Italy beat England in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday to be crowned Europe’s soccer champions.
In the penalty shootouts that decided the match, 3 English players - Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bakayo Saka - missed their penalties.
Immediately, and before anyone had had a chance to react, pundits warned that we should expect racist abuse to come the English players’ way.
When the abuse came, *it* became the news: People were rightly outraged, but inadvertently amplified the toxicity by simply reporting about how outraged they were - instead of counteracting the outrage & toxicity with knowledge & love.
For example, typical responses from my friends on my news feeds were (real life examples):
- “It’s already happening on Twitter!”
- “I knew we would be waking up this morning to headlines of racist abuse.”
- “I was stupid to expect anything else.”
But, spreading Knowledge is more powerful than spreading Outrage.
We get from the world what we put in.
If we amplify outrage & toxicity, we get more of them. If we amplify Knowledge & love, we get more of those.
Rather than spreading disbelief & shock, if we really care, we can write messages of love & support for Rashford, Sancho & Saka.
We can educate our friends & networks about their life stories, backgrounds, personhoods — who they are as people.
We can show them love & support.
The surface level “omg I can’t believe the world is still X 😱 😱 😱“ does not solve anything.
Let’s not be bystanders who add to the yelling; let’s be leaders who are examples of the change we preach.
Spread Knowledge, not Outrage!
