Kevin Prince Boateng’s protest about racist chanting once again highlighted the systemic problem of racism among European football fans. I don’t think this is a problem with a single cause, but I do think that we can learn from the fact that racist chanting is unknown inside American sports stadiums.
First, few would deny that racism is a problem in the US. I heard an interesting piece on the radio the other day about a young American woman who was lifelong heavy metal fan but found herself being told she was not welcome at concerts- because she happened to be black. Most African Americans I have ever spoken to can cite similar situations where they feel they are not welcome. So then why is overt racism absent from American sports stadiums?
It’s not as if American sports fans are especially polite. Many are, but then so are many football fans in Europe- when it comes to extreme abuse we are talking about a minority. But you can hear lots of abusive language in American stadiums directed at the players. It’s also not about the law. Racial chanting at a sports stadium is illegal in the UK but still goes on (about 40 arrests per year at the moment), while it is not illegal in the US (in fact, it would be protected under the first amendment).
I think it’s connected to the hooliganism issue. This is also something that is systemic in Europe but more or less unknown in the US. Recent events have demonstrated that the US has a serious problem with violent crime; the US homicide rate is nearly five times that of Western Europe.
I think the connection has to do with ownership. In Europe the fans feel like they “own” their stadium – it’s their turf. In some cases the fans can claim this is literally true, e.g. many of membership clubs in Germany. In other cases either the stadium is municipally owned, or, as in England, the fans feel that their commitment to their club entitles them to a kind of ownership. In the US I think the fans are in no doubt that, however much their patronage deserves special consideration, they are nonetheless customers and in no sense owners of the team. Indeed, owners are very high profile individuals in the US, leaving little room for doubt about who owns the stadium.
How you behave in your own home tends to be very different from how you behave when you are a guest. I think that European fans feel at more liberty to express themselves, including the minority that want to indulge in racial abuse and acts of violence.
I also think that the legal owners of the stadiums take a very different approach in the US and Europe. If there were American sports hooligans they would be treated with extreme prejudice by stadium owners, since the owners would rightly think that it would damage their own reputation and certainly the scope for selling products to their peaceable customers during the game. If a few heads were accidentally broken in the process, I think owners would be confident that the jury would side with them in any court case.
In Europe one is generally left with the impression that the stadium owners and managers are afraid of offending the fans. Football is too central to “the community” to impose severe restrictions which might inconvenience the majority of decent fans. Likewise with racist abuse. In America, I would guess, if racist abuse were a systematic problem among fans of a particular team, the owners would threaten to move the team to another location. Of course, that would never even be considered in Europe.
This may be part of the reason but it’s also the case that there is very little chanting of anything at American sports. *Team Nickname* clap, clap, clap is about the extent of it, certainly nothing close to the quantity and intricacy of chants you get at football games anywhere in Europe. If the type of scum who might chant anything racist never even start anything as anodyne as “She fell over”, anything unpleasant is very unlikely to ever get going.
I think this is really poor Stefan; there’s _so_ many other factors to consider. For starters, many US sports stadia are municipally owned; the dominant financing model is to bid cities against each other to who will construct a free park for a team; the city will retain ownership rather than simply give it away.
The most dominant place in Europe where clubs also own their own facilities is the UK, which has a better record in this respect than, say, Italy, where ownership is predominantly with the city.
The issue isn’t actual ownership of the stadium, or the team. It’s the attitude of the authorities who run the stadium as to what they tolerate. That doesn’t form in isolation but is a function of the law and custom of the country in which the stadium is. There’s a much stronger awareness of racism and a public drive to eradicate it in the US for around 30 years (part of the Culture Wars) meaning that when it manifests itself, stadium operators are far, far more likely to act as it is a toxic association for sponsors and fans in general.
That’s nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with public culture. It might be that owners and operators are afraid of offending fans, but that would suggest a degree of credence being paid to fans which isn’t experienced by fans groups; far likelier is that in the countries concerned, the owners and operators aren’t concerned with racism because racism – or at least acting in a strident and purposeful anti-racist manner – isn’t part of the public culture. It’s hard to divorce the attitude in many Italian stadia from the attitudes of police in the same cities to immigrants, or to the attitudes of the governing bodies whenever they open their mouths. What spills forth isn’t a kowtowing to racist fans but a backwardness on these issues.
