MAY 3 ― It has been, happily, a bad week for racism.

Firstly, Barcelona star Dani Alves sparked a social media-led campaign after reacting to having a banana thrown at him by picking it up and eating it.

The incident occurred during his team’s La Liga meeting with Villarreal last Sunday night and Alves has been widely praised for taking an active role in the ongoing struggle against discrimination by making a serious point with a light-hearted gesture.

All week, fellow sports stars and celebrities have been falling over themselves to show their solidarity by snapping photos of themselves eating bananas and posting them online, with the hashtag #weareallmonkeys proving a global smash on Twitter and the offending Villarreal fan being punished with public disapproval and a lifetime stadium ban.

A similar story has been unfolding in the United States, where Donald Sterling, the owner of NBA basketball team Los Angeles Clippers, has been banned from the sport for life after a tape was released of him criticising his girlfriend for having friendships with black people.

Sterling will now be forced to sell the club he has owned for more than three decades, with a host of famous faces including Oprah Winfrey and Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs touted as potential buyers.

As with Alves, it has become more than just a sports story, with Sterling’s indiscretion dominating the news agenda throughout the US all week and the NBA earning widespread support for its hardline response in issuing a lifetime ban.

These two incidents are great “copies” ― good stories which will attract readers and viewers and sell advertising ― and Alves and the NBA have obviously done the right thing. But the most important question is how much good will they actually do in combating racist attitudes?

To answer that, it’s probably worthwhile considering what exactly we are hoping to achieve. Obviously, the elimination of racism…but how?

Essentially, it could be said there are two types of racist: those who have somehow come into contact with inaccurate “facts” and allowed themselves to reach a conscious conclusion that some races are superior to others. These I would call committed racists.

Then there are those who have never really thought about the issues concerned but lapsed into racism either through fear of the unknown, or simply by following the lead of other influential members of their peer groups. These are wavering racists.

The committed racists, in all probability, are something of a lost cause. People who cling to firmly held beliefs, no matter how ill-founded they might be, are not going to change them.

You might be able to stop a committed racist from expressing his or her views by making him or her fearful of the consequences, but it’s extremely unlikely they will ever be “converted” to another way of thinking: they have opinions which they believe are right (even if they are wrong). They will not change.

However, the second group ― the wavering racists who don’t really have a proper reason for their prejudices ― certainly can be turned.

If they are forced to confront an issue they have never really thought about in great detail and given compelling evidence (rather than the inaccurate facts of the racists), they would concede the error of their old ways and adopt a more enlightened attitude.

In the big picture, what we need to do, I would suggest, is prevent children who don’t even notice that people have different skin colours from coming into contact with the wrong “facts” which will allow them to become committed racists, who might then also influence wavering racists to their ill-informed way of thinking.

So how can that be done? Confronting issues, providing compelling evidence, giving information to children…don’t they sound like the kind of things that should happen in schools? Isn’t that where we all start to learn the truth about the world around us? Isn’t that, then, the place we should be taught why racism is wrong…not from footballers on Twitter, but from teachers armed with evidence-based text books?

The answer to combating racism, I am convinced, lies in education ― not banning racists from attending sports fixtures or owning sports teams.

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling (in photo cut-out) has been banned from the sport for life after a tape was released of him criticising his girlfriend for having friendships with black people. — Reuters pic

Governments ― the only organisations with the power to decide these things ― should ensure that all schools include the relevant lessons within their curriculum. At schools, we are taught how to read, we are taught how to write and how to do sums. We are taught why chemical elements behave in a certain way and how the moon controls tides; we should also be taught why human races are qualitatively equal.

I would also like this to be a slap in the face to people who casually talk about “football’s problem with racism” whenever something like the Alves incident turns up. Saying that football has a problem with racism is almost as ignorant (although less damaging to individuals, of course) as saying that black people are stupid.

Football (or basketball, or cricket, or whatever) does not have a problem with racism: society does. People do not turn up to football matches, become racist, go home and stop being racist. Racists are racist people, not racist football fans.

That’s not to say sport can’t make a difference or that it should absolve itself of responsibility. It can, by events like this week, make examples of racist behaviour and send a message to society: this is not acceptable.

Because sport and its leading practitioners command a lot of publicity and wield a strong influence, it can be used to help turn a few of the wavering racists in the right direction by taking a consistently firm stance, and force a few of the committed racists to keep their views to themselves.

But the chief ambition of society should be to stop people from becoming racist in the first place. Sport can’t do that ― only education can.

Sport can support the fight against racism; but it shouldn’t have to lead it.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.