Chelsea’s racism problem is everyone’s racism problem

Chelsea fans were in the news again for racially abusing a rival team’s player, but the problem is not Chelsea’s alone to solve.

Last week, a video circulated online showing a group of Chelsea fans singing a song in which they called Liverpool’s Egyptian forward Mohamed Salah a “bomber,” a reference, presumably, to the fact he’s Muslim, which in the small minds of a large collection of idiots is equivalent to being a terrorist.

When it was confirmed the men in the video were Chelsea fans, the club released a statement calling the behavior “abhorrent,” and promising action. Three of the fans in the video were denied entry to the Blues’ match against Slavia Prague on Thursday. All six of them face lifetime bans. As far as these things go, this qualifies as a strong response, but of course the problem is these things can’t go very far.

Indeed, the video was but one in a long line of racist incidents involving fans of the west London club, some of which have received equally strong responses, many more of which haven’t.

In 2015, a group of Chelsea supporters prevented a black man from boarding a Paris Metro train while singing “we’re racist and that’s the way we like it.” Earlier this season, Chelsea fans racially abused Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling in a match at Stamford Bridge.

In 2012, John Terry was found guilty by the FA of racially abusing QPR’s Anton Ferdinand (brother of Rio Ferdinand, Terry’s center-back partner for England for most of the previous decade) during a Premier League match in 2011. Terry retained the club captaincy and was given a hero’s send-off when he left Stamford Bridge in 2017.

There have been more incidents than these, but the pattern is clear enough without going into detail: Chelsea fans have a long, ugly history with racism. This isn’t really news to anyone who follows English football. Predictably, then, much of the response to this latest incident has focused on that history.

The main takeaway, it seems, is that Chelsea have a racism problem, which might be true, but if it is true certainly doesn’t make them an exception. Indeed, given all that’s happened this season, it’s hard to read the relatively narrow focus on Chelsea as much more than a way for non-Chelsea fans to abdicate responsibility.

The men in that video deserve to be condemned, but they shouldn’t be condemned merely as Chelsea fans. For they’re also football fans. They’re English. They are, for now at least, Europeans. They’re white people. If you’re any one of those, their behavior implicates you as well.

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There has been a notable increase this season in the number of high-profile incidents of racism in football. Or perhaps there’s only been an increase in high-profile discussions about racism in the media (and on social media). Whatever the reasons for this — a changing political climate, more players speaking out — it’s worth dwelling a little longer on what these discussions amount to.

On one view, this is a positive development: The first step to solving any problem is recognizing it exists. On another, it’s just sad. Not only is racism alive and thriving, but the media’s newfound interest in the subject has served as a deeply troubling reminder of how pathetic our response to incidents of racism has been in the past.

What did you do, what did you say, what did you write when Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, when Blaise Matuidi, when Kevin Prince-Boateng, when Mario Balotelli, when Yaya Toure, when Patrice Evra, when Sol Campbell, when Mido, when Avram Grant, when Jason Euell, when Rhian Brewster, when Samuel Eto’o, when Lilian Thuram, when John Barnes faced similar abuse, or even just tried to highlight the scale of the problem?

The easy response to this line of thought is to say that we’re making progress. To say that us white fans have made mistakes, will make mistakes, but the important point is that we learn from them, that we grow. This seems a reasonable enough sentiment on its face, but where is the evidence of this progress?

In the ‘80s, English football fans were relentless in their abuse of black players. There is a famous picture of Barnes, playing for Liverpool at Goodison Park in 1988, kicking away a banana that was thrown at him by someone in the stands. This season, over 30 years later, a Tottenham fan did the same thing to Aubameyang. Again, where is the evidence of this progress?

You might be tempted here to hold onto the belief that things are getting better, and to suggest instead that racism is resurgent. That is, things did genuinely improve for a while, but now, as a result of all sorts of factors — globalization, economic uncertainty, etc., etc., — it’s making a comeback.

This may be an even more insidious line of thought than the first, providing as it does anyone who wants one an excuse for their former inaction. Even if it’s true according to some metric or other, it should only cause us to think more seriously about what we meant when we said things were getting better in the first place.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has written extensively about the resegregation of America’s schools in the years since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, discussed this idea in a 2017 piece on the public school system in Jefferson County, Alabama:

“If there is a benefit to having to fight for civil rights over so many decades, it’s that it makes you presciently aware of the way that racism does not so much go away but adapt to the times. And so Clemon, first as a lawyer, then as a judge and then as a lawyer again knew how hard it was, especially these days, to prove the racial motivations of people who enough to keep them hidden.”

