The Los Angeles Times reports:
Although players of color have graced Europe’s top leagues since the 1970s, and there’s hardly a championship team anywhere without some Brazilian or African imports, an astonishing level of racism persists among some fans and even coaches.
Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, for example, recently complained that the influx of foreign players deprived his compatriots of role models: “Let them learn from [our players] and not some Zumba-Bumba whom they took off a tree, gave two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.”
Then there was Spain’s coach, Luis Aragones, caught on TV telling striker Jose Antonio Reyes that he was better than his French Arsenal teammate Thierry Henry. Except Aragones didn’t say Henry’s name; he used a vicious racial epithet.
In Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, black players regularly suffer racial abuse in the form of ape noises and bananas thrown from the stands.
Although the penalties aren’t always as strong as they ought to be, FIFA, the sport’s governing body, has made combating racism a priority.
The full article can be found here.
Update: An ESPN special of the whole thing here.
“Let them learn from [our players] and not some Zumba-Bumba whom they took off a tree, gave two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.” OUCH!!!! What a bunch of idiots.
If the racism was really that bad, these players of color wouldn’t be on these European teams. As for the Europeans, they are the biggest racists of all, and they have been for hundreds of years. I can’t understand why any person of color or Jew would ever want to live in Europe, much less play for their national teams.
These white hypocrites, they call their black players monkeys and make ape sounds, but when those same “monkeys” bring home a victory, these same white racists are the first to celebrate.
These black players should leave these teams, ensuring that the next time Europe ever sees a World Cup victory will be when whites make up 25 percent of the population of that continent.
They wouldn’t leave their teams because they make millions playing ball there.
I lived in Spain for several years and have lots of family and friends. Honestly, racism is not really a big problem there. It exists there, it exists everywhere. You are always going to find stupid people, especially in a country that was run by fascists until 1975.
Don’t judge an entire continent based on its soccer hooligans. I don’t know a single racist person in Spain but I know countless here in the USA. The racial tensions I have encountered here in the States are very serious compared to anything I have heard of in Europe (and I have only heard of it, I’ve never actually seen it.) When I was a kid growing up in Texas I saw the Jasper incident where a group of whites dragged a black man through the street. Nobody in the town cared to do anything to stop them. Now *that* was messed up.
You need to go out more in Spain then, I have friends at work that are from Spain (I speak Spanish fluently, and I work for an engineering company), and they say that the way blacks and even just non-spaniards are treated in Spain is repulsive. For example, they would all agree with what this Spaniard had to say.
Granted, I am not saying that the United States is racism free, but certainly it is looked down upon much more here than in Europe.
msondo,
What happened in Jasper was certainly terrible, but I don’t think its fair to the people of the town to make it sound like he was dragged down main st. while hundreds of people just watched. the guy was killed in a remote area, and i’m sure that there would have been many people that cared enough to stop it if they could have. you exaggerate too much
Hmm, I’m not so sure… as I said I have spent a considerable amount of time there. I’ve lived there, my wife is from there, I have tons of family and friends there. I went to an international university the first time I lived there and hung around a fairly diverse crowd which is sort of rare for a country that is almost racially homogenous. I’ve never personally felt or witnessed racism there, but when I lived in Texas I would encounter it almost weekly.
I’d ask your spanish friends how many blacks they actually knew… and closely? My wife, for example, never personally knew a black person until she was in her 20’s so she is fairly ignorant to the non-white spaniard life in Spain but would agree that racism exists, but she is always telling me that the level of racism in this country is absurd compared to the ‘racism’ in Spain. I’m not saying it is some paradise… in fact Spain has issues with things like sexism, but as a non-white person who has actually lived in Spain and with a large network of Spaniards at my disposal, racism isn’t a big problem. It’s almost exclusively an issue with facists sympathetic to hard-line rightwing Franco era politics.
I think there is a difference between racism and ignorance, and as I mentioned my wife is fairly ignorant of Africans due to her lack of exposure to them. There is a lot of contempt for Moroccans but that is fairly contemporary and due to the wave of illegal immigration. I have had several Moroccan friends in Spain, all I’ll admit were fairly rich, but were respected as much as anybody else since they arrived legally and werent in to illegal activity.
Tom: You are right, they didn’t drag him down Main Street. Up until the late 1960’s, though, there were public lynchings throughout the south of African American victims. Jasper, and many places in the south, do have very serious problems with racism.
Here is a link with info and photographs:
http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
I think we are speaking past each other on this. I could certainly agree that there are patches in the United States that are as racist as they were before the civil war. I am not referring to those areas.
I am referring to the country at large. Please tell me, what do you think would have happened in the United States if the United States world cup coaches would have said what the European coaches said? Or if a United States newspaper would have made references to Condolezza Rice the way the Spanish leading newspaper El País did? See here. It is clear to me that the results would have been very different than how they were treated in Spain.
El País, btw, is a fairly left-leaning newspaper. They are actually considered enemies against the hard-right fascists that most of the racism in the country comes from.
What would have happened in the United States if the coaches said the same? I think you have to take in the context that the US has a very violent history against people of African descent. That in mind, I’d say it would have been a horridly stupid thing to say and would have likely ended the careers of everybody involved. There would have been huge public outcry and it would have been a media sensation for a few minutes… soccer would be demonized as the sport of racist white people (despite the fact that its greatest stars are black.)
Spain, on the other hand, doesn’t have a huge rap sheet like the US does. It’s also not as “politically correct” as the US. I think most people in Spain would agree that they were a poor choice of words. I’m not sure if “black hand” was supposed to represent something in a poetic sense. “La Mano Negra” was the name of an anarchist organization in Spain but Rice is anything but aligned with anarchist ideology. It’s not quite as bad as a member of the Royal Family dressing up like a Nazi for a costume party (as happened last year)… which would have been worse had he been German, but considering he is from a country that actually fought the Nazis I consider it bad judgement and insensitive, not racism. Talking about Rice’s black hands in Spain is not nearly as bad, as say, putting a confederate flag on the back of your pickup truck (which is very prevalent in the south yet never spoken about.)
So yeah, the results would have probably been different but only because the context is different.
Talking about Rice’s black hands in Spain is not nearly as bad, as say, putting a confederate flag on the back of your pickup truck
Well maybe that is why you see racism everywhere in the United States - you seem to erroneously equate what you see as necessarily racist with what is only possibly racist. Talk to those people that display the confederate flag and you will see that many of them see it as a national identity symbol instead of as anything slavery related. It is like those Texans who refer to themselves as Tejanos instead of anything else. Granted, the confederate flag is strongly associated with the civil war which is associated with slavery but many of those who use the confederate flag see it as a form of heritage of what part of the United States they are from. I personally don’t like the flag but I can atleast understand why someone else might and yet still not be a racist. In fact, I’ve met a couple left wing academics who believe displaying the United States flag is also racist.
As far as Spain goes, it isn’t just with the newspapers either (but the fact that a left wing newspaper published that, speaks volumes about how Spain is as a whole), it’s the full culture. Martin Varsavsky said:
Either way you cut it, whether for historical reasons or not, atleast in the United States there is a public outcry when anybody makes clearly racist comments, something that is obviously missing in Spain and most of the rest of Europe.
I added an ESPN clip of the whole thing above. It is a must watch for those of you interested in this…the clip can also be found here.