Aslur against ethnic Azeris on an Iranian children’s television program has sparked a backlash that has spilled onto the streets.
The popular children’s program Fitilehha has been cancelled amid the controversy it caused when it aired an episode on November 6 depicting an ethnic Azeri brushing his teeth with a toilet brush.
But the outcry has continued to grow, with members of the country’s large Azeri minority staging large street protests on November 9 in the northwestern cities of Tabriz, Urmia (Orumieh), and Zanjan.
Video footage from the protests shows large numbers of people marching through streets, chanting “stop racism against Azeris.” Riot police were deployed on the streets.
Mohammad Sarafraz, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the country’s state broadcaster, apologized for the episode, which he said was “insulting” to ethnic Azeris. He said the producers of the program would be severely punished.
“The [IRIB] apologizes for the slip-up, and it will redouble its efforts to strengthen national unity among Iranian ethnic groups,” Fars news agency quoted Sarafraz as saying on November 8.
‘Unintentional Offense’
Davud Nemati-Anarki, the head of IRIB’s public relation’s department, also apologized for the “unintentional offense” caused by the TV program.
IRNA quoted Masud Pezeshkian, a lawmaker from the mainly ethnic Azeri-populated city of Tabriz, as saying that the incident was the result of a “mistake” by the producers of the program.
Mohammad Ismail Saeedi, lawmaker from Tabriz, said an “insult against the Azeri people is an insult against all Iranian people.”
The contentious Fitilehha episode showed a man and his son, speaking Persian with Azeri accents, expressing their unhappiness with the hotel they were staying in, deeming it “smelly.” The punchline was that they had mistakenly used a toilet brush to clean their teeth.
Iran’s Azeri minority is about 10 million strong, and includes prominent figures such as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi.
Fitileh, a popular program aired every Friday, is not the first in the Iranian media to run into trouble for its depiction of Azeris.
In 2006, Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani landed in jail after publishing a cartoon that showed a cockroach speaking Azeri.
The cartoon, which ran in the children’s section of a state newspaper, showed a cockroach asking, “What?” in Azeri. It was deemed insulting by many members of Iran’s Azeri minority, who took to the streets to show their anger.
The government responded with force to the subsequent unrest. Nineteen people reportedly died in street clashes and many others were arrested.
By Frud Bezhan , Rfe/Rl – Radio free europe
Darren Wilson Is Racist, As It Turns Out
Writing for the New Yorker, Jake Halpern has turned in the first extensive interview with Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson, Mo., cop who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown. In conversations at his home, hidden somewhere “on the outskirts of St. Louis,” Wilson reveals he’s not exactly haunted by second thoughts about what happened: He “did his job” that day, and just wants to move on with his life.
According to the Department of Justice report on the circumstances of Brown’s death, Wilson is right: the shooting was defensible and he didn’t violate Brown’s civil rights. That’s the Justice Department report Wilson would prefer to focus on, not the second one that determined the Ferguson police and courts—of which he was a part—are racist and heavily weighted against black people.
Wilson repeatedly insists to Halpern that race wasn’t a part of how he did his job—“Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue.”—but, in the most telling part of the profile, goes on to describe a blind, black, single mother who was powerless to stop her kids from causing trouble and allegedly committing crimes, no matter how many times Wilson tried to catch them carrying weapons.
Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson – Darren Wilson
Greens NSW MP Dr Mehreen Faruqi hits back after receiving racist tweet
GREENS MP Mehreen Faruqi, Australia’s first female Muslim MP, says the Reclaim Australia movement has legitimised “blatant, ugly” racism in Australia.
Dr Faruqi made the comments after receiving a racist tweet about a photo she shared on Twitter of a night out with her 19-year-old daughter.
“How beautiful is Brisbane river at night! Enjoying some quality time with my daughter,” she tweeted on Saturday night, after speaking on a panel about how to increase democratic engagement of the Muslim community.
User @wesi12 replied, “Before your husband blows it up?”
