Maurice Edu revealed yesterday he was the target of racist abuse from his own fans at Glasgow Rangers.  Fans confronted him as he entered his car after Rangers’ mind-boggling 4-1 Champions League loss at home to Romanian champions Unirea Urziceni.  Edu did not play in the match.  It was not the first time it has happened.

Why does something unthinkable in the U.S. occur with such relative frequency abroad? There are a few explanations.

The simple premise is that Rangers fans are jerks.  It has documented validity.  These are the same fans who taunted former Celtic star Shunsuke Nakamura with “Nakamura ate my dog” chants and have an ethos grounded in hatred of Irish Catholics.  The club profess to be hunting for the racist moron in their midst, but that’s like scouring for a redneck in Mississippi.

Another explanation is cultural.  Racism was central to the British Empire, but the British Empire was not necessarily central in British life.

America had slavery on domestic soil well before its inception.  In Britain, most did not experience black people, until waves of postwar immigration in the 1950s and 1960s.  Looking for an American context, the incident resembles xenophobia over Mexican immigration more than slavery.  That in no way excuses the Edu incident, but it, perhaps, explains why the less urbane would not see it as obviously inappropriate.

What happened to Maurice Edu would never happen in America, not today.  We revel in the freakish athleticism of our African-American athletes.  Our prominent columnists would never use flimsy unfounded research to buttress racial stereotypes.