Soccer Player Suspended For Allegedly Offensive Racial Remark, Sparking International Debate About Language And Context

Star soccer player Edinson Cavani, a Uruguayan striker who plays for Manchester United, was fined and suspended after publicly thanking his friend Pablo Fernandez by using his childhood nickname, “negrito.”

The problem for Cavani came when people in British media who had not grown up in South America used a singular, narrow contextual view of Cavani’s use of the word to paint him as a racist. Cavani was fined about $135,000 by the English Football Association and suspended for three games for the alleged infraction. As Dariela Sosa explained on Persuasion:

To us Latin Americans, the story was just short of incomprehensible. “Negrito”—the diminutive of the word for “black”—sounds aggressive in English. But, as Uruguay’s National Academy of Letters noted, in Spanish it’s not offensive; it’s a term of endearment. It’s not even particularly racialized: Plenty of white people are nicknamed negrito, including, as it happens, Cavani’s friend. (His hair is black.)

The Uruguayan Players’ Union released a statement regarding Cavani’s punishment, writing, “Unfortunately, through its sanction, the English Football Association expresses absolute ignorance and disdain for a multicultural vision of the world.” The South American Football Confederation released its own statement of support for the striker, saying the EFA did not “consider the cultural characteristics and the use of certain terms in everyday speech in Uruguay.”

As Sosa explained, this incident goes far beyond misunderstandings between particular audiences, it “shows how America’s racial debates are being globalized via the export of a radical form of antiracist ideology that sees appeals to context or cross-cultural understanding as excuse-making for bigots.”

She went on to say that race in Latin America is different than how it is seen in American and Europe. In Latin America, race is “context dependent,” she wrote, describing how people may choose to identify differently depending on where they are or who they’re with.

“Race isn’t fixed for us—which is one reason that racialized terms in Spanish don’t carry anything like the sting they do in English,” Sosa wrote.

She went on to explain how “banning a given word regardless of the context in which it is used assumes that words exist in isolation from how we use them” makes no sense linguistically, yet this is exactly why Cavani was punished.

“Applied without regard for social, cultural and linguistic context, antiracism efforts risk becoming a caricature of themselves, driving a wedge between people of different cultures rather than bringing them together, as soccer does so impressively around the globe, engaging people of all origins and colors in team efforts. The English Football Association, with its over-the-top sanction of Cavani, managed instead to show only mindless adherence to a brand of maximalist Anglo-American antiracism ideology that does little to combat racism itself,” Sosa wrote.

In addition to the context being ignored in regard to Cavani’s statement of gratitude to his friend, intent was also ignored. The New York Times has been grappling with this issue for two weeks now, first insisting a white reporter should have resigned for using a racial slur “regardless of intent” only to walk the statement back, saying “of course intent matters.”

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