Dr Faruqi posted the Twitter exchange to Facebook on Monday and said this is the sort of racism legitimised by movements like Reclaim Australia.
Reclaim Australia is an anti-Islamic group which led a series of protests across the country on July 19, with clashes between anti-Muslim and anti-racism demonstrators.
The Economics of Racism
by Michael Reich
Michael Reich is Professor of Political Economy at U. C. Berkeley. This article was written in 1974, hence used only data available at that time. His research was repeated on later census data in his book Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 1981, and by other researchers, with similar results. His main thesis is that most workers are harmed by racism, regardless of their race. Reich believes this analysis to be based on ideas from Marx, but whether Marx would agree with his assumptions about how wages are determined is debat- able.
In the early 1960s it seemed to many that the elimination of racism in the U.S. was proceeding without requiring a radical restruc- turing of the entire society. There was a grow- ing civil rights movement, and hundreds of thousands of blacks were moving to Northern cities where discrimination was supposedly less severe than in the South. Government re- ports pointed to the rapid improvement in the levels of black schooling as blacks moved out of the South: in 1966 the gap between the me- dian years of schooling of black males aged 25 to 29 and white males in the same age group had shrunk to one-quarter the size of the gap that had existed in 1960
By 1970, however, the optimism of earlier decades had van- ished. Despite new civil rights laws, elaborate White House conferences, special ghetto manpower programs, the War on Poverty, and stepped-up tokenist hiring, racism and the economic exploitation of blacks has not less- ened. During the past twenty-five years there has been virtually no permanent improvement in the relative economic position of blacks in America. Median black incomes have been fluctuating at a level between 47 percent and 63 percent of median white incomes, the ratio rising during economic expansions and falling to previous low levels during recessions. Segregation in schools and neighborhoods has been steadily increasing in almost all cities, and the atmosphere of distrust between blacks and whites has been intensifying. Racism, in- stead of disappearing, seems to be on the in- crease.
Besides systematically subjugating blacks so that their median income is 55 per- cent that of whites, racism is of profound im- portance for the distribution of income among white landowners, capitalists, and workers. For example, racism clearly benefits owners of housing in the ghetto where blacks have no choice but to pay higher rents there than is charged to whites for comparable housing elsewhere in the city. But more importantly, racism is a key mechanism for the stabilization of capitalism and the legitimization of inequality. We shall return to the question of who benefits from racism later, but first we shall re- view some of the economic means used to subjugate blacks.
THE PERVASIVENESS OF RACISM
Beginning in the first grade, blacks go to schools of inferior quality and obtain little of the basic training and skills needed in the labor market. Finding schools of little relevance, more in need of immediate income, and less able anyway to finance their way through school, the average black student still drops out at a lower grade than his white counterpart. In 1974 only 8.1 percent of blacks aged 25 to 34 were college graduates, compared to 21.0 percent of whites in the same age bracket. Exploitation really begins in earnest when the black youth enters the labor market.
A black worker with the same number of years of schooling and the same scores on achieve- ment tests as a white worker receives much less income. The black worker cannot get as good a job because the better-paying jobs are located too far from the ghetto or because he or she was turned down by racist personnel agencies and employers or because a union denied admittance or maybe because of an arrest record. Going to school after a certain point doesn’t seem to increase a black per- son’s income possibilities very much. The more educated a black person is, the greater is the disparity between his income and that of a white with the same schooling. The result: in 1966 black college graduates earned less than white high school dropouts.4 And the higher the average wage or salary of an occupation, the lower the percentage of workers in that occu- pation who are black.
The rate of unemployment among blacks is generally twice as high as among whites. Layoffs and recessions hit blacks with twice the impact they hit whites, since blacks are the “last hired, first fired.” The ratio of aver- age black to white incomes follows the busi- ness cycle closely, buffering white workers from some of the impact of the recession.
