dna edit: Race on the pitch

It has been a big few days for sports internationally in all the wrong ways. Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a US National Basketball Association (NBA) team, set the ball rolling — allegedly caught on tape telling his partner not to associate with “black people” and not to bring them to Clippers games, along with other racist rhetoric. There has, understandably, been an explosion of outrage in the US with everyone from former legends of the game like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan to US President Barack Obama condemning Sterling. Just two days later, it was football’s turn when a fan threw a banana onto the pitch at Brazilian player Dani Alves who was turning out for Spanish club Barcelona. Again, the incident has pulled in leaders both inside and outside the sport — Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) President Sepp Blatter and Brazilian President Dilma Roussef respectively.

Commenting on sports controversies is not usually the provenance of national leaders. But by placing the incidents in a broader social and sporting context, the debates swirling around them have shown why Obama and Roussef have been compelled to speak up — there is something rotten in the state of marquee sports across the world today. This is not the first time issues of race have permeated basketball and football, after all. Nor are they the only sports to be affected. In the US, the usage of Native American mascots and names has been debated for decades. Both the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) have seen controversies over teams such as the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians — and over players and fans alike using racial slurs.

International football has it far worse. In the wake of this latest incident, Alves pointed out that he had been at the receiving end of such behaviour for the entirety of his career. He is one of many. For all that FIFA and the European governing body UEFA have been commendably severe in cracking down on anyone, fan or player, who has indulged in racism, racist behaviour is still endemic in Italy, Russia and various other European nations. Monkey chants, throwing bananas and even cruder racial slurs — of the kind that saw Ghana international Kevin-Prince Boateng walk off the pitch last January — are par for the course. Fans have been fined and barred from attending matches, teams made to play without home fans, other teams and entire federations punished, but nothing has taken. Closer to home, institutional racism was one of the defining features of international cricket in previous decades given England and Australia’s control of the game. That may have changed now, but fans can still be as ugly as ever, whether in Australia or in India.

That is the central contradiction of sports. It has been viewed since antiquity as a microcosm of human striving, highlighting all that is best in human nature. That is not entirely untrue. And yet, that impulse exists alongside racist behaviour that those responsible for it would, in many cases, shy away from exhibiting elsewhere. Perhaps it is the gladiatorial nature of sporting contests that arouses such ugly instincts, or the dehumanisation of athletes seen to be performing for the benefit of the audience — with a healthy dose of mob mentality added to the mix. Whatever the reasons, the past week has shown once again that the pitch remains one of the foremost arenas where racism must be combated.