A few weeks have now passed since Liverpool player Luis Suarez was found guilty of using a racially objectionable word towards Manchester United’s Patrice Evra. But in the storm that followed the incident in the game last October, huge levels of ignorance around racism were shown.
The stance that LFC took to defend a player that admitted to using a word that we would describe as racist was extremely disappointing. To say that, because he has always worked with black players, he can’t be racist, and that the word is acceptable in the Uruguayan’s country, is completely irresponsible.
The days after the LFC statement gave us a snapshot of society and people who are naïve and ignorant blindly following the lead of the football club, playing down racism. A number of people said to Stan Collymore on Twitter that black people “just have a chip on their shoulder” and it is no different than being called fat or bald. Then we saw an alleged incident of racial abuse from a Liverpool fan to an Oldham Athletic player during a match at Anfield in January. LFC released another statement, this time condemning the fan and reiterating Liverpool’s previous hard work to kick racism out of football!
That was like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted; if that statement had come straight after the Luis Suarez charge then we may have avoided the alleged abuse in the Oldham game and also the thousands of rival fans that are undermining the seriousness of the situation by making racist jokes at Liverpool’s expense.
Racism is a way of making millions of people that have a lot of things in common turn the things they don’t share into negatives, thus keeping them divided. The majority of people in the world have struggles everyday and they are told to blame at each other for the reason we have to struggle.
When we stop doing this we will realise it’s the people telling us to blame our neighbours, who are the real problem.
The only time they struggle is when they have too much capital and nothing left to buy; they are the lowest class in society but call themselves the upper class.
