‘We’ve always known white lives matter’
Astory did the rounds during the 2003 Cricket World Cup about casual racism directed towards Michael Holding. He was waiting at the reception desk of a hotel with his wife, Laurie-Ann, about to check in.
When it came to their turn, Holding began speaking to the receptionist, but they interrupted him and turned to his wife, who has a lighter complexion than her husband. “Excuse me, sir. I was dealing with this lady first.”
She was white. He was black. Whites first. It was an encounter that was not followed up in the papers nor confirmed with the man himself.
As I recall it became an item in a Cricket World Cup diary column, a throwaway embarrassment of a paragraph that brought a sigh of exasperation and an anger that no matter how much things change they stay the same.
My memory is hazy about the incident 17 years later and a Google search could not find a link to it, but I remember being told the story by a broadcaster over a glass of wine. I remember it being Holding. The story came back to me when Holding spoke on Sky Sport on Wednesday as we waited for England to play the West Indies.
He spoke on racism and Black Lives Matter. He delivered an eloquent, exceptional and erudite monologue on racism, a four-and-a-half minute lesson that was calm and angry.
It was a Whispering Death of an oration, a piece of television that should be played over and over again.
“When people reply to me saying ‘all lives matter’ or ‘white lives matter ’— please,” said Holding. “We black people know white lives matter —I don’t think you know black lives matter. So please don’t shout back ‘white lives matter’. The evidence is clearly there that white lives matter. We want black lives to matter now.”
Holding spoke of education and history, of how racism began with the dehumanisation of people of colour, people who weren’t white. He spoke of how when the West Indies beat England 5-0 in the 1984 series and celebrated with signs that said “blackwash”, it was a necessary reaction to the word “whitewash”.
He talked of how racism stalks every aspect of our lives — language, wealth, education and sport, to name just some.
“Education is important unless we want to continue living like this and having demonstrations every now and again, and a few people saying a few things,” said Holding.
“When I say education, I mean going back in history. People need to understand this thing stems from hundreds of years ago. The dehumanisation of the black race is where it started. People say, ‘that was a long time ago, get over it.’ No, you don’t get over something like that.
“How do you get rid of it in society? By educating people, both black and white. I hear people talking about brainwashing and I didn’t understand as a young man what that meant but now I understand. We have been brainwashed in different ways.”
That brainwashing has stopped the confrontation of the casual racism experienced in hotel foyers, taken away empathy, understanding and the ability to listen and emboldened racists to double down.
From the axis of weasels of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro to the whitesplainers who say “all lives matter” without questioning why “black lives matter” is so vital and necessary.
That brainwashing saw News24 allow the publication of a “column” by a reader, one Jason Stoneman, that was racist and sexist. Headlined Holding Hypocrisy” it attacked“Holding on a personal level, saying he cheated on his wife who was a “balding lumpy porker brown Arawak native from Antigua”.
News24 took the piece down, fired the subeditor who put it up on its site and apologised to Holding. That it was posted in the first place was a disgrace.
“Things have to change,” said Holding on Wednesday. This cannot be a blip of a movement in the history of the world.
This must be the time history is rewritten and corrected, that we ask why white refers to all things good and black the bad. This must be the time, as Nasser Hussain said on Wednesday, to realise we have “been looking away too long”.