Blacks pay higher rents for inferior housing, higher prices in ghetto stores, higher insurance premiums, higher interest rates in banks and lending companies, travel longer distances at greater expense to their jobs, suf- fer from inferior garbage collection and less access to public recreational facilities, and are assessed at higher property tax rates when they own housing. Beyond this, blacks are fur- ther harassed by police, the courts, and the prisons.
Blacks pay higher rents for inferior housing, higher prices in ghetto stores, higher insurance premiums, higher interest rates in banks and lending companies, travel longer distances at greater expense to their jobs, suf- fer from inferior garbage collection and less access to public recreational facilities, and are assessed at higher property tax rates when they own housing. Beyond this, blacks are fur- ther harassed by police, the courts, and the prisons. seniority, age, health, job attitudes, and a host of other factors. They presume that they can analyze the sources of “pure wage discrimina- tion” without simultaneously analyzing the ex- tent to which discrimination also affects the factors they hold constant.
But such a technique distorts reality. The various forms of discrimination are not separable in real life. Employers’ hiring and promotion practices; resource allocation in city schools; the structure of transportation sys- tems; residential segregation and housing quality; availability of decent health care; behavior of policemen and judges; foremen’s prejudices; images of blacks presented in the media and the schools; price gouging in ghetto stores—these and the other forms of social and economic discrimination interact strongly with each other in determining the occupational status and annual income, and welfare, of black people. The processes are not simply additive but are mutually reinforcing. Often, a decrease in one narrow form of discrimination is accompanied by an increase in another form. Since all aspects of racism interact, an analysis of racism should incorporate all its aspects in a unified manner.
No single quantitative index could adequately measure racism in all its social, cultural, psychological, and economic dimensions. But while racism is far more than a narrow economic phenomenon, it does have very definite economic consequences: blacks have far lower incomes than whites. The ratio of median black to median white incomes thus provides a rough, but useful, quantitative index of the economic consequences of racism for blacks. We shall use this index statistically to analyze the causes of racism’s persistence in the United States. While this approach over- emphasizes the economic aspects of racism, it is nevertheless an improvement over the nar- rower approach taken by conventional econo- mists.
COMPETING EXPLANATIONS OF RACISM How is the historical persistence of racism in the United States to be explained? The most prominent analysis of discrimination among economists was formulated in 1957 by Gary Becker in his book, The Economics of Discrimination. Racism, according to Becker, is fundamentally a problem of tastes and attitudes. Whites are defined to have a “taste for discrimination” if they are willing to forfeit income in order to be associated with other whites instead of blacks. Since white employers and employees prefer not to associate with blacks, they require a monetary compensation for the psychic cost of such association. In Becker’s principal model, white employers have a taste for discrimination; marginal productivity analysis is invoked to show that white employers lose while white workers gain (in monetary terms) from discrimination against blacks.
Becker does not try to explain the source of white tastes for discrimination. For him, these attitudes are determined outside of the economic system. (Racism could presumably be ended simply by changing these attitudes, perhaps by appeal to whites on moral grounds.) According to Becker’s analysis, employers would find the ending of racism to be in their economic self-interest, but white workers would not. The persistence of racism is thus implicitly laid at the door of white workers. Becker suggests that longrun market forces will lead to the end of discrimination anyway: less discriminatory employers, with no “psychic costs” to enter in their accounts, will be able to operate at lower costs by hiring equivalent black workers at lower wages, thus bidding up the black wage rate and/or driving the more discriminatory employers out of business.
