Erm, not quite ‘a picture of a black man’ is it?

I think a distinction has to be made between being racially offensive and racially insensitive - this would fall into the latter for me. Bernardo is clearly not a racist, but equally someone of his profile is never going to have a free pass to put things like that in the public domain - him and Mendy obviously have a good enough relationship that jokes like that are fine between them, but approach a black stranger with that cartoon and say you look like him and see what sort of reaction you get - if people see him get away with that on a Twitter, it normalises the behaviour.

White people are depicted in cartoons in various ways. If a black player compared a white player to one such cartoon on a crisp packet would this be deemed "Racially insensitive" and would there be a furore to this effect with 'Kick it out' getting involved ?

Perhaps I am not cerebrally blessed sufficiently to understand all the intracacies of such matters and as such don't have the 'Bandwith' mentally to absorb all the arguments.

Edited by Willo (03 Oct 2019 10.28am)

Black features are black features,nothing to be ashamed about.I have seen handsome black men with such features and the same applies to black ladies pleasing to the eye.

Theresa May has been 'Cartoonised' with a certain facial feature exagerrated for effect.If one compared a white public figure to an image of her in a cartoon, would there be the same furore ? It would probably be deemed crass or insensitive but alas the PC Brigade would,I dare to suggest,not be so active in their condemnation.

You understand what a charicature is, right? So we are not talking about real black features.. we’re talking about exaggerating said features for comedic effect.

Conveniently swerved the Gareth Thomas point; nicely done.

The exaggerated features are tied to race - that’s the difference between this and your Theresa May example.

John Barnes has very cleverly positioned himself as the ‘alternative black opinion’ in a lot of the talks around issues like this - he knows there’s huge appetite for ‘anti-PC’ opinions these days, so he exploits it. There are hundreds of examples of black people who did take issue with this, but we’re supposed to just listen to the one who didn’t?

Again, I don’t think this is about racial offence, but more around insensitivity, so this ‘stop being offended on others behalf’ is just more pandering to his audience.

As I said in my original post, I don’t for one minute think Bernardo is a racist bloke, so it’s not surprising Sterling has defended him.

It’s very transparent; he’s now booked by every news outlet every time a racism story pops up.

why is his opinion more important to you than all those who did find this insensitive?