Defendant Danilo Avelar, who can also play at left-back, returned to headlines in the sports press after an episode classified as “racial insult” in June this year. While recovering from an injury, the Corinthians player was playing a match in an online game when, in the midst of a chat discussion, he wrote to a foreign opponent “fih of a black girl.”
From then on, the via crucis, typical of those chosen as targets of identity campaigns, began. First, the case was widely reflected in the bourgeois press and social networks, to the point of leading Corinthians fans to ask for the athlete’s dismissal for being racist.
Very quickly, the player was excluded from the squad in an electronic soccer game and banned from the platform that maintained the “first person shooter” game, where the dispute had occurred. Corinthians even announced the athlete’s dismissal, but ran into what remains of the sports law: the athlete could not be fired while recovering from an injury.
Danilo has fulfilled the almost official script of someone who is captured by the identity radar. He assumed his guilt, explained the context, in the case that he had been offended for being Brazilian by the foreign opponent, reinforced that even so he was wrong and was obviously not acquitted.
Recovered from injury, he was not listed in any games during the year. With a contract valid until the end of 2022, the player is very close to joining Cruzeiro, which plays in Serie B next year, under the command of Vanderlei Luxemburgo and with a lot of pressure to return to the first division of national football. Now there is already pressure on social media for Cruzeiro not to sign the player, who was nominated by the team’s coach.
The Latin saying “errare humanum est”, in Portuguese “err is human”, is not part of the identity booklet. As a persecutory method, the identity court establishes absolute moral values and considers the human being as something static, immobile. Danilo Avelar is and always will be a racist, simply because he used a certain expression in the middle of an argument. And he no longer worked for the club with which he still had a year and a half contract, even though the episode took place outside his professional practice.
The player reported in September that he has been studying the subject throughout the year, that he took a course with “a black researcher” and participated in activities with the Central Única de Favelas. It is a more current version of the still existing confessionals of the Catholic churches. And as in the Catholic religion, the sinner will never cease to be a sinner, he must always kneel in the confessional.
