Why do racism, prejudice and bigotry have to be part of our everyday lives?
Be honest. Don’t you get a bit sick of the darkies/queers/knackers etc complaining? You’ve got your problems. Who asks about you? You’re not prejudiced. You know a gay black traveller and he’s a real character, plays games against you in the alley, him barehanded, you with your hurley and the thing about him is you can slag him and he gives as good as he gets. It’s the moaning and whingeing crowd that annoy you.
Maybe the column isn’t for you this week.
I was looking at America and Spain and thinking what a good week it was. A soccer player in Spain peeled and ate a banana that was thrown at him in a racist act which never seems to get old in that country. By ridiculing the racist it sparked a wave of support and opened a bit of a debate.
In America the hideously rich, hideous fella who owns the LA Clippers basketball team was caught on tape advising his girlfriend (or mistress or companion) to stop posting pictures of herself with black people and to stop bringing them to games if possible. She could see black people and sleep with black people but not be seen with them in public herself. Sponsors stampeded out of the building. Players, most of them black, were horrified. The owner has been banned for life from the NBA.
The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (there’s a name that shows its age) cancelled an award it was supposed to give the old geezer.
All good, because the worst kind of prejudice is other people’s.
Especially foreigners. Foreigners can be desperate racists. Our own prejudices are forgivable. We got problems.
Last Friday night I was out in Cork having some food in Wagamamas with a close friend. As it happens he is heroically straight, award winningly straight. Obviously I have sent people to brainwash him and recruit him but nothing works. As we were eating a couple of lads passed and one lad he played with popped over to say hello.
We were talking when my friend got agitated and started shouting at the other guy who had moved on.
I turned around. A red-faced man, pretending to be talking into a mobile phone was scurrying out the door.
What’s the story? My friend and I went to the pictures together a while back and I tweeted something about it afterwards and your man and his friends were straight on with abuse… ‘they should emigrate…’ ‘no Gaymarriage in Ireland’ etc. The usual crap.
The man was out in the rain now still talking into his hand.
Now the funny thing is that I’m not really bothered by people like him. I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of a mention here if I was. I do know that a lot of young men or women faced with difficult decisions would read this brave keyboard warrior’s nonsense and feel hurt and intimidated. A pity they couldn’t see the real him — running away into the rain.
Odder still is the fact that the man works for the State. He does a job in the community. I’d have no doubt that he thinks of himself as a good citizen and a solid fella. Just all the rights for gays or whoever stuff annoys him. So he has the courage to go online and have a go.
He’s not alone. We are all shocked that there is some decrepit old racist in charge of a basketball team in America who would say such things but we have a high tolerance level for the sort of abuse and bullying which happens online. It’s not just minorities who get it in the ear either. I have noticed an increased trend for abusing sports people or anybody in the position to make a mistake in public. Any excuse to throw the first stone.
For the sake of a quiet life we’ll let taxi drivers bend our ears about Polish people getting free cars when they arrive in Ireland and black people getting free houses and gays getting everything — and as for travellers... Other people’s prejudices are something awful but you’re not going to change to another taxi.
I was on a flight to Germany on Tuesday talking to a colleague about racism in America. It’s always better to be talking about somebody else’s racism. He said that one thing you had to say about the southern States, places like Alabama and Georgia, where he had worked, was that many people there were still open about their racism. Other parts of America have learned more subtle forms of prejudice.
So there is a public stoning when an old man gets caught being an open racist in a phone message but there is no serious examination of why so many NBA players are black but so few owners and key executives are of the same colour. I don’t know much about the NBA but I doubt the owner of the LA Clippers woke up one day in his 80th year and decided he was going to become a racist. From what I’ve read he made a lot of his money renting out poor quality housing in slums. He has a vertically integrated business model of exploiting black people from the bottom up.
Funnily enough, the black person who sparked the rant was Magic Johnson, who is now being mentioned as a potential buyer for the Clippers. Along with Oprah. America has its black people which it approves of.
The point I am making is that in seeing the Clippers and the Barca situation we have no reason to feel smug. We have settled in and made lives for ourselves in practically every country on earth, but many of us bitterly resent anybody coming here to make a better life. We hear about some group wanting the rights that the majority have always enjoyed and, you know what, I have nothing against them but I get sick of the moaning, I have problems…
When Lee Chin was getting abused for the colour of his skin some time back one GAA official thought he was settling the argument by announcing triumphantly that Lee is actually a Wexford man.
As if it would all be understandable if Lee was from someplace else.
We’ll learn slowly if the tone of our online discussions are anything to go by. It’s a long time since Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball, since Cassius Clay cast off his slave name, since Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave those black power salutes. Back then none of those heroes could have imagined a week like the past week. Not in 2014.
They’d have thought that prejudice would at least have become a lot more subtle. More like the Irish model…
