I know just how cruel racism is

I REMEMBER the first time someone made fun of me at school about how I was “Chinese looking”.

I was seven years old and totally floored. Not because I was being made fun of – that was just part of school – and not even that it was about my appearance.

It was because I genuinely hadn’t ever realised that my difference in appearance to the average white person was anything to talk about.

To me, it was just like the fact that some people had black hair and others blonde. I just didn’t see the joke.

I ran off to my brother crying and he told me that I would need to expect more of this.

In the last week we have seen an enormous reaction to the awful death of George Floyd in the USA while being held down by a police officer.

#Blackouttuesday saw Instagram flooded with plain black pictures as people showed their support for the protests (above). We also saw a large number of sporting organisations post messages on social media to show their support for diversity in our society.

I believe sport has an enormously important role to play to stand up and educate people about racism.

When a football fan racially abuses a player, I cringe when I hear people say football has a racism problem. Football and sport in general are a reflection of our society. In that instance, football doesn’t have a racism problem, our whole society does.

I don’t believe people are born racist. Somebody teaches a child to start seeing difference in race and then judging it. I didn’t see it when it first happened to me as a child.

Sport has the ability to bring together people of different colour, race and religion. So, it is wonderful to see sporting organisations across the world posting supportive messages at this time, but what about always? Why not consistently send out messages to fans that that sport or team embraces diversity rather than just now when it seems important to do so? Educating people about racism is not a short-term flood of information or the length of a campaign and it is definitely not when it seems trendy. It has to be there all the time and in all levels of sport.

Football can be the flagship for this from players starting with an academy at seven years old to a lifelong season ticket holder. Sponsors can be asked to help with this messaging and education.

Let it be there all the time so that anyone who has been taught to be racist has the opportunity to be educated why not to be.

There is no place for racism in sport or our society. In some ways we have made great progress with this over the years, but sometimes we are reminded that we also have a lot more work to do.

WHEN the Premier League returns later this month, viewers will have the option to have artificial crowd noise on during the games. I heard it recently used on a couple of the BT Sport Bundesliga matches and have to say I quite liked it. There is no delay to the crowd’s reaction to goals and there is a home team bias built in – it was certainly better than just stadium echoes for me.

TAKE A KNEE Bundesliga stars join world-wide anti-racism protest