Meanwhile, at a seemingly much, much more trivial level is the Suarez-Evra fracas. Anyone who has been around sport knows that the air is permanently thick with insult and abuse. A good deal of it is sexual either in terms of what the other person can or cannot do, has or has not physically got, or what might or might not happen or has happened to your opponents partner, wife, girlfriend, ex, mother, sister, grandmother. A good deal of it is about personal appearance - height, weight, hair, teeth, eyes and so on. The question in this case wasn't whether Suarez said something derogatory but whether he 'racialised' the conversation. Again and again, people have tried to say that whatever Suarez said was only or merely something that people say to each other in Uruguay, in Latin America, in colloquial Spanish etc etc. Well, let's remember first that Uruguay was once a slave-owning society and the idea that any word meaning 'black' is somehow neutral or 'only' or 'just' anything is hard to believe. I notice that there haven't been long lines of black Uruguayans queueing up to tell British interviewers how they love being called 'black' by white people when tensions are high in arguments and confrontations.
Even so, no matter what kind of codes Suarez was using at the time, there can be little doubt that he changed the nature of the 'conversation' (euphemism, I know) by introducing 'race' into it. And this is the key. Why does a white person do that? What possible purpose is there for a white person in the middle of a confrontation (for whatever reason) suddenly say that the other person is 'black'. It can only be part of the business of trying to get the upper hand. In other words, the white person reaches for the hierarchy he is part of, (the racist hierarchy,) and pluck the trump card from the pack: the one that says 'inferior' (in his book). It is completely irrelevant that black people use this or that term to each other or within the hierarchies of racism use the word 'white'. Racialising the confrontation is to get the upper hand by relying on perceived notions of who is top dog, based on centuries of domination and oppression. The thousands of column inches I've seen written on this case all trying to prove that 'negro' isn't a slur completely miss the point.
