Those who say that the stadiums should be closed for 6 months, those who propose honorary citizenship for the goalkeeper struck by the rudeness of those who think it is right to address him as a monkey. There are those who call for outright defeats, those who pontificate that the goalkeeper should not have returned to the field, those who add that he should not have given in, and therefore the right thing was, on the contrary, to remain on the field. Obviously, there is no one answer.
But first of all, it is not a solution – in fact, perhaps the opposite is true – to raise the tone against “racism in stadiums”. Because it is an abstract, and probably simplifying, formula. It is almost useful for those who deny that our society is still profoundly and – we fear – irremediably racist, to point to the stadiums and some of those who frequent them as the exclusive source of the problem. It is an old argument, which describes fans full of troglodytes who when they see black lose the light of reason, assuming and not granting that, as troglodytes, they have ever been gifted with it. Nobody – let it be very clear – denies that stadiums are a convenient stage for ganging up, that they are an outlet where voice adds to voice and becomes a choir, and therefore makes more noise.
But those who have the task of observing what surrounds us cannot limit themselves to indignation when, with a rather sustained and predictable periodicity, the case of the insolent, insulted black player, assimilated to an animal (which is also very intelligent like the monkey), breaks out. It is not enough to “use” these cases to stamp the badge of indignation.
This should be done, for example, in front of immigrants who, although legal and with a paycheck, are unable to find houses to rent in our cities.
It should be done when our roads turn into perpetual wars, and a delay in the green light or a priority not given is enough to trigger the troglodyte of which there are many, too many.
It should be done when we hear “he’s black, but he’s good”, about a doctor, a nurse, a cook, a plumber. When the foreign origin or the different skin color of those around us trigger in us not only the natural distrust towards what we know less, but distancing, or even something worse. And when in the name of a now useless and very moldy joking spirit, we fake complicit laughter in the face of unbearable jokes. Something will change when instead of complicit laughter we will be able to say that racist jokes can no longer be heard, can no longer be accepted, whoever the author is. Will he be offended? Patience: those will be our “two cents” donated to the progress of civil coexistence.
Therefore, if we observe what is undeniable, we understand well that it is sacrosanct to be indignant at the troglodytes of Udine who have insolent Maignan, but it cannot be enough. Because the problem is there, of course, but it is only one of the faces of the phenomenon. Stadiums offer us a cheap window into what we are, or have become, or are becoming. I am a thermometer that marks the fever, I am not the disease. I am the occasional amplifier of a voice that however speaks every day, even if it is heard less, even if it makes less headlines because perhaps it hits a cleaning lady who doesn’t know where to go to sleep, and not the doorman who everyone knows and has millions of followers. Or maybe it hits those hundreds of nameless hands reaching out from a boat to find safety, and who ended up at the bottom of the sea. And in front of which “sites” now get by with a few lines positioned on the tenth scroll, like the grayest of routine news that no one clicks on anymore.
We are all a bit inside that chorus against Maignan, if we pretend not to see that that chorus is the effect of who we are. And we are all part of that chorus if we use it to absolve ourselves, thinking that the problem is only them, those ten or a hundred or a thousand troglodytes who vomited it on a football pitch.
2024-01-22 12:00:00
#Racism #isnt #chorus