Christina Patterson: The world really has changed. But Sepp Blatter hasn't noticed yet

Furore: Sepp Blatter with Tokyo Sexwale in South Africa in 2009 (Getty Images)

There was a point where it all got rather surreal.

That was the point when an old white man, who runs an organisation that seems to attract an awful lot of criticism, appeared to accuse a young black man of racism. The white man was Sepp Blatter, the 75-year-old head of football's "governing body". The young black man was Rio Ferdinand, a footballer who plays for England and Manchester United. And the surreal moment was when Blatter, or possibly someone tweeting on his behalf, told Ferdinand that the person Ferdinand had called, in a tweet, a "black man" had a name.

You can see why he'd want to bring it up. It's a brilliant name, the kind you'd be dying to toss into a conversation, maybe even join Twitter to tweet. Perhaps that's why Blatter, or someone on his behalf, issued a photograph of him hugging Tokyo Sexwale. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the fact that Tokyo Sexwale (which isn't, apparently, pronounced "sex whale") is black.

But it certainly looked, when Sepp Blatter issued the photo with a headline saying "committed to the fight against racism", as if the Minister of Human Settlements of South Africa had been given his rare starring role on the Fifa website because of the colour of his skin. Rio Ferdinand seemed to think so. "I need the covering eyes symbol!!" he tweeted. "Fifa," he explained, "clear up the Blatter comments with a pic of him posing with a black man..." A "pic", he didn't need to say, whose message seemed to be "some of my best friends are black".

To be fair to Blatter, some of his best friends are black. Jack Warner, who once told an audience that a "white foreigner" who was trying to interview him was "trash", and who resigned from his post as vice president of Fifa after being accused of offering bribes, is black. So is Mohamed bin Hammam, who planned to run against Blatter as Fifa president, but who, after investigations by an "ethics committee" some were surprised to discover existed, was, unfortunately, banned from Fifa for life. You couldn't really say that Fifa wasn't, in all kinds of ways, an equal opportunities employer.

But you could certainly say that its approach to what a lot of people, but not necessarily Fifa, call racism, is quite old-fashioned. It's old-fashioned in the way that those signs that used to be displayed outside guest houses saying "no blacks, no dogs, no Irish" now seem a bit old-fashioned. If, say, you'd just come over from Jamaica, because the British Government invited you, and were looking for somewhere to stay, and saw one of those signs, you were meant to just smile and keep walking until you found somewhere else. And if, say, another player on the pitch should refer to the colour of your skin, in a way that didn't sound complimentary, and maybe use "a word or a gesture which is not the correct one", then what you should do, according to Blatter, is say that "this is a game" and "at the end of the game we shake hands". You should do this, he implied, because these are the examples that triggered the question, even if the other person has called you a "nigger" or a "fucking black cunt".

He seemed to be surprised when his comments didn't go down all that well. He seemed to think that he had been "misunderstood". He was "committed", he said, though it might have been nice if he'd come up with a different metaphor, to "kicking" racism "out".

Perhaps when Blatter sees football fans making monkey noises, and throwing bananas when a black player comes on the pitch, which sometimes happens in Spain (and which is why one black British player left his Spanish team after one season), he thinks they're just being friendly. Perhaps, like Berlusconi talking about Obama, he thinks it's funny to talk about a black person's "tan". Perhaps he doesn't realise that the world has changed.

It takes time to change a culture, and an awful lot of effort. Sometimes people get confused. Sometimes they mix up race and culture, and think that if you criticise a culture, you're also criticising the colour of someone's skin. They think that stating certain facts – about levels of Nigerian fraud, say, or absent Caribbean fathers, or the lyrics of certain rappers – or even not liking the work of particular artists, makes you a racist. They seem to like calling other people racist. It seems to give them a nice, warm glow.

Race has nothing whatsoever to do with culture. It's the thing we can't, whatever efforts we make, change. To insult someone for their race, and not for what they do or say, or even for how they play a game, is about as low as a human being can go.

On Thursday, a black man testified in a London court. He testified even though his father had died the night before. He spoke about the night, 18 years ago, when his friend, Stephen Lawrence, was killed. He described how some young white men had chased them, and how one waved "something shiny" before his friend fell. He said that when his friend got up, and ran, "blood was streaming out around his neck". As he talked, Duwayne Brooks cried. When his best friend died, he said, the word his killers yelled out was "nigger".

Better living through technology

To be honest, I'd forgotten, but the Carphone Warehouse hadn't. They sent me a lovely email to say that it's been a year since I bought my iPhone. At first, I couldn't understand how everyone else seemed to know how to stroke it in a way that made magical things happen. I wondered if, like breastfeeding, it was something you were meant to be born knowing. But I'm getting the hang of it. The map that tells you where you are seems better than a virgin birth. So does the app that tells you your bus is on its way. I was Lady Luddite, but now, as Gadget Girl, I'm free. It can't be long before, like pretty much everyone else, I'm wearing giant (Ironic? Retro? Can someone please explain?) headphones.

How much lower will this scandal go?

When Errol Morris decided to call his latest documentary Tabloid, he can't have known that its British release would coincide with the biggest ever investigation into the tabloid press. Its star is a former beauty queen who in 1977 was accused of kidnapping and raping her Mormon ex-boyfriend, and went on to get her dead dog cloned. As Theresa May said, I'm not making this up. In this case, the relationship between tabloid "victim" and tabloid hack feels, most of the time, pretty equal. In the stories from the Leveson inquiry, it doesn't. This week's include a suicide and an attempt at suicide that failed. That's a big, shameful, and possibly industry-wrecking leap from "The Manacled Mormon".

c.patterson@independent.co.uk / Twitter.com/queenchristina_