Friday, 9 September 2011

Fight the Power

The important question of the day: are tweets written in a vacuum?  By which I don't mean do they have influence on the wider society but does each individual tweet bear a relation to all other tweets [by the same person].  Even though they're only 140 characters isn't there a certain responsibility to hold an opinion from one tweet to the next.  To hold a consistent train of thought from one tweet to the next - if I say x in one tweet, I can surely not say not-x in the next tweet.
I mention this because I saw a football journalist (that is to say a professional writer) write in one tweet (or a few actually, the professional writer wasn't succinct enough) a story about a football manager (unnamed, hence my lame but satirical refusal to name the journalist ) saying something racist about Thierry Henry.  He followed this up with a tweet calling football's racism "unspoken."  Really?  The story of literal spoken racism is followed directly by the assertion of the unspoken nature of the racism.  I would argue that it is this short-sightedness that could be a contributing factor to any continued racism in football (in this context the shortage of black managers)
Speaking of which, Neil Warnock takes the place of 'Arry Redknapp today as rent-a-quote.  Telling us there's no problem with racism in football because Keith Curle has had two jobs:
“I’ve got Keith Curle working for me and I personally feel if you’re good enough it doesn’t matter what nationality you are or what colour your skin is. ...
If you’re good enough you get a job and you keep it. Keith has had two managerial jobs, other people have got them as well.”
Which is about as ridiculous an argument as you can get. As ridiculous as the argument that Neil Warnock is self-evidently as racist because his version seems to require the belief that the shortage of black managers is caused by black people not being very good at managing, rather than entrenched institutional attitudes. 

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