Sports like football have been trying to eradicate racism from their grounds for many years now, but cricket’s associations have only now come to terms with the fact that the issue needs to be sorted out in a systematic manner in their sport as well. The Symonds incidents with the crowd chants in India and now allegedly with Harbhajan on the field mean that racism has been brought into the glaring lights of the popular media in India.
One thing to come out of the controversy is that the ICC has no established rules and procedures to tackle and punish race related offences in the game, whether by players or by fans. As football has been dealing with this issue for a very long time now, I thought I would spend some time discussing the history of racism in football, and the steps towards eradication taken by it’s governing bodies.
The phenomenon of racism in football is obviously not as old as the scourge of racism in society in general, but it has been around for a very long time, and over the last 2 decades, FIFA has initiated numerous programs to try and eradicate this unsavoury practice, which is most prevalent in Europe.
Most of football’s issues with racism are with the crowds, with monkey gestures and bananas being thrown at black players being very common, seen recently in Spain with Samuel Etoo the target. Crowd chants related to colour of skin are commonplace. Recently we saw this in in cricket as well with Andrew Symonds clearly being targeted by the Indian crowd.
Nazi swastika flags can be found flying in the crowds of Rome and Milan. Also, it must be pointed out that racism as a concept does not only target the colour of one’s skin. Ethnicity and religion are also targets of racists. In fact anti-semitic crowd chants are also heard often in football, especially in the Dutch league. Reported incidents of racism on the field between players are less frequent, but well documented as well.
Pointing out the many specific incidents would take up too much space, but high profile targets of racism have included John Barnes, Thierry Henry, Samuel Etoo and Marcel Desailly. You can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_football for interesting specific occurrences of racism in the sport.
Continue reading ‘Racism in football - Of monkeys, bananas and Swastikas’
Conversations
Patresia Ancel, Sanat, dharmaraj, Sanat, Shweta Varma, Sanat, Sanat, thripuranath, vkt, Sanat [...]
Amrita Sachdev, vikas, ChandraPrabha Dewangan, Ganesh Sidharth, Sumit Raut
Kasi Raj kumar, Satyaki Roy, Donald duck, Bharat, shriti, vikas
Satyaki Roy, madhan, Narayan Shrawagi, Ganesh Sidharth
sai krishna suryadevara, Sharmila bali, khyati chawla, Ramya, kousar, Kovsar, Kovsar, Sameer Chaudhary, devas, aruna [...]
RAHUL, Jayashri, shriti, Narayan Shrawagi, swapna dhandapani, musolini, ARTHI.G, Suhita Paul, Lalit Mishra, kumaragurubaran [...]