“Kneeling only goes to highlight your ignorance. England is NOT! a #racist country”: Aversive racism, colour-blindness, and racist temporalities in discussions of football online.

DOIDGE, Mark, RODRIGO-JUSUE, Itoitz, BLACK, Jack, FLETCHER, Thomas, SINCLAIR, Gary, ROSATI, Pierangelo, KEARNS, Colm, KILVINGTON, Daniel, LISTON, Katie and LYNN, Theo (2024). “Kneeling only goes to highlight your ignorance. England is NOT! a #racist country”: Aversive racism, colour-blindness, and racist temporalities in discussions of football online. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

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Abstract

Drawing on theories of aversive racism and colour-blindness, which stress the invisibility of contemporary racism, this article analyses online discussions on taking the knee (TTK) during EURO2020 men’s football tournament. While highly visible racist abuse directed at Black English players after losing the final to Italy (dominative racism) received most public attention and repudiation, based on 6,850 English language tweets published on Twitter/X, this article shows how subtle racism and colour-blindness were reinforced in discussions around TTK over the duration of the tournament (aversive racism). The article also shows how individuals online developed a variety of strategies (evidence, othering, critique, and activism) to challenge the main arguments against anti-racist activism in football (identified in four themes: BLM, Marxism, virtue signalling, and woke). The article makes an original contribution by examining the changing intensity of online conversations on TTK over the duration of the tournament. Our analysis identifies key moments in the tournament, political elites’ rhetoric, and trends of success and failure as relevant factors that shaped vernacular conversations online. The discussion ultimately argues that investigating the temporal patterns of public discussions on (anti)racism provides valuable insights to understand the contemporary complexity of racism in football and society more broadly.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Centre for Sport and Exercise Science; Sport Industry Research Centre; Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute; Humanities Research Centre; Sociology, Politics and Policy Research Group; Department of Sport; Department of Humanities; Department of Media Arts and Communication; Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics; 1603 Demography; 1608 Sociology; Demography; 44 Human society
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	04 Jul 2024 10:30
Last Modified:	04 Jul 2024 10:30
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/33912

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