OLIVER HOLT’S VIEW ON THE RACISM ROW ROCKING FOOTBALL
Ispent a week in Alabama last month and on a quiet day, after I had been to see the world heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder in his training camp outside Tuscaloosa and wondered at the scale and the majesty of Bryant-Denny Stadium, where the all-conquering University of Alabama football team plays, I headed further south on a quick road trip.
I stopped in at the Foster Auditorium on the university campus and found the doorway where the former hard- line segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace had stood in 1963 to bar the way to two African- American students hoping to enrol at the university before he was forced to give way by the Alabama National Guard.
It was one of the landmark moments in the civil rights struggle and Bob Dylan referenced it in The Times They Are A-Changin’. ‘ Come senators congressman, please heed the call,’ he sang, ‘don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall…there’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.’
Then I drove down through tired, struggling little towns like Centreville and through cotton fields and straggling communities grouped around Route 219, to Selma so I could walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge where a group of civil rights activists began a voting rights march in 1965 only to be beaten brutally with billy clubs by the police when they reached the other side of the Alabama River.
When I got back to the hotel that night, the television news was running the latest story on how Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers and, more recently, the face of a new generation’s civil rights battle in the US, had been ignored by yet another NFL team who needed a back-up for an injured starter.
In the face of a spate of shootings of unarmed black men by police and security guards, Kaepernick began the practice of taking a knee during the playing of the US national anthem before games as a form of peaceful protest. He has been ostracised by the league as a result. Many of his supporters fear that his playing career is over.
But Kaepernick i s the most obvious symbol of the fact that in the States, black athletes are using their power and their profile to stand at the forefront of campaigns to try to protect the rights their forebears fought so hard to attain in places like Tuscaloosa and Selma and to rail against racial prejudice in modern-day America.
LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers pl ayer and t he most high- profile basketballer in the NBA, has had several public spats with President Trump. Trump responded in one Tweet that he preferred Michael Jordan, the notoriously apolitical f ormer Chicago Bulls superstar, who was said to avoid taking sides because ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’.
Those days are over in the States now and they are over in England, too. Raheem Sterling’s Instagram post last weekend that responded to the way he had been abused during Manchester City’s match against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge was a sign that black athletes here have also decided that enough is enough and that they are ready to use their position and their influence to speak out.
Just as in the States, there is a feeling that today’s generation of black footballers are trying to defend the gains made by their predecessors. The Brexit vote appears to have empowered many of those who hold racist views and encouraged them to express those views more openly and more vociferously and, because football is a microcosm of society, it is feeling the aftershock.
On Thursday night, Chelsea fans sang anti-Semitic chants during their team’s Europa League match with MOL Vidi in Hungary.
Anti-semitism is on the rise in the country as a whole so, again, it is little surprise it is bleeding into football, too. Hate crime has been increasing since 2016. Issues around race are more and more charged.
Progress in race relations appears to have stalled in football. In fact, things are going backwards. In an echo from the 1970s, a banana skin was thrown by a Spurs fan at Arsenal forward Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang during the north London derby this month.
Chelsea fans in the front row of t he Matthew Harding Stand spewed their venom at Sterling, their faces twisted with hatred. We are heading back to the dark ages.
Aweek before that, the appointment of Sol Campbell as Macclesfield Town manager was greeted with the kind of aggressive derision that made many feel uncomfortable.
Campbell was said to be unworthy of a job at a club that is bottom of League Two because he was arrogant and socially awkward, qualities that never seem to have disqualified well- known white ex-players from becoming managers.
Campbell’s appointment means there are now eight black or ethnic managers at our 92 league clubs, a figure that shows they are still woefully under-represented. Some black former players, who fought hard for progress for much of their careers, looked at the treatment meted out to Sterling and, heartbreakingly, felt the need to apologise.
The former Wigan and Blackburn Rovers forward Jason Roberts wrote to Sterling on Twitter: ‘Truth is, we have failed and you will have to fight for the basic right of being treated the same as your peers. Sorry.. J.’
In his Instagram post, which linked the abuse he received at Stamford Bridge to the contrasting portrayals of black and white players, Sterling sought to shine a light on what he believes is unconscious bias in the media industry by citing headlines from the MailOnline website about City team-mates Tosin Adarabioyo and Phil Foden buying houses.
The headline referring to 21year- old defender Adarabioyo, who is on loan at West Brom, concentrated on how he spent £2.25 million on a property ‘despite having never started a Premier League match’.
The headline referring to Foden, 18, reveals he has bought ‘a £2m home for his mum’.
Of course, there are significant differences between the players other than their colour: Foden had a much higher profile because he was a prominent member of England’s Under- 17 World Cup champions last year and notably, he broke into the City’s first team.
By contrast, Adarabioyo is largely unknown by the general public. But Sterling’ s point resonated with black players across English football.
I believe that on the sports pages of this newspaper, the ratio of positive to negative stories about Sterling is about 10-1, which feels like a fair portrayal. But I also accept that the mere statement of that estimate does not properly answer his assertion about unconscious bias.
The post has been hailed as a game-changer, a key moment in sport’s fight against racism and intolerance in this country. For that to be true, we cannot afford to relegate it to another one-week wonder, whose power is lost when the initial outrage ebbs away.
Some black members of the sports media have already noted the irony of being deluged with calls to appear on various chat shows and news bulletins to talk about what Sterling said after careers spent largely ignored when journalists or ex-players are needed to comment on football.
I do not believe that there is racism in British sports journalism, but there is certainly work to be done in all newsrooms in this country when it comes to diversity. It is the key to ending unconscious bias. It is another source of frustration for black journalists that many of us keep saying that and yet change appears to be painfully slow. The Mail, I think, recognises that.
In partnership with the Stephen Lawrence Foundation, it is helping to fund students through higher education and establishing a pathway on to the company’s training scheme.
It is also in the process of opening up a second pathway for black and ethnic j ournalists through another partnership. It is one of the key components of the way forward.
Sterling has stimulated a debate. His words have crystallised a feeling of resentment among black sportsmen and black journalists and the black community generally, that their voices are not being heard and that English football i s sinking back i nto a swamp we thought we had dragged ourselves clear of.
Being a civil rights tourist, walking over a bridge in Selma in the steps of brave men and women and staring at a doorway in Tuscaloosa is a comfortable way of doing nothing. It would be strange to gaze on that struggle of the past and ignore the issues that lie before us now.
There’s a battle outside and the walls are beginning to rattle.