I would be willing to bet my house that there are plenty of people piling onto Bellingham on twitter etc because he isn't white. Doesn't matter if race is being mentioned or not. Plenty on twitter will jump at the chance of giving him abuse because he has a black parent. While there will be plenty who just don't like his attitude which is by and large understandable, there will be plenty driven by race. That's the world we have been living in for a long time now.
Big mistake from Ian Wright, this will last and cause many more problems than it solves. He's just another part of the media but has become a bit carried away with himself in my opinion. He needs to realise that talking about things quietly is often better than shouting about them ... ... sadly having a big mouth, and using it, seems to be increasingly normal in all walks of life.
When real racism and hatred exist it deserves to have a light shining into the dark places it came from and for everybody to stand up and stop it The problem these days is, we have too many people waving torches into places that are not dark which makes it difficult to find the real hatred and to spot where the darkness is.
Agreed and I was thinking back to less enlightened times race wise (UK 1970s) and ironically the two greatest sporting icons at the time were black and were hyped and loved by almost everyone or so it seemed as a child - Pele and Muhammad Ali.
Is this the same Muhammad Ali who spoke out persistently spoke out against the racist abuse he received throughout his life, even going as far as to throw his Olympic gold medal into a river in protest as a reaction to racism? The guy that racists on this platform as recently as a few years ago refused to stop calling Cassius Clay as a sad tribute to racists from the 60s and 70s? Plenty of racism around. Us pretending it's not there isn't very productive, it's just burying our head in the sand.
You're missing my point. My point was there have been black icons in the past so Jude Bellingham isn't a game changer here and nor is he arguably the first black British sports star, which was probably Daley Thompson, so Ian Wright's argument isn't, in my opinion, that relevant. And I lived through the 70s so I know there was racism and Ali, Pele and Daley would've received it and Daley will still, so I'm not pretending it never happened or it's not still around.
A load of bollocks. Did he hear the roar when Bellingham came on? England fans love him, they know he's one of the best players in the world, (is still bloody 22!) and we are lucky to have him .
While the conversation includes black as a term there is still a long way to go. Only when gets referred to as a superstar, not a black superstar, has racism truly gone.
That’s a fair point, I often hear the first black this the first black that and wonder why they can’t just mention how good someone is. Having said that I’m white and can only understand up to a certain point, name calling doesn’t bother me neither do threats of violence. But I’ve never been bullied as an innocent child just because I’m black. That is vile and I’ll never understand that either.
I agree. But this conversation is about the black term. As for superstar, I’m not sure Jude Bellingham has done enough to earn that moniker yet.
It does feel to me like racism might be on the rise, but mostly as a reaction to social commentary about oppressor/oppressed dynamics being amplified in the last decade, when White people are broadly painted as an oppressing class, it's logical they will form an identity that defends themselves. This is a OG from Wright and further feeds into the trends we're seeing online and in real life.
