Opinion

THE CULTURAL TIGHTROPE

BARNEY GRIFFITHS

Racism? That's a bit rich

Indeed, the pair had to be kept separate for several minutes due to the distinct possibility of a real fight ensuing.

This week's col­umn is based on a cu­ri­ous in­ci­dent that took place in a sum­mer foot­ball tour­na­ment I played in with my team – an as­sort­ment of age­ing Irish and Brita­lans sprin­kled with a cou­ple of off­spring of one of the play­ers, who were born here, and oc­ca­sion­ally an old Cata­lan friend thrown into the mix. We play in a Mon­day night league and are known for being by far the old­est team but one that, de­spite its British and Irish foot­balling roots, ac­tu­ally tries to play “proper foot­ball”.

Any­way, I'm not going to ram­ble on about foot­ball, but about the in­ci­dent, which took place on a balmy night in Sant An­dreu and had an in­ter­est­ing reper­cus­sion, cul­tur­ally speak­ing. Not to put too fine a point on it, one of the mem­bers of my team, let's call him Craig, could not look more “guiri” if he tried and is not the deftest of foot­balling tal­ents ei­ther, hence his em­ploy­ment as a de­fender to stop any­thing and every­thing that comes his way, by fair means if at all pos­si­ble. On the oc­ca­sion in ques­tion, the means he em­ployed may have been some­what less than fair, as the ref­eree awarded our ro­bust and skil­ful young Cata­lan op­po­nents a free kick after Craig's op­po­nent came down rub­bing the side of his head and claim­ing he'd been el­bowed. His com­plaint very quickly es­ca­lated into full-on ver­bal abuse and even grab­bing Craig by the throat.

What hap­pened next led me to note the in­ci­dent for the pur­poses of this col­umn: far from being en­raged by the clench­ing of a palm around his throat, what sent Craig truly bal­lis­tic was the lan­guage his op­po­nent di­rected at him. And not be­cause it was the usual mix­ture of in­sults re­gard­ing what he'd like to do to his mother's or an­ces­tors' milk, al­ways a truly bizarre in­sult for a for­eigner to hear, but be­cause he deemed the lan­guage used against him racist: “inglés de mierda”. Now, I must admit, I never thought I would see the day when a blonde-haired well-ed­u­cated Eng­lish­man would claim to have been racially abused, and that it would ac­tu­ally in­flame his anger to the point where he would have to be pulled apart from the abuser. In­deed, the pair had to be kept sep­a­rate for sev­eral min­utes due to the dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity of a real fight en­su­ing.

All this led me to think­ing that Craig's re­ac­tion to being the tar­get of racism , some­thing the abuser was dis­tinctly obliv­i­ous to but very happy to dis­cover pro­voked such anger, was ac­tu­ally a very Eng­lish mid­dle-class source of ire in this case and per­haps fi­nally a chance to put the shoe on the other foot and feel vic­timised when peo­ple of Craig's pro­file have spent their whole life as the priv­i­leged white man. What made it more in­ter­est­ing, how­ever, was when other mem­bers of our team later jok­ingly put his re­ac­tion down to “Brexit angst”, lead­ing me to pon­der whether this dis­play of Eng­lish in­se­cu­rity may be a mere taste of things to come for my com­pa­tri­ots in the post-Brexit age.

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