Even for Ultra's that is difficult to make sense of. If it's not done for racist reasons why nbot just boo or call them shit. Jeer them. But it's monkey chants. Do they do those to white players? No. They do it to black players. Because it's racist.
I understand the idea of 'respect' because you jeer and boo a good opposition player but don't tend to bother with opposition players that are a bit shit. But for it to specifically be monkey chants is clearly racist. If I were a black player I'd go nowhere near the likes of Italy and Russia.
I think they genuinely believe it's not racist because it's perfectly acceptable in their country to do this. A female friend has an Italian boyfriend and people openly give them looks of disgust and shake theri head and kids stare and point at them over there.
It’s not ‘perfectly acceptable’ to do it within Italian society and it is condemned by the majority of people. There are backlashes against this sort of thing, especially from the younger generations.
The country is behind the UK with it though across society but it didn’t have the same sort of migration, during this period the UK did experience problems as well.
Saying that though it’s now relatively common to see ‘mixed couples’ and years and years ago I was seeing a girl from India and we never experienced any sort of problems or hostility.
Saying that though, Italian do tend to stare a lot more in general. I get stared at pretty often just for looking different but here it doesn’t have the same level of rudeness as in the UK.
