“We’re racist, we’re racist. And that’s the way we like it.” Just in case there was any possibility that the group of Chelsea fans were preventing a man from boarding a train on the Paris Métro for a reason more obscure than the colour of his skin, they helpfully illustrated their actions with a chant. They are racist.
They like being racist. What further justification than their liking of racism could they possibly need?
It’s quite menacing, I think, the counterpoint in that chant, with the understated use of the word “like” confirming that half the fun is in embracing a powerfully destructive and hateful identity in a casual way, as if it’s merely a mild preference. These guys don’t feel passionately racist. It’s just something they “like”. No big deal. What’s all the fuss about?
Are these men still finding their self-identification as racists enjoyable, now that a fellow passenger has filmed them in their petty aggression and taken it to the media?
The hope is that these men will be identified, banned from attending Chelsea matches at the very least, and perhaps faced with criminal charges.
In the meantime, we can be assured of further why-oh-why discussion as to why football should continue to attract racists, despite the game’s years of concerted effort to disassociate itself from racism.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it always seems to me that football support is all about feeling that you’re part of one group and are opposed to another group. In that way it surely shares at least some of the mentality of the racist. Then there’s the even more tiresome question of why these racist men support Chelsea even though it has so many black players. Yes. Why would a racist enjoy cynically exploiting the skills of black people? Such a baffling mystery. When, in human history, has that ever happened?
No doubt these men are now feeling that they are the victims – victims of the political correctness that they think it so clever to defy. It’s a shame, in a way, that the term “political correctness” even exists, that being against ignorant prejudice and vicious hatred can be characterised not as civilised but as “political”, not as right but as “correct”. The phrase implies heavily that a set of rules that should be followed has been brought into being in some arbitrary, faceless, undemocratic power-grab.
The saddest thing is that men such as these men, who “like” hating strangers of whom they know nothing, really do feel that they are the ones being oppressed by a sinister ideology, when all that’s oppressing them is their own nasty, small-minded resentment.
