Soccer Player Suspended For Allegedly Offensive Racial Remark, Sparking International Debate About Language And Context
Star soccer player Edinson Cavani, a Uruguayan striker who plays for Manchester United, was fined and suspended after publicly thanking his friend Pablo Fernandez by using his childhood nickname, “negrito.”
The problem for Cavani came when people in British media who had not grown up in South America used a singular, narrow contextual view of Cavani’s use of the word to paint him as a racist. Cavani was fined about $135,000 by the English Football Association and suspended for three games for the alleged infraction. As Dariela Sosa explained on Persuasion:
To us Latin Americans, the story was just short of incomprehensible. “Negrito”—the diminutive of the word for “black”—sounds aggressive in English. But, as Uruguay’s National Academy of Letters noted, in Spanish it’s not offensive; it’s a term of endearment. It’s not even particularly racialized: Plenty of white people are nicknamed negrito, including, as it happens, Cavani’s friend. (His hair is black.)
The Uruguayan Players’ Union released a statement regarding Cavani’s punishment, writing, “Unfortunately, through its sanction, the English Football Association expresses absolute ignorance and disdain for a multicultural vision of the world.” The South American Football Confederation released its own statement of support for the striker, saying the EFA did not “consider the cultural characteristics and the use of certain terms in everyday speech in Uruguay.”
As Sosa explained, this incident goes far beyond misunderstandings between particular audiences, it “shows how America’s racial debates are being globalized via the export of a radical form of antiracist ideology that sees appeals to context or cross-cultural understanding as excuse-making for bigots.”
She went on to say that race in Latin America is different than how it is seen in American and Europe. In Latin America, race is “context dependent,” she wrote, describing how people may choose to identify differently depending on where they are or who they’re with.
“Race isn’t fixed for us—which is one reason that racialized terms in Spanish don’t carry anything like the sting they do in English,” Sosa wrote.
She went on to explain how “banning a given word regardless of the context in which it is used assumes that words exist in isolation from how we use them” makes no sense linguistically, yet this is exactly why Cavani was punished.
“Applied without regard for social, cultural and linguistic context, antiracism efforts risk becoming a caricature of themselves, driving a wedge between people of different cultures rather than bringing them together, as soccer does so impressively around the globe, engaging people of all origins and colors in team efforts. The English Football Association, with its over-the-top sanction of Cavani, managed instead to show only mindless adherence to a brand of maximalist Anglo-American antiracism ideology that does little to combat racism itself,” Sosa wrote.
In addition to the context being ignored in regard to Cavani’s statement of gratitude to his friend, intent was also ignored. The New York Times has been grappling with this issue for two weeks now, first insisting a white reporter should have resigned for using a racial slur “regardless of intent” only to walk the statement back, saying “of course intent matters.”
In other news:
Fifth Graders Forced To Celebrate ‘Black Communism,’ Hold Mock ‘Black Power’ Rally, Honor Angela Davis
Fifth graders in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were subjected to a celebration of “black communism,” complete with a mock Black Power rally to honor devout communist Angela Davis.
Christopher Rufo, contributing editor at City Journal, reported on the classroom activities after receiving whistleblower documents and speaking to a school source. Students at William D. Kelley School were forced to participate in a social studies curriculum that celebrated Davis, “praising the ‘black communist’ for her fight against ‘injustice and inequality.’” Students were required to “‘describe Davis’ early life,’ reflect on her vision of social change, and ‘define communist’—presumably in favorable terms,” Rufo reported.
At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.
Davis is a militant activist praised by the Left. She joined the Communist Party and has won the International Lenin Peace Prize, an award from the Soviet Union named after Vladimir Lenin. She has also been accused of anti-Semitism over her support for Occupy Wall Street and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
As Rufo noted, the William Kelley School is one of the worst-performing schools in Pennsylvania, with just 3% proficient in math by sixth grade and 9% proficient in reading. “By graduation, only 13 percent of Kelley students will have achieved basic literacy,” Rufo reported.
The school, however, appears to have given up on improving academic performance, instead focusing more on “political radicalism.”
“Even the school’s newest public artworks illustrate this politicization. Administrators recently commissioned a mural of Davis and Huey P. Newton, who represent the Communist and Black Panther revolutionary movements of the 1960s; both figures stood trial for various crimes, including the murder of a police officer,” Rufo wrote.
William Kelley is not the only school in Pennsylvania turning toward political activism. As Rufo reported, the superintendent of the Philadelphia public school system announced the district would be working to “[dismantle] systems of racial inequity” and advertised racially segregated training programs for teachers.
As The Daily Wire has reported, the “antiracist” movement has been spreading across schools, teaching students that America is inherently racist, as are white people. This new school of thought also teaches that concepts like objectivity and individualism are part of “White Supremacy Culture.” In Oregon, students will now be taught that finding the right answer in math is a symbol of white supremacy. In San Francisco, schools are more focused on renaming buildings and declaring acronyms to be a “symptom of white supremacy culture” than on getting kids back into school, even as suicides in the city are increasing.
dailywire.com