The approach to racism argued here is entirely different. Racism is viewed as rooted in the economic system and not in “exogenously determined” attitudes. Historically, the Ameri- can Empire was founded on the racist extermi- nation of American Indians, was financed in large part by profits from slavery, and was ex- tended by a string of interventions, beginning with the Mexican War of the 1840s, which have been at least partly justified by white su- premacist ideology. Today, by transferring white resentment toward blacks and away from capitalism, racism continues to serve the needs of the capitalist system. Although indi- vidual employers might gain by refusing to discriminate and hiring more blacks, thus raising the black wage rate, it is not true that the capi- talist class as a whole would benefit if racism were eliminated and labor were more efficiently allocated without regard to skin color. We will show below that the divisiveness of racism weakens workers’ strength when bargaining with employers; the economic consequences of racism are not only lower incomes for blacks but also higher incomes for the capitalist class and lower incomes for white workers. Although capitalists may not have conspired consciously to create racism, and although capitalists may not be its principal perpetuators, never-the-less racism docs support the continued viability of the American capitalist system.
We have, then, two alternative ap- proaches to the analysis of racism. The first suggests that capitalists lose and white work- ers gain from racism. The second predicts the opposite—capitalists gain while workers lose. The first says that racist “tastes for discrimina- tion” are formed independently of the economic system; the second argues that racism inter- acts symbiotically with capitalistic economic institutions.
The very persistence of racism in the United States lends support to the second ap- proach. So do repeated instances of employ- ers using blacks as strikebreakers, as in the massive steel strike of 1919, and employer- instigated exacerbation of racial antagonisms during that strike and many others.7 However, the particular virulence of racism among many blue- and white-collar workers and their fami- lies seems to refute our approach and support Becker.
SOME EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
Which of the two models better ex- plains reality? We have already mentioned that our approach predicts that capitalists gain and workers lose from racism, whereas the conventional Beckerian approach predicts precisely the opposite. In the latter approach ra- cism has an equalizing effect on the white income distribution, whereas in the former ra- cism has a disequalizing effect. The statistical relationship between the extent of racism and the degree of inequality among whites provides a simple yet clear test of the two approaches. This section describes that test and its results.
First, we need a measure of racism. The index we use, for reasons already men- tioned, is the ratio of black median family in- come to white median family income (abbrevi- ated as B/W). A low numerical value for this ratio indicates a high degree of racism. We calculated values of this racism index using data from the 1960 Census, for each of the largest forty-eight metropolitan areas (bounda- ries are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, who use the term standard metropolitan statis- tical areas—SMSA’s). There is a great deal of variation from SMSA to SMSA in the B/W in- dex of racism, even within the North; Southern SMSA’s generally demonstrated a greater de- gree of racism. The statistical techniques used are based on this variation.
We also need measures of inequality among whites. Two convenient measures are: (1) the percentage share of all white income that is received by the top 1percent of white families; and the Gini coefficient of white
incomes, a measure which captures inequality within as well as between social classes.8
Both of these inequality measures vary considerably among the SMSA’s; there is also a substantial amount of variation in these within the subsample of Northern SMSA’s. Therefore, it is very interesting to examine whether the pattern of variation of the inequal- ity and racism variables can be explained by causal hypotheses. This is our first source of empirical evidence.
A systematic relationship across SMSA’s between our measure of racism and either measure of white inequality does exist and is highly significant: where racism is greater, income inequality among whites is
This evidence, however, should not be accepted too quickly. The correlations reported may not reflect actual causality since other in- dependent forces may be simultaneously influ- encing both variables in the same way. As is the case with many other statistical analyses, the model must be expanded to control for such other factors. We know from previous in- ter-SMSA income distribution studies that the most important additional factors that should be introduced into our model are: (1) the indus- trial and occupational structure of the SMSA’s; (2) the region in which the SMSA’s are located; (3) the average income of the SMSA’s; and (4) the proportion of the SMSA population that is black. These factors were introduced into the model by the technique of multiple regression analysis. Separate equations were estimated with the Gini index and the top 1 percent share as measures of white inequality. also greater. This result is consistent with our model and is inconsistent with the predictions of Becker’s model.
