Today the FA released its verdict of a three-match ban and a £100,000 fine for footballer Edinson Cavani. This verdict is in itself an act of racism. Danish professor Andreas Beck Holm explains why:

After a recent football match, Edison Cavani responded to a congratulatory tweet from a friend with the words "Gracias negrito". The FA has decided that this was an act of racism. It clearly was not, for the following reasons:

1.  It was a greeting to a friend. You generally do not racially abuse friends who congratulate you.
2. The word "negrito" in South America is affectionate, not racist.
3. As soon as the player was informed that his greeting might be misunderstood, he deleted it, precisely because he did NOT want it to come across as racist.

To interpret the communcation between Cavani and his friend as an act of racism is in itself an act of discrimination against another culture. The verdict implicitly yet very clearly states that the cultural norms of South Americans are inferior to those of Great Britain and should not be tolerated at all.

The charge and verdict put forward by the FA is based on several assumptions that are obviously ethnocentric. First, that words in foreign languages that resemble words in English have identical semantics. Second, that it is the task of the FA to police the communications of foreign players with their fellow countrymen. And third that the cultural norms and ways of thinking of western elites constitute a universal normative ideal that should be enforced on people from dissimilar cultural backgrounds.

We demand an apology from The Football Assocation to Edinson Cavani and the culture of Uruguay.