Insidious racism needs stomping out
IT takes a lot to stop you in your tracks online these days, so accustomed are we to the trolling, belligerent racists and their fellow travellers on the hard-right, but boy did this shock a lot of us out of our complacency.
When, on Monday afternoon, former Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright tweeted out screen grabs of the vilest abuse possible directed at him on Instagram, it managed to shock in a way many of us have ceased to be shocked by what we see on social media.
There’s a certain amount of privilege at play in that too, we suppose. The internet is a very different place if you’re a person of colour or a woman rather than a straight white man. Still, such was the ferocity of the bile Mr Wright was subjected to it felt, to us at least, like an escalation of hate.
This wasn’t the kind of subtle, dog-whistle racism employed so often, this was almost the literal language of the Ku Klux Klan. Shocking as that is, it’s frankly staggering – although sadly not that surprising – that it seems to have come from somebody within this country and, indeed, this province.
What the hell is going on here? What the hell in this young man’s experience could have led him to possibly behaving in this manner? Call us naive, but honestly we thought that by now we’d be far beyond this kind of thing by now. Call us even more naive, we thought we were beyond that in this country.
Before the Syrian crisis, Ireland had one of the largest foreign-born populations in Europe and, even so, our politics has for the most part managed to avoid the thud-thumping nationalist and nativist nonsense that fuelled both Brexit and the election of Donald J Trump and, maybe, that’s the source of all this.
In as much as we like to think of ourselves as a place apart – fools to the left of us, fools to the right – nowhere is a land apart nowadays, ironically enough given what these people think. Idiocy doesn’t stop at the sea’s edge. We have to be vigilant and diligent in calling this disgusting racism out and in stomping it out. We need more Ian Wrights out there shining a light on the dark recesses of the internet.
The last few days won’t have been much fun for the owner of the account from which those messages were sent. He’s unlikely to ever live this down and, you know what, that’s a pretty good deterrent. Harsh? Certainly, but no more harsh that the abuse dished out in the first place.
We’ve said it on these pages before and we’ll say it again: freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of that speech.