An obscenity uttered by a soccer player during a football match is an event of world shattering importance, or so the ‘anti-racist’ lobby and assorted braindeads would have us believe.
It is difficult to believe this incident happened nearly a month ago, at least for those who are not au fait with the hysteria generated in Britain by any suggestion of racism or a racial slur, especially one sandwiched between two profanities.
It happened in a soccer match when John Terry (pictured below), then Captain of both Chelsea and England as well as President of Chelsea Pitch Owners turned to an opposing player, Anton Ferdinand, and uttered “you f*****g black c**t”. Unfortunately for Terry and the world, the cameras were there, and it doesn’t take a great deal of lip reading skill to confirm that he said what they say he said.
One would have thought that Ferdinand, like Terry, being not only a big strapping lad but paid an obscenely high salary for running up and down trying to kick a ball into the back of a net, would take this sort of thing in the spirit it should be taken, like water off a duck’s back. An indication of how much these so delicate chaps are paid can be found here. Alas, Ferdinand decided he wanted to make it official, but even if he hadn’t, by that time the tidal wave of hysteria had taken the choice out of his hands.
Incredibly, this incident has caused more outrage with the authorities than the shooting dead of a young, unarmed black man in Tottenham, although not with either the natives or the lumpen proletariat, as the August riots clearly demonstrated.
Having shot and killed Mark Duggan, the Metropolitan Police spoke to no less that six senior Chelsea players about this non-incident, and are sending a file to the Crown Prosecution Service. Phone them to report a burglary, and they will give you a crime number. Nice to know someone has their priorities right.
Enter Sepp Blatter, head honcho of world football. His – very reasonable suggestion – was that the two should shake hands at the end of the game and forget about it. The vitriol that was subsequently poured on this elderly administrator beggars belief, it was as though he had himself walked onto the pitch and mouth the verboten insult.
By this time, all manner of “anti-racist” loonies had crawled out of the woodwork, and on Sunday morning, this was one of the issues debated on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live programme, with all the usual obfuscation, intellectual dishonesty, and whinging by not only liberals but people who could never in a million years be construed as liberal, yet for some reason feel obliged to prefix all their arguments on this subject with “I’m not racist, but...”
Appearing on the programme was a certain John Amaechi , who as well as being both a six foot ten basketball player and black, is an out of the closet homosexual. That will have gone done well in Jamaica – not.
The big debate was racism, can it ever be acceptable, how bad is it nowadays, etc? Do some members of ethnic minorities suffer from a lifetime of abuse, as was claimed here? Can white people ever understand what causes racial offence?
Amaechi made an unusual claim that nowadays, (white) people find many different ways to say the N word without actually using it.
Right, let’s do some educating. The word racism has a surprisingly recent history. It was coined by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and was the title of his final book, which was published posthumously in 1935. Originally the word meant a belief that racial differences are innate rather than environmental.
There is absolutely nothing controversial, obscene or anti-social about this claim, because clearly we are all of us the products of our genes, our environment and luck/caprice/fate, what have you.
The word was also used to encompass the belief that some cultures and indeed some races were/are superior to others. Again, that belief need not be obscene, but it had and has nothing to do with what John Terry did. He simply insulted a fellow player. For the reader who is interested in what might be termed the evolution of racism, this short study should be helpful. For a more detailed treatment, check out The End Of Racism by the Asian-American academic Dinesh D’Souza.
To equate John Terry’s outburst with anything more than sheer bad manners is overtly dishonest. Amaechi, who has actually received an OBE, was not satisfied with mere intellectual dishonesty, he had to compound it with claims of what has been called statistical racism by alluding to the casual racism that exists in society, that sees “disproportionate” numbers of blacks and Asians in prisons, in football, some 30% of the players are black but there is only one black manager...
Okay, let’s look at the real reasons for this, there are “disproportionate” numbers of blacks in prison because white police officers are smarter than black criminals. Period. There are also reasons that have little or nothing to do with race, like the growing underclass of all races, who are both unemployed and unemployable, so what do they do? They deal in drugs, mug people and steal. The solution to this problem is not more “anti-racism” which means more taxes spent to engage moronic social(ist) workers, affirmative action and brainwashing, the solution is to take these people out of the poverty trap.
And are there really so many Asians in Britain’s gaols? As for Amaechi’s claim that 30% of the football players are black but there is only one black manager, why are there so many black players? Is the population of Britain 30% black? The “anti-racist” lobby and their lapdogs never tire of throwing around these stupid statistics as though they actually mean something. People are not numbers; the fact is that whatever racists believe, blacks have contributed enormously to contemporary music, but precious little to science, period. By the same token, they – or some of them – excel at sports including track events, boxing – as per Joe Frazier – and soccer, though not, apparently, swimming. No one can have it all. Perhaps most blacks don’t have what it takes to become football managers, perhaps they simply don’t aspire to this profession where they will be expected to boss people around, and be sacked in double quick time if they don’t deliver.
On the subject of black managers, one phoned in to the programme, presumably he was the one to whom Amaechi alluded. Unfortunately, he made a fool of himself, although his contribution was obviously intended to be intelligent. According to John Barnes, blacks have been disenfranchised for over 400 years, and disempowered by slavery; he said this as if whites had never been subjected to slavery. Is an albino black man white? he added in all seriousness. And then, cringe, if you’re a black person and you happen to look like a monkey – like some white people do...Kindly leave the stage.
