How football is reframing the way we think about race

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/16/black-footballers-publicly-reacting-racist-abuse

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I’ll always remember the first time I was called a nigger: on a football pitch in Germany. I was 13, it was my first ever time outside the country without my parents, on an otherwise pleasant school trip to the leafy German city of Bonn, on the banks of the Rhine. We’d struck up a friendship with a group of local kids, and after our snore-fest trips into town to look at the monuments that bore little relation to our working-class lives back in the multicultural hinterlands of Sheffield, we would escape to play football with them near our youth hostel at around four o’clock every afternoon.

As sometimes happens with teenagers, after one particularly competitive match, things got a bit nasty, and it ended with a slew of insults between players on opposing sides. I had nothing to do with the altercations, but one of the German players singled me out, shouting: “At least we don’t have a nigger on our team!”

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I was too confident in my own thick, brown skin, having grown up in a rough but convivial part of Sheffield, to allow that comment to affect my performance on the pitch, or my enjoyment of being away from home with my mates. To tell the truth, I had football to thank for keeping me away from drugs and giving me a shared culture with classmates. In fact much of the cultural confidence that allowed me to stay balanced despite experiences of racism came from football.

For a long time now, high-profile footballers have been the faces of black Europe. And they gave me my first encounter with a wider African-European diaspora. I was taught endlessly about long-dead white men at school. But in the late 1980s and throughout the 90s a generation of “Afropeans” came of age – brown-skinned men and women who were woven into the continent’s cultural fabric. The word “European” could no longer function as a synonym for whiteness. Brilliant black footballers subverted the traditional notions of (white) Europe presented at school. It was through the sport that I would first learn of the Surinamese community in the Netherlands, that Senegalese men and women lived in France, and that Belgium had a relationship with Congo.

These players had brown skin, but they weren’t “going back” anywhere any time soon, and they challenged reductive national identities by their very presence. Remember the inspiring picture of a dreadlocked Ruud Gullit lifting the 1988 European championship trophy in his orange shirt? He was the symbol of Dutch football and of Dutch triumph.

Has there ever been a player as thoroughly English as Ian Wright, who now wears his patriotic heart on his sleeve as a TV pundit? If someone asks you to name a Swedish footballer, Henrik Larsson, whose father hails from Cape Verde, is one of the first names that comes to mind. And who could possibly be more French than Thierry Henry? Well, possibly Zinedine Zidane, a man who was famously quoted in a 2004 Observer interview as saying: “Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.”

All of this was powerful stuff for someone who was born brown-skinned, working-class and northern in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and as a young child had felt, to quote Caryl Phillips, “of, and not of, Europe”. By the late 90s, though, we had been seduced by the notion of a multicultural Britain, guided by New Labour. This era swallowed up radical leftwing politics, including notions of black solidarity that had helped to educate, galvanise and mobilise communities of colour. But racism was still there, lurking under the surface; it just became more nuanced and discreet. The effect was that much of the black community born in the 80s grew up complacent and politically disengaged.

Football is a microcosm, and this mood was reflected in the apathetic, uninspiring and underachieving generation of footballers in the 2000s. But that has changed, and my faith in the role football can have in society has been rekindled.

The revival began with the 2018 World Cup and the way it brought a divided nation together, even if only for one long hot summer. But it has continued, as this generation of black players has tackled racism head on. And it’s necessary. They have to defend their presence in a toxic political climate. The conversations that have emerged around Danny Rose and Raheem Sterling’s comments on racism both on and off the pitch mirror the impact of the NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s protests in the US, where he has been blackballed for taking a knee during the national anthem, and, more recently, Moise Kean’s reaction to racism aimed at him from fans in Italy. The players’ responses have been honest and raw.

These successful millionaire sports stars are speaking out against a backdrop of societal and institutional racism, and doing so with integrity. Their fame and economic power could have made them comfortable enough to turn a blind eye, but they are taking risks in speaking these uncomfortable truths. Sometimes – as with Kean and Kaepernick – it is in the form of a mere physical gesture, yet it is refreshing to see a glimpse of somebody reacting so honestly in the public sphere.

However, they can and should go further. When black players step on to a football pitch they are occupying a rare piece of sacred ground on a fault line in our societies. The sport is at the intersection of huge corporate interest and working-class communities, both black and white, that have been torn apart by neoliberal capitalism and much of the media. Footballers have unique access to those same communities via social media. When column inches are devoted to the subject of racism in football, footballers could use such platforms to draw people into discussing bigger issues, such as the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. They can highlight the connection between the hostile environment in football stadiums and the hostile environment imposed by the government towards black communities.

The notion of somebody being, say, black and Italian is no longer surprising, thanks to those players who blazed a trail for black Europeans in the 80s and 90s. This next generation of stars has the opportunity to reframe how we think about race, and leave a legacy that transcends flashy cars and lucrative endorsement contracts. Speaking out is not only now possible, it is a moral obligation.

As a 13-year-old I was left speechless by the racism I faced. Perhaps if I’d had Raheem Sterling as an example, I’d have been better armed with a response.

• Johny Pitts is the author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, which will be published by Allen Lane in June