Originally Posted by Alexander Netherton
...
It was only a couple of years later when some members of the Stretford End sang the racist chant about Emmanuel Adebayor. Of course, the chant doesn’t have the ‘n’ word in it, so people believe that there’s no way it can be racist. That’s because the general understanding of racism in this country is that unless you’re using an explicitly racist slur to someone, you’re not being a racist. The various nuances about race and racism - that oppression can be structural and systemic, not purely personal, and it can be linked to stereotypes that cause wider problems - are ignorantly or deliberately lost and disregarded in order to give bigots the plausible deniability they love to hide behind. It wasn’t a huge number of fans, though, and things didn’t take off as they have this week.
...
But now, United fans have a new chant, about Romelu Lukaku’s supposedly enormous penis. It is plainly racist, reducing Lukaku to a figure to be mocked because of a stereotype that has long been linked to other prejudicial representations of black men as sexually aggressive, to use just one example. Apparently the joke is about his penis, not his race, so it can’t be racist. It is a compliment, if anything, so it can’t be racist. It isn’t offensive in the opinion of some people, so it can’t be racist. There are other more racist chants, so it can’t be racist. It isn’t the biggest problem in racism, so it can’t be racist. It isn’t the biggest problem of any kind in the world, so it can’t be racist. You should stop bringing attention to racism because that just perpetuates racism. None of these arguments stand up to any kind of rigour, and there is a reason for that. They are the desperate claims of people who hate to be called racist more than they hate racism itself.
The Romelu Lukaku chant is racist. It is not hard to grasp. It is not hard to stop doing it.