some misplaced trust in one of their employees should they deal swiftly and with conviction with regards to this racist idiot of a ‘fan’.

Why is it that these incidents seem to have suddenly flared up in such succession though? I think there’s a lot of reasons (mostly boring political ones that make no sense). In truth, it all kicked off with the John Terry incident. His supposed racially motivated shout seemed like a moment of ignorance, frustration and nastiness. It seems as if Terry never thought he’d be caught, but the video clip of him shouting the alleged phrase was key in outing this particular incident. It perhaps suggests that more of this sort of thing occurs on the football pitch, but goes unreported.

For Suarez, it was a similar case. He claimed to be ignorant of the fact that the term ‘negro’ could be seen as offensive, but upon looking at the way in which the term was used in the report of the incident, it seems impossible that Suarez was unaware he was being grossly offensive. Of course, the FA had no concrete proof that all these things were shouted, but the nature of the case would suggest that there were at least a few assertions to that effect.

Some people seem to think that the victims of these attacks are looking for trouble. I don’t think that can be true at all. For Evra, he was branded a liar and had to go through a drawn out case with the FA over the incident. Unless he had a severe personal problem with Luis Suarez, I can’t think why Evra would want to cause such fuss if no racial abuse had taken place. Same with Adeyemi, people were saying that he was having a bad game and decided to selectively hear a racist shout. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean; why would Adeyemi want a reason to cry on the football pitch. That just sounds stupid to me.

You see, this sort of condemnation of anyone who’s prepared to step forward and call out racist abuse only serves to stop players from coming forward in the future. If Evra had kept quiet about Suarez, or if Adeyemi had not confronted the abuse he received, or if John Terry hadn’t been caught on video, players and fans around them may have considered that sort of behaviour to be acceptable because it wasn’t followed up by anyone. It’s easy for things like that to become the norm, so it’s a good thing that there are players willing to express the fact that this is unacceptable.

These incidents have led to a lot of frustrated fans. They are either totally offended that one of their players or fellow supporters is being condemned, want to cover up their ears and pretend that racism in football isn’t a problem, or are just flagrant racists. The latter of those three is thankfully the least common, but unfortunately more nastiness occurred when Stan Collymore was subject to racial abuse on Twitter. Sadly, the internet is an effective framework for allowing this sort of thing to be more outspoken and more likely. 

However, internet warriors are a different sort of people from actual football fans. The internet does have a lot of kitsch, tongue-in-cheek racism that some people may find offensive, but is done with a beam of irony. Unfortunately though, there are a lot of impressionable people that will take all this literally, and they don’t care that their hurtful comments are being directed at real people. Now I don’t really like Stan Collymore when he’s on the radio or anything, but I know he is a real person and I would feel embarrassed to send him something insulting over Twitter. It seems some people are happy to hide behind their keyboards and throw abuse wherever they feel is necessary.

He’s been arrested now though (the racist, no Collymore).