27/08/2025
🚨 Guillem Balague writes:
"I was listening to the (from my point of view, misguided) debates on TV and radio about Vinicius and I have to add several things.
LaLiga has opened an investigation into the racist insults against Vinícius at the Carlos Tartiere stadium. Real Oviedo itself has promised to see it through to the end. However, while the institutions are taking action, the MEDIA DEBATE in Spain once again stalls at the same point: the cause of the Brazilian's anger is acknowledged—the racist insults—but the rest of his behavior is criticized.
The same litany is repeated: “yes, he is insulted, but he should behave better.” As if ONE THING COULD BE SEPARATED FROM THE OTHER. As if they weren't part of the same process.
When Vinícius confronts the stands or gestures that the rival will be relegated to Segunda, it is interpreted as an arrogant, out-of-place attitude. But that reaction COMES FROM THE SAME PLACE as his protests against racism: a constant struggle against a hostile environment.
The sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois described it more than a century ago with the concept of double consciousness: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” That is what Vinícius lives: he is himself, joyful, defiant, competitive; but constantly perceived through a white gaze that demands calm, docility, and a permanent smile from him.
The problem is not only what is said, but who says it. In sports radio and television in Spain, the voices are, overwhelmingly, those of white men. Very few women, and hardly any Black journalists. This does not imply explicit racism, but it does reflect a lack of diversity that impoverishes the analysis.
Stuart Hall warned: “The media do not just transmit information; they construct meanings.” If all those who construct those meanings start from similar experiences, the conclusions will be limited. It is not about bad faith, but about a homogeneous cultural framework that fails to grasp what it means to suffer racism on a daily basis.
Frantz Fanon, in ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ expressed it clearly: “The black man has to fight twice as hard to be accepted as a man.” That overload translates into anger, tension, gestures that from the outside seem excessive. But seen from within, they are pure survival. When the Spanish press demands that Vinícius limit himself to “play and shut up,” it reproduces what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racism without racists”: cultural frameworks that do not insult directly, but blame the affected person for their own reaction.
I myself am a white man, and I know I will never fully understand what it means to live racism. But in the United Kingdom, I learned to listen to diverse voices and recognize that the richness of debate only emerges when different experiences are incorporated: of race, gender, class, sexual orientation. The theorist Sara Ahmed sums it up well: “Diversity is not an institutional adornment, but a practice of transformation. Without diverse voices, institutions repeat the same old discourse.”
I do not accuse the Spanish press of being racist. But I do accuse it of not doing enough to vary the discourse. In the case of Vinícius, that has clear consequences: it is accepted that he suffers racism, but he is reprimanded when he responds with his character. For me, BOTH THINGS ARE THE SAME: resistance against a world that wants him fitted into a foreign mold.
The day the press understands that his gestures, his protests, and his way of playing are inseparable from his experience, the analysis will be fairer. And, above all, more human."
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