As if that were not bad enough, another woman phoned in, one of those diversity consultant types, who spoke about white privilege. There is no such thing as white privilege. Ask David Duke.
Returning to John Amaechi, he did not mention professional snooker players, but since its inception, the World Professional Snooker Championship has been won entirely and only by white men, in fact until Cliff Thorburn picked up the title in 1980, it had never gone outside these islands. Does this mean snooker is inherently racist, whatever that is supposed to mean? Not one bit, although there are now some half-decent black players, the first non-white world champion is likely to be from the Orient, the prodigiously talented Ding Junhui or someone like him.
Having said all that, we may also look to snooker for the solution to the real problem posed by John Terry, which has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with ill-tempered and often ill-mannered young men who are as over-remunerated as the banksters, and like the banksters, think they are a law unto themselves. In addition to Terry’s mouthing off at Ferdinand, two of his team mates were sent off during this match.
Last week, a former Premier League football player was gaoled for two and a half years for a revenge attack on a witness in a murder trial. Guess what colour Elliot Omozusi is? he a victim of racism?
And so to snooker. Snooker is not a sport in the same sense as soccer, but it is extremely tightly controlled. Snooker players are subject to a strict dress code, and are expected to conduct themselves properly at all times on and off the table. They even declare their own fouls.
Okay, Ferdinand should not have been such a cry baby, but likewise John Terry and all professional footballers are paid astronomical salaries, and are public figures. With that territory comes certain obligations, in particular to comport themselves in a befitting manner both on and off the pitch. That or suffer the same fate as John Galliano.
Does this mean the Football League should bring in Barry Hearn to run the sport? Why not, certainly he could act as a consultant.
It is not the chimera of racism that needs to be purged from Premier League football, rather it is the players who need to realise that – to paraphrase Voltaire – with great wages come great responsibility, starting with behaving in a manner that befits the adulation bestowed upon you by the people who pay those wages, however inflated or undeserved they may be.
[Football, ‘racism’ and hysteria was published on/in Digital Journal November 20, 2011, and was pulled the same day, apparently after several complaints that I had engaged in “unjust racial profiling”. At that point the site counter recorded 214 page views and 11 people pressing the like button. It is reproduced above with one or two very minor alterations, eg the reference to John Terry as then Captain of both England and Chelsea; at the time of writing, he has been stripped of the former.
After the article’s removal, I was asked if I might wish to edit and resubmit it, ie censor it, but decided against it. Apparently with regard to there being “disproportionate” numbers of blacks in prison is because “white police officers are smarter than black criminals”, someone thought this statement was unfair because intelligence does not play a role in this. In the first place it does, and in the second place I was not talking about intelligence but dumb and smart. No one ever accused (the white serial killer) Ted Bundy of being unintelligent, but what he did was dumb way off the scale in addition to any adjectives such as “inhuman” you might wish to add. In any case, my comment was not directed at black criminals – dumb or otherwise – but against the intellectual dishonesty of John Amaechi, and against all the self-styled “anti-racists” – Black and red – who trot out such self-serving statistics every time race rears its head.
I am certainly not unsympathetic to the plight of the underclass – black or otherwise – rather I have for years argued for the institution of Basic Income to lift them out of poverty, a measure which would also do much to reduce crime. Indeed I posted a link to this very solution in the article.
“People are not numbers; the fact is that whatever racists believe, blacks have contributed enormously to contemporary music, but precious little to science, period.”
Someone took umbrage to this because “Black people have contributed lots to science.”
Such as? Here is an archived link to some of the inventions credited erroneously to Blacks. The reality is that the African never got around to inventing the wheel, much less the silcon chip, the internal combustion engine or even the slide rule. Fanciful claims to the contrary assist neither Blacks nor race relations.
Whenever I hear such claims I am reminded of that ludicrous quote by Herskovits in The Myth Of The Negro Past: “Let us suppose, in short, it could be shown that the Negro is a man with a past and a reputable past; that in time the concept could be spread that the civilizations of Africa, like those of Europe, have contributed to American culture as we know it today; and that this idea might eventually be taken over into the canons of general thought. Would this not, as a practical measure, tend to undermine the assumptions that bolster racial prejudice?”
In other words, we should lie in order to combat prejudice. And lie on a grand scale.
One of the very few Blacks who has contributed anything to the hard sciences is Dr Patricia Bath, who in addition to distinguishing herself in her chosen field, ophthalmology, invented both a device and a technique for the removal of eye cataracts. She also co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. Black men who have made any meaningful contribution to science are as scarce as hen’s teeth, and before the Negro encountered the White Man he made no contribution to science whatsoever. That is a simple, historical fact and has nothing whatsoever to do with racism or any other ism.
I should point out that nothing in the above article was or is intended to denigrate genuine Black achievements in any way, manner, shape or form, but nor do I excuse its polemical nature, because John Amaechi and his ilk need to be held to account when they talk rubbish, which is most of the time.
Finally, if we’re talking about racism, meaning presumably in this context, bigotry, racial bias, etc, it is the likes of Amaechi who should be taken to task.
Like the truly horrible Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he is someone who has made a comfortable living out of a supposedly so racist white society, and all he, she, and people like them ever do, is complain.
Most working class and not a few middle class whites would gladly change places with him from a socio-economic perspective.
[The above was published originally November 21, 2011. Around 9pm, it was deactivated apparently after several complaints. It had had 214 views, and 11 people had pressed the LIKE button. I was asked if I would like to edit it and resubmit it, but I told Chris Hogg I would find a new home for it in due course, ie here.]
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