NYT SAYS BRITISH FOOTBALL CULTURE IS MAKING WHITE AMERICANS RACIST
For the stunted American male, frustrated with the changing demographics of the country and gripped by the belief that his days on top are coming to an end, there may be no form of pornography more satisfying than watching a bunch of hard-drinking, pub-singing soccer fans with thick brogues beat the hell out of one another. The scene is almost always the same: Singing men in red advance upon singing men in blue. When they meet in the center of the frame, red shoves blue, fingers are pointed and then, inevitably, a green beer bottle flies across the screen and explodes on red’s head. The lines of singing men collapse into a squirming, punching mass and by the time the police trot up, usually dressed to the hilt in riot gear, both red and blue have gone scurrying away, leaving a few behind sitting on the ground in a bloody stupor.
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Then, about a half-hour before kickoff, E.C.S. arrived to the beating of drums. They marched a few hundred deep up the alleyway, holding banners and scarves above their heads. Some wore bandannas over their faces; some held up flares of green smoke; the vast majority were white. In throaty unison, they sang: “Take ’em all, Take ’em all, put ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em! Short and tall, watch ’em fall. Come on boys, take ’em all!” Each phrase was sung with a disorienting British lilt.
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In Seattle, I saw glimpses of the same denial. A march of mostly white men and women through the streets of Seattle singing “put ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em” is absurd on its face (oddly enough, the lyrics of the original song by Cock Sparrer, an English band from the Oi! punk scene, derisively refer to “Americans in dark glasses”). But when these lyrics are sung in pubs in England or at National Front meetings like the one Buford attended, it also raises the question: Who, exactly, is “ ’em?”
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There are now two separate American soccer cultures: one white, the other Latino. And while some of the Europhilia can be attributed to the relative newness of American soccer fandom (traditions, I suppose, have to start somewhere), it’s worth asking why soccer fans in a country with millions of immigrants from soccer-crazed countries in Central and South America would look so longingly toward Western Europe, or why the American media’s coverage of soccer culture, however scant, focuses on soccer bars in gentrified Brooklyn and fan organizations in majority-white cities like Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
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If Alexi Lalas wants to know why so many Mexican-Americans choose not to root for the United States, he doesn’t need to look much farther than the crowds who gather in M.L.S. stadiums and bars and sing songs inspired by groups who shove black men off subway trains and travel to foreign cities to taunt Muslim immigrants. There is nothing wrong about borrowing what you love, but it should be called what it is — a dream of an ultimately monochromatic gathering in which thousands of white men can brawl (but safely and without guns!) in the streets and drunkenly sing Phil Collins melodies in pubs, lending a hooligan snarl to a white, suburban culture.
