Words will always hurt me

Tuesday January 10, 2012

Stuart Waiton says the recent rows about racism in football are the mark of an infantile society

There’s an Australian comic who takes the piss out of people who claim to be offended. “So what,” he says, “so you’ve been offended. Nothing happens. You don’t wake up the next morning with leprosy”.

Clearly nobody has told Patrice Evra this, or the John Terry complainant, or the FA, or every football commentator on Talk Sport or the TV. Adrian Durham on Talk Sport explained that he knew that if he made one slip of the tongue regarding race then he would be washing dishes for the rest of his life. Strangely Durham appeared to think that this was fair enough.

Hopefully for Alan Hansen’s livelihood, his slip of the tongue, using the word ‘coloured’ when discussing the issue, will not lead to his sacking. But who knows in the irrational witch-hunt atmosphere of ‘tolerant’ 21st Century Britain. For football people who are always going on about the need for footballers to ‘man up’, there is a remarkable lack of questioning about what is happening in football at the moment.

I asked one of the admin workers at my University what they thought about it. She thought it was a joke. “Grown up men telling tales on one another”, she remarked with disdain. What is obvious to some is unfortunately a bizarre pantomime of confused offence for others. It appears that football pundits can talk ad nauseam about over-paid ‘big girl’ footballers who dive all the time. But call someone a nasty name using a race related term, and all bets are off.

Surely you don’t have to be a card carrying BNP member to think that there is something wrong with the whole Evra/Suarez thing. Unfortunately we appear to have been educated out of being robust individuals who are expected to sort things out for ourselves (as we used to educate children to be with the idea of ‘sticks and stones’). Instead the correct response when someone does something that you find offensive is to contact the authorities.

Within the media the correct response is to feel offended for the offended. And anyone who does not show that they are also offended are themselves seen as being offensive. That few people are prepared to state the obvious – that this is a highly competitive contact sport where people both physically and verbally get stuck into each other all the time and should, and always have been, expected to deal with this – is worrying.

When Materazzi made Zidane head butt him by whispering in his ear that he was giving his sister one (leading to Zidane’s sending off in the World Cup), it was one of the best pieces of defensive work Materazzi had ever done. Of course all sorts of questions were raised about this offensive-ness, not least because there was a question about racism once again, but the main question that should have been raised was about Zidane’s weak character that led to him letting his team mates and his country down over a petty insult.

Another worrying aspect of the Suarez case in particular is that the questions being discussed are less about what he said than what he is. “Is he a racist?” is the key question being discussed. But what if he is? Does that mean he should be sacked? Why not imprison him while we’re at it? The public order offence against John Terry is similarly strange. It appears today that a public order offence can be said to have been committed if someone feels offended by what you said. Of course if Terry had shouted “you fat bastard” it is unlikely this would have been classed as an offence. But say “black bastard” and it is one.

In other words, using racist language is now a crime. In a grown up society (indeed a passionately anti-racist one at that), these complaints would have been dealt with in-house or ignored entirely. There would be no suspension, no court case, no media drivel about being offended. There would just be a couple of players having a word with each other after a game of football.

The final tragedy of all this is that relations between ordinary punters and black and Asian people in this country will only become more distant, awkward and confused because of the nonsense of ‘offence’ which turns even the most anti-racist individual into an anxious tongue twisted twerp unable to have a conversation with a colleague without feeling the need to receive linguistic correctness training, just in case.

Stuart Waiton is founder of Take a Liberty (Scotland).