We need Rooney Rule to change our thinking
BUILT-IN PREJUDICES ARE SO HARD TO SHIFT THROUGHOUT SOCIETY
IS football racist? Yes. But then again, so am I. And so, probably, are you. At least a little bit. Have you ever crossed the road to avoid a young black guy on a London street? Or felt a tremor of unease at the bearded Asian man going through airport security? Even dodged a Polish builder.
I have. I couldn’t help it. Though my liberal, left-leaning brain was telling me to pack it in, my subconscious stubbornly refused to obey. It was too long steeped in racial stereotypes – the gangland mugger, the suicide bomber, the slapdash Eastern European.
And I know why. Growing up in Newcastle during the 1980s was hardly a multicultural experience. My school had no black kids, no Asians or Poles. The closest we got to an exotic outsider was when some dodgepot got expelled from the Catholic gulag up the road.
Sure, we were taught about tolerance and other cultures. But by then our minds were packed with preconceptions from media and fiction, programmed to parrot the overheard prejudices of adults.
We’d had no real people, no friends or neighbours to explode the myths, to break down the wall of otherness.
That’s how discrimination really works. It isn’t the placard-wielding nutters outside mosques or the John Terry types spouting abuse. It’s the insidious, latent subconscious of people who should know better. People like employers, police, teachers… and football chairmen.
Chairmen, see, tend to be old and white. They grew up at a time when coon jokes were the acceptable highlight of any stand-up routine, when you went round the Paki shop or down to the Chinkies. When non-white faces were few and far between. When it was fine to think of black people as athletic but thick.
That stuff is tough to shake. And everyone, everywhere, gravitates towards familiarity. It’s why, faced with three candidates of similar ability, a middle-aged white man will generally employ another middle-aged white man.
Instinct
People go with what they know, informed – even though they don’t acknowledge it – by the deeprooted prejudices of a lifetime. They instinctively avoid the other.
That is why Keith Curle and Chris Powell are the only black managers in the top four divisions.
And why Greg Clarke deserves all the stick he’s received for reneging on a promise to raise the idea of a ‘Rooney Rule’ at the 2013 Football League AGM.
The rule, used successfully in the NFL, would make it mandatory for chairmen to interview at least one black or minority candidate for every managerial role.
According to Clarke, he shelved the issue because the man who raised it – Barnet chairman Tony Kleanthous – was no longer a member of the board.
Kleanthous this week called Clarke “disingenuous” and accused him of “hiding behind excuses”. BBC pundit Garth Crooks said the Football League chairman had “bottled it” and urged him to consider his position.
Whether Clarke is guilty of a deliberate fudge or simply misjudging the importance of the issue only he can say.
But what is beyond doubt is that the Rooney Rule is now imperative. For a long time I naively believed that, with changing attitudes, black coaches would get a chance, that talent and hard work would eventually overcome prejudice.
A bit like Trevor Brooking who, based on no evidence whatsoever, declared this week that it wouldn’t be long before “10 or 20” of the 92 teams had an ethnic manager.
Yet as the years pass and nothing changes, it is time to face facts. Attitudes have not changed. Black players still face invisible barriers. And not just from outright bigots whose beliefs are set in stone. From good, decent men who don’t even know they are racist.
Only death, retirement and time will truly eradicate the problem. Only when today’s multicultural generation head up companies can we hope for genuine equality.
In the meantime, though, we can – and should – twist arms. The Rooney Rule would give a voice and a face to the subconscious other. And it might just force a chairman or two to see the talent beyond the colour.