A black person has to get over the hurdle of their skin before they can even think what they want to achieve
Cricket legend Holding hoping his new book on racism helps to educate and is positive sport can aid society in properly addressing the issue...
IT will be a year ago this coming Thursday when rain halted play of a Test match between England and the West Indies in Southampton and Sky Sports presenter Ian Ward turned to Michael Holding and asked him about the Black Lives Matter movement.
The respected cricket pundit spoke eloquently for more than four minutes about the dehumanisation of black people through history. Articulate, angry and passionate, it is a mesmerising piece of unscripted television. It was as if he was waiting his whole life for those words to come out. And many in the audience had waited a long time to hear them spoken on television.
He had no idea of the impact they would make. ‘I am not on social media or anything like that, so I had no idea that it was being shared and retweeted,’ the legendary fast bowler says now. ‘I was invited to come on Sky News to talk about it, other news channels wanted me on.
‘The thing is I am a cricket commentator, not an activist. I am happy to talk about this issue in the right environment and discuss it with anyone, but my job is to talk about cricket. I never expected what I said to get as much attention as it did. I am just happy that I was given the opportunity to talk about it, as I have said before, thank goodness it rained! But I am glad that it struck a chord with so many people.’
Thierry Henry was among those who sat up and took notice. The Arsenal legend contacted Holding through their mutual employer, Sky, and the ball was set rolling for the work that culminated in a new book, Why We Kneel, How We Rise. Holding interviews successful black athletes from Henry to Usain Bolt, Michael Johnson to Naomi Osaka. They all relate their experiences of discrimination and racism, overt or otherwise, throughout their lives. And the thing is that their tales are remarkably similar, which didn’t surprise Holding.
As he discovered through each of their stories, fame and money matter in this world but the colour of your skin still matters more. This is captured perfectly by an incident which happened to Henry when he first moved to New York. In most of the world, he was one of the most recognisable sportspeople around. Not in the Big Apple.
‘In New York, who was he?’ Holding says. ‘He was one of the most famous footballers on the planet but in New York, he is just another black man. That is what Thierry said to me, that there he went back to being a black man. Fame and fortune make people look at you differently, but if you don’t have that fame any more, you just go back to being black.
‘He told me about ordering an Uber one night when he was out. He was dressed in a tracksuit and hoodie, because that’s usually how he dresses. The Uber comes, Thierry recognises the number plate, puts his hand out and the Uber just drove straight by him.
‘For people like Thierry and Usain, their fame can put them outside the prism of racism, it can take them outside being black. And if you are famous, it can protect you among those who know you. But once you get outside those people who know you, you are right back to being second-class again and that is the problem. We need to get past that.’
Twenty-five minutes on the phone with
Holding is peppered with this sort of wisdom and insight. He’s a fascinating individual, the sort you could spend all day talking to. Holding made his name as part of the West Indies side that were like no other in the history of sport. For 15 years, between 1980 and 1995, they crushed all before them. In that spell, they didn’t lose a single Test series. Home or away.
No side ever dominated a sport for as long as Holding and his West Indies teammates did. The names of those great players on that incredible team transcend cricket. Holding himself, the fearsome fast bowler known as ‘Whispering Death’ because he was so light on his feet. Viv Richards, arguably the greatest batsmen of all-time, who wore a wristband of green, gold and red to represent the plains of Africa, the gold which was stolen and the blood which was spilled. Clive Lloyd, their legendary captain.
Growing up in Jamaica, Holding says he didn’t experience racism and it wasn’t until he started travelling around the world with the West Indies that he realised the discrimination that existed – his first tour of England was the famous 1976 series when England’s South African captain Tony Greig said he would make the tourists ‘grovel’ and the Windies responded by annihilating their hosts, Holding taking 14 wickets and Richards hitting 291 runs during one Test at the Oval.
It was also during that tour that Holding realised what the team meant to the West Indian community in England. Playing a warm-up match against Surrey, Lloyd tried out a few different things on the field rather than chase down a gettable total. The West Indians started to boo their own team.
