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.
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