Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson is a basketball legend..The point I am making is that even I know a basketball star when I see his name. But whoever heard of Donald Sterling until the other day? For your edification, this is the 80-year-old billionaire chap, the owner of a less than memorable basketball team, who got so incensed by his 20-something “girlfriend” posing for a photograph with Magic Johnson that he upbraided her publicly for associating with “Blacks” and bringing them to his games. For his pains, Sterling was fined $2.5 million and banned from basketball for life. But why did he make such a blunder in the first place? After all, a person who is worth billions of dollars cannot be stupid. Therefore, something else must have prompted him. But let’s forget the ignoble bigot for a while, for he is not alone. Around the same time, some fellow in Spain did not like a Brazilian who plays for Barcelona, Dani Alves, and so he threw a banana just as the player was about to take a corner. The banana, which Alves peeled and bit with relish, apparently left a very sour taste in the mouths of football fans. Or so we are told. Alves is not the only footballer to have suffered for being both an accomplished footballer and black. In 2006, Barcelona star Samuel Eto’o was so fed up with monkey chants directed at him that he tried to walk off the pitch until his team-mates persuaded him not to. CLOTHED IN VELVET In January last year, another African player, Kevin-Prince Boateng, a Ghanaian, did walk off the pitch after receiving the same treatment in Italy. His team, AC Milan, followed him in solidarity. But in the same year, Yaya Toure, a Manchester City player, was so taunted with racial slurs while playing a Russian team that he gave a blunt warning to the football governing body, Fifa, to do something about racism failing which all the black players in Europe would boycott the 2018 World Cup slated for Moscow. Others who have had it rough include Mario Balotelli, Anton Ferdinand and Patrice Evra, which indicates that all black skins are fair game. Now, ask yourself this: If world-famous football stars can be racially abused, what of the ordinary black man and woman in Europe and even Asia? As those who have travelled to the West can attest, dehumanising racism is alive and well, and always, black people are at the receiving end. This is one topic that is carefully skirted around by Western intellectuals, politicians, the media, and everyone who matters. Rarely will you hear or read a well-informed debate on racial discrimination and intolerance, and their very destructive effects on both the perpetrators and victims. But despite the efforts at denial, racism is alive and well in the 21st century just as it was in the 19th, only this time it is clothed in euphemisms and circumlocution. Only rowdy retards at football stadiums do not understand that for it to be more effective, it has to be clothed in velvet and delivered softly, not hurled like a missile. Another fact is that although overt racism has become politically incorrect in many countries of the West – and the East – its subterranean ramifications come in many guises. The immigration official at the airport who gives a second or third look at you and the photograph on your passport is sending a subtle message: You are black, and you don’t belong here. I don’t care what the visa on your passport indicates; as soon as you step onto our soil, you will start murdering our people. Why don’t you just stay in your corner of the jungle? This may sound harsh, but I am convinced that racism was invented in the West and it has always been their disease. We, Africans, happen to be at the bottom of the pyramid of “victimhood”, with other races in between. The question is why.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 22:38:11 +0000
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