Egonu and Dosso, does racism in sport affect women the most? – Corriere.it

There is currently no boyfriend of Paola Egonu and no girlfriend. Instead, there are repeated racist insults against her. There is her sensitivity of hers – which is not fragility at all costs – which led her (almost) to leave the national volleyball team after she was asked “why you are Italian”. The opening prompts a question: what does her private life have to do with it? For the football coach Carolina Morace the sexual orientation of the Italian volleyball champion would have prompted discrimination against her. Is racism also a gender issue? «Absolutely yes – insists Morace – like the visibility of Paola, her being outside her box. In sports, black-skinned men are targeted by idiots. They are seen as national heroes, myths to be demolished. Towards women there is a tendency to have a different kind of attitude. They are still considered weak, fragile indeed. Paola, however, has two “differences”: she is black and has a free sexual orientation. More or less declared ».

Carolina Morace has lived intensely the world of football, even as a former player. Her is a general view. “Sport is only a small part – she added Morace – unfortunately we live in a society where there is no culture of diversity, where a profound ignorance on the issues of freedom resists”. Over the years, racist insults have also hit men from the sports world: from Koulibaly footballers to Osimhen to Boateng and many others. There is a difference, obviously. Rahel Sereke, Italian-Eritrean urban planner, who has dealt with and still deals with diversity and the racial question. She studies Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at the State University of Milan and is an active part of the “Cambio Passo Onlus” association, of which she is a founding member, which protects the rights of migrants seeking asylum. Sport is not her terrain but discrimination, female or male, is a universal theme.

From another perspective, Sereke comes to the same conclusion as Morace. “Man is the main target of racist insults, the hero from whom, in the collective imagination, we must defend ourselves – he says -. The sports champion is perceived as more threatening than the woman. And then he attacks him, he tries to break down the myth. The Egonu case is explained by the influence, in the specific case, of the gender orientation. It is not only the racist epithet, it was probably born out of his homosexuality. There is no real work of contrasting these increasingly widespread phenomena and we live in an elderly society where a whole series of prejudices are transferred to young people ». Paola Egonu, who received many messages of solidarity, primarily those of Mario Draghi, struck because she is a visible character compared to many others who suffer the same offenses: daily episodes that cannot even be counted.

Sereke adds: “I am humanly sorry for the discomfort that the volleyball champion felt, but what happened has shed light, at least for some time, on other events of the kind that are usually experienced anonymously.. The 15-year-old boy from Gallarate, addressed in a football field as a “negretto” by the opposing coach. At another time, the episode would not have had the same resonance. The attack suffered on the street by Zaynab Dosso, an Italian sprinter and bronze medalist in the 4x100m at the last European Championships, and denounced, is the Egonu effect. Denouncing is difficult, also because in the case of women there is a risk of not being believed ».