Racism in sport – one step forward…

The Guardian, 18 December 2003

This time last year British fans starved of victory on the field could console themselves with the thought that they enjoyed superiority in at least one corner of the sporting realm. While manifestations of race hate had mostly vanished from British arenas, they were flaring up with increasing violence across continental Europe.

In October, 2002, when Slovakian fans subjected black England footballers to racist abuse, the nation and its media rallied round our lads. A warm glow of self-congratulation emanated from Britain’s punditry; it had not always been easy, they averred, but had we not matured into an altogether more tolerant and civilised society, certainly compared with our benighted fellow Europeans?

A year later the picture is more sombre and ambiguous. Commentators inclined to complacency will have been rudely awakened by events at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland in April, when England beat Turkey amid chants of “Die, Muslim, die” and “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk”. Police made more than a hundred arrests – but not one was for a “racially aggravated” offence. The FA moved quickly to condemn the abuse and to block England fans from travelling to Turkey for the return match. That action may have saved England from having to play the game behind closed doors – the penalty meted out to Slovakia last year. Instead Uefa imposed a ?68,000 fine.

In some quarters Turkey have replaced Germany as the arch-rival, which is not surprising, given that the second world war is remote terrain compared with the “war on terror” and the war on asylum seekers. National unity and loyalty took an anti-racist form when England met Slovakia but wore a face of malign bigotry when the same team played Turkey. In a globalised economy sporting nationhood is likely to remain a theatre in which racial, religious, national identities are continuously – and confusingly – played out.

Measuring progress in the battle against racism in sport is always tricky. Those who claim that great strides are being made are usually those who denied there was much of a problem in the first place. Those who remain sceptical about the efficacy of the actions taken so far are usually those who once clamoured loudest for such actions to be taken. (Confession: I belong in the second camp).

What exactly is being measured? If appearances are all, then the look of our football teams would suggest that England is a paradise of racial equality. Yet in 2003 we have had well-documented indictments of systemic racism in our police, prisons and in the Crown Prosecution Service. A recent report from the National Centre for Social Research indicated that overt racist attitudes increased last year after nearly two decades of decline; the authors attribute the rise in part to government and media attacks on asylum seekers. Then there are those 17 elected BNP councillors.

Racist abuse continues to plague European football – blending hatreds old and new, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti- semitic, anti-refugee. In March Stamford Bridge played host to a high-profile Uefa-sponsored conference on racism and xenophobia at which the Uefa chief executive Gerhard Aigner vowed to confront the problem with “a concerted effort on the part of all those concerned”. Uefa says it wants clubs to tackle the disease but has so far proved reluctant to issue significant deterrents, a point made by Patrick Vieira after Arsenal players were subject to abuse in Valencia. For his pains Vieira was fined by Aigner. With so many interests now vested in European football, buck-passing seems endemic.

It was grass-roots campaigners who first took the battle against racism into the football grounds. Where they led, the football establishment followed. Despite incidents in Sunderland and elsewhere, progress here has been real. Large-scale racist abuse, common in the past, has become rare (which is not to say that under the right conditions, not least when race and nation merge, it will not make a comeback, as it did in the England-Turkey match). The challenges, say campaigners, are often no longer quite so in-your-face but they are none the less substantial.

The power of the stereotype endures. Whatever Bend it Like Beckham may have done for young Asian women, Asian males remain absent from professional football. Various sociological factors are advanced to account for this manifest gap but they do not add up to a convincing explanation. What continues to be decisive here are the racial assumptions made by the (mostly white) people in charge of the game.

The same argument applies to the paucity of black coaches, managers and administrators. Twenty per cent of professional footballers in this country are black but there are only five black managers. One of them, Andy Preece, whose contract at Bury was terminated by “mutual consent” this week, was subject to racial abuse by a section of his own team’s travelling fans earlier this year.

A generation of retired black stars have begun to speak out about the glass ceiling that confronts them when they seek to move up the game’s hierarchy. And there is the not insignificant fact that less than 1% of Premier League season ticket-holders are black.

