Spain: Racist soccer fans force a national reckoning
“Is Spain a racist country?” asked María Martín and Andrea Garcia Baroja in El País (Spain). The question is inescapable after the racist abuse that Valencia fans hurled at Real Madrid soccer star Vinícius Júnior last week. When the Black forward from Brazil and his teammates arrived at the stadium for an away game, a mob met their bus, chanting “Vinícius is a monkey.” Then, during the match, Valencia fans in the stands gesticulated, mimicking chimpanzees and shouting “Monkey!” whenever Vinícius touched the ball. It got so bad that the 22-year-old athlete actually halted play and pointed out one of the offenders to a referee. Several fans were arrested. It’s not the first time Vinícius has had to put up with such harassment. Since 2021, he has filed 10 complaints with Spain’s premier soccer league, La Liga, and earlier this year, someone hanged an effigy sporting his jersey from a bridge in Madrid. “Racism is normal in La Liga,” Vinícius tweeted. “The federation considers it normal.”
He’s not wrong, said El Periodico (Spain). Unfortunately, racism in the stadiums is something of a Spanish tradition. Back in 1993, fans in Madrid shouted “Ku Klux Klan!” at Nigerian player Wilfred Agbonavbare, and in the mid-2000s, Cameroonian players Idriss Kameni and Samuel Eto’o faced monkey chants from fans in Zaragoza. Of course some of the fans are jerks, said
La Vanguardia (Spain) in an editorial. Soccer “brings together many unpresentable people in the stands who still don’t understand that racist behavior has no place in today’s society.” But don’t condemn our entire country for the despicable actions of a few. That would be just as “unfair” as it would be to say, as some here do, that Vinícius “is responsible for the insults he receives” because he plays aggressively and dances when he scores a goal. Instead, we should deal with abusive fans by updating the rules to make the threat of a team’s suspension more credible. If the fans know they face “the prospect of serious damage to the team,” they’ll be more likely to “take an active part in silencing the racists and throwing them out.”
This problem isn’t unique to Spain, said Guilbert Kallyan Da Silva Araújo in Brasil de Fato (Brazil) “Europe is racist.” So is the United States. In fact, racism is “a cancer that structures capitalist society” everywhere. It stems from the need to divide the world based on skin color “to legitimize the colonial enterprise” and define “the Black body as a commodity, dehumanized and impossible to be seen as a human being.” Frankly, Vinícius didn’t even have to leave home to encounter this kind of bigotry, said Vinícius Vieira in UOL.com.br (Brazil). “He was probably also called a monkey during his childhood and adolescence.” I experienced the same thing growing up in Brazil, like the day I picked up the school lunch dessert—a banana—“and the entire school yard” exploded “with laughter and monkey imitations,” just like the ones that filled the stadium in Valencia. The burden is on the white people of the world “to recognize their privileges and decree the end of a system they created to oppress us.”