The best that can be said for Dave Whelan is that he is an ignorant old man. A relic of a by-gone age.
The FA is investigating remarks made by the Wigan chairman during an attempted defence of his appointment of Malky Mackay as manager.
Whelan was born in 1936 so he was brought up in a Britain where discrimination wasn't illegal. Even in the post-war world I grew up in, people could be denied work or promotion on the grounds of religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. A landlord could have a policy of "No dogs, Irish or Blacks."
A lot of the attitudes then were unthinking rather than deliberately discriminatory. One of my local shops was known as the Paki's. No-one bothered to find out if the owner was indeed Muslim or of Pakistani heritage. Then everyone with a brown skin was called a Paki. The Italian café down the road was the Tally's or I-Tie's.
If you were slow to share your sweets or, a bit older, buy your round, you'd invariably be told, "Don't be such a Jew!"
People with dark skins were called "darkies". The very polite termed them "coloureds." Golliwogs advertised jams. One of the most popular television programmes was the Black and White Minstrel Show. Comedians built whole careers on racist, sexist and homophobic routines.
If you followed sports in those days, teams from Latin American and Mediterranean countries were invariably "temperamental". And, of course, keen to cheat. German teams were always "dour", those from the Soviet bloc "robotic."
A lot of people in those days said it didn't matter. Words couldn't hurt. No harm was meant. Can't you take a joke? Don't be so po-faced!
But of course it did matter. Labelling whole groups as sharing the same characteristics is the starting point for discrimination. It justifies inequality.
Fill in the blank. "[………….]! They're all the same. What can you do?"
There was even academic opinion underpinning such distinctions. Some psychologists argued there were "North European" and "Mediterranean" personalities. Only a step away, you might think, from asserting the existence of a "Nordic type".
As late as the 1970s, Professor Hans Eysenck asserted that black Americans were intellectually inferior to whites. The smart Africans, it was argued, escaped the slavers leaving an inferior gene pool to be exported to America.
Things started to change in the much-maligned 1960s. The oppressed fought for their rights. Discrimination was slowly but surely made illegal. Personal and social education in schools and diversity training at work promoted respect for others as well compliance with the new laws.
The likes of Dave Whelan never benefited from such programmes. In his world still, no doubt, all Jews love money, all Welsh are good singers and all Italians great lovers.
You'd have thought though he'd have learned from his own sport. In the 1950s, it was routinely said that black people would never make good footballers. And that softy foreigners couldn't play on muddy pitches! You'd think simple experience would have eliminated all such spurious categorisation from his thinking.
And, as a business man, would he have been happy for one of his sports shop staff to call a customer a "chink"?
You'd expect a younger man like Malky MacKay to be better informed. At the very least, you think he'd be aware of the perils of casual racism in private communications. Had he forgotten Ron Atkinson's blunder ten years ago, calling a black player "a fucking lazy, thick nigger" on television when he thought he was off-air?
But let's not kid ourselves. Whelan and Mackay are not alone. The sentiments they express are not unusual even in 2014.
"Gay" is routinely used as a put-down in every playground and workplace.
The local take-away or restaurant - Chinese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese etc. - is the "Chinkies". A certain facial feature is "chinky-eyed." A step up, I suppose, from the "slitty-eyed" descriptor preferred by the Duke of Edinburgh.
A whole political party is home to those happy to call faraway countries "Bong Bongo Land" and laugh at jokes about "sluts".
Even in 2014, there are still many who complain about "political correctness gone mad." They should be ignored. It's right to bring Mackay and Whelan to book. Their crass comments don't merit huge punishments but they shouldn't be disregarded either. We mustn't allow any slip in standards, any lapse back to the discrimination of the past. When times are tough, it's only too easy to blame the "different" and to exclude the "outsiders".
Some time ago, I was in a Malaysian restaurant. It was a quiet night so I got talking to the waitress who, it turned out, was also the owner. She was of Chinese heritage, born in the then Malaya and brought up in Singapore. Including English, she spoke five languages. She told me she arrived in the UK with a single, crumpled £10 note.
Decades later, she had built up a successful business. She hadn't claimed a penny in benefits. Her husband had died young of cancer so she was active in local health charities.
There are many words that could describe this individual: "wonderful", "inspiring", "an example".
Only someone with a very warped frame of mind would choose "Chink."
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