ABSTRACT
The powerful influence of racism on the lives of specific Scottish ethnic minorities continues to receive limited recognition in Scotland. Many of the selfserving devices employed by majority group members to deny racism are common to other societies (van Dijk 1984, 1993), but some local myths on what it means to be Scottish are used to sustain majority self-satisfaction and complacency that racism is absent from Scotland (Finn 1987; Armstrong 1989). Sport has been one of the main means of enacting a sense of Scotland and Scottishness (e.g., Walker and Jarvie 1994), but it has been Scottish football that has, in different ways, become the most prominent, popular representation of Scottishness (Finn and Giulianotti 1998). For that reason, the study of racism in the context of Scottish football offers important insights into racism in Scottish society. This chapter will explore how racism has been evident in Scottish football, but denied, and how this misunderstanding of racism is entangled with the equally misunderstood notion of ‘sectarianism’.