All the equations showed strikingly uni- form statistical results: racism as we have measured it was a significantly disequalizing force on the white income distribution, even when other factors were held constant. A I per- cent increase in the ratio of black to white me- dian incomes (that is, a 1 percent decrease in racism) was associated with a .2 percent de- crease in white inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient. The corresponding effect on top 1 percent share of white income was two and a half times as large, indicating that most of the inequality among whites generated by racism was associated with increased income for the richest 1 percent of white families. Fur- ther statistical investigation reveals that in- creases in the racism variable had an insignifi- cant effect on the. share received by the poor- est whites and resulted in a decrease in the income share of the whites in the middle in- come brackets. This is true even when the Southern SMSA’s are excluded.
Within our model, we can specify a number of mechanisms that further explain the statistical finding that racism increases inequality among whites. We shall consider two mechanisms here: (1) total wages of white la- bor are reduced by racial antagonisms, in part because union growth and labor militancy are inhibited; (2) the supply of public services, especially in education, available to low- and middle-income whites is reduced as a result of racial antagonisms. tual discriminatory practice from the objective economic self-interest of most union members.
The second mechanism we shall consider concerns the allocation of expenditures for public services. The most important of these services is education. Racial antagonisms dilute both the desire and the ability of poor white parents to improve educational opportunities for their children. Antagonisms between blacks and poor whites drive wedges between the two groups and reduce their ability to join in a united political movement pressing for improved and more equal education. Moreover, many poor whites recognize that however inferior their own schools, black schools are even worse. This provides some degree of satisfaction and identification with the status quo, reducing the desire of poor whites to press politically for better schools in their neighborhoods. Ghettos tend to be located near poor white neighborhoods more often than near rich white neighborhoods; ra- cism thus reduces the potential tax base of school districts containing poor whites. Also, pressure by teachers’ groups to improve all poor schools is reduced by racial antagonisms between predominantly white teaching staffs and black children and parents.
The statistical validity of the above mechanisms can be tested in a causal model. The effect of racism on unionism is tested by estimating an equation in which the percentage of the SMSA labor force that is unionized is the dependent variable, with racism and the structural variables (such as the SMSA industrial structure) as the independent variables. The schooling mechanism is tested by estimating a similar equation in which the dependent variable is inequality in years of schooling com- pleted among white males aged 25 to 29.
Once again, the results of this statistical test strongly confirm the hypothesis of our model. The racism variable is statistically significant in all the equations and has the pre- or that some skilled craft workers benefit from
Source: The Economics of Racism
Federal Investigators to probe racism claims in Pocomoke City
POCOMOKE CITY, Md., (WUSA9/DelmarvaNow) Federal Department of Justice investigators are expected to visit a small riverfront city on Maryland’s Eastern shore this week to look into ugly allegations that the firing of a popular African-American police chief was motivated by racism.
Former Chief Kelvin D. Sewell was fired June 29 after he backed a pair of African American officers who had filed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Complaints. Sewell also raised questions about how a federal grant meant to hire an additional police officer had been spent by town officials. Sewell filed his own EEOC complaint, claiming he was being pressured by the city’s mayor to fire the two officers.
Town officials refuse to comment or explain their position because of the legal actions. However, the city’s attorney denies any wrongdoing by city officials.
Meanwhile, a town council meeting last week drew a large crowd in support of Sewell, who is seeking his job back.
“We want our chief back,” said Tonya Ginn of Pocomoke City after Monday night’s mayor and city council meeting at City Hall.
It was so packed for the meeting that many people were standing in the lobby, crowding around the entrance to Council Chambers, shushing each other at times to try to hear what was being said. It was hot, and people were fanning themselves.
The group listened as people spoke to the mayor and council, sometimes telling the others who was speaking for those who couldn’t see.
Even though Sewell is not the chief anymore, some still think of him that way.
“I came out to help support Chief Kelvin D. Sewell and I still call him chief because that’s how I look at him,” said Pocomoke City resident Vanessa Jones, wearing a T-shirt with Sewell’s photo on it. “He has done so much for the Pocomoke community.”
Tyler Bivens of Pocomoke City also came to support Sewell. “I call him my chief,” he said at one point.
