My fears confirmed

I always thought that the rest of the Western world had more issues with race than had led on. I mean let's face it, it's pretty naive to think that it wouldn't. People of European decent have oppressed people of color on every habitable continent on Earth. If America, a relatively young country, has yet to deal with all its issues with race, what's there to make you think places with much longer history would have done better.

What triggered this was a Real Sports' story on racism in European soccer. Know I knew of the problems they were having in Spain, however it seems to commonplace in Italy, some British Stadiums, Germany and just about all of Eastern Europe. You have whole sections of stadiums doing the Nazi salute, making monkey sounds whenever a black player touches the ball, throwing bananas at Black players and that's just the beginning.

In a soccer match between Spain and France last year in Madrid, the entire stadium of about 80,000 did the monkey chant and also chanted in unison; "Jump if you're not Black" because France has Black players on its national team.

What's worst is that it's not just the fans. An Italian star was suspended for doing the Nazi salute during a game. The Spanish national coach called France's Thierry Henry, one of the best soccer players in the World and a Black man, a "Black piece of shit." An Italian hockey player was just suspended permanent last week from the national team because he was yelling racial slurs at a biracial player during a game.

What's really upsetting about all this madness is that no one is really doing anything about it and it has been going on for years. I know we still have these type of people in America, but it's NO way they'd be allowed to do this in America in 2005.

When you couple this problem up with the recent race riots in France and in Australia and you start to see that the reconciliation that Europe and the Western World claimed to have with people of color has yet to fully come to fruition. I'm really worried about people of color around the world now. I know these racists, just like in America, are small in number. However, they have gumption that racists in this country haven't mustered yet. Add that to governments that really won't do much to alleviate the problem and you have a very bad situation brewing.

21st century starting to look a lot like the 20th to me.