Racist animalization persists in European soccer through monkey taunts and banana pelting.

Evidence

Contemporary popular culture in Europe continues to express this beastliness by white Europeans towards those Europeans not figured as white and to those figured as not (or never fully) European. Thus the infantilizing popularity of the Tintin and Zig et Puce comics of the 1930s and of Blondin et Cirage in the 1950s has given way to white soccer fans and some players throughout Europe publicly demeaning black players on European club teams, including those of North African origin, by calling them “monkeys” or “orangutans” or “apes,” even spitting at or pelting them with bananas during games. Attending some professional soccer games in Europe today serves as contemporary equivalent of the visit to the World’s Fair a century or so ago. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 879

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the complacency/immodesty material on how moral panics and dehumanization recur across eras.