Late Sunday night, Rio Ferdinand tweeted: “Bro we need protection. Who is protecting Vinícius in Spain?
I had a reflex action: I retweeted the tweet. I did it hot, which is how things should not be done, but at that moment I identified with the indignation of Rio Ferdinand.
A friend caught my retweet, and that's why he sent me an audio.
My friend is black, like Ferdinand, like Vinícius or like myself, and in his childhood he had been named the best children's soccer player in the world, and in the audio he told me: "There are racists in our society, let's not be so naive as to say that there are none. The issue is that Vinícius is not collaborating much with the anti-racist fight (...) Notice that there are many black players in Madrid and they only insult him”.
I took out a pen and notebook and wrote down: Militão, Alaba, Mendy, Camavinga, Rodrygo, Tchouaméni, Mariano, Rüdiger and Vinicius himself.
Then I asked myself: "Of all of them, who is the rival public insulting?"
To Vinicius.
True: only Vinícius.
Well, Vinícius is the footballer who is affected and exhibits his weaknesses and measures himself against the windmills. And also, the only one who stirs, is outraged, points out and responds mockingly to the public. He challenges him.
That said, does the Vinícius variable justify the insults?
Children absorb what they see and have no filters. Soccer is part of his imagination, of his education. The children contemplate and listen to what happens in the stadiums, and from there they learn the good and the bad.
Among the bad, there is the insult to a black soccer player, being called "monkey" because of his skin color. It is bad and intolerable (no matter how much the insult is a part of the soccer liturgy): the contagion effect will invite many schoolchildren to call a classmate “monkey”. We must not exceed that barrier, Vinícius wears as he wears.