I think you’re avoiding the point- which is that racism and hooliganism are not good for business and so are mostly suppressed in American sports.
It’s true that most stadiums built in the last 20 years are municipally owned, but the contracts usually gives the team owner complete discretion over the use of the space on gameday- municipal ownership is a fig-leaf to justify municipal investment, which in turn is extracted under the threat of relocation. There is no doubt about who owns the team.
The problem with your complacent argument about England is that the government felt that racist chanting was such a problem that they passed a law against it – and even then it still goes on (hence the arrests). You couldn’t pass such a law in the US because of the 1st Amendment- but even without it being illegal it doesn’t seem to happen.
Look at what happened in the NHL last year with Wayne Simmonds and Joel Ward to know racism is not totally absent from US/North America arenas.
I would also say that drunken behavior and tribalism is a huge problem, esp in the north east US. Go to an NFL game wearing the away team colors and you can get pelted w beer, verbal insults and perhaps violence.
Of all the North American leagues the NHL is the only one where the idea that hooliganism might actually be good for business sees the light of day. Moreover, there is a long history of discrimination in the NHL- not racial but by anglophone Canadian teams against Francophone players. It’s also not a coincidence, I think, that as the NHL expanded southward into the US the issue of hooliganism came to be seen as more of a threat.
From this post, I can tell you’ve not been to a hockey game in or around Montreal. To say that hooliganism became prevalent in hockey through southward expansion is debatable. You can go to Laval and see games where the game is secondary to the fighting: on the ice and in the stands. Furthermore, if there’s “no racial discrimination” in the NHL, it is due to the scarcity of African-Americans participating. And what accounts for that?
Back to the original subject: racism in sports in the United States vs. Europe is fairly complex, but it can be summed up in one sentence: identity. An example: as a kid, I was a part of the community surrounding The Citadel Military Institute in Charleston, SC. As a first generation American who is also a minority and as a former employee of the college, about half of my interaction came through sporting events: football, basketball, and to a lesser extent, baseball. Basketball and baseball were relatively tame events, with people getting excited when the referee or umpire, respectively, made a bad call. Football, however was a different story. I don’t need to recall for you the entire history of the Civil War, I’ll just note quickly that the first shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and cadets of the Citadel operated cannons that fired on federal Fort Sumter.
It’s the same cannon fire I heard every time the Citadel scored a touchdown. The same Dixieland being sung by the crowd. The same Confederate flag being flown. The same reports of hazing against black cadets, year after year. Sure, Charleston is genteel, but it can also be racist.
Similar circumstances surround Ole Miss and football. 1962 was a great year, as far as they’re concerned, anyway.
Institutionalized *violence* (not just racism), here or in Europe, plays a huge role in the atmosphere of a sporting event. As someone alluded to earlier, there are so, so, so many instances of rivalries that have their roots in politics, religion, race and socioeconomic status. Barcelona/Real Madrid. Celtic/Rangers. Roma/Lazio. Partizan/Red Star. Olympiakos/PAOK. Ajax/Feyenoord. Those are roots in the Spanish Civil War, religion, regionalism-turned-Fascism, WWII Facism/Anti-Fascism, Ancient History and socioeconomics, respectively.
Racism is a problem in Europe, sure, but it’s a symptom of a much larger issue.
I wasn’t saying that hooliganism started when the NHL moved south, I was saying that the NHL started to see hooliganism as a problem when it started to move south- they wanted to clean up its image for an American audience. And as I say in the blog, this is not an issue with a single cause- but that doesn’t stop us from trying to focus on particular causes.