Federal Investigators to probe racism claims in Pocomoke City
Racism is real and still very much an issue in this country, one that pervades many aspects of life. But not everyone in America fully appreciates that fact. As many studies show, white Americans are often cut off from the realities of racism, living within homogeneous social networks and communities.
But if you have any doubts about whether racism still exists in America, this 3-minute video from Brave New Films, a California-based company that makes films to spur political activism, might clear them up. The video counts down eight reasons that racism is still very real in America, using research from Yale University, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New England Journal of Medicine, among others.
Compelling reasons why racism is real
1. Black sounding names are 50 percent less likely to be called back by those reviewing job applications. In a 2002 study, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan of the University of Chicago mailed thousands of job applications to reviewers that were identical except for the names. They found that applications with white-sounding names like Emily and Brendan were much more likely to be answered than identical resumes from black-sounding names like Lakisha and Jamal.
2. Black people are charged roughly $700 more when buying cars. A study by Ian Ayres and Peter Siegelman of Yale Law School found that dealers quoted lower prices to white men than blacks and women, even though all buyers used an identical script for negotiating.
3. Black drivers are twice as likely to get pulled over. Numerous studies — including this 1999 study by the ACLU and an analysis of FBI records by USA Today last year — show a significant racial gap in police stops and arrests.
4. Black clients are shown 17.7 percent fewer houses for sale. A 2012 study of housing discrimination by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found that black homebuyers who contacted agents about recently advertised homes for sale learned about 17 percent fewer available homes than equally qualified whites and were shown 17.7 percent fewer homes. Asian homebuyers learned about 15.5 percent fewer available homes and were shown 18.8 percent fewer homes.
5. Black people are much more likely to be arrested for marijuana use. A 2013 study by the ACLU showed that, while marijuana use rates are equal among blacks and whites, black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for it.
6. Black people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people. A 2007 study by Marc Mauer and Ryan King of the Sentencing Project document the incredible incarceration rates of young black men. “If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spent time in prison during his lifetime,” they wrote.
Shooting the messenger might as well be the national sport in Croatia. As Zoran Stevanovic, who works with Uefa as head of the Fare (Football Against Racism in Europe) network in Croatia found out, there seems to be a widespread feeling in the country that racism isn’t really that big a deal unless someone from the outside finds out about it. After Croatia were ordered by Uefa to play their next home game, against Italy in June, behind closed doors, Stevanovic found himself targeted by CFF, the national football federation.
His crime? Telling on Croatia supporters’ racist behaviour during the qualifier against Norway on 28 March – or so the CFF claimed. It started two Wednesdays ago, after news of the ban emerged. “We are shocked by this draconian punishment for five firecrackers and two racist chants,” Damir Vrbanovic, the CFF executive president, told Jutarnji list daily, adding that the federation would appeal and that the man responsible for bringing Uefa’s attention to racist chants was Zoran Stevanovic.
Two days later the CFF addressed an open letter to Stevanovic, starting with: “It is clear to us that your organisation makes a living off informing Uefa against Croatia supporters. It is clear that, in that fight, you won’t hesitate to use the battle against racism as a cover, without feeling any guilt, for your agenda to have Croatia national team play its home games without fans …”
Uvijek vjerni, the official national team supporters’ club, released an open letter as well, saying Stevanovic had “denounced Croatia supporters and the Croatian people as a whole” and insisting there were no incidents – although everyone at Maksimir Stadium or watching on TV witnessed them.
Croatia have a long-standing bad reputation for their fans’ behaviour. At Euro 2012 the federation was fined because supporters racially abused the Italy forward Mario Balotelli; in December 2013 the defender Josip Simunic was suspended for 10 matches by Fifa for shouting, together with the crowd, a salute historically associated with Croatian fascists in the second world war at the end of the home match against Iceland; in November 2014 Croatia supporters threw flares, fought police and made the same chant in the away section at San Siro in Milan, which led to the game being stopped for a period of time, another Uefa fine and a partial crowd ban for the next home match. And when that match came, the same salute – Za dom – spremni (For home – ready) – could be heard several times at Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium, shouted loudly by hundreds of fans. One section screamed “Za dom” and the other would answer “Spremni!”
