By asking the former Crawley manager if he was ‘consciously racist’ the panel gave him an excuse to double down on denial
Despite being found guilty of 12 charges of discriminatory conduct, but buoyed by the ludicrously outrageous finding that he was “not consciously racist”, John Yems believes that he is the real victim and is owed an apology. For those who believe we live in a culture of victimhood, this is its natural but absurd logical extreme. Truly, we are through the looking glass.
This week, an independent panel commissioned to adjudicate on charges brought by the Football Association against Yems published its reasoned judgment. That judgment catalogued Yems performing a shocking greatest hits of lazy racist tropes: use of the N-word, referring to a player as a “curry muncher”, describing Muslim players as “terrorists” and many more. Despite this grotesque cabaret, most attention has focused on the panel’s finding that, while acknowledging it was an “extremely serious case” that “came across to the victims and others as offensive, racist and Islamaphobic”, Yems was “not consciously racist”. That conclusion was unnecessary, dangerously muddled thinking and does not appear justified by the panel’s other findings.
