John Barnes – Passionate, Articulate But Undialectical

John Barnes, writing in The Guardian 5/11/13, argues that one-off high profile racist incidents in football grounds ought not to be of concern, it’s deep seated racism in society that we need to focus on. The other stuff is just a distraction. Here is Barnes in his own words: Tackling racism is a long and complicated process but one thing’s for sure; it cannot be solved by banning a player or closing part of a stadium. The problem is wider than that and if football really cared, those involved in the game, players in particular, would worry less about one off incidents like what happened to Toure and more about what is going on around them. Perceptions need to change and for that to happen, education needs to be pushed as the only way forward.

There’s not much to disagree with here other than the unnecessary either/or approach that Barnes adopts, his heavy emphasis on long tern education against a somewhat cavalier attitude towards one-off incidents. Barnes even goes as far as to say: ‘That is why it is pointless, and pretty ridiculous, to be worrying about a footballer getting racially abused in no way are they the biggest sufferers, and quite frankly, if I was someone like Toure, I’d feel embarrassed if I had to look at someone who was suffering genuine racism and take their sympathy.’

Barnes then completes his argument by adding: ‘A millionaire getting booed in Russia is nothing compared with generations of people never getting the chance to better their lives and those of their children.’

It’s not hard to recognise the fallacy of this either/or dynamic. Because you are rich and famous a person of colour does not suffer genuine racism, whereas, according to Barnes, genuine racism is only truly experienced by those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. I get the point that Barnes is trying to make but I suspect in so doing he has created an altogether unnecessary and false dichotomy. All racism is poisonous, irrational and abhorrent, all racism is debilitating, and all racism, at least in 21st century Britain, is against the law. Therefore, public condemnation and sanctions by law should be applies to each and every case of racism no matter what the social status of the victim, no matter how seemingly ridiculous the case might be.

Furthermore, the either/or scenario that Barnes creates between ridiculous sanctions and long-term education seems to me to be totally artificial. Surely applying legal and other institutional sanctions is very much part of the long-term educational process? Without such sanctions, one off racist incidents soon become a societal norm, as they are now becoming in huge swathes of European society, with once socialist Russia now in a notoriously reactionary vanguard role.

Of course Barnes is right a simple sanction will not change the mind-set of the likes of John Terry and Luis Suarez, but repeated sanctions do establish parameters by which a society can measure itself. Compared to the 1970’s, Britain is far more robust in this area, and a better place for it, but with John Terry keeping his captaincy at Chelsea, it is easy to conclude that we have still have much further to travel.

I do believe that John Barnes is absolutely correct to highlight the blighted lives of countless millions of people, not only in Britain, across the planet, seemingly because of the colour of their skin. The legacy of centuries of European colonialism stubbornly persists. The toxic poison of racism that was drip fed into generations of Europeans in order to facilitate the economic rape of the planet has not been entirely switched off. Just a cursory glance at Britain’s rabid tabloid press is ample evidence of this. But this Euro-centric racism is both a thing in itself and a ruse by which class domination can be perpetuated. Irrational concepts of racial superiority (and Europeans do not have a monopoly in this regard) is the ideal mechanism by which to turn the world’s population against itself, and no one did divide-and-rule better than the British. But skin colour is not a prerequisite for this vile art. Just look at how the English worker was taught to hate his white Irish counterpart. Look today how West Europeans are being taught to hate and fear their white East European co-workers. Remember too how Germans were indoctrinated to hate their white Jewish neighbours.

So race and class are intertwined in our collective human history and the lancing of the racist boil still festering in the European collective consciousness will ultimately only be completed when we expose, dismantle and finally transcend our deeply entrenched class divisions. As John Barnes correctly notes, this will likely be a long and painful process. But we can act now. All tools available to us should be deployed; legal sanctions, institutional sanctions, spontaneous public protests, political agitation, and critically, the long process of ideological reorientation. That reorientation must, at its heart, absorb the all too obvious fact that there is only one race, that being the human race, and all divisions around colour, nationality, religion, gender and sexuality are entirely manufactured and perpetuated by self-serving elites.

The seeming paradox that Barnes creates between genuine racism and celebrity racism simply does not exist. All racism is anathema to human dignity and collective progress. Toure should be saluted for his courageous stand. Managers should follow his lead and be bold enough, in the face of a weak and equivocating UEFA, to remove from the playing field their entire team in the face of any sustained racist abuse even if the match is a so-imagined crucial one. John Barnes should also be saluted for throwing himself into the ideological fray, and I trust that as an elder statesman of Black English football players, he will eventually find himself shoulder to shoulder with this new generation of black footballers who might just be confident enough to make a principled, even heroic stand.

If any football manager truly wishes to be known as The Special One here is the perfect opportunity to earn that accolade.

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