The Daily Mail is more racist than football and Strictly Come Dancing (but not the Leveson Inquiry)
WRITING in defence of football’s designated position as a sport riddled with racism and in need to state control, lest the white working class fans race riot, Martin Samuels uses his Daily Mail column to compare the national sport to Strictly Come Dancing.
Samuels notices that Colin Salmon has been voted off BBC pro-celebrity dance show Strictly Come Dancing. Colin Salmon is black. He was voted off in a public vote. Samuels writes:
The past two weeks, Salmon has been inexplicably endangered by the public poll. On Sunday, his luck ran out. He performed nervously in the dance-off and was eliminated. Aside from Louis Smith, the Olympic gymnast, who is mixed race, Strictly is now all white on the night.
You might not have noticed that Salmon is black. Samuels has:
If a black contestant is very good, he or she might make the final. If a black contestant is even half as clumsy as the white folk competing, out he goes.
Racism?
Samuels sees a “certain preference from the audience at home“.
The paying public use their money to phone in and vote for their favourite. The least number voted for Salmon.
…the strangest postscript to Salmon’s exit was that nobody found it strange at all. There was absolutely no puzzlement that a perfectly capable dancer, without doubt open to further improvement and appreciated by knowledgeable judges, should not find similar favour with the public. If it were football, the Prime Minister would be airing his views on Radio 4.
That much is true. The elite looks for racism in dust at football grounds. Anti-racism is their clarion call, a kak-handed effort to unite the country to a cause for the good. That these elite are nearly all white, Christian males matters not. Ignore all that. Focus on their anti-racism badges and armbands. You can always trust a cause that demands the righteous wear an armband, can’t you?
The anti-racism charabanc “creates the impression that football is a rancid cesspit of racial hatred when it is actually making more young black men rich than any industry this side of MOBO”.
All correct. Football is not riddled with racism. It is just another part of life that reflects society. But it’s supported by the white working class, and the elite fear them. So. They must be controlled. One fan’s monkey chant is not the antics of an isolated, mentally negligible pillock trying to rile the opposition; it’s the thin edge of a Jackboot-sized wedge. If one fool gets way with it, all the fans will be doing it. Sod the fact that black footballers are now part of football’s fabric and often come from the same social strata as the fans. The elite who are less likely to live and work with black people – but who are more likely to employ them (see the lack of black football managers – just 4 from 92 at non-black–owned pro clubs) – use anti-racism as a tool to deflect our gaze from them to the real menace: the working class.
Samuels concludes:
Yet if Strictly Come Dancing were a Premier League football team, Colin Salmon would be in the starting XI on Saturday, and picked solely on ability. And that is the biggest problem. That we do not recognise where the real problem is any more.
What’s odd about his piece is that he picks a popular show to compare and contrast football to. Why bother? He writes for a popular newspaper. How many black faces did you see at the Leveson Enquiry into media standards? Not many. How many black faces were on the Inquiry Team investigating the media? None. How many black faces featured on the Leveson Inquiry’s Module 2: The Press and the Police? None. How many appeared for Module 3: The Relationship between Press and Politicians? None.
On the Daily Mail’s website, there are 14 blogs. How many feature a byline of a black face? None. All are white.
How many Mail columnists listed on the paper’s site are black?
News columnists : 0 from 18
Sport columnists: 2 from 37
TV & Showbiz: 1 from 1
Female: 0 from 8
Health: 0 from 2
Money: 0 from 13
Mail on Sunday: 1 from 2, if you include a writer called “Black Dog”. But it’s 0.
You Mag: 0 from 7
Live Mag: 0 from 8
Right Minds: 0 from 49 (one is the dark-skinned Abjijit Pandya)
Books: 0 from 1
Of 160 Daily Mail columnists, 3 are black.
Compare that to football and Strictly.
The Daily Mail’s editor is white. The paper’s owners are white. The Daily Mail is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust plc. It’s 13 board members were white males until September 14 2012 when a woman was welcomed aboard. She’s white.
No need to look for signs of racism on Strictly Come Dancing when you work at the Mail…
Posted: 7th, November 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