It doesnt happen in US stadiums because North Americans are less racists than Europeans as a result of the culture wars that Dave mentioned. It is simple as that. Do you recall that Jackie Robinson was subjected to racism, not to mention death threats. Same with Hank Aaron. That doesnt happen anymore because it is culturally unacceptable to be racist in America. I lived in England and regularly heard people say racists remarks of the kind I have never heard here. We have made great strides in this country regarding racism and you dont seem to want to acknowledge that. Instead you blame it on capitalist owners merely looking out for their pocketbook. It’s insulting.
Are you kidding? Google “racism in America” and read some of the entries; There are whole libraries of research devoted to continuing problem of racial prejudice in the US. I think it would be hard to argue that there is less racial prejudice in the US than in Europe- but for some reason or another this is not expressed in stadiums in the US. My point is that Europeans should stop and think about why (hint: the answer is not that the US is a paradise of racial harmony).
Racism in America has been at the forefront of our culture since we became a country. First it was our freedom. then it was the First Nation People, the Civil War, and the civil rights explosion of the 1950’s that had the National Guard escorting kids to school. We work hard to fix those problems and have grown from it. In case you forgot, we recently elected a black man to run this place twice.
Our sports are one of the key ways that black people have shown the world that we are capable of great things. In the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens and 17 other black men wore the stars and stripes in Nazi Germany in flying colors. We integrated in other sports and through that we earned respect. MIchael Jordan, LeBron James, Muhammad Ali, (The now disgraced play on-playa) Tiger Woods, and Ray Lewis are all excellent examples of the black man as athlete and American Sports Ambassador. They have all dominated the minds and hearts of the world and crushed all who challenged them.
Finally, racism in America is strongest in the south, primarily Alabama and Mississippi. Tonight Alabama is going to be playing for their fourth title in ten years. The SEC, Alabama’s Conference, has the most BCS wins of any college conference. If you are white and want to play American football in the NFL, they recommend you look elsewhere, like Notre Dame, for college. You won’t get any playing time in the SEC. This is a major turnaround for University of Mississippi, who was forced by the United States Supreme Court to admit their first black student in 1962.
I think the US is miles ahead of the rest of the world in racism. True there are massive issues, but there are a lot of people working to turn those issues around. When an issue gets squashed, another one comes up and we will kill that one too, maybe not today, maybe not next year, but we will succeed. To look at the issue in America, college football is a great place to start. they have been talking about it for decades here. And yes, their chants are a lot more unique and creative than the corporate beerfest that is the NFL.
“In the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens and 17 other black men wore the stars and stripes in Nazi Germany in flying colors. ”
Jesse Owens and the 17 other black men who competed at the Berlin Olympics were well treated in Germany (obviously the Games were destined to be a propaganda show to fool the world that Germany is a peaceful and tolerant nation) and also didn`t face racism inside the stadium. But Jesse Owens was racially discriminated against in the US before and after 1936. In fact I would argue that Jesse Owen`s life in the United States would be hard to stomach for most present-day Americans – and that`s probably the reason why no film director wants to make a movie out of it. In popular US history, he defeated the Nazis at the Olympics – but that`s only a small part of his life and doesn`t include the racism he experienced in the US. The latter part seems to be forgotten nowadays.
Then how come racial abuse used to exist in American stadiums and it doesnt now? It has nothing to do about with ownership or economics and everything to do with a cultural shift.
We could back and forth on this forever, but two things you should note (i) I said right at the start that there is probably not one explanation (ii) economics and forms of ownership are an aspect of culture.
stefan-
the first amendment does not apply to priavate corporations or organizations. a simple google search would have provided that information.
this answer came up on the first hit from my google search:
“The First Amendment applies to the government — to protect individuals from government censorship. While the text of the First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” it means that no federal, state or local government official can infringe on your free-speech rights. A private company is not a government or state and therefore generally is not subject to the requirements of the First Amendment.”