And yet Davor Suker, the former striker who is the CFF president, called the atmosphere “beautiful” and said: “We are proud that no serious incidents were recorded.” Last month Suker was elected to Uefa’s executive committee, running on a platform that included the politics of “zero tolerance to racism and discrimination”, despite Serbian allegations that he was a fascist sympathiser. The irony now, of course, is that his right-hand man Vrbanovic is expressing shock and wants to appeal because he feels the disciplinary measure is too harsh for “two racist chants”. How many should there be for “zero tolerance” to take effect? Three, maybe? Six? Eleven?
After Vrbanovic accused Stevanovic of being a “grass”, Uefa’s website was inundated with “Za dom spremni” comments and an angry lynch mob formed on social networks, calling the Fare man a “Serb” and a “traitor”. Part of the media joined in, albeit in a more subtle way, despite Stevanovic saying it wasn’t he who reported it and explaining that the network doesn’t really work that way.
In the end, Fare headquarters released a statement, saying it had sent two independent observers to the Croatia v Norway game. “Fare observers are highly trained and experienced individuals who are independent and carry no affiliation to any clubs or national teams involved in the matches they observe,” the statement said. “Our member groups are unconnected with the action taken by football authorities and should not be subject to recriminations of any kind.”
The CFF has had plenty of experience with Fare and Uefa’s disciplinary sanctions and it is hard to believe that it was not fully aware of how this works, just as it could have expected the crowd ban after the incidents that took place at Maksimir. But still the federation allowed itself to lead the way in a scandalous man hunt, attempting to expose Stevanovic as responsible for getting Croatia the sanctions from Uefa and not the hundreds of fans who took part in shouting the racist salute. Now the question waiting to be answered is: why?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If there are mass “Za dom spremni” salutes in the stands and no one is around to report them, does Croatia have a problem with racism?
But it’s not as if that is the only football-related problem there. On Monday the CFF delegation – including Niko Kovac, the national team manager – was physically attacked by a group of Hajduk Split fans in a restaurant by the motorway. They were heading to Split to discuss details for the match against Italy. Why were they attacked?
With the National Basketball Association playoffs underway, there comes a renewed focus on the most tedious part of basketball: the last two minutes of a game. Fouls, commercials, time-outs, more commercials, substitutions, replay reviews, even more commercials—it’s a seemingly endless slog, one that feels longer and longer each year.
“I’d like to be a little more forward-thinking about the attention span of the people we’re trying to capture right now,” former NBA coach and current ESPN and ABC commentator Jeff Van Gundy told VICE Sports. “I don’t even know why we just don’t play 48 straight minutes. These guys are some of the most highly conditioned athletes in the world. Let’s go. Let’s play. Let them get into a rhythm.”
Forty-eight straight minutes? Sounds pretty good for viewers, but not so great for the record books and the advertising-funded television networks that Van Gundy works for. Of course, angst over basketball’s last two minutes is nothing new. In fact, there has been a recent, remarkable shift: Once upon a time, those same 120 seconds weren’t considered too dull.
They were considered too exciting.
Remember when everyone agreed that “you only have to watch the last two minutes of an NBA game”? Complaints about the last two minutes are almost as old as basketball, but it took African-American domination of the sport to make those minutes especially compelling—and to make that excitement a bad thing.
The last two minutes had their first crisis in the late 1940s. Commercials and replays weren’t a concern, but fans from that era certainly were familiar with a parade of fouls. “Donnybrooks,” the Los Angeles Times called the ends of games in 1948. With no shot clock, teams played keep-away at the end, producing frantic scrambles and whistles.
