#SomosTodosMacacos (We Are All Monkeys)

In April 2014, during a football match in Villareal, Spain, between the home team and Barcelona, a fan threw a banana from the stands at Brazilian football player Dani Alves, in what had become a common act of racism and dehumanization at European football games. Alves stopped, picked up the banana, took a bite, and seamlessly took a corner kick. Fans of both teams cheered for him, and thousands more applauded online. “When you want to troll Dani Alves but Dani Alves trolls you instead,” one wrote. “Hahaha what a legend move.”

Even before that move, in collaboration with Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, the superstar Brazilian football player known simply as Neymar, Alves had planned more counterspeech, working with a marketing agency to prepare an online response to racist banana tossing. 

A few days later, Neymar posted an image of himself and his toddler son holding bananas, on Twitter and Instagram. The caption read, “#SomosTodosMacacos, #WeAreAllMonkeys, #SomosTodosMonos, #TotsSomMonos” – “we are all monkeys” in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Catalan. 

Thousands of people from around the world, including athletes and celebrities, quickly joined in, posting selfies eating bananas with one or more of the hashtags.  In Brazil, the campaign was also criticized by people who saw it as an easy way for the privileged to signal anti-racism without really doing anything about it (a common criticism of viral online anti-racism campaigns organized around a hashtag), and felt that “we are all monkeys” only propagated a familiar hateful insult. Still, it was warmly received by many. The original Instagram post of Neymar and his son received 688,000 likes, and Alves’ post containing the video of him eating the banana received 491,000 likes.