On Predictability and Prejudice.

A few weeks ago the England football team lost the UEFA Cup final on penalties, and the three players who missed their shots were black. Predictably, they got hounded and racially abused on social media.

Equally predictably, outrage ensued. ‘This is unacceptable’ went up the cry. ‘These people must be found and punished.’ For at least a week the news pages were full of it, and the country was more or less united in its condemnation of the abusers. It’s good that the outpouring of support for the abused players was so big, but I wonder whether we’re taking the right approach in dealing with it.

It seems to me that the kind of people who engage in racial abuse are usually very small people, insecure people, inconsequential people. They rarely do it on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis; they do it either anonymously or from the safety of a crowd. And I would suggest that they do it precisely because they are small and inconsequential, and so are inclined to feel that they have no other way to make their presence felt. What other means do they have to ‘play their part’ and make a difference? And so surely, by shouting their sins from the rooftops, condemning them long and loud from the news pages, and demanding that precious resources be allocated to find and punish them, we are – to their minds – vindicating their actions and making them all the more likely to carry on doing it.

I have to say at this point that I am white and have never personally experienced racial abuse. I cannot, therefore, know precisely how a non-white person feels when they are held up to ridicule and abuse because of their colour. But I can say that I sympathise, I can say that I have hated racial prejudice all my life, and I can admit that I feel a sense of anger at the cruelty and injustice of it. And that’s why I worry that we might be making the problem worse.

So how should we approach the issue? Well, the first three thoughts which spring readily to mind are these:

1. The abusers need to be re-educated so they lose the desire to do it, but that’s a big ask. It raises the question of where do we start, and the methodology involved is both complex and imprecise.

2. We need to find ways of shutting them down in the first instance, and the tech firms claim they are trying to find those ways.

3. Failing that, it seems we need to simply ignore them so that their actions are not being vindicated and they’re not making a difference. But how do you ask a black footballer having bananas thrown at him, or being verbally insulted, or being told to go home where he belongs, to ignore it all? Life’s never easy, is it, but I do feel that our minds need to go a little further than simply seeking revenge.