Itoje, himself the son of Nigerian parents, added: \u201cI think we\u2019re going to see in the coming years a huge amount of damage that has been done to us as humans and as a society as a result of social media in terms of brains and brain development.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecondly, the stuff around Edwin is obviously incredibly sad. It\u2019s something that no one should have to go through and it\u2019s a further reminder that there\u2019s still work to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Racism is an issue across several sports, with Real Madrid footballer Vinicius Junior allegedly abused by Gianluca Prestianni of Benfica during a Champions League tie this week.<\/p>\n
Prestianni denies the allegation, which is being investigated by European governing body Uefa.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have these incidents that happen which are terribly sad and they should be condemned with full force when they do happen,\u201d Itoje said. \u201cBut what happened to Vinicius Junior … 30 years ago that probably wouldn\u2019t have even made the press. The referee would have told him to get on with it. His team-mates probably would have said that to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo while the stuff we\u2019re seeing, whether it\u2019s Vinicius Junior, whether it\u2019s Edwin Edogbo, they are terribly sad and we as a community need to keep on stamping this type of thing out.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I do also believe that we are moving in somewhat the right direction, although moving in somewhat the right direction is not a given.\u201d<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Itoje, himself the son of Nigerian parents, added: \u201cI think we\u2019re going to see in the coming years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1903,74,13381,162194,11687,35142,162196,162195,28903,1634,5504,68924,162193,162192,1073,17154,111,139,69,1118,69724,4739,1072,213,31145,765,8218],"class_list":["post-293096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-abuse","tag-after","tag-captain","tag-corrosive","tag-criticised","tag-debut","tag-edogbo","tag-edwin","tag-effects","tag-england","tag-following","tag-irelands","tag-itoje","tag-maro","tag-media","tag-nations","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-racist","tag-six","tag-social","tag-sports","tag-suffered","tag-test","tag-warns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}