Vinicius is not Mandela, but... | Soccer

For some reason that escapes me, Valencia continues to insist that what happened last year with Vinicius Jr. at Mestalla had little or nothing to do with an episode of racism. Or with an episode of generalized racism, to be more exact, since no one will doubt at this point that one, two, 30 or 333 Valencia fans making the monkey gesture (even the expression is sick) or insulting a rival for the The color of their skin is racism of the crudest and indisputable nature. “You cannot disqualify an entire fan base because of a few,” it is argued – and rightly so – from the city of Turia. From there we would only need to agree on how many racists seem like a few to us and how many seem like enough to us, we won’t say many.

It is important to remember where we come from to analyze what happened this weekend. On the one hand, we have a fan base, almost a city, offended by such accusations. Also considering that there is something artificial or orchestrated in all this controversy. Even for feeling directly attacked by a footballer who leaves much to be desired in his behavior on the field of play, something that has nothing to do with his condition as a black man, but which serves as an incentive for all types of insults and racist manifestations. . Because – and this should not be ignored from Valencia – similar attitudes have been repeated in last Saturday’s game, whether they were more or less, whether they seem many or few to us.

We witnessed, for example, the encounter between a mother and another woman who recorded the first woman’s son while he called Vinicius Jr. a monkey, and we will talk at another time about the ability of football to unmask objectively incapacitated fathers and mothers. to educate a child. But we also saw the general joke caused by a fan dressed as a banana, thank goodness they didn’t throw him among several on the field when the Madrid striker passed by him, although I’m sure more than one person thought of it. . That the Brazilian was in charge of facing the stands almost by system, or that he raised his fist in a purely cinematographic gesture, designed to adorn a future documentary about his fight, has no real importance, although for many it has some importance. Nor is it Vinicius Jr.’s fault that Peter Federico received hundreds of thousands of messages with racist overtones on his social networks, unless someone continues to think that the blame for racism always lies with the black man, be it directly the one insulted or the one who is insulted. insults by association (wink, wink) as seems to be the case.

Any type of argument starts badly when the lack of condemnation of what Vinicius Jr. repeatedly suffers in different fields in Spain, not only in Mestalla, starts from the fact that the Brazilian is not Martin Luther King, nor even Tommy Smith or John Carlos. And even if he was. Nothing would change, since the racist always feels legitimized to be one without thinking about ethical, moral and much less historical considerations. The last stone in the credibility of their harassers consists of demanding that the insulted person be a certain exemplary person: that he not take days off, that he dedicate his entire life to the cause, that he does not dare to denounce the racism received firsthand until he denounces the one he received. he preys on someone else’s. Vinicius Jr. may never be Mandela, but who cares: a racist will still be a racist.