I’m not sure what your point is. My point is that the UK government passed a law making racist chanting at football grounds illegal and that I doubt that would be feasible in the US because of the first amendment.
i think the import you placed on the first amendment disregards the conversation regarding racism and prejudice in general that has taken place in the united states over the last 50-60 years. does racism exist in the states? yes. but is it as overt as it has been european countries? no. i would suggest the reasons are not because of a sense of ownership but because of education.
while speech is protected by the first amendment, private corporations have the ability to place restrictions on speech where governmental agencies do not. however, many of the sporting arenas within the states have been backed by local governments. if the local government is involved with the stadium, clubs are faced with issues of censorship. which prompts me to return to the theory that racism has been discussed for a significantly longer period than in many of the european countries now faced with the question of how to prevent the issue.
when i look at the racialism prevelant within europe it is not limited to sporting events. there are cultures within prior eastern block countries, italy, spain, that accept racist behavior and, in many instances, support the expression of those divergent views through daily interaction. this is not a hooliganism issue but a cultural and educational issue.
consequently, i do not see how the first amendment nor hooliganism have any bearing on the absence of racism in american sport. americans are increasingly territorial and exclusive in regards to sport teams, yet racism does not exist within our stadiums not because of a heavy handed ownership, but because we have evolved from the conversation of “well, it exists; now what?”
I’m no lawyer, but your discussion convinces me that legal action against racist speech is far more complicated in the US than the UK- isn’t that enough to make my really very simple point? Again, like other posters you seem to draw a false dichotomy between “culture” and “economics” – the structure of economic organization is an aspect of culture.
Really, you can’t see how the First Amendment has any “bearing on the absence of racism in American sport”? I think the fact that it’s a CRIMINAL OFFENSE in most of Europe and yet STILL frequently occurs, while it’s completely legal (First Amendment) but almost unheard of in the American sports landscape is very intriguing and worth analyzing. Sure, you can get kicked out of a stadium for inappropriate speech in the US, but you don’t get thrown in the back of a paddy wagon.
I’m not avoiding the point at all Stefan; if that was your point, there are better and more robust ways to make it that piggybaqcking this issue. The point is that you’ve attempted to link the issue of racist chanting in US sports stadia and the nature of team ownership, and I’m pointing out that this is a simply untenable notion, which, without any evidence to support it from you.
The first premise you make is that – critically – racism is suppressed in stadia. That means that it would be there but for the suppressing. If it weren’t suppressed, then this argument would fall at the first hurdle, since the suppressing was being done by other agencies and actors than the teams, and therefore ownership was simply not a factor at all.
That leads us to the second premise – that the reason it is suppressed is that team owners rule the roost and take action that owners in Europe haven’t been taken, because the latter are more in hock to varieties of stakeholder pressures.
Since – as far as I’m aware – the first premise falls, then we simply can’t begin to evaluate the second, that the key suppressant is the owner with the motive to protect his investment and the means to do that by more dictatorial rule.
If, however, racism isn’t suppressed in stadia per se but across society, then the ownership of the team has naff all to do with it. My contention is that people aren’t verbally racist in public in stadiums because they aren’t verbally racist in public full stop, because when they are, things happen to them that are bad, ranging from being sacked, careers ending, hate mail, verbal and physical abuse in response. The 1st Amendment gives someone the right to be racist, but not the right to be protected from the consequences.
Now, sure, stadia could be places where people behave in ways that are contrary to the public culture that governs the norms of social life. As a result, sports stadia could become places which tolerated. Neither of us have any evidence whatsoever that this is the case since one can’t prove a negative. I could equally argue that aliens from Mars have never landed inside a privately-owned stadium for similar reasons.
If what you’re suggesting is true though then we must at least see more racism whenever the Packers play at home, what with the team being fan-owned and not controlled by dominant individuals, with the sense of ownership being much the stronger there. Is there any evidence that the Pack is more racist at home?
The only thing we can say for absolutely certain is that whilst racism is a major issue in the USA, it generally isn’t one that manifests itself in terms of public expressions of racism, unlike in Europe, where differing countries have varying degrees of problems on this ver score.
