I'm going to preface this article by telling you that I don't like John Terry. The man can do some nice kicks, and just as many excellent runs, but more prevalent is the fact that he's a fucking moron, and should have been stripped of the England Captaincy a long time ago if he ever deserved it at all. Having said that, I do believe that his recent controversy has been blown out of all proportion, has been misread, misrepresented and is a true misunderstanding of what racism actually means. For those of you unfamiliar with the story go here, or just google "John Terry Racism." The long and the short of it is basically that the England football captain called another player a "fucking black cunt" during a game, it was caught on camera and now he's in trouble.
The story is being followed endlessly by the news with the focus now turning to racism in the game as a whole. I have issues with the whole saga, and it has annoyed me to the point where I need to start telling people about it.
Racism, in its truest form, is essentially the belief in superiority based on ethnicity, and the discrimination that follows from that line of reasoning. The traditional paradigm would be, "white people are better than black people", although its scope is obviously much wider. Terry's comment is ostensibly racist in content, but to extend that to the point where he's labeled a racist is naught more than hysterical oversimplification. The real issue here is offensive language in general, not racist language.
Offensive language is a choice of words designed to cause harm. If I call you a "motherfucker" am I saying that I literally think you have sex with your mother? No. If I call you a twat, am I sexist for referring to you by a lady's happy-bush? No. If I call someone a ginger, I don't literally think that I'm better than that person. They could have any hair colour and that would be true. What I'm actually doing is picking a feature of their's which I think will cause them harm when I treat that term as an insult. John Terry doesn't believe in the innate inferiority of black people. He's just a simpleton whose aptitude for hurting people's feelings got caught on camera. Do you think there'd be all this media hype if John Terry had called this guy a bastard having known his parents weren't married. It seems unlikely. Difference is, race is a sensitive topic; illegitimacy is not.
In my mind, true racism is such an anachronistic concept that it's almost laughable; think of the homophobia practiced by the Westboro Baptist Church. Their belief in the crimes of deviant sexuality is not only baffling, but hilarious to most people. Aside from the small minority of actual rasicts, most people would say the same of racism. Of course discrimination based on race still exists, just as it does based on gender, sexual orientation, aesthetics, etc. People are always going to be different and those differences are always going to create problems and cause divides. John Terry doesn't really believe that black people are inferior to him. He just knew the words which would be the most hurtful. Placing this huge focus on race and racism isn't going to help the problem go away; if anything, it compounds the issue.
When arguments about taste, acceptability and decency arise, I try to ignore them. I'm more than happy for offence to be caused and for people to get upset. Boundaries are never pushed and opinions are never changed by accepting the status quo. But for the love of God, John Terry is not an actual bigot. Wait until he joins the KKK, then call him a racist. Until then, these retarded, nigger-loving faggots need to climb down from their moral high ground, wipe the sand from their vaginas and let.it.go! I bet they're on their periods or something.
