Opinion – Renata Mendonça: We white people need to fight racist acts without clubbing

This text is for those like me who were benefited at birth by coming into the world with “the right color”. If you think this concept doesn’t exist, do a Google search on “by mistake” deaths. Interestingly, victims are always black, have you noticed? He rummaged around in his backpack, put his hand in his pocket, acted like a suspect… suspect why? By color. And only.

In the same week that the brutal murder of Moïse in a kiosk in Rio de Janeiro had repercussions, and that a black man was murdered in the building where he lived by a neighbor sergeant who “mistaken” him for a robber, we see in football one of the main players of the country to suffer racist attacks when he went to the locker room during the Fla-Flu break.

I learned from Professor Silvio Almeida that treating cases as “isolated”, demanding only punishment for individuals who committed such acts without further reflection on what each of these crimes means, is a mistake.

“Looking at racism from an individualistic point of view is tempting because, in addition to being simpler and almost intuitive, it allows a quick identification of a cause or a ‘culprit’. The solutions also seem easier: education or judicialization. These are circumstantially necessary measures, but they are equivalent to However, if racism is understood in a complex way, the ‘fight for rights’ and ‘anti-racist education’ become just two tactics within the multiple strategies that the fight against racism must mobilize “, he wrote.

Obviously I’m not an expert on racial issues, but I seek to learn more about them every day. And I think that’s the least we whites should propose to do if we really want to be part of the anti-racist struggle – remembering that racism was a problem created by whites, so it’s our duty to fight it. What we lack most in this whole process is the basics: LISTEN.

When the president of Fluminense, Mário Bittencourt, says that the club is investigating the facts, because the video released with the insults to Gabigol was “inconclusive”, according to him, I wonder: if it were a Fluminense player the victim , would the president have the same opinion? What conclusion do you draw when you hear fans screaming “monkey” at a black player coming down to the locker room?

It’s not just Fluminense. Not long ago, midfielder Gérson, then at Flamengo, denounced having heard racist abuse from Juan Ramírez, then a Bahia player, and the Bahian club’s first response was to question the victim’s word. One of the most active clubs on social media on the anti-racist theme cast doubt on the claim of the black player on the opposing team. If it were the other way around, would the attitude be the same?

Even with the video showing the screams of “monkey” to Gabigol, the president of Fluminense treated the situation as an “alleged case” of racism, “alleged racist offenses”, also putting in doubt what the player claimed and what the images said. .

And he also said that “he feels the pain of racism because his wife is black”. A common subterfuge that we white people insist on repeating without realizing that these phrases only show that we don’t understand what we’re talking about.

We white people need to talk less and listen more when it comes to racism. And in the field of football, you can’t be anti-racist “with clubism”. It’s only worth the fight if the aggressor is not a fan of my team. If it is, it becomes “the alleged case”, the “alleged offense”. If there’s one thing “inconclusive” in this story, it’s what attitude Fluminense will take to truly repudiate the racist act in its fans.