Rose’s tale of daily bigotry was more powerful than a thousand column inches or a hundred TV talking heads
THE outrage at the Burnley fans who paid for a ‘White Lives Matter’ banner to fly above the Etihad back in June was not universally shared.
The club’s management and players registered their disgust at the stunt
– as did everyone in football who was asked about it.
And, away from the sports pages, the wider commentariat used it as a stick to beat those deemed too ignorant, or unwilling, to understand the Black Lives Matter mantra.
But a section of white, working-class people was genuinely confused.
They didn’t have a problem with the ‘White Lives’ message – indeed, felt it was right that someone was speaking up for them.
Although some minds were changed when they discovered the main perpetrator was a Tommy Robinson fanboy.
I know this because people contacted me after I’d condemned it – asking why I believed white lives didn’t matter as much as black ones.
They argued that, as sad as George Floyd’s murder was, it had been committed thousands of miles away by a more violent police force than ours. And in Britain there are millions of white people who are being shafted by the system. So why aren’t millionaire footballers taking the knee to show solidarity with them before every game?
And no amount of explaining that Black Lives Matter was a scream of rage at people being continually discriminated against because of their skin colour, could sway them.
After all, I was told by some that I’m just a leftie snowflake jumping on the PC bandwagon. They had a point.
I don’t experience racism so why should anyone care what I, or any other white football journalist, manager or player has to say about it?
Well, the next time anyone asks why football should differentiate between the injustices faced by black and white people, I’m going to direct them to Danny Rose’s explanation, on a podcast, about the repeated prejudice he confronts in his daily life.
How he was pulled over by a riot van and three police cars near his mother’s Doncaster home last week, on the spurious grounds that “a car was being driven badly”.
It is, he says, a regular occurrence.
“Each time it’s, ‘Is this car stolen? What are you doing here? Can you prove that you bought this car?’,” said Rose.
The Spurs full-back also told of a recent train journey when an attendant pointed out to him he was in firstclass and demanded to see his ticket, while two white people weren’t challenged to produce theirs.
That, he said, was his everyday life experience so it didn’t surprise him. Just as there was no surprise in playing for Sunderland, Spurs, Newcastle, Bristol City, Peterborough, Watford and Leeds and not seeing a black person “working upstairs”.
Those daily experiences are foreign to white people – which is the essence of the Black Lives Matter message.
It’s a heartfelt cry for dignity and equality.
That’s why white footballers, who have heard their black colleagues abused from the terraces and who rarely get stopped in their expensive motors, offer support with the knee.
As Raheem Sterling showed when he called out negative media coverage of black players’ lifestyles and Marcus Rashford when championing the fight against child poverty – footballers’ words matter.
Which is why Rose’s account of the daily bigotry that even a rich and famous black man like him is faced with is more powerful than a thousand column inches or a hundred TV talking heads.
And, if it makes only one doubter appreciate what the BLM movement is saying, then he’s done more than a hundred pre-match knee-takes.