Stop Being Weird About Red Hair

Since FIFA announced that the 2021 World Cup would be held in Qatar, much has been made of the human rights abuses that the country inflicts on LGBTQ+ people and migrant workers, especially in preparation for the event. Now that it’s time to follow through on the World Cup after a tumultuous two years in the pandemic, these concerns were brought further into focus. None of this was lost on President Gianni Infantino, who took almost an hour of a press gallery’s time to disclose that actually, Europe’s the bad one, FIFA is good, and he feels gay.

“Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.”

This is utterly jaw-dropping coming from someone ranked on Forbes’ Most Powerful list in 2018 who reportedly makes a base salary of $3.19 million. It would be very interesting to note what part of that life makes you feel as though you were a modern-day slave. I’d be willing to bet absolutely none of it.

The reason that Infantino believed he could to relate to marginalized people under a brutal police state that routinely destroys LGBTQ+ communities is that he is, no joke,  a ginger Italian.

“Of course I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated [against], to be bullied, as a foreigner in a foreign country. As a child I was bullied – because I had red hair and freckles, plus I was Italian, so imagine.”

Let’s take a moment to absolutely bask in the fact “I know what it’s like to be gay, I’m a ginger Italian” was used to defend slave-like labour and anti-LGBTQ+ abuse.

Now that we’ve done that, I can assure you how positively bat-shit insane that sentiment is. You don’t need me to tell you that, as you presumably have a functioning language centre of the brain. But since he insists on it being a qualifying attribute to discuss human rights abuses, I suppose I can weigh in too. After all, having red hair as a child is a weird quirk that Infantino and I also share. We’re not like other boys. So let’s talk about my experience.

There’s a weird trend you may remember from the mid-2000s about “gingers” and how it’s fine to treat them as inferior. We can thank a South Park episode titled “Ginger Kids” for that. This led to “Kick a Ginger Day” being declared in 2008, a day which also happened in Canada in 2009 and up to, at the very least, 2011.

Guess who was in high-school during those years.

I don’t talk too much about having red hair or the teasing/bullying I faced because of it. My experience usually isn’t necessary to examine or relay. But I remember most of what I faced from Kick a Ginger Day being playful and not on the violent end. When I came home that first day, my parents were watching a news report. They turned to me, worried. “Did this happen to you?” my mom asked. I said yes, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Like I said, my treatment was mostly playful, though my shin certainly hurt by the end of the day.

Other instances were more hurtful. I remember one day accessing my locker while some students were waiting to get into the class. One of them was talking to their friend but clearly looked at me then loudly said “Ew, a ginger.” I responded “Ew, a human” and that seemed to shut him up. Looking back, this was extremely cringe, but I still feel the “I’ve had enough of this” feeling that motivated my incredibly bad retort. I also remember stray comments like “You’re a fucking ginger” not being rare. My parents have told me that there were days I would come home as a small child, bury my head in my pillow and say I wish I didn’t have red hair.

Since high school, however, almost all serious harassment over the colour of my hair disappeared. I continuously get compliments over the tone and liars have told me that it’s very attractive. Any teasing I received for my red hair when I was a kid has been more than compensated for at this point. The most I get is the (very funny and correct) notion that all tall white men with red hair and beards look the same. Sure, I’ll have to occasionally put up with the, now decade-old, soul jokes, but that’s increasingly rare.

Also you’d think by now some layer of creativity would have kicked in like a ginger child’s shin but apparently not.

This isn’t to say that others with red hair had the privilege of being neurotypical or as well liked as I was at the time. There were certainly redheads who were bullied more severely than I was. I also think there’s potential for a valuable insight into the sociological phenomenon of discrimination on an individual level. Something as innocuous as orange hair can be cited by others as a reason to turn against a minority population, surely that must say something about human behaviour.

So with that being said: Is having red hair like being gay, disabled or a modern-day slave?

No.

Fuck no.

Holy fucking shit no.

Again, you absolutely did not need me to tell you this, but there is no comparison. I don’t care how much Infantino was bullied for being a redheaded Italian, but it’s not even close to the systemic discrimination that actual marginalized people face on a daily basis. He didn’t even have a popular but subpar animated show1 informing schoolyard bullying to contend with. Even so, I am at no risk of being turned down from a job, hunted by police, or restricted from participating in society because I have red hair. So if I’m not at risk, neither is the rich guy who placed one of the biggest sports events in a country that, I cannot stress this enough, killed 6,500 people in preparation for it.

The entire speech is just as bat-shit as that sentence, by the way. Infantino tried to use the past history of Europe’s colonialism and crimes against humanity to defend Qatar, brushed off the refusal to sell alcohol as an inconvenience instead of the sign that Qatari officials can change their commitments at will, and generally sounded like a criminally online Twitter thread come to life. But there’s something about the use of red hair as a bridge to discrimination that lodged in my brain.

After Kick a Ginger Day took hold, there was a weird backlash that became popular in the mid-2010s which a lot of redheaded people latched onto: taking pride in their red hair. “Kick a Ginger Day” became “Kiss a Ginger Day,” I was regularly recommended “Ginger Pride” groups on Facebook, and ads about “Ginger Fest” or whatever. It was weird, but it was more than just weird.

Lately, a trend online is making red hair being synonymous with whiteness. There’s an alarming amount of weirdos who think ginger comic book characters are being erased on the silver screen2. There’s even articles about these characters being “race swapped” with actors of a non-white race. All of these people are very “concerned” about red hair not having the representation we “need.” Interesting that these messages come from people who mix in the same spheres as the South Park weirdos who shoved their foot up our ass.

This attitude most recently covered the thinly-veiled… *ahem*… “concerns” over the casting for the new Little Mermaid because she did not have red hair (or white skin, which I’m sure was a coincidence). This talking point was something that we as a community did not need or ask for. The main reason we didn’t ask for this is that there is no redhead community. All of us are from varying ethnic groups that just so happen to have a percentage of the population that has red hair, yet a quirk of our genetics is being used to justify racist behaviour.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened here. The internet using a connection of red hair to deflect from bigotry has made its way to arguably the most powerful figure in sports. Infantino thinks that he can gloss over justified criticisms of FIFA and himself by relating the shred of discrimination he faced in his life. Though I would laugh at the possibility that Infantino has been browsing /r/movies and the Twitter accounts of people who unironically use the hashtag #whitegenocide, the rhetorical use of red hair stems from the same place. “Redheads face adversity in some form, so they are equally as qualified as marginalized people to speak to discrimination.”

This rhetoric and attitude has been brewing online for some time, and finally, it leaked into the mainstream. If you think that xenophobia may have motivated his bullying more than his red hair, I would agree. But when discussing the bullying he faced as a child he said red hair first, and needed to use the word “freckles” to punctuate it, before bringing up his Italian heritage. So we have the head of FIFA making a speech to defend their exploitative deal with Qatar, and the first thing he uses as an example of the discrimination he faced is his red hair.

As someone who also faced bullying because of his red hair: kindly shut the fuck up.