It always starts with good intentions. Neymar and Dani Alves — with the help of marketing agency Loducca — had come up with a clever way of addressing the racial abuse all too common in Spanish football. The next time a banana was thrown at a black Barcelona player, eat it. And then tweet about it. The hashtag had already been picked out.
No one is a monkey: Dani Alves’ campaign and counteracting racism in football
Dani Alves’ willingness to hit back against racial abuse with a marketing campaign is understandable, but it’s not doing much to counteract racism.
David Ramos
#weareallmonkeys duly went viral.
As Loducca said, “A gesture needs no translation and what we’re seeing is that this has gone viral, globally. The idea was for Neymar to eat the banana, but in the end it was Alves, and that works just the same... The best way to beat prejudice is to take the sting out of the racist action so it isn’t repeated.”
The simple truth, however, is that we are not all monkeys. None of us are. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that takings selfies of oneself eating a banana is to stopping racism in football as tweeting #StopKony to stopping the Ugandan warlord. You can’t “reclaim” racism and turn it into a positive, no matter how many bananas you care to consume.
The movement started by Alves and Neymar is clever, but those blindly clapping along, portraying it as a step forward, might be missing the point. Standing in solidarity on social media is not the same thing as fixing the problem. A moment of your time on the internet, hashtags, selfies and caps-locked rants do little to address the real issue here.
Awareness has been raised, but unless it’s acted upon we’re congratulating ourselves without actually having done anything. Tweeting is not the same thing as acting.
Genuine social responsibility would have been for the hundreds of fans around the person that threw the banana to either stop him or to report him immediately. Villarreal must be commended for how fast they went about the process of identifying the fan as David Campayo Lleo (thanks to the cooperation of the other supporters) and for their no-nonsense stance on the situation. But the banana isn’t thrown in the first place if Lleo either recognizes racial abuse is wrong or those around him speak up against it.
That’s the sad part. No one stopped it; no one reported it to security until there was a formal investigation. What happens if Dani Alves ignores the banana? If he doesn’t eat it and continues on with the game, does the incident get swept under the rug just, like the other times that the officials and fans have chosen to look the other way?
Less than two years ago, Angel Villa Llona, president of the Spanish FA, inexplicably stated that racism does not exist in Spain. This came in response to UEFA fining the Spanish FA after Mario Balotelli was racially abused by Spain fans during Euro 2012. It came less than a year after Dani Alves claimed that racism in the Spanish games was 'uncontrollable'. Take charitably, the authorities seem to fall prey to a childish lack of object permanence: the problem does not exist if they do not witness it. For the more cynical observer it looks like outright denialism.
It is understandable that said authorities do not want to be associated with the taint of racism, that they try not to see it even when it’s starting them in the face. But continually sweeping racism under the rug leads to the construction of a strange, fantasy world in which racial harmony has been achieved. It hasn’t.
After joking that the banana provided him with the potassium that he needed to help Barcelona in their comeback win, Alves said “I have been living in Spain for 11 years, and for 11 years I’ve been laughing at these morons”. Eleven years of racial abuse! No wonder he resorted to a pre-planned campaign to draw attention to it.
Dani Alves/Photo credit: David Ramos
The detractors claim that the non-spontaneous nature of the campaign somehow impedes its message, but there’s an argument to be made that it actually makes it more powerful. That Neymar and Alves had to resort to this type of marketing in order to bring attention to such a serious problem speaks volumes of the inaction and ineptitude of the officials and clubs in dealing with the matter via official channels.
Despite its flawed nature, the campaign at least forces people to face the problem, even for a brief moment, which is far better than leaving it ignored. That it was planned is entirely irrelevant.
The way that Alves’ immediate reaction was received is entirely unsurprising. Next to victim-blaming, generally impossible in instances of racial abuse, our other favorite trick in devaluing suffering is to urge individuals to struggle in dignified silence. It’s classy. It’s disciplined. And it keeps us in our comfort zones, allowing us to take a selfie with a banana and move on without really getting to grips with the issue.
The fetish for dignity in the face of racism is why Kevin Prince-Boeteng was chided for walking off the pitch rather than dealing with abusive chants, why Samuel Eto’o was described as ‘uncontrollable’ for taking the ball and attempting to walk off the field when confronted with racism and it’s why Sepp Blatter thinks a handshake between the abused and abuser would solve racism. “Take the abuse, deal with it privately and quietly.” Suffer, and make sure you do it with class.
Eating a banana may indeed have taken the sting out of a racist act, turned it into something harmless and something comedic. But that in itself does as much to fight racism as Blatter’s handshake. Banana-throwing is a symptom, not a root cause, and mocking the act does nothing to address deeper-lying problems. If bananas are ignored, racism will manifest itself through another path.
the authorities seem to fall prey to a childish lack of object permanence: the problem does not exist if they do not witness it.
Indeed, that’s what we’ve seen with the public support for Lleo. Eight hundred people — friends and family of a racist — have come out in public support of of the former Villarreal youth coach as he faces up to three years in prison for racist provocation. These supporters cite the “public media lynching” as the cause for their protest, implying that it was somehow unfair of Alves to point out a racist act rather than accepting that the act was in itself wrong. If this isn’t racism, it’s certainly enabling it.
If the #weareallmonkeys movement ends with the hashtag, it’s a colossal failure. Genuine progress would be to realise that those of us — the majority of us — who find racism utterly abhorrent must actually fight it rather than standing by and watching. These injustices are only allowed to fester because of the inaction of good people. In El Madrigal, as many other stadiums, the number of good citizens far outnumber the number of racists, yet the ignorant ones are always the loudest. And they’re the ones who act.
Thinking “what they are doing is disgusting, but thankfully I’m not racist” is hardly any better than the act itself. Standing by is the act of a coward. If you can watch someone abuse another without speaking up or taking action, you are no better than the abuser. If you claim to be against racism, but don’t the courage to stand against it when you see it, you a part of the problem. An isolated minority can only wield this much influence if everyone looks the other way.
But don’t worry, I’m sure many in the silent majority retweeted Neymar’s selfie.
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