Black Lives Matter but I can’t say black. I’m confused.
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What happened to about 19 VAR referrees they had in the VAR room , maybe that’s why it’s gone downhill.
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Hahahahahahaahahahahaa that’s brilliant
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I can site two instances of what could be classed as “micro-aggressions”.
I was watching the Sheffield United v Man City game when Steve MacManaman referred to Brewster as Raheem Sterling and sounding a bit shocked he quickly said sorry and corrected himself. Would he have got Owen and Shearer mixed up?
We have just one black guy that has worked in our factory for many years. We then took on another young black graduate in the office. I spent a week with him doing some induction stuff. Twice during that week I called him by the name of the other much older factory guy. I was mortified and the second time, this lad just said “don’t worry X did the same thing”. X was his line manager.
Both cases illustrate this issue that some people see the colour first…would I have confused them if they had both been white…?
I really hope it is a generational issue but…
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My dad gets peoples names wrong all the time, sometimes he can go through 3 or 4 names before he gets mine right. It happens, I wouldn’t say it’s racist.
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The whole “all look alike” racist trope has some logical grounding based purely on someone’s environment. We are better at differentiating between faces that we are accustomed to being around. For example many people living in black communities in Africa find it harder to differentiate between white faces.
That’s not racist, per se, it’s environmental conditioning. Humans have developed skills to spot the nuances in faces of similar skin tones that they have regular contact/interactions with.
More of an issue for me is examples like the Rhian Brewster/Raheem Sterling mix up. They don’t even play on the same team, nor were they even sharing a pitch. McManaman has simply reached into his “young black player who formerly played for Liverpool” tombola. That’s lazy stereotyping for which he should rightly feel embarrassed.
We should all be better than that.
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Pretty certain they were both on the pitch at that time, but still…
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How can he make such a mistake.
Ssssssssssssterling would be the one slithering on his belly in the penalty box
You’re right - I missed that you had said it was SU v City and they both played the whole of that game.
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He didn’t say black, he said negru. Pierre Webo does not speak Romanian and thought he said negro.
The assistant referee, as we can see from the video, speaks fluent English and will have known the connotations of his language to non-Romanian ears even before all the diversity training UEFA referees go through.
He shouldn’t have said it. If he had used the English word black he would have a case here to say he is being victimised but he didn’t. He used the Romanian word and then acted shocked when non-Romanian speakers thought he racially attacked someone.
Amazing how quickly the conversation turns to “Why are black people so easily offended?” or a criticism of racial equality programs.
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You’ve lost me there.
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Oh my days this is insane. The mental gymnastics everyone has to jump through nowadays to not offend somebody.
I left home because my mum is sexista, she kept calling me by my sister’s name. She’s not forgetful, she’s doing it on purpose.
This world makes me weep.
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ESPN are reporting it as a “racist slur.” Not even an alleged racist slur, which might be supportable. Fuck sake. To be very clear, even if you come down on the side of thinking using race as an adjective is not on, what Webo thought was said to him and what people were responding to in real time was something very different than what actually was said. What productive conversation there could be had around this incident is now being lost to the sort of performative nonsense that Barnes typically rails against in these cases*.
*He often responds to these sorts of incidents with a sigh, claiming that white people are quick to support these sorts of anti-racism cases because they require nothing from them other than performative outrage, and it provides them racial bonafides so that they dont have to address more substantial issues of racial inequality.
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How so? He speaks fluent English, he knows black is the correct term and he knows negru sounds suspiciously close to negro, especially in front of non-Romanian speakers which almost everyone else was. Instead the conversation has already turned to “he was saying black in Romanian so everyone should just shut up its fine”. How is anyone not Romanian supposed to hear the nuance between negro and negru?
My problem with this incident is that the debate has immediately twisted into a debate about “you can’t even say black anymore!” When that is clearly not the issue.
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Do you speak any foreign languages? I’m not sure that is a reasonable expectation of someone who is English as a second language talking to someone who is a native speaker of his primary language. Even more so, I think that is a problematic expectation to require English to be default language we must all use when saying anything even possibly racially adjacent.
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It’s the default language of a UEFA referee.
What exactly did the guy expect the reaction to be when he referred to a black person as negru infront of people who don’t speak that language and won’t understand the nuance of the word?
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Officiating teams are picked from the same country for a reason though.
Regardless of his linguistic prowess though, I think it is problematic to demand people to default to English for these sorts of discussions for reasons that should be fairly self-evident.
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I didn’t say all people should speak English when referring to race, I said that guy can speak English and he knows the connotations of calling a black person negro because UEFA diversity training is fairly extensive. He knows negro and negru sound exactly the same to someone who doesn’t speak Romanian and he was infront of a group of people who almost all did not speak Romanian. Pointing at a black man and saying “The negru one” was obviously not going to go across well.
I’m not saying the man is racist or that he intentionally used racially aggressive language because I don’t know him but I am saying that his decision to speak Romanian was, in that instance, ignorant to the reaction of the person he was pointing at. We moderate our language in professional contexts all the time and he should have done so in this situation.
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After last night this are the teams that qualified for the last 16. Teams in the nr. 2 spot can be our opponents except for English teams.
C:
- City
- Porto
E:
- Chelsea
- Seville
F:
- Dortmund
- Lazio
G:
- Juventus
- Barcelona
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I have not seen that part but did the referee address him in Romanian? If so then the obvious reaction is to return the interaction in the language it was started in. I speak both English and Afrikaans fluently with English being my native one. If I am addressed in English I speak automatically in English and if addressed in Afrikaans I speak automatically in Afrikaans with no conscious thought behind it when either happens. I speak Zulu to a certain extent as well as some Tamil (not very prevalent at all despite the huge number of ethnic Tamil here so lets not use that as an example) and if I am addressed in Zulu to an extent that I cannot reply coherently I automatically revert to English as an answer, again without conscious thought.
There are alot of nuances in this incident and I personally am really uncomfortable about declaring this as racist. He perhaps should have been aware of the high chance of misinterpretation but it’s the heat of the moment with lots of people shouting and performing. People aren’t robots.
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