Ruzbeh Saadati – December 21, 2025
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Critical race theories expose and contest how dominant cultural discourse pathologizes marginalized protest—branding it as impolite, angry, or irrational—as a mechanism of stigma and silencing that preserves racialized power relations. |
What we are witnessing these days under the name of football is neither simply football nor ordinary fan rivalry. What operates through football and its so-called controversies is a politics of shame: a mechanism that is activated whenever the margins begin to make noise, in order to push that noise back, neutralize it, and return it to silence. What happened in the recent Tractor–Persepolis match—from the Tractor captain’s reaction to the eruption of anger in the stands—did not occur in a vacuum. It emerged on a bed of accumulated humiliation: years of racist chants, years of the stereotype of the “Turk donkey,” and the normalization of insult under the guise of banter. For years, the central media have been willfully blind, and even Turk coaches and players on central teams have not once spoken out in protest. This silence is not neutrality; it is a form of participation that stabilizes humiliation and grants it legitimacy. In such a context, the anger in Tractor’s stands is not a deviation, but a delayed response to systematic violence.In this context, demanding ethical conduct from the humiliated spectator is itself a form of violence. Ethics never takes shape outside relations of power. When insult is institutionalized by the center, expecting aesthetic self-restraint from the margins means imposing obedience under the cover of morality. The margin is expected to articulate its pain so gently that the center remains undisturbed. If the anger of the margins is not “beautiful,” it becomes illegitimate—an anger that is not the product of incivility, but the result of accumulated silencing on the periphery.
What is even more worrying, however, is not the central stands, but the sermonizing, polished reactions of a segment of Turk activists who rush to judgment without contextual analysis, using familiar labels against Tractor supporters: loutish, extremist, uncultured, and so on. These judgments often do not come from a position of critique, but from an assimilated mindset. This group still sees the world through the eyes of the center—through the eyes of those who have humiliated them for years. They pre-emptively assume themselves to be accused and suspect, and attempt, by condemning “us,” to obtain a certificate of moderation from the center. This is not a politics of resistance; it is a politics of distancing oneself from the collective body of the humiliated. Here, morality becomes a tool: to purify and absolve the preacher, and to secure his credibility in the eyes of the center.
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The pattern we are confronting has appeared in many global experiences: the illusion that if the margins behave more politely and neutrally, the center will eventually recognize them. This hope is a structural illusion with an essentially political function; the structure itself produces it in order to keep the margins trapped in a cycle of waiting. An illusion that history, in fact, refutes. Neither in the U.S. civil rights movement, nor in the anti-apartheid struggle, nor in Europe’s linguistic and cultural movements were rights won by complying with the tastes of power. Power is never challenged in the language it prefers, and history has always moved forward through ruptures, disruptions, and fractures.
The injection of shame is a tool for controlling the margins: instead of confronting violence and humiliation, the reaction of the victim is problematized. Instead of condemning racism, retaliatory anger is branded unethical. In this displacement, the issue itself is transformed: no longer is structural humiliation at stake, but “our” bad behavior. The ashamed activist, knowingly or not, plays an intermediary role in this shift; he renders the violence of centralists invisible and foregrounds the reaction of the margins. He strips the anger of the margins of its politics and its history, reducing it to a matter of individual character.
This note is not a defense of profanity; it is a defense of understanding the field and grasping the situation. When ethics turns a blind eye to structures of humiliation and judges only the behavior of the silenced, its first victim is the protesting voice. One cannot expect communities that have been addressed for years through racist stereotypes to express their reactions in forms approved by their very humiliators. Such an expectation is a continuation of the same unjust order—a form of existing violence.
As long as structural racism remains the core issue, every call for “civilized” silence and noble passivity is a call for the continuation of the status quo. Distancing oneself from “us” in order to move closer to the center is neither politics nor ethics; it is a denial of the self. The margins are not liberated through apology, nor through self-condemnation. Liberation lies in the explicit voicing of wounds—even if that cry offends the ears of the center and its adherents.
The concern of this text is not decorative morality, but an ethics that gains meaning within struggle and in relation to power and counter-power—an ethics deployed not to soothe the conscience of the dominant side or absolve the center of responsibility, but to understand the position of those pushed to the margins and to articulate resistance. An ethics that is not meant to comfort the dominant order.
Keywords: Politics of shame, Silencing the margins, Racism, Racism in football, Center–periphery, Marginalized anger, Moralization of protest, Assimilation, Resistance