It is a worrying sign that clubs have been reluctant to return a recent questionnaire on race-related issues sent out by the Commission for Racial Equality. The football establishment seems willing to share the limelight but less keen to share power. And in this it is typical of sports hierarchies in general. The culture of denial has always impeded aspirations for racial equality in sport. Sometimes what is denied is the reality of racism and sometimes the responsibility to do anything about it.

We can still console ourselves that in the sporting arena things are often much worse in other countries. The unwelcome curtain-raiser for South Africa’s rugby World Cup adventure was the alleged refusal of the white South African lock Geo Cronje to share a room with his black team-mate Quinton Davids. The South African Rugby Football Union media director Mark Keohane resigned, declaring that prejudice in the game was “tolerated, wished away and excused”.

When the South Africans won the 1995 World Cup, the victory was celebrated with the resonant mantra of “one team, one country”, a slogan which the hero of that victory, Chester Williams, now describes as “a lie”.

An investigative panel chaired by judge Edwin King – who supervised South Africa’s cricket match-fixing hearings – was to have sifted through the evidence about racism in South African rugby. The investigation, abandoned last week, was unlikely to have stifled the continuing debate about “quotas” in the selection of provincial and national sporting teams and about the effectiveness or otherwise of the various “transformation” programmes designed to overturn the legacy of apartheid. The new South Africa has invested heavily in the symbolic power of sport but keeps bumping up against less pliable realities. The settlement that ushered in black majority rule left white economic power, not to mention ancient prejudice, largely intact.

In contrast to the rugby squad, the visiting South African cricketers seemed a model of inter-racial harmony. Perhaps the young batsman Boeta Dippenaar was merely being more candid than most when he said: “We’ve got an exciting blend of cultures but one still likes to associate most with one’s own people.”

The same unthinking tribalism was echoed at the highest level in world cricket when the retiring ICC president Malcolm Gray commented on the friction between the Anglo-Australian and south Asian blocs: “It is human nature for people to flock together and grow a colour mentality. One thing I’ve learned in this job is just how racist people are. I didn’t realise everybody was as racist as they are.”

It seems he was not thinking about the Australian batsman Darren Lehmann, who was heard muttering the phrase “black cunts” in reference to his Sri Lankan opponents. The ICC imposed a five-match suspension, rightly (if belatedly) recognising that racist abuse was an offence of a specific nature, above and beyond the “sledging” now common in the international game. However, Yorkshire, the county for which Lehmann has played with great success, did not agree. “He is not a racist,” insisted the chief executive Colin Graves. “He’s said something in the heat of the moment. We’ve all done it.” Graves’s comment succeeded only in consolidating Yorkshire CCC’s reputation as a safe haven for racist assumptions. It is now two decades since people started asking why the county does not play local Asians in its first XI. The excuses get less satisfactory by the year.

Yorkshire, however, are an exception. In general, sports bosses welcome the new Benetton-style branding but are decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of redistributing resources and control. It is not just in South Africa that entrenched inequalities, including economic ones, undercut the multicultural imagery.

It is 55 years since Jackie Robinson broke the colour bar in American baseball and decades since major US team sports began to be filled with black faces. Even in the mainly white and middle-class preserves of golf and tennis Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters reign supreme.

But when it comes to race in sport, the US remains the major case study of the gap between appearance and reality. Try spotting black faces in the upper echelons of American sport, among managers and owners. Or take the paradox of the Williams sisters. By any measure their performances have been phenomenal. They are winners, they are entertainers, they play with power, skill and grace and they are unabashed clothes horses, all of which ought to make them the darlings of the media and the public, not least in their native land.

But it is not only in Paris that they have received a good deal less than their due. Forty years after Althea Gibson, 30 years after Arthur Ashe, the Williams sisters are sometimes treated like riff-raff crashing one of America’s affluent gated communities. Theirs seems to be one bootstrap-success story this society – otherwise addicted to the genre – cannot stomach.

Since we have behaved like the 51st state over the last year, it is a paradox we ought to ponder.