That year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association decided to solve the problem by allowing teams to waive a free throw in the final two minutes and just take the ball out of bounds, a rule the NBA mulled as well. But this didn’t stop the fouls, so the next year the NCAA made violations occurring in the last two minutes function as technicals. This proved even worse.
“That durned rule ruined us,” University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp fumed after St. John’s University turned a five-point lead into an 11-point win by keeping uninterrupted possession for the last two minutes. “You can’t win when you’re behind.”
By mid-season, some conferences abandoned the rule and began tinkering with alternatives, like having a jump ball after each made free throw in the last two minutes. Soon, anarchy reigned, with every conference doing its own thing. A New York Herald Tribune story headline from 1950 asked, “Which Rules Tonight?” One critic was certain that unless the college game found a way to standardize the rules, “the basketball fan is going to throw up his hands with an ‘Aw, nuts’ and go out to a movie, or maybe stay home and look at television.”
The NBA was tinkering with the last few minutes as well, trying to cut down on the fouls. For a while, players were allowed no more than two fouls per quarter, but this didn’t fix anything. The league also tried mandating jump balls between the shooter and fouler after every made free throw in the last five minutes, a plan successful enough to last about four years.
In 1954, the NBA dropped the jump balls and adopted the shot clock, and the last two minutes in college and pro games began to look a lot different. The NBA sped up, and college gradually slowed down. In a 1968 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament game, for instance, North Carolina State beat Duke University 12-10. One of the referees, Otis Allmond, complained to the Washington Post that “nobody does anything for 38 minutes and all the action comes in the last two minutes.” He said he only blew his whistle about three times all game, lamenting that “with the do-nothing game, that one call can win or lose it.” At one point during play, he added, “I got caught in front of the TV camera and Bones McKinney, one of the television men, and I chewed the fat for a while.”
Not all games were like this. The previous year, University of California, Los Angeles coach John Wooden had told the Post that most coaches “think too much of college basketball” to stall. Even so, Wooden advocated for a shot clock and staged a “freeze” of his own to protest the practice. Some coaches wanted a shot clock just for the last few minutes, while yet more said that was the only time it shouldn’t be allowed: “In the last two minutes,” Coach Al Kyber of American University said, “stall ball is part of the game.” Georgetown’s Jack Magee went further. While acknowledging that the stall might not be “for the run-of-the-mill fan,” he insisted it was one of many strategic elements the pros lacked, and to put in a shot clock would be “to take something away from the coach. The premium would be placed on recruiting rather than coaching.”
Changing the college game, Magee added, would be tampering with “the American way of life.”
NBA Games got less and less American
If that was the case, then the NBA just kept getting less and less American. The first instance of the modern complaint about the end of professional games came in 1960, when the Boston Celtics’ Bill Sharman complained that things had just gotten too easy: “There’s really nothing for the fans to get excited about until the final two minutes of a close game. But if the teams scored only 50 or 60 points a game, then a basket would mean something again.” To people who learned the game before the shot clock and fast break, modern scores just didn’t look like basketball numbers. Even though they featured Bill Russell, Sharman’s Celtics were giving up 116 a night. The game had evolved dramatically. It was “just run-and-shoot, run-and-shoot, run-and-shoot,” a critic wrote in 1967. “An occasional slowdown, or a 40-35 game, would be nice for a change.”
But if it was true—as a columnist agreed with Sharman—that scoring had made the pros such a “colossal bore” that “a man can’t get steamed up until the final minutes of a game,” it took until the 1970s for this complaint to harden into conventional wisdom. The game was dull and easy, and would only get worse, as shown in a Hartford Courant columnist’s 1971 attempt to describe the sport’s future: “Seems the television networks refused to carry the game, even the pros, because advertisers wouldn’t buy time unless their commercials were shown in the last two minutes which is all any viewer would watch anyway.”
What could be killing the sport? As the 1970s began, the NBA was 60 percent African-American; by the end of the decade, that figure had grown to 75 percent. The “last two minutes” meme grew in tandem. All the while, the league’s popularity declined.