This calls to mind some things Barnes spoke about following the racist abuse of Sterling by Chelsea fans last December. First, fans don’t become racists when they enter the stadium. Second, a stadium full of racists who are smart enough to keep their mouths shut is only marginally preferable, if indeed it’s preferable at all, to a stadium full of racists who aren’t.

The more general point is that racism doesn’t exist only when white people decide to talk about it, or when it’s thrust unavoidably in front of them. It should be a source of enduring shame to the vast majority of white football writers, myself included, that we said almost nothing about any of this until Sterling implicated the media earlier this season.

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All of which brings us back to the responses to the video of Chelsea fans singing a racist song about Salah. Two strands of thought, in particular, stood out. The first focused on Chelsea: This is a racist club. Eliminate the club, eliminate the problem. The second was more general, but no less unhelpful: These aren’t real fans, they don’t represent their club or this sport.

The problem with both of these responses was the same: They narrow the issue to a point at which anyone who either isn’t a Chelsea fan or doesn’t think of themselves as a racist (which is almost everyone) can safely ignore it. Perhaps nowhere was this abdication of responsibility more glaring than in the reaction of the Liverpool fans who jumped to Salah’s defense.

For Liverpool also have a recent, ugly history with racism. The club, and many fans, staunchly supported Luis Suarez when he was accused by Evra of racist abuse during a Liverpool-Manchester United game in 2011. When he was found guilty, and banned for eight games, there was no serious reckoning by fans or the club with their initial response.

More recently, Roberto Firmino was accused of racist abuse by Mason Holgate during a Merseyside derby in 2018. Firmino was cleared of all charges, but an alarming number of Reds responded with the astonishingly dumb, incoherent, dangerous (not to mention demonstrably untrue) claim that false accusations of racism are almost as bad as racism itself.

Just last week, Sterling spoke about how his first experiences of racism came after he moved to Liverpool as a 15-year-old, having grown up in a predominantly non-white area of London. This, too, seemed to make some Liverpool fans bristle. He’s just bitter after the way he left Liverpool, or some other irrelevant nonsense.

In all of these discussions, and there are many, many, many more that don’t involve either Liverpool or Chelsea fans, a common theme emerges: It’s that we, and by “we” I mean white people, are more concerned with litigating what does or does not make someone Fundamentally Racist than we are with fighting racism itself.

Does the fact Suarez invoked Evra’s skin color while insulting him during a match make him Fundamentally Racist, or was it just the heat of the moment? Does the fact Leanardo Bonucci blamed Moise Kean for being racially abused by Cagliari fans make him Fundamentally Racist, or was it just a momentary lapse in judgment?

We talk about these incidents as if there’s some hidden threshold, as if there’s a difference between doing and saying and thinking racist things and being racist, as if, if you can just limit yourself to one racist thought a week, you get to rest easy in the knowledge you’re not Fundamentally Racist, and therefore not part of the problem, and therefore free to leave solutions up to others.

If you’re white, you have almost certainly said a racist thing or thought a racist thought or made a racist assumption or done a racist thing. If you haven’t, you’ve benefited from another white person who has. This does not make you an irredeemably awful person, provided you learn the right lessons, listen, educate yourself, try to be better. If you care about fighting racism, the discomfort you feel while talking about it needs to be worked through, not ignored.

Given all this, what does it say about us if we think it’s a sufficient response to the scale of football’s racism problem to call Chelsea a racist club, or to say that those racist fans don’t represent us? The fact is they do represent us — of course they do, how could they not? — and our unwillingness to accept the full, ugly implications of this fact is only an obstacle to our doing anything about it.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that racism isn’t football’s problem alone to deal with. But football is the most widely practiced activity on earth, and in its popularity, the diversity of its participants and the organizational structure that binds its fans there is the potential seed of a powerful political force.

This story will get old soon; it might be old already. The news cycle will move on and we’ll forget all about this problem until the next viral incident. It feels trivial to say that this isn’t enough, not even close. A piece like this, full of its own contradiction, can never be enough. As long as we wait for racists to act before responding, they will remain a step ahead.