Google trends released its annual ‘year in search’ report. This list encompasses the most searched topics and terms globally. Inspired by a visualization by analyst Roshaan Khan, I researched one of the most highlighted words of the year, “racism”, checking the most searched phrases of 2020 and comparing it with the results of the last 5 years in Portugal.

Clearly, many of us still remember this statement by Mister JJ (Portuguese football coach). Personally at the time I found the statement quite unfortunate, and that was the main motivation for this little analysis. The word racism had a huge growth in Portuguese society in 2020 compared to the previous 5 years.

This is due to the greater attention that gender issues receive by the younger generations, verifying a greater sensitivity and less tolerance towards situations of discrimination and prejudice. This year, in fact, numerous situations occurred in Portugal and throughout the world, all highlighted in prime time, with great expansion in social networks such as the “Black Lives Matter” movement, stimulating the Portuguese to feel more informed, mainly to searches such as “sos racism”, “xenophobia”, “contra racismo”, “racism what is it” and “racism definition” being quite positive, showing a great awareness and progression in the topic.

Portugal shows the highest peaks of interest in February 2020 (60) when Marega(Porto Player) leaves the pitch under shouts of “monkey”, in June 2020 (100) when 46-year-old African-American George Floyd died in a detention in the USA and in December 2020 (41) when the PSG-Basaksehir match was interrupted by alleged racism of the fourth referee, leading to Jorge Jesus’ comment, the title of this theme.

In conclusion, in this Google Trends measure of interest, I note that racism has much more impact at the level of searches in Portugal when it is linked to football news, leaving in question if our increasingly technological society is aware of this reality and if it assumes the evident existence of interpersonal, institutional and structural racism and the need to draw concrete public policies to fight it.

Thank you for reading.