Italian Soccer’s Anti-Racism Campaign Features Paintings of Monkeys

Four months into the Italian soccer season, the country’s top league is wrestling with a persistent problem: A series of players have again been victims of racist abuse in the country’s stadiums, groups of hard-core fans have defended their right to abuse anyone any way they choose, and certain clubs have denied that racism is even a problem.

Last month, one of the country’s highest-ranking soccer officials was accused of trying to conceal racist chanting rather than address it, and a powerful newspaper was criticized for its tone-deaf coverage of the issue.

So on Monday, Lega Serie A, the organization that oversees the country’s highest division, responded by launching a series of anti-racism initiatives. Almost immediately, even one of those — a series of images of monkeys in club colors — was criticized as racist.“In a country in which the authorities fail to deal with racism week after week #SerieA have launched a campaign that looks like a sick joke,” the anti-discrimination network Football Against Racism in Europe said in comments posted on the organization’s Twitter account. “These creations are an outrage, they will be counterproductive and continue the dehumanization of people of African heritage.”

Lega Serie A had scheduled Monday’s news conference in Milan to reveal its plan to tackle Italian soccer’s endemic racism problem in three ways: by introducing facial recognition technology to enable clubs to identify and bar offenders; by appointing a so-called anti-racism team, consisting of 20 players from Serie A’s 20 clubs; and by creating a cultural program centered on bespoke works created by the artist Simone Fugazzotto.

Source: The New York Times

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