As most of you probably know, current Chelsea and sometimes England captain John Terry was found not guilty on racial abuse allegations towards QPR defender Anton Ferdinand (brother of Terry's England teammate, Rio Ferdinand). The reason I choose to post about this is because while I obviously dislike racism, I think it's somewhat hypocritical the way this case came about and how this represents a shift to a society where things are possibly to politically correct and "racism" can be used as an easy way of incriminating someone you don't like to begin with.
Let's begin with what I consider a racist. A racist to me is someone with racial motives for negatively discriminating or showing aggression towards another individual or group of people. All of us harbor a very slight amount possibly from lack of exposure to a race or a few bad instances. Just in the same way that people make mistakes and people make bad decisions time to time but are not considered that mistake, racism should be seen the same way. A non-racist individual can use a racist term and not be considered one if they have many interactions with said race and "racist behavior" is usually not a problem. Even if Terry had been found guilty, I wouldn't consider Terry a racist because he has a much longer history of good relations with black players, especially the ones on his team. He could very well just dislike Anton.
This brings me to another point, the only thing that even brought race into the phrase "black f***ing c**t" is the word black. It should be obvious to people that the real insult was every other part of the sentence. Identifying race doesn't make someone racist. This phrase if said is just offensive and should be treated as such. This is all on the basis that he actually said this as an insult since apparently he said those specific words because he was denying calling Anton this and the camera's just picked it up out of context.
This again brings me to yet another point. Anton had to be told he was "racially abused." Then after the charges are pressed, everyone considers Terry guilty because of previous reasons to dislike him that have nothing to do with his racial relations. Fabio Capello lost his job for trying to defend the captain under the legal perspective of "innocent until proven guilty." Now the verdict is out, so many people (many of them supposedly credible on the sport) are saying this is a bad day for football and it has set the sport back decades. They are basing this again on something that was brought to court and not proven guilty. I think the more embarrassing part of this is that a man faced with such a serious charge can not be found not guilty without still being guilty to the public. What was the point of the trial then? Should we just allow everyone who is charger with racial allegations to just be found guilty because it dealt with race regardless of truth or proof? That would raise the conflicts between races because it would be an easy out for black players. Terry went through everything as he legally should and won.
To summarize, the worst thing football can do is keep this ordeal going longer. I do not defend racists but they need to actually be a proven racist before I question my support. So in this case, I support John Terry, club and country.
Daniel
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