How did Bobby Davro think his racist jokes at a Tottenham-Chelsea game were OK?
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Version 0 of 1. “He’s one of our own, he’s one of our own, Harry Kane, he’s one of our own.” There’s something beautiful about that chant sung by Tottenham fans for Kane, our home-grown striker. It gives a real sense of unity – a connection between the stands and the pitch, and a feeling that everyone in that stadium belongs. It’s why I made my way to Wembley on Sunday to watch Tottenham – my team – take on Chelsea in the Capital One Cup final. But when I arrived at an official pre-match Spurs supporters’ event, I was met by a different type of feeling. It was a feeling that told me I didn’t belong. Hanging over the balcony in a function room in nearby Wembley Arena, microphone in hand, was television’s Bobby Davro. He’d been hired to host the event, and chose the venue to deliver a routine of largely racist and discriminatory jokes. I’ll save you the details, but the jokes included the same lazy, racial and cultural stereotypes that we’ve all come to know. They were about Muslims playing golf but blowing up at the 15th hole. They were about people called Mohammed who are quite obviously Islamic State fighters and not members of “our” troops because of their name. My religious beliefs – or lack of – do not come into it. We live in a free society and if people want this type of humour there should be a home for it. But should that home be Wembley Stadium, the home of English football? Should it be an event that was supported by Kick It Out, a pro-inclusion organisation against racism and discrimination in football? Davro obviously hadn’t seen its logo emblazoned on the back of his ticket. It was with little surprise, then, that I heard this morning’s news that Kick It Out has seen a 35% increase in reports of abuse at football games since this time last year. And that news came on the back of the horrible, mobile phone footage from two weeks ago of a group of Chelsea fans in Paris blocking a black man from boarding a Metro train. That grainy footage of them standing there, chanting “We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it” has plagued all proper-thinking football fans since. So how did Davro choose to address this anxiety? At a game, let us remember, against the very same club that is trying to deal with a real and menacing pocket of racists. He didn’t, of course, and instead chose to qualify his string of racial slurs by saying that he could make these kind of jokes because a lot of his friends were … racist. There was no reproach. The word just hung there like a bad smell as most around me laughed. I honestly don’t believe Davro is a racist, and when we spoke on Twitter after the event, he said as much himself, but the fact he felt so comfortable delivering these types of jokes in that social context is perhaps telling of a wider problem that football clubs and organisations such as Kick It Out are trying to deal with. A good start would be to vet the material aired at official pre-match events. If not, all this gesturing about being anti-racism and anti-discriminatory – whether it’s race, faith, nationality or sexuality – is just lip service. In the meantime, I probably won’t be returning to a game for a while. I’ll watch from my front room. I’ll cheer Kane and his teammates on as I hope they can fire us into the Champions League. I’ll listen fondly as the crowd chant Kane’s song. But deep down, I’ll remember my experience of last Sunday – and for the first time be wondering whether there’s a tiny fraction of those voices who don’t see me as “one of their own”. |