Sport makes racism look silly

The racist abuse suffered by some members of the England football team in Bulgaria was deplorable. It may have been shocking, but it wasn’t surprising. Indeed the players were expecting it. They had let it be known that they would walk off the field if subjected to racist taunts and insults. That is a dignified response, but it’s quite possible that advertising their intention was seen as provocation and so made such abuse more likely.

There have been cases of vile racist – and sectarian  – abuse at sporting events for years in many countries across the world. However reprehensible, this isn’t, for two reasons surprising. It is well-known that people will behave worse in a crowd than they would in a small gathering, and football stirs passions to an extraordinary decree. All sorts of abuse have always been common. Many a referee or player in the away team has had his sexuality questioned and I recall the story long ago of a Scottish footballer who complained that fans were abusing him as “a Fenian bastard”. “Och, forget it”, said his team-mate, “they ca’ me that a’ the time”.  “Aye, but that’s different,” was the reply. “You are a Fenian bastard.” Quite so.

The second reason is more uncomfortable. Racism is natural. This is sad, but it is very difficult to eradicate racism unless you begin by admitting that it is also true. Anti-racism and tolerance are not natural; they are learned; learned by individuals and learned by societies. Almost everyone in Britain born before, say, 1950 – and a good many born still later – grew up with an ingrained sense of difference from people whose skin was darker, and a sense of superiority also. This was the case also in continental Europe, in the USA and in what we used to call the White Dominions – it is dishonest to pretend this wasn’t so.

People casually used racist nicknames. Back in the 1950s few British men or women would have welcomed a black son-in-law; a black daughter-in-law might have been more acceptable, but only just.

I would guess that most British people born since the 1960s find this racism – a racism that seemed natural because it was unconscious – bizarre, weird, disgusting, scarcely comprehensible. That’s the measure of how far we have come. The rivers of blood foretold by Enoch Powell never flowed.

There is still racism in Britain of course, but it’s not a river in spate; it’s a stagnant and stinking pool. The Queen’s grandson can marry a woman of mixed race, and almost all of us say “so what?”

The classroom has played a big part in bringing about and fostering this changed attitude, a far bigger part, I would guess, than the anti-racist laws passed by parliament.  So has sport, and especially football, the arena where vile racist abuse was still common and tolerated by other spectators a quarter of a century ago. Now half the England team is black or of mixed race; so are the best supported clubs in the English Premiership. It’s difficult to feel that whites are superior when your heroes are black or of mixed race. It’s hard for a white boy to be racist when he worships his club’s black striker and pins his photograph on his bedroom wall.

English rugby fans are mostly middle-class and still predominantly white. The popular image of the Twickenham faithful is of gin-and-tonic drinkers in Barbour jackets, somewhat bizarrely singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, a spiritual from the slave plantations. But if England have beaten Australia by the time you read this and then go further in the World Cup, players of Tongan and West African origin will be hailed as every bit as authentic English heroes as their captain, Lancashire’s Owen Farrell.

Familiarity breaks down barriers of race and class, and boys and girls today elect heroes with no regard for skin colour, no thought of it, I would guess.

George Orwell said many more sensible things than most of us and as many stupid things as most of us. One of the stupid ones was the assertion that international sport provoked more ill-feeling than good. Experience and observation demonstrate that it ain’t generally so. Think, for a surprising example, of last year’s successful football World Cup in Russia.

Of course there is often ill-feeling, vile behaviour and foul language at matches, as there was in Bulgaria last week, but in sport racism is on the ebb, and it’s on the ebb in our country and in western Europe generally in part because sport breaks down barriers. Sport makes racism look silly and this is every bit as important as teaching people it is wrong.