The issue of legalities is a red herring, and I’m not at all sure why you suggest I’m being complacent about England. The genesis of the law in England was that after ignoring racism in grounds for several decades, fan pressure in the 1980s organised against the far-right started to become mainstream, at the same time as the UK’s own culture skirmishes in the 1980s. When clubs were pressed – belatedly – into acting, they liaised with the Police who told them that they were restricted in what they could do, because it wasn’t a crime to be racist in a stadium.
Now sure, the problem in the UK was much deeper than the US’s, in terms of public displays of racism, but anyone comparing the UK and US using sport and not through the lens of 300 years of slavery and its legacy would be guilty of over-reaching somewhat. On that point, there’s an interesting blog here:
http://nickilisacole.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/overt-european-vs-covert-american-racism-a-critical-evaluation/
No Dave, talking about racism being bad for business is precisely the place to discuss the issue of racism in European football stadiums. the issue of overt/covert expressions of racism is interesting. The article you link to points out that public expressions of racism are ridiculed and shamed in the US- but in my experience that is also true of the UK. This is a blog, not an academic paper, and I’m expressing my opinion – it’s fine if you disagree.
This is well done. I’ve often had this conversation with friends (we’re Americans) and believe there is also something to peer-pressure within stadiums. In the US, I think if racist chants were to break out inside a stadium, the other fans would quickly shut them down. Whether by requesting action from stadium authorities or direct confrontation with the offenders, US fans would not tolerate outright racism (at least towards certain groups). Conversely, European/UK fans have a much more tribal connection to both the club and fellow fans (related to what you are saying about ownership) in a way that makes fans feel they are playing a direct part in matches. When racist chants break out, the peer-pressure works to keep non-offending fans silent because doing so would be a direct challenge to their own group.
It’s worth noting that the first moves to tackle racism in stadiums in the UK came from fans who started to apply that peer pressure, often with little back up from clubs.
I also think the sense that one shouldn’t speak out due to peer pressure is much overplayed. The issue is less peer pressure than fear, since many of the agitators behind racist chants are often the most physically intimidating and its only relatively recently that clubs have started to apply consistent policies in support of fans who report fellow fans for racism that start to encourage fans who want to report that the club will both act on the information and that the person doing the informing won’t be suffering consequences.
One reason we don’t really hear racists chants at American sporting events… It’s very unlikely that both teams will not have people of color. It’s kinda hard to single out people by race on the other team when you have some of those same people on your team.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen here. Here’s an example of a recent incident at a basketball game: http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/blog/eye-on-college-basketball/17821954/southern-miss-band-chants-wheres-your-green-card-at-angel-rodriguez
You’d be hard put to find a major European football team without at least one player of African/Caribbean descent
But aren’t most of the noticeable events happening at teams/locations that don’t have players of African origin? Pro Patria looks extremely white to me. While they doesn’t address all of the cases (Lazio had a recent incident & does has African players), the “other” is a noticeable factor in these cases. I believe a number of the more publicized cases were in Eastern Europe (Serbia, Croatia, Poland) where you aren’t as likely to find the African players.
I don’t think you will find a single cause as to why people in Europe are more likely to use racist chants in a crowd.
I could totally be off base on this, but i would wager there’s a greater chance of being seated near a non-white person in an American stadium than a non-white in a European stadium. As internet comment threads have proven, people are much more willing to make inflammatory/racist/insulting statements if they know there is zero chance of being confronted in-person by a targeted individual.
And please people, Stefan is an economist. Of course he knows there are other factors involved. Go read a psychologist, sociologist, or anthroplogist’s soccer blog if you’d like to explore the other reasons.
Thanks Jay. Good point about proximity, which also raises the question about why there are so many non-whites in European football and so few non-white football fans- the “community” dimension of European football often seems to work against some groups who are deemed not welcome by a fraction of the white majority.
That’s an interesting point; despite much work kicking racism out of football (however imperfectly, as has been recently seen), that’s a very different thing from encouraging minorities into the stadium.
You can’t discuss that issue in the UK – at any rate – without focussing on the broader sock-ecoinomic shift brought about int he last 20 years, where the cost of entry has changed the demographics of the game; the communities you see less of in the stadium – poorer people – are the same communities in which you find ethnic minorities over-represented. Asking why more black people don’t watch Tottenham Hotspur can’t be divorced fro the question of why on average black people in Tottenham have less money than white people.
Having read through a small library of soccer books in the last year, I’ve thought about this same question quite a bit. One thing that struck me was the number of times authors talked about fans viewing the stadium as the only place where they could safely express their views without fear of retaliation. Many of these cases involved places where basic free speech did/does not exist (Soviet Bloc countries, Iran, Argentina under the military junta, etc), or where ethnic/racial/sectarian violence was/is a reality. The anonymity of being part of the crowd/mob at the soccer stadium gave them the courage to say things that they could never say out on the street safely. Some of the cases were speech that would be protected political protest and some of it was hate speech.
Most contemporary Americans don’t have a context for needing to censor themselves like this. By and large it just isn’t part of the broader cultural context. There are times in American history when this has been a little different and certainly places where you don’t want to go and spout an unpopular opinion (or be and unpopular color or ethnicity), but it currently isn’t the general rule and hasn’t been for quite a while. During periods of civil unrest in the US, sports stadiums weren’t really looked at as a place to express dissent or protest. That history doesn’t exist in the US in the same way.
I think you can make the case that in many other countries, the soccer stadium is a place where I can get away with saying things that I normally wouldn’t. Things that would put me in danger physically or socially if I voiced them in a lot of other places. I don’t present this as a wholesale reason for why you don’t see the problem with racist chants at sports events in the US, but I think it does illuminate the cultural backdrop some.
I thought your blog was interesting. I appreciate you have limited time, but my general view is that academic blogs are underworked, in that the real benefit and contribution would come from dialogues. It would be interesting, for example, to get some British or other American academics or even industry people to add commentary and then post the whole thing. But I appreciate that this takes a lot more time than a blog.
On the substance, I thought your point about home and guests was insightful, but not wholly explanatory. Talk to some friends about the difference between a Lions game and a Wolverines game: the former is much more characterized by drunken debauchery and abusive behavior. On the other hand, I witnesses 6 security guards dragging and tackling a drunken fan at a Phillies game whose principal offense was wearing a t-shirt with “fuck” featured, so you are quite right that American stadium operators would rather offend the minority rather than the majority.
There are a few other independent variables (allowing for heterogeneity) that you might consider in a more complete explanation. One, echoing your main point, is that, other than NFL and a few big-time college football games, football and baseball do not sell out, so there is a real effort to sell tickets to families which may not be the case with European games with limited stadium capacity.
I think your insight is limited, though, because at least in some cases it appears that clubs ARE quite concerned about racist chanting and take extraordinary steps to prevent it (with CCTV, etc): witness West Ham re Spurs. Even if club/stadium owners took an American style, I suspect there would still be a minority who are chanting. So let me offer my additional theory: the problem is the homogeneity of the fans. One of the reasons you don’t have racist chanting in the US is because if you did, a number of large black fans would beat the crap out of any wanker sufficiently drunk and idiotic to propose it. (Ironically, contrary to your blog, there is an exception to the First Amendment for “fighting words,” and actually (thank you) this is a great illustrative hypothetical for my constitutional law course, so that shouting a racist taunt that insults a player on the pitch is unlikely to be actionable, but shouting a racist taunt that insults someone in the stands so that there is a clear an imminent threat of a fight breaking out actually is a criminal offense.)
The very limited anecdotal evidence I have read of recent racist activities in Europe suggest that the harm is to players and society, not that fights break out in the stands between the racists and minority race fans or their white sympathizers. Is this true? If so, I think this may be the independent variable with the largest coefficient.
I think it has somewhat to do with racial makeup of the big 3 sports. Notice that NHL and NASCAR have more racial incidents than the big 3. The big 3 have huge numbers of racial minorities and all it takes is hem boycotting to end the entire season. Also I think the American fan base sees sports more as a hobby and less like a religion probably because of the variety of sports we have. My city is a baseball city but it also has an nfl and NHL team and most fans enjoy all three because it gives them something to root for all year long.