‘I didn’t get it until I was going over to England more regularly and started to have more conversations with West Indians who lived in the UK. It was then you realised how much it meant to these people to see us win, because they were living in a society that told them they were no good or had no worth, so we gave them a success they could identify with. Every time the West Indies won, it made them feel a little taller in that society.’
Within that, there is a lesson about the power of sport. It is why it has been so interesting for Holding to look at racism through the prism of some of the most famous black athletes in the world. So we learn of Bolt, who had a similar experience to Holding of growing up in Jamaica, of being followed around a high-end jewellery shop in London and being asked by an assistant if he is sure that he can afford a watch he is looking at.
One of the interesting things is that many of the athletes – from Henry to Bolt to Michael Johnson, who says his first experience of racism was in college – don’t feel discriminated against until they leave the environment where they grew up. And Holding wanted to use sport to look at this issue because at its most base level, it doesn’t discriminate. If Bolt is the fastest person on the planet, he will win the 100 metres Olympic title. If Osaka is the best tennis player, she will win the Grand Slam events.
Aside from the thoughts and experiences of the likes of Adam Goodes and Hope Powell, the book also retraces the story of black oppression to the present day. Parts of it are difficult to read. Holding had sent his older sister chapters to read but she couldn’t finish some of it, as the passages about lynchings were so harrowing.
And through his own research, Holding discovered parts of black history which has been suppressed. As he told the Sky Sports audience that day in Southampton, it wasn’t
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Thomas Edison that invented the light bulb but Lewis Howard Lattimer, a black man. The first person to reach the North Pole was also black, as was the man who discovered the smallpox vaccine. But they have been removed from history.
‘So many things have been hidden and so many things have been airbrushed out of history,’ Holding says. ‘And why do these things happen, it is because they want to show that the white race is superior in some way.’
That is the essence of white privilege, a phrase that can put noses out of joint but only, Holding believes, because people misunderstand what it means. ‘White privilege doesn’t mean you are getting a free ride, it just means that the barriers put up in front of you aren’t there because of the colour of your skin. A black person has to get over the hurdle of having black skin before they can even start to think what they want to achieve. Nobody is getting a free ride but there are less hurdles to jump if you are white.’
Holding has been heavily critical of the England cricket team only taking the knee when they played
West Indies last summer – in the book, he calls them ‘virtue-signallers’ – as it sent out the wrong message. That they only care about tghe Black Lives Matter movement when they are playing a black team. However, he is full of praise for Gareth Southgate and the England footballers, continually taking the knee despite the booing from a vocal minority of their own supporters.
‘If you are doing it, you have to want to do it, otherwise it just becomes a box-ticking exercise, which is what it seemed to be with the cricket team. Contrast that with the footballers, I applaud Gareth Southgate and his players because they were getting a lot of stick, they were getting booed, and they kept doing it because they believed it was the right thing to do.
‘They showed it was more than a gesture, that they were doing it for humanitarian reasons.
‘It wasn’t for a political movement,’ says Holding, who is perplexed that Black Lives Matter has been painted as a subversive political grouping.
‘When Colin Kaepernick first took the knee in 2016, he wasn’t doing it for political reasons. He was doing it to highlight the injustice and violence against black people in America. How is it political to stand up for human rights and human beings? The people who say (that) don’t like to be reminded of what has been done to black people through history.’
Holding knows protests on a sporting field, or athletes telling their stories, won’t be the main driver for change, but it can help. Like he hopes that this book will help educate people and maybe inspire them to do something to help.
‘Sport can help and sport can be a vehicle for social change in that it can get the message out there that these issues exist and society needs to be fixed. But society has to fix itself and the first step in that is to admit there is a problem.’
And Holding remains hopeful that it can be fixed. ‘I know there will always be racists out there, that racism will exist in some form but I firmly believe that there are more good people than bad people in the world and it is up to the good people to help fix society.’
And maybe his book can be a catalyst for that by inspiring some people to do more to combat racism. ‘I hope it can make some difference. If we can achieve more understanding and more education, this book will be more important and significant than any 14-wicket haul I took in a Test match,’ Holding agrees.
It was to all our benefit that it rained in Southampton a year ago as it has allowed Michael Holding to emerge as one of the more thoughtful